philosopher1978

Here are the slides from the presentation I gave at the annual Philosophy of Computer Games conference earlier this week (paper co-written with Jo Iacovides).

For this assignment we have been asked to get a sense of the diversity of those involved in the profession of elearning by looking at job opportunities in the field via jobs.ac.uk and conference announcements on ALT-C.

At the time of writing (16^th Jan 2012) there were 11 jobs with the keyword ‘e-learning’ and four with the keyword ‘elearning’ on jobs.ac.uk.  Here’s a screen capture.

Though some jobs appear under both keywords, there seems to be a slight tendency for salaries on the right hand column to be a little higher, even though the nature of the appointments is similar (at the officer/manager level).   Most of these jobs seem to reflect a supporting role for the educational technologist, though this doesn’t equate to a lack of seniority or executive power judging by the salaries and the various descriptions of duties.  At the same time, there are some roles here where elearning is mentioned as an afterthought or as lip-service to current trends in higher education.  For instance, the  Assistant/Associate Professor in European History at Qatar University is expected to be competent with elearning methods but it’s not clear how this is integrated with other aspects of the job or what kind of measures the university intends to use.  This gives the impression that the person writing the job specification may not themselves have a good understanding of elearning.

Moving on to the conference notices at ALT-C… there are currently four conferences being promoted here.  They are as follows:

The first two are online webinars run using Blackboard virtual learning environments and intended for assessors and candidates for the CMALT professional membership scheme for elearning practitioners.  Looking over the list of CMALT members at http://www.alt.ac.uk/sites/default/files/public/Cmalt%20holders%20list_20111121.pdf I noted that none of my OU colleagues seemed to be members (which is a bit surprising given the fact that  CMALT is mentioned in H808).

The third event is a webinar featuring two eminent learning technologists, Diana Laurillard and Stephen Downes.  There isn’t much in the way of detail about the content of the webinar – only the question ‘to what extent should learning design be supported computationally?’.  Most of the page is just biographical information which suggests that they’re relying on reputation alone to sell the event.

The final event is a conference which takes place in Manchester next September.  There aren’t many details here and you have to go to http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2012 instead.  The motivating questions for this conference seem to be very general and focused on the core activities of learning technologists rather than anything particularly topical.  I suppose this lends weight to the idea that the activities of learning technologists can be highly diverse.

CMALT stands for Certified Membership of the Association for Learning Technology .  “CMALT is a portfolio-based professional accreditation scheme developed by ALT to enable people whose work involves learning technology to:

• have their experience and capabilities certified by peers;
• demonstrate that they are taking a committed and serious approach to their professional development.”

The CMALT prospectus mentions the following values in relation to professional accreditation.

• Commitment to ongoing professional development
• Gaining and providing recognition of skills, feedback
• Critical reflection on practice
• Keeping up to date with new technology
• Willingness to learn from colleagues and those with different backgrounds
• Effective communication and dissemination
• Awareness of wider context
• Understanding accessibility and assistive technologies
• Acknowledging copyright
• Ongoing evaluation and validation of professional skills

Possibly relevant but not mentioned:

• Effectively meeting obligations to students
• Staying focused on delivering results
• Awareness of institutional ethics

 Like a lot of ethical guidance, most of these are formal in nature.  Let’s think about how they compare with education ethics more generally conceived.  The Association of American Educators presents a number of principles and maxims in their code of ethics.  I don’t have the space to discuss them all here, but here are some highlights.

Overall this gives the impression that educators have a quite different set of responsibilities to learning technologists and, accordingly, a distinct set of ethical codes and principles.  There is more of a sense of duty of care and precaution in the educational ethics, while the CMALT values are more to do with innovation, future facing, and ongoing professional change.

An interesting conversation between David Roberts (Grist), Andrew Sullivan (The Daily Beast), and Matthew Yglesias (Slate).  Organized and chaired by Andrew Light (Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDpFBvYDY5s

What do learning technologists do?  Well, this is a question I should be able to answer because at some level I claim to be a learning (educational) technologist.  According to the Association for Learning Technology, learning technologists are “people who are actively involved in managing, researching, supporting or enabling learning with the use of learning technology” (ALT, 2011).  This is quite a broad definition, and one which could apply to all kinds of professionals.  But we wouldn’t want to call everybody who fits this definition a learning technologist, would we?  After all, everybody who works in a university is arguably supporting learning.

For me, my professional identity is bound up with a committment to particular set of methods and domains of enquiry.  At the same time, working in research involves an openness to revising one’s views about the best methods to use for investigation.

Jacqui’s forum post argues that one problem is that the role of the technologist is not standardised across institutions.  However, I would suggest that this kind of standardisation is often prohibited by the nature of the work.  If one’s job is to innovate, then it can be difficult to enshrine this is a job description.  In practice, there is a somewhat abstract relationship between the nature of the work that I do in researching and supporting research projects and the eventual application of that research in reconsidered practice.  In any case, one thing I liked about the defintion that Jacqui provided was the idea of focusing on the outputs of a technologist: the design, delivery, support, management and development of technological solution for education.  This seems more specific than ALT defintion.  My first thought was that, as a professional, I don’t really do that unless one frames it in terms of ‘support’.  But thinking about it further, I do contribute to the development and delivery of technical solutions… though often one step removed.

Lisewski and Joyce (2003:63) suggest that many learning technologies are ‘highly reified’.  Thinking in terms of reification is one way of understanding a sense of distance or alienation from the products of one’s labour.  But I find the treatment of reificiation in the paper somewhat discomforting.  Wenger’s account seems to just refer to non-participation or ineffectiveness (something that can be quantified).  But true reification is surely concerned with the formation of human subjectivity through and in interaction with the world.   Reification affects the whole of the social world; else it doesn’t exist. It cannot be limited to a particular context because it necessarily represents or expresses an ideology.  Reification is not a Heideggerian term, but as Heidegger (1954) reminds us, technology by its nature reveals a certain interpretation of the world.  We need better ways of understanding the impact technology has on our thought, motivation and autonomy.  And that seems to be something to which a philosopher can contribute.

ALT (2011) What is Learning Technology? Available at: http://www.alt.ac.uk/about-alt/what-learning-technology [Accessed December 10, 2011].

Heidegger, M. (1954) “The Question Concerning Technology”, from Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings from “Being and Time” (1927) to “The Task of Thinking” (1964), rev. ed., edited by David Farrell Krell. Harper: San Francisco.

Lisewski, B. and Joyce, P. (2003) Examining the five‐stage e‐moderating model: Designed and emergent practice in the learning technology profession. Association for Learning Technology Journal, 11 (1). pp. 55-66. ISSN 0968-7769 Available from http://repository.alt.ac.uk/399/ [last accessed 30 Oct 2011].

Wenger, E. (1998), Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Here is a copy of the slides from the presentation given at OpenOpen earlier today by myself and Anna De Liddo. The title of the talk was “Building and Communicating Evidence of Effectiveness in OER through Collective Intelligence” and relates to our work on the OLnet project and the OER Evidence Hub.

These are the slides I’ll be using for my presentation at Visual Learning – Development, Discovery and Design at the Visual Learning Lab, Budapest University of Technology and Economics later this week… assuming, that is, that I will be able to get there with the UK borders staff on strike :s

Good calls for papers are kind of like buses:  they tend to show up in groups.  Three caught my eye this week… here’s hoping that I can find the time to get around to all of them!

1. Critique, Democracy, and Philosophy in 21st Century Information Society: Towards Critical Theories of Social Media

The conference is the fourth in the ICTs and Society-Conference Series (http://www.icts-and-society.net). The ICTs and Society-Network is an international forum that networks scholars in the interdisciplinary areas of Critical Internet Studies, digital media studies, Internet & society studies and information society studies. The ICTs and Society Conference series was in previous years organized at the University of Salzburg (Austria, June 2008), the University of Trento (Italy, June 2009) and the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (Spain, July 2010).

We are living in times of global capitalist crisis. In this situation, we are witnessing a return of critique in the form of a surging interest in critical theories (such as the critical political economy of Karl Marx, critical theory, etc) and revolutions, rebellions, and political movements against neoliberalism that are reactions to the commodification and instrumentalization of everything. On the one hand there are overdrawn claims that social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, mobile Internet, etc) have caused rebellions and uproars in countries like Tunisia and Egypt, which brings up the question to which extent these are claims are ideological or not. On the other hand, the question arises what actual role social media play in contemporary capitalism, power structures, crisis, rebellions, uproar, revolutions, the strengthening of the commons, and the potential creation of participatory democracy. The commodification of everything has resulted also in a commodification of the communication commons, including Internet communication that is today largely commercial in character. The question is how to make sense of a world in crisis, how a different future can look like, and how we can create Internet commons and a commons-based participatory democracy.

This conference deals with the question of what kind of society and what kind of Internet are desirable, what steps need to be taken for advancing a good Internet in a sustainable information society, how capitalism, power structures and social media are connected, what the main problems, risks, opportunities and challenges are for the current and future development of Internet and society, how struggles are connected to social media, what the role, problems and opportunities of social media, web 2.0, the mobile Internet and the ubiquitous Internet are today and in the future, what current developments of the Internet and society tell us about potential futures, how an alternative Internet can look like, and how a participatory, commons-based Internet and a co-operative, participatory, sustainable information society can be achieved.

A full list of suggested questions can be found on the conference homepage. Abstracts are due by 29th February 2012.

2. London Conference in Critical Thought (June 29th and 30th, 2012)

In collaboration with the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, the London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT) is designed to create a space for an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas for scholars who work with “critical” traditions and concerns. We welcome work from the humanities and social sciences, including but not limited to papers drawing upon continental philosophy, critical legal theory, critical geography and the Frankfurt School. The LCCT aims to provide an opportunity for those who frequently find themselves at the margins of their department or discipline to engage with other scholars who share theoretical approaches and interests.  Interdisciplinary and inter-institutional, the conference hopes to foster emergent critical thought and provide new avenues for critically orientated scholarship and collaboration.

Scholars working in philosophy, literature, geography, law, art, and politics departments have already proposed panels and/or streams for the conference. These address issues as diverse as animality, sovereignty, human rights, cosmopolitanism, the city, and the relationship between text and space. Through these streams participants are encouraged to engage with a variety of thinkers including Kant, Deleuze, Marx, Lacan, Foucault, Spinoza and Derrida, to name a few.

If you would like to present a paper as part of an existing stream/panel, propose a new stream/panel or contribute to the general stream please see our website for details. The deadline for stream proposals is the 15th of January, 2012, and the deadline for paper proposals is the 19th of February, 2012. The conference will be open for registration as of April 2012 and is free for participants.

http://londonconferenceincriticalthought.wordpress.com/

The London Conference in Critical Thought is co-hosted by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities for the inaugural year of 2012.

3. Black Sabbath and Philosophy

The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series – Abstracts and subsequent essays should be philosophically substantial but accessible, written to engage the intelligent lay reader. Contributors of accepted essays will receive an honorarium.

Possible themes and topics might include, but are not limited to, the following: “Am I Going Insane?”: Madness in Sabbath and Foucault; Purging Fear and Pity with Sabbath and Aristotle; “War Pigs” and Pacifism; Gods who can Dance: Nietzsche, Sabbath, and Dionysus; Sabbath’s Sonic Meaning and the Devil’s Interval; “Fairies Wear Boots”: Drugs and Transcendence; “Push the Needle In”: The “Hand of Doom” and Addiction; “Solitude”: Existential Alienation and Despair; Working Class Heroes: Sabbath’s Politics; Spiral Architects and Rock Poets; “My name is Lucifer, please take my hand”: The Occult and the Virtues of Blasphemy; Sweet Leaf and Snow Blind: The Epistemology of Addiction; Is it still Sabbath without Ozzy?: The Metaphysics of Band Identity through Time; The Godfathers of Metal: Genre and Influence; Iron Man and The Wizard: Sabbath’s Mythology; “Tomorrow’s Dream”: Existential Freedom and Rebellion; Johnny Blade and Hypermasculinity; Why Scary Music Makes Us Feel Good: Sabbath and the Paradox of Horror; “Dirty Women”: Gender and Sexuality in Black Sabbath; The Fifth Member in Creativity and Performance: Is Sabbath more than the Sum of its Parts?; “Lord of this World” and the Problem of Evil

Submission Guidelines:

Submission deadline for abstracts (100-500 words) and CV’s: December 30, 2011. Submission deadline for first drafts of accepted papers: March 12, 2012

Abstract & CV by email to: William Irwin (williamirwin@kings.edu)

I was fortunate enough to attend the annual Open Ed conference last week, and there was much food for thought.  I live-blogged as many of the sessions as I could in Cloudworks and there’s a video archive of the presentations available on YouTube.  The event certainly gave me quite a lot of ground for reflection and some of that will be covered in further posts.  But I’d like to concentrate here on both my general impressions and on a couple of the keynote speakers.  (I would like to offer the caveat that I don’t know a great deal about all the speakers and their work, and I’ve never attended an open education conference before; so these comments are just my impressions as a sympathetic but inquisitive person with a practical interest in a major OER project.)

Coming off the back of my recent attempts to understand the ‘openness’ of OER and work on the OLnet Evidence Hub, I was particularly interested in how closely my understanding of the OER world and its issues related to the discourses taking place within the community.  It certainly seemed to me that there are two levels of discourse at the moment.

The first is about the right kind of licensing for open content (of which CC-BY) is perhaps the ‘gold standard’ (notwithstanding the issue of commercial use of another’s intellectual property).  This is really the OER question as far as OERs themselves are concerned.

The second - and, to my mind, the far more pressing and yet generally neglected part of all this - is to do with the implications of widespread adoption of the ‘open’ model of education.  I alluded to some of these issues in my previous presentation.  The difference between consecutive keynote sessions on day two of the conference really drew out the tensions between those who see themselves as proposing radical changes to education and those who are rather more pragmatic about managing a process of change towards the use of OER.  Here are the two presentations in question.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7InldTL-ek

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pud46fxRlts

Josh’s presentation was a sobering account of the various obstacles that need to be overcome at institutional, governance and financial levels, while Jim’s more a more polemical plea for innovation and change in the world of education.  Josh had the spreadsheet, Jim had the pot of gold.

I think David Wiley had it right when he commented at the end of this session that it’s the tension between these two perspectives that people need to think about.  But on Twitter it was all about Jim’s presentation.  Perhaps it’s just because I’m new to all this (or maybe because of Jim’s somewhat unconventional style) but I was pretty confused by Jim’s presentation.  When I remarked on Twitter that I didn’t really see how Jim’s approach  could be replicated without Jim and in different subject areas, the response was quite telling.  Some of those following the conference hashtag who are close to DS106 were straight to Jim’s defence and we ended up with a bit of a crossed wire.  But I was quite surprised to get this kind of response to a well-meant question at a conference (which, after all, is a place for exchanging ideas).  It left with with a sense that I was encroaching into a space that some felt sacred.

More generally, I found was that whatever self-critique was going on amongst the delegates it wasn’t very obvious.  Rather than raising troublesome questions in the session  most of the discussion about the issues takes place online. It’s great that the Open Ed movement provides such a level of support to its members, but I come from a tradition which encourages face-to-face exchange in public fora.  Sometimes putting people on the spot and challenging them is the start of a productive process of exchange.

Typically, conferences are about like-minded people coming together, and this is undoubtedly a good thing.  But sometimes Open Ed 11 felt a bit like the choir preaching to itself.  Useful for me in terms of getting an understanding of the movement and where it’s at, but maybe not exactly what is needed to push OER and open education to the next level.

(At least now I know what an edupunk is!)

I’ve just been looking at Beware critics of Connectivism ! Or how I feel connectivism opens up content creation and access by @Ignatia Webs.  It’s doing the rounds on Scoop.It and seems quite popular with lots of comment and re-scooping.  But I remain a bit confused about the allure of Connectivism.

As a theory, Connectivism has no efficacy (it doesn’t really purport to explain so much as describe at a very general level) so it makes little sense to me to speak about it enabling anything… It’s true that we are always ‘connected’ to other people and systems it’s not clear to me that connectivism represents anything more than a historical process of increased complexity of networks over time.  It may well help people to learn to think of the process in a TEL context to think in terms of networking and systems, but, despite what Ignatia thinks, whether or not it’s a theory does matter; even if side-stepping this question might facilitate learning.

I think that we should care whether a theory is “lasting” or not since that is what helps us to theorise better and come up with better theories.

In any case, I find the analogy between infant learning and connected learning to be quite spurious and perhaps representative of the way that a ‘catch-all’ theory can be used.  Of course infant learning is characterised by interaction and feedback:  all human learning is.  In fact, all human interaction is like this.  It’s also present in interaction with non-human beings and objects.  In fact, it’s far too general to belong to Connectivism.

Good theories have specificity.

The Scientific Annotated Review Database (or SARD), one of the major research outputs from the MOTILL Project, is now available at www.motill.eu.

The SARD collects more than fifty expert reviews of scientific literature relating to the areas of mobile and lifelong learning. It also contains commentary on a number of policy documents in these areas. Each review includes recommendations for policymakers who wish to promote or support this kind of lifelong learning.

The SARD is free to access and we hope that you will find it to be a useful resource.

JISC inspires UK colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies, helping to maintain the UK’s position as a global leader in education. The New JISC strategy for 2010 is focused on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of universities and colleges, and places technology-enhanced learning at the core of the learning culture of the future.

A significantly enhanced culture of technology-enhanced learning is expected to be one of the main outcomes of this strategy. Students now expect a fully functioning technology-enhanced learning environment with content and resources available online 24 hours a day. A growing community of part-time and overseas students, lifelong learners and professionals, is enabled by flexible learning, meaning that its development will help to drive growth in the sector. A rich technology-enhanced learning culture will therefore also make UK colleges and universities more attractive in the domestic and global markets.

Support for technology-enhanced learning will include guidance on ways to provide new and innovative services, advice on designing a curriculum, a series of national programmes, and development of technical standards to support sharing between systems and institutions. Use of mobile technology, including smart phones, and online networks that support learning, are part of this new landscape.

Read the full executive summary.

A recent article in the Times Higher Education Supplement outlines the ways in which mobile technologies are beginning to become much more widely used in the classroom. The piece challenges widely held view about the role of mobile technology in the classroom situation and notes that many schools have overturned bans on the use of mobile phones in schools in recognition of their untapped potential to support learning. Projects at Sheffield College approach this from a contractual point of view, asking students to sign up to codes of behaviour for proper use at the start of each year.

Suggestions for manging the use of classroom mobile technology:

* Identify and support champions – volunteer teachers who are prepared to take some risks.
* Initiate discussions about using mobile phones for learning (perhaps using pupil voice work) and survey ownership, device capability and the ways mobile phones are already being used in the school.
* Involve those who have responsibility for curriculum, student management and technical support to plan how they will be used.
* Provide hands-on, small-scale opportunities for teachers to try out appropriate uses for mobile phones.
* Encourage teachers to design activities that make the learning purpose clear and to anticipate management issues at the classroom level (such as rules and etiquette).
* Inform parents of the learning purposes for mobile phones and involve them in establishing appropriate ownership, management and ethical arrangements.
* Anticipate and address technical issues ranging from battery-charging to network access, security and data protection.
* Develop new school policies that shift the focus of attention away from the device to the uses, security and behavioural issues that are the real concern.

Carly Shuler draws on interviews with mobile learning experts as well as current research and industry trends to illustrate how mobile devices might be more broadly used for learning. Examining over 25 handheld learning products and research projects in the U.S. and abroad, the report highlights early evidence of how these devices can help revolutionize teaching and learning. Pockets of Potential also outlines mobile market trends and innovations, as well as key opportunities, such as mobile’s ability to reach underserved populations and provide personalized learning experiences.

The report highlights five opportunities to seize mobile learning’s unique attributes to improve education:

1. Encourage “anywhere, anytime” learning
Mobile devices allow students to gather, access, and process information outside the classroom. They can encourage learning in a real-world context, and help bridge school, afterschool, and home environments.

2. Reach underserved children
Because of their relatively low cost and accessibility in low-income communities, handheld devices
can help advance digital equity, reaching and inspiring populations “at the edges” — children from economically disadvantaged communities and those from developing countries.

3. Improve 21st-century social interactions
Mobile technologies have the power to promote and foster collaboration and communication, which are deemed essential for 21st-century success.

4. Fit with learning environments
Mobile devices can help overcome many of the challenges associated with larger technologies, as they fit more naturally within various learning environments.

5. Enable a personalized learning experience
Not all children are alike; instruction should be adaptable to individual and diverse learners. There are significant opportunities for genuinely supporting differentiated, autonomous, and individualized learning through mobile devices.

Read the full report here or download the executive summary.

The MOTILL Project will be disseminated at the MoLeNET conference on 1st December 2009. http://www.molenet.org.uk/

The conference aims to…

• disseminate nationally the good practice, lessons learned, tips, tools and advice arising from MoLeNET to-date
• share research, and evidence of impact, from mobile learning projects including the MoLeNET programme
• demonstrate technologies, systems, learning materials and techniques
• provide an opportunity for networking and knowledge sharing
• encourage debate and inform strategic thinking about the future of technology enhanced teaching and learning

As well as following the MOTILL project on this blog or through the main portal, you can now also keep up to date through a number of Web 2.0 applications.  Here are some of the ways you can stay in touch.

You can also find more information on the project at the dedicated Open University pages.

An interesting article from boston.com describes the kind of generational shift that is taking place with respect to the uptake of new technologies.   The iPhone in particular in singled out for being intuitively accessible to infants, lacking a keyboard or mouse and being operated with a touch screen.

These “mobile kids” are the purest breed yet of natives to the wireless world where the rest of us are refugees. Their fluency with technology and expectations of instant access to everything will eclipse even those of their older siblings and cousins, the “digital kids” weaned on desktop computers wired to the Web.

But in addition to being irresistable to young children, mobile technology can actually promote their development. The article draws on Piaget’s model of cognitive development to show how mobile technology has advanced to the point where it can bring real pedagogical benefits.

“The future that we envisioned for so long is finally starting to happen,” says Warren Buckleitner, educational psychologist. “I’d love to bring Piaget back from the grave and give him an iPhone.”

Read the full article here.

Castle College in Nottingham are the beneficiaries of a sunstantial grant awarded by MoLeNET, the mobile learning network.

STUDENTS in Nottingham will benefit from £100,000 of new equipment – including Nintendo Wii consoles and iPods.

Castle College is hoping the gadgets will encourage 300 children from disadvantaged backgrounds to learn to use modern technology.

It will use £40,000 to increase its wireless internet capacity, so students can access the internet all over its campuses.

Up to £60,000 will be used to buy Nintendo Wiis, iPod Touch MP3 players and the new Nintendo DSi, which is a portable games console with a handheld camera.

Lyn Lall, Castle College’s development manager for new technologies, said: “Innovative methods and materials will make the learning experience more personalised and fun, which will result in increased engagement, retention and achievement levels of students.

The devices will be used as to support the development of literacy, numeracy and IT in vulnerable young people who are not in education, employment or training.  Read on here.

Here’s an interesting article about the development of contact lens technology towards a personal ‘heads up’ display which will display contextual information, translate in real time, relay information from the internet, and so on. Another interesting application of this kind of technology is biomonitoring. Just as a… blood test reveals all kinds of information about a person’s health, so the surface of the eye’s chemical composition can tell us about nutrition levels, blood glucose and other biomarkers. This information could be transmitted wirelessly and monitored in real time. So this kind of technology could be used to help individuals learn to live with a range of medical conditions.

Calculators are an often used example in the philosophy of mind.  Sometimes they’re used analogously, to show how computational algorithms can be implemented in a variety of mediums (say, the very different circuitries of the calculator and the human brain).  Other times, they’re used metaphorically, as objects that we can attribute intentional states: the calculator ‘knows’ how to add and ‘believes’ that 2+2=4.  But how appropriate are comparisons between calculators and humans?  Is it a matter of implementing the same (or nearly the same) algorithm?  Or is the comparison a mere metaphor?   Stanislas Dehaene is the champion of the surprising view that neither of these (caricatured) approaches can be right: calculation is neither a matter of merely attributing intentional states, nor do humans and calculators implement algorithms in the same way.

(Apologies if this topic seems old hat to any – if you are a person already familiar with Dehaene, ‘cultural re-mapping’, number sensing, and the like, the payoff to re-reading this extremely cool and interesting stuff about human mathematical capabilities, is some very exciting and interesting new advances in brain localization and machine-learning)

Dehaene’s view is that our mathematical abilities result from the mixture of two evolved mechanisms, and, importantly, a sprinkling of language.  The first of these evolved mechanisms is a capacity to distinguish a certain amount of discrete quantities, or numerosity: the ability to tell apart one, two, three, and maybe four and five.  Then, there is the capacity to distinguish differences in quantity: that six is bigger than one, or that twenty is less than sixty.  Both of these abilities can be found in animals, and, yes, human children.  And it’s easy to understand why such mechanisms might persist over time*:  as an organism, it is very handy to have a capacity to determine between alternatives; whether option (a) was better than (b) because more nutrients, or less competition, or what have you.

What is gained when language is thrown in the mix is an ability to systematize quantity, to give every number a label that is easy to organize and remember.  This process builds upon the evolved mechanisms mentioned above, and extends them, particularly, our capacity in naming and utilizing discrete quantities (Andy Clark, in particular, has a good account of how this might work).  Eventually, through individual learning from teachers and parents, an infant gain the ability to determine absolute difference between number.  This replaces the kind of logarithmic guesstimation of our biological heritage.  (Radiolab has a fantastic podcast focussing on this aspect of Dehaene’s theory) –And from this, our ability to do mathematics follows (more or less).

So now, let us return to the calculator. Can it still serve as an image, a guiding picture for an understanding of how humans do math?  Well, maybe.  Whatever it does – and it certainly does calculate – a calculator certainly doesn’t have the same mathematical upbringing that we do.  All this means is that, whatever analogical perspicacity a calculator might bring to the mathematical abilities of full-grown, mathematically-capable humans, it won’t shed any light on how these mathematically-capable humans come to have their (near) algorithmic capacities.  If we really want to understand human-style math, we’ll need a new, genetic way of understanding such capacities.

Luckily though, we are beginning to create such a genetic account.

Marzo Zorzi, of the University of Padua has led a team that have created a neural network with the power of comparing estimated quantities.  Unfortunately while the article doesn’t link this research to Dehaene, it’s clear to see that this neural network mirrors the evolved mechanism he (that is, Dehaene) invokes to explain human numerosity.  This is exciting stuff!  Not only might this research help us situate such a pattern in the brain (perhaps via this new groundbreaking method of localization), but it may eventually help us to understand the way in which such a circuit gets recruited by language to allow for our distinctively human way of implementing mathematics.

Of course, there are always caveats.  This neural network has to ‘learn’ the trick of comparing estimated quantities, whereas it seems that evolution has made this ability in some way ‘innate’.  And further, we seem to be a ways away from any ‘hybrid’ approach in machine learning (indeed, language comprehension is a huge, if not the problem for artificial intelligence).  Never the less, I’m please and excited that we are slowly phasing out the more simplistic calculator-cum-human-calculation image, for more realistic comparisons and metaphors for our distinctively human ability to use math.

*It’s a particular bugbear of mine when scientists use the phrase ‘why such a (mechanism/organ/function) evolved’ – rather than this more innocuous and, in my view, correct phrase – thus reading a certain amount of teleology into the particular mechanism/organ/function that isn’t there.

RELATED:

Klein, Colin – Philosophical Issues in Neuroimaging

Clark, Robin – Generalized Quantifiers and Number Sense

‘Without a tradition, everything is impermanence and flux.’ Thus writes David Brooks in a New York Times piece giving advice to the rebellious and dissatisfied youth of today. If you are one of these youth, Brooks’ advice is that your rebellion should be grounded in a past tradition:

‘If I could offer advice to a young rebel, it would be to rummage the past for a body of thought that helps you understand and address the shortcomings you see. Give yourself a label. If your college hasn’t provided you with a good knowledge of countercultural viewpoints — ranging from Thoreau to Maritain — then your college has failed you and you should try to remedy that ignorance.’

Many years ago Bernard Crick made a similar point in his book In Defence of Politics. Conservatives anchoring themselves in tradition, he argued, forget that radical, dissenting progressivism is just as much anchored in tradition. ‘The conservative’s choice of being traditional or anti-traditional is meaningless.’

This is a fine point for an Englishman to make. The Burkean conservative claims the mantle of the Parliament of 1688, yet even the most extreme radical has roots that go deeper, into the Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, and Nonconformists of the Civil War decades. Conversely, it was Lord Melbourne, the spokesman for the party of progress, who gave Queen Victoria, the emblem of tradition, the most conservative advice ever given to a sovereign: ‘Never try to do good; you only end up getting into scrapes.’

And you hardly need to look to English history to find the meaninglessness of the conservative’s tradition/anti-tradition dichotomy. Bismarck, whom Frederick William described as a ‘red reactionary smelling of blood’, clung to his agrarian Junker roots against all the progressive influences of a privileged liberal education. Yet he went on to found the welfare state, half a century before the rest of Europe caught up, and to create a kind of nation the world had never seen before.

Radicalism, then, can be as sunk in tradition as conservatism. But should it be? Brooks does not say so, but the reasons radicalism ought to align itself with tradition concern moral philosophy.

Anybody hoping to do good in the world, whether by conserving, reforming, or revolutionising it, must have a clear idea of what it means to do good. There are only two ways of determining this – two metaethical theories – that have really influenced politics. One claims that doing good consists of making as many people as happy as possible. The other claims the concept of goodness cannot make sense apart from a notion of the proper function or end for things of a particular kind. To be a good person is to admirably fulfil the proper function, or serve the proper end, of a human life; a good society is one in which people are provided what they need in order to do so.

Of course there are other metaethical theories, but what political influence have they really had? G.E. Moore’s theory that goodness is a non-natural property, perceived through moral intuition, is said to have influenced John Maynard Keynes. And he definitely influenced politics. Certainly Moore’s reminder that people sometimes pursue intuited and intangible goals may have inspired Keynes’ attention to the so-called ‘animal spirits’ at work in the economy. And yet did Keynes need this reminder from Moore? It seems a historical extravagance to think so.

There are also various constructivist and social contract theories around, which some people might take offence at my having dismissed as not politically influential. But social contract theory in its authentic Hobbesian form is really a version of the first of the above-listed theories. It identifies the good with the maximisation of happiness, the social contract being the reliable mechanism for ensuring it. Alternately, in its corrupted Lockean version, it is a form of the second theory; the social contract and the natural rights of man flow out of the purposes our creator had in making us social beings. In its modern Rawlsian form social contract theory is not a metaethical theory at all, and anyway has not been massively influential over modern politics, not, at least, if modern politics is held to involve the governed as much as the governors.

Now out of the two main politically influential metaethical theories, the second leads very quickly to an emphasis on the importance of tradition. Where are we meant to learn the proper end of a human life, if not from some tradition? Looking at nature doesn’t help. The only purpose for which, according to our best science, nature has built us is to help enlarge the possibilities for a certain macromolecule to make copies of itself. That is not morally inspiring. Indeed to morally endorse the ends for which natural selection employs the human phenotype leads us down a very dangerous path. ‘That way’, to quote Alex Rosenberg, ‘lies the moral disaster of Social Spencerism (better but wrongly known as Social Darwinism).’ There have been a few interesting attempts recently to arrive at more positive forms of moral naturalism, such as Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness. But it is possible to claim that these are underdetermined, if not undermined, by modern biology.

If nature doesn’t give any morally satisfying answer to the question ‘what is the purpose, function, or end of a human life?’ does that mean that only tradition can do so? Probably not. But being embedded within a tradition does give the only semblance of authority to our answers. This was the main point of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. Novelists, artists, and philosophers often make guesses at what life is all about. But how we should determine which guesses are better than others is completely unclear. ‘We’re here on earth just to fart around,’ wrote Kurt Vonnegut. Well, why not? And then, at the same time, why?

The only real hope of convincing somebody not already convinced that your vision of the good life is the correct one lies in pointing out to her that she is already committed to that vision herself, following from her commitment to some shared tradition. As a liberal, as a democrat, as a Christian, as a socialist, she must think that this is what life is for – this is, it would seem, the closest one can hope to come to having right and wrong answers to questions about ultimate ends.

And yet, of course, it’s tremendously limited. This authority, or pseudo-authority extends only to the perimeters of a single tradition, and has only as much force as that tradition has internal unity and consistency.

This might push one to adopt what looks like the more natural and objective measure of goodness found in the first of the two metaethical theories listed above. Applied to politics, it places major demands on social science. It requires a policy, program, or revolution to be justified in terms of the happiness it is likely to provide, rather than in terms of its embodying some correct vision of ultimate ends. To make such a justification requires a social science with considerable predictive power, a social science that can predict when, under what conditions, and how much people will be happy. We seem a long way off having anything like this, as I’ve mentioned before. Indeed, a chapter of After Virtue is dedicated to arguing that predictions of even the near future of society are forever beyond our power to make.

Thus we might be pushed back again to the other theory, that what we do, both as individuals and as societies should be determined by beliefs about ultimate ends. But, again, agreement on these beliefs seems to require mutual embededness in a single tradition. None of the great moral conflicts of the future are likely to involve only stakeholders committed to a single tradition.

More than this, conservatives like Brooks and MacIntyre (I’m hurting somebody by putting them in the same sentence and I’m not sorry), perceiving that tradition hardly plays the role they would like it to play in people’s moral decision-making, recommend that we all actively embed ourselves into a tradition. The problem is that I suspect we all know deep down what a tradition is, namely a set of reasons for doing a set of things there are no good reasons to do. Once you’ve engaged your critical faculties, disengaging them is often impossible. Yet this is what would be involved in making the kind of uncritical allegiance to the moral authority of tradition that conservatives want us to make, whereby tradition would speak within us as a kind of second nature.

This, then, is the dilemma for the young people dissatisfied with the current order of things Brooks is addressing. If they – actually we – set up general happiness as our objective moral standard, we have no guarantee that our projects will help us to meet it. If we commit to some vision of ultimate ends, we have nothing but appeals to tradition by which to justify our commitment, and tradition won’t work the way we need it to. What, then, should we do? Create a new tradition, I suppose. That, however, might take a few centuries. For now just fart around.

Achieving happiness is easy. I don’t mean eudaimonia – that oversophisticated happiness for Pinot-snuffling yuppies. I mean ordinary, practical happiness for ordinary, practical folk: utility. Achieving eudaimonia is definitely not easy; at your very approach it dances away like a will-o’-the-wisp on gossamer winds of pretentiousness. But utility? Utility is solid and graspable. In fact, Australians say ‘utility’ to refer to what Americans call a ‘pick-up truck’. A ute, we normally say. What’s more blunt and practical than that? Eudaimonia is a concept for sprinkling on your puy lentils to add that certain je ne sais quoi. Utility, on the other hand, is a concept you could change your sparkplugs with.

So, achieving ute is easy. Here’s how you do it. Start with the things you have. Now exchange them with people for other things you would prefer to have. People will participate in these exchanges whenever their preferences are different to yours. This will be often, since humans are psychologically diverse. Keep exchanging for as long as your preferences fail to be maximised, and you’ll always be getting closer to full happiness.

As long as there are free markets, the opportunity for exchange will be there. You may not like where you are, but you can always exchange your way to somewhere better. Suppose, for example, you inherit a large manor house from your parents, but you don’t like manor houses. Suppose, also, that you’ve always wanted to be a collector of comic books, but you don’t own a single one. Blast! But exchange provides the way out of this cruel trap. In fact, it provides the way out of all cruel traps. More money than sense? Buy yourself some education! All dressed up and nowhere to go? Exchange some of your clothes for invitations to exciting events! Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink? Find somebody who prefers non-potable water to potable water, and let the trading begin!

Why does it somehow happen, then, that markets are relatively free and yet people aren’t moving towards full satisfaction? There are three main explanations. Maybe people are already fully satisfied. Maybe they’re refusing to exchange on account of some perversion. Or maybe they’re screwing up. (There is a fourth possible explanation, which is that some factor external to the whole system of exchange is causing interference. This possibility threatens to undermine the whole theory by introducing untestable ceteris paribus clauses into its main principles. Let’s never talk about it again.) So, as I said, there are THREE explanations. The third requires the introduction of a new concept. It’s possible to screw up by being mistaken about your preferences or by forming false expectations. This is why we need the safety net.

The safety net is a familiar concept from the circus. The tightrope walker, for example, is meant to walk across a rope, but sometimes she makes mistakes. So, as she’s training, they put a net under her. Otherwise she would fall. See? Safety net. Likewise, a free market lets you exchange your way to happiness, but just in case you make mistakes and make yourself less happy, there’s the safety net, in the form of the welfare system. It keeps you from getting too unhappy as a result of your own maladroit exchanges. You could also call it ‘training wheels’. It’s for people who haven’t quite got exchange right yet – people whose hedonic balance is a little off. Don’t worry, little darlings. We’ll catch you. Now, back on the rope.

I said back on the rope! Yes, you see? The problem with the safety net is that it also catches the aforementioned perverts, who simply refuse to help themselves to greater happiness through exchange. Imagine a lazy circus student who doesn’t even try to walk the rope, tumbling straight off every time and using the safety net as a big hammock until somebody prods him off. That’s a good reason not to make the safety net too comfortable. Make it out of some kind of tough material so it chafes the skin, or, better yet, rig it up like the rope-beds in the hostel described by Sam Weller in the Pickwick Papers: every morning the ropes go slack and oversleepers are dropped onto the hard wood.

The above should give you everything you need not only to achieve happiness but also to build the good society. So why is there so much debate about political economy? Because people don’t understand these simple principles. Maybe they didn’t read The Constitution of Liberty, because it was too long. Now they can read this blog post, which is much shorter with no loss in content.

Take Mitt Romney. He recently got into trouble for saying he wasn’t concerned about the very poor, because there was a safety net for them. That’s perfectly sensible, as I have proven. People like Paul Krugman might come whinging with their statistics about tax rates and poverty, but they ought to listen to Adam Smith, who said ‘I have no great faith in political arithmetic’ (Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter V). The theory I’ve just fully outlined requires no reference to numbers; it’s a piece of folk psychology. Treating it as some kind of scientific theory, tractable in terms of quantitative laws with specific values for its variables runs it straight into the objection that all attempts to do so hitherto have rendered it either false or so generic as to be vacuous (see my previous post, which asserts the same point, also without evidence). Let’s never talk about that again either.

Back to Romney, who next said something even more sensible, which is that if there are holes in the safety net, he’s happy to repair them. Good thinking! Imagine if the circus school net-maker wasn’t vigilant! The real problem is the next thing he said, which is that he wants to focus on the middle classes, rather than the very poor or the very rich. Certainly focusing on the very rich would be silly and pointless. They’re miles above the safety net! They’re not just walking the tightrope; they’re flying over it, somersaulting off unicycles and pogo sticks with big goofy grins on their faces. The middle classes are also above the tightrope, leaping up to swing on trapezes at various levels. But that means Romney’s idea is foolish. If government starts trying to help the middle classes, this will involve putting safety nets at different levels above the tightrope instead of below it! But if you do that, the nets will get in the way of the performances! This is what economists call ‘crowding out’.

In conclusion, Romney’s views are horribly confused and show a basic failure to understand political economy, which consists, to recap, of the following two principles: (1) people make themselves happier by exchanging, and (2) government’s only role is to provide a safety net for people who suck at exchanging. Deviating from these principles, Romney will end up wrapping up the whole circus in safety nets like a crazy incontinent spider.

Perhaps, however, his social philosophy is not the one I have just outlined. Maybe he is applying some heretical social philosophy, one that draws from a stock of concepts going beyond those of exchange and safety nets. If so, he must tell us so, and what his new, deviant social philosophy is. But then he also shouldn’t confuse the matter by using a term like ‘safety net’, which immediately signals commitment to a classical theory admirable in its straightforwardness, if nothing else.

Aaron Meskin is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on aesthetics and other philosophical subjects. He was the first aesthetics editor for the online journal Philosophy Compass, and he co-edited Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007). He is a former Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics and is Treasurer of the British Society of Aesthetics.

Roy T Cook is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, a Resident Fellow of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, and an Associate Fellow of the Northern Institute of Philosophy (Aberdeen). He works in the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and the aesthetics of popular art. He blogs about comics at:  www.pencilpanelpage.wordpress.com

Philosopher’s Eye: Why did you two decide to edit The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach?

AM: I thought there was enough good work out there being done on comics that someone could produce a good book on the subject matter. I like to work collaboratively, so when I met Roy it seemed like a good idea to work together. I suppose there’s also a sort of selfish reason–philosophy is about conversation and I wanted more conversation (and more interlocutors) on a topic I care about.

RTC: Aaron was nice enough to ask me – someone with no prior professional experience in aesthetics – to comment on a three-paper session on comics at an aesthetics conference. The volume was conceived over coffee at the same conference, based on the positive response to the papers and resulting discussion.

PE: What’s the central concern of the book, and why is it important?

AM & RTC: The book focuses on the aesthetic issues that are raised by the art form of comics. It is not philosophy ‘in’ or ‘through’ comics–the basic idea is to take comics seriously as an art and explore the philosophical questions that art raises. One of the most useful and interesting thing for philosophers of art to do is to focus on the specific issues raised by particular art forms–this strategy has really paid off in recent philosophical work on film and music.

PE: And what is it that draws you to this broad area?

AM: I care about the popular or mass arts. I particularly like comics. I like working in relatively new areas — I like the freedom and the challenge of figuring out what to say about topics that haven’t been previously explored by other philosophers.

RTC: Aaron and I arrived at this shared interest from completely different directions. While Aaron is an aesthetician who began to explore his interest in comics, I was just a guy really into comics who, as a result, started working in aesthetics (prior to this I had neither training nor experience in aesthetics). I think the different backgrounds and approaches helped when we were putting together the volume.

PE: What comics do you recommend for people who don’t know a lot about the art form?

AM: It’s an obvious recommendation, but Art Spiegelman’s Maus is the unquestioned masterpiece of the form. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Some other great works: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Charles Burns’ Black Hole, Daniel Clowes’ works such as David Boring, Ghost World and Ice Haven. Anything by Chris Ware. The British artist Posy Simmonds is wonderfully literary. I like some things by the (oddly) mainstream comics author, Grant Morrison, very much–Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Seven Soldiers of Victory. George Herriman’s early twentieth-century comic strip, Krazy Kat, is amazing, as is Winsor McCay’s even earlier strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland. The former is strange and profound, the latter is visually stunning.

RTC: Of course, Aaron and I don’t agree about every comic, but I won’t name the comics in his list that I think are overrated! Comics that I would add to the list are Canadian cartoonist Seth’s It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken and Wimbledon Green, anything drawn by either Jack Kirby or by Darwyn Cooke, and anything written by Warren Ellis (who was kind enough to write a preface for the anthology!). Aaron didn’t mention what is, in my opinion, Grant Morrison’s masterpiece – The Invisibles. In addition, I cannot emphasize enough my love for John Byrne’s work on The Fantastic Four and on The Sensational She-Hulk during the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Finally, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts is widely held to be a national treasure here in the States, but it deserves still more attention (and much more academic study).

AM: And I’m not saying anything about Roy’s list. Except that Seth really is worth reading.

PE: What sort of audience did you have in mind for this book?

AM & RTC: The volume should be of interest to philosophers, philosophy students, and anyone interested in comics (i.e., fans, comics theorists, comics makers). Anyone interested in the popular arts. So everyone, basically!

PE: What sort of reaction do you hope the books will get?

AM & RTC: Philosophers and philosophy students who read it will see that there are serious and interesting issues raised by comics. We hope they’re encouraged to think seriously about comics and other under-explored art forms. And we hope that people from outside of philosophy (comics fans and artists and theorists) will come to understand what philosophical aesthetics has to contribute to the understanding of the art form.

PE: Why do you think people should take comics seriously as an art form and topic of philosophical interest?

AM & RTC: Comics have tremendous artistic capacities–they can do pretty much everything literature and painting can. They have a remarkable capacity to tell complex and emotionally rich stories by means of visual narration. And they raise fascinating philosophical questions about representation, narrative, artistic value, authorship and more. Even those who aren’t fans should recognize that they raise interesting philosophical issues.

PE: What’s your current project? What’s next?

AM: I’ve got a lot of things other than comics that I’m working on–some experimental aesthetics, work on relativism and the semantics of aesthetic predicates, work on the short story, co-editing a book on aesthetics and the sciences. But I’m not going to stop working on comics–I’m in the process of writing an introduction to the aesthetics of comics for a forthcoming anthology on the philosophy of art, and I’ve just had the idea for a way of structuring my own book on comics. It has to do with opera! I hope to get round to writing that book sometime in the not-too-distant future.

RTC: After all the work involved with this volume, I need to get back to my day job – logic and philosophy of mathematics. So I am working on two main projects. The first is developing a version of logical pluralism from an intuitionistic perspective. The second is continuing my work defending, and mathematically developing, Scottish logicism, a contemporary variant of Gottlob Frege’s logicism. On the side, however, I am also currently working on a short book examining John Byrne’s use of metafictional strategies in The Sensational She-Hulk, and what this kind of ‘formal play’ has to teach us about how comics work.

I have a little bugbear.

A little pet peeve.

So there are a ton of different usages of the word ‘philosophy’.  Leaving aside its double-life as a verb, the OED lists nine noun entries for ‘philosophy’ – and one of them really grinds my gears.  I might be the only philosopher that gets the irritated, nails-on-chalkboard sensation when someone uses the term in this way, but I suspect not.  Not only are philosophers incredibly sensitive to their own use of language, splitting already split hairs, I find that they’re almost preternaturally attuned to the misuse of words in others.  Maybe we’re just all jerks.  Number six in the OED list is the spine-shivering offender, particularly, entry (b): “In extended use: a set of opinions or ideas held by an individual or group; a theory or attitude which acts as a guiding principle for behaviour; an outlook or world view.”

Maybe now you’re starting to sympathize with me.

Maybe now you’re starting to get that nervous twitch at the corner of your eye.  Such usages invariably begin with ‘My philosophy…’ (or worse, ‘our philosophy…’).  Businesses, politicians, and celebrities are, if not the worst offenders of this usage, certainly offer us the most prevalent examples.  Here are some, randomly culled from Google: ‘Our marketing philosophy […] depends heavily on our belief in limitless possibilities’, ‘My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.’, and so on*.

Why is this, and lets not mince words here, offensive to the two ears of (at least this) academic philosopher?  My own suspicion is that it has less to do with an ivory-tower defence of a proper usage of the term, than with the inevitable Crocodile-Dundee-style confrontation between 6B and these proper usages: i.e. ‘That’s not a philosophy, this, is a philosophy.’  To wit, when people start thinking that academic philosophy is the same as gathering and living by a collection of opinions, or indeed, ethical statements, which academic philosophy believes is but a subset of problems under only one (but a major) division of the discipline.  This, at least, is what pushes my button.  Not the use of the term, but that it misleads people about what philosophers actually do on a daily basis.

One might think that definition 6b hasn’t applied to mainstream philosophy since the time of the Ancient Greeks, where one’s philosophical analyses and conclusions really were a world view: things really did look different if you were an Epicurean as compared to a Stoic.   So maybe, what we need to do is isolate this use of ‘philosophy’ and try to slowly replace it with ‘ethos’ or ‘guiding principles’ or ‘firmly held beliefs’.   Would that solve the problem?  I’m not sure, and I’m starting to come round to the fact that this idea is a little misguided.  That really, 6B, and all its usages, even the extremely annoying uses, really does belong with all the other definitions, and that it should not only be used in this way, but encouraged.

Say what you will about David Foster Wallace – but in this area, I think he’s right.  In his doorstop of a book, Infinite Jest, he spills a lot of ink showing the wisdom of common phrases.   He picks up on this theme in the heart-wrenching (and mercifully, much shorter) 2005 Kenyon commencement speech.  What does a liberal art’s education really mean? –and the platitude, that it “teaches you how to think”?  I won’t retrace the article, suffice to say, that “teaching you how to think” has more depth, and more to teach, than you might think a common, bandied-about phrase really should.

And this, I think, is the way we should treat number 6B.  It might seem irritating, and a distortion of the ‘real’ uses of ‘philosophy’ – but it is just as real, and just as relevant.  Philosophy was, as alluded to above, once much more than an analysis of the necessary and sufficient conditions, or of supervenience bases and non-reductive explanatory levels: it did capture something about the world, and the way we do (or should) live in it.  And I think we should keep that in mind as we go about our studies, our great tracts of analyses – we are doing more than definition no. 1, creating “[knowledge], learning, scholarship; a body of knowledge”, and doing more than performing 4a “[rational] inquiry or argument, as opposed to divinely revealed knowledge” – that we are attempting to understanding the world by carving it at its joints, and trying to find our place in it – that we are, after all, crafting a world view.

Related:

David Vessey – Gadamer and Davidson on Language and Thought

*I have a suspicion, that the word ‘philosophy’ becomes something of a null search term when attached to most words.  Outside of its specifying usage with words like ‘ancient’ or ‘of law’, I doubt it really adds any great value to the trimming of search results.  I also think there are rules for a drinking game in here somewhere.

 As NPR reports, planets are being discovered that might support life.  These new and exciting celestial spheres are more-or-less suitable for the emergence of life: the temperature, gravity, and elemental make-up of such planets can create selection pressures that range the gamut from mild to pretty-much-inhospitable.  One such discovery is especially noteworthy: Kepler 22-B (named after the telescope) is in the ‘goldilocks’ zone.  In this zone, the size of the planet and its proximity to its star create the right sort of conditions to support flowing water.

The BBC (picked up by Slate) go on to make the link between the discovery of such planets and astral systems, and SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.  With the discovery of more and more of these potentially-hospitable earth-twins, SETI gains a more plausible target to turn its arrays.  With the discovery of more and more of such planets, it is more likely (though I am hesitant to use this term here) that we may discover intelligent life.  Another variable in the Drake Equation starts its climb up in the cardinal numbers.

But wait! What is intelligent life?  The ability to broadcast galactic radio-waves?  Drake, at least, keeps that a separate variable, a tier that only a select group of intelligent critters will ever reach.  But that really seems to operationalize our search for intelligent life.  What if, being impatient, we send a probe (‘Make it so Number One’, etc.) to Kepler 22-B and discover strange, barely congealed bioluminescent areas – would we be right in attributing it with intelligence?  Might our current conceptions of it be too broad? – too exclusive?

Alva Nöe, my usual blogulocutor, seems to think that our current understanding of intelligence is limited.  Drawing on Enactivism (championed by, among others, Evan Thompson and the late Francisco Varela), Nöe argues that we have overlooked plants for too long!  On an Enactive understanding, life and mind and constitutively linked – the organizational structures of life are ‘intelligent’ – and plants are surely alive.  Thus, they are in some way intelligent!  Sure, plants won’t be constructing radio-arrays anytime soon, but they display some kind of intelligent life.  After all they adapt, and adapt to, their ecological niche, they can orient themselves towards nutrients, etc.

There are reasons both to agree and disagree with the organization cum intelligence view.  It certainly gives a deep unity between all living things, and may create a gradational scale of intelligence that, yes, would probably be more useful for our Kepler probe.  But it is less likely to proffer any meaningful observations about what makes human intelligence so unique and powerful – why we have constructed radio-arrays, and are actively looking for other array-assemblers.  Such arguments are very poor at explaining how our level of intelligence could arise: how one could jump from sunflowers to super-sunflowers to humans.

When it comes to searching for intelligent life, I have to agree with SETI: wait and hear.  While it might be unfair to many planets with hypothetical plant-proto-intelligence, if we hear radio waves, we have a pretty good reason to think we’re listening to the emanations of an intelligent creature.

Related:

Scientific Models – Stephen M. Downes

Congratulations to John Hawthorne, editor of Philosophical Perspectives, for his recent grant award from the John Templeton Foundation! Prof. Hawthorne will lead a project titled “New Insights and Directions for Religious Epistemology” that seeks to revitalize the field by drawing on recent developments in mainstream epistemology. Valued at £1.3 million, the award will support three postdoctoral researchers, three PhD students, 22 visiting research fellowships, nine public lectures, four roundtable discussions, six workshops, and a major international conference.

To me, the first of January is always a write-off.  Nothing productive ever happens.  It exists among the days of hangovers and jetlag.  But now it is the day after the first, and it is now (as it was yesterday) 2012, and that means it is the perfect time to discuss, well, time.  And there have been quite a few timely stories lately, from Samoa and Tokelau going back to the future, to the growing schism between international time and astronomical time.  Even the Royal Society has some choice words on tricky temporal travails. And, resolutions aside, I’m going to attempt to be timely myself, and make this a rather short post.  I want to share a few thoughts and links about the commercialization of time.

Of course, time is involved in many non-trivial ways in our daily life: the flow and change of seasons that signalled times of growth and harvest; the rotations of the sun that marked out the day’s working hours; the shivers of tide that allow for the gathering of molluscs, and so on.  There is a strain of philosophy, particular the early Phenomenologists, that assert that such relationships to time are primordial, originary.  These initial demarcations of time and change are what allow our mind to grasp a hold on the concept, to bring it to the rarefied reaches of reason, and to gain a measure of control over it.  This is a rich field of thought, but I want to make just a few remarks about one aspect of this control: when time becomes part of – a tool, even – of our commercial and economic spheres.

Harvard Professor Peter Galison, and his book, Einstein’s Clocks and Poincare’s Maps, helped me make sense of how time was reigned in.  Until the late 19^th century and early 20^th, every major urban central had its own ‘local time’, most often set to accord with astronomical time, where noon corresponds to the apex of the sun in the sky.  But with the introduction of telegraph lines (and predominantly their use in calculating longitudinal maps), among other reasons, time was brought under international purview, and regulation.

We can find in these telegraph lines the beginning of time’s integration into our economy.  This shouldn’t be taken to mean those aspects of our economy ‘where time is of the essence’ in expediting parcels, or trading stocks – where time, or the lack thereof, is prized – but in date-line jumping and satellite calculations (the modern day telegraphy).  Time is no longer just a way of marking change, or an absolute stream, or the meaning of the structure of care – and maybe it never has been just these things – but now it’s not just something we value, but an integral part of our economy, something to be debated over in terms of dollars and cents, part of what makes the world as we know it go round.

Related:

Matthew McGrath – Temporal Parts

Sonia Roca-Royes – Essential Properties and Individual Essences

Christmas – Philosophy for Everyone

Better Than a Lump of Coal

Fritz Allhoff, Scott C. Lowe

From the blurb:

From Santa, elves and Ebenezer Scrooge, to the culture wars and virgin birth, Christmas – Philosophy for Everyone explores a host of philosophical issues raised by the practices and beliefs surrounding Christmas. Offers thoughtful and humorous philosophical insights into the most widely celebrated holiday in the Western world Contributions come from a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, theology, religious studies, English literature, cognitive science and moral psychology The essays cover a wide range of Christmas themes, from a defence of the miracle of the virgin birth to the relevance of Christmas to atheists and pagans

As the last of the United States’ armed forces withdraw from their prolonged engagement in Iraq, an observer can pause to reflect and consider the moral status of this conflict. Two recent experiences – incredibly trivial though they may be – inform my analysis. Firstly, I happened to chance upon In the Valley of Elah (a 2007 film whose story aims to highlight some of the terrible psychological effects that can result from throwing young individuals into such a conflict) the other day, and I found it quite compelling. Secondly, in a recent philosophy seminar that I was overseeing, a student attempted to raise the war in Iraq as an example that might offer support for a more general point about the validity of a consequentialist justification in moral reasoning; at the time I didn’t have any knowledge of the numbers involved, so I couldn’t say much about the nature of the example as regards a strictly consequentialist calculation. Due to my role, I felt compelled to stay silent at the time, and it left me frustrated.

I shall elaborate upon this second instance first. The war in Iraq was mentioned because – so the student asserted – America’s action was a reaction to 9/11, the war being started in order to prevent future attacks; therefore given that fewer Americans had died in the war in Iraq than in the 9/11 attacks (or so it was believed in the, as it turns out, rather ignorant context of the seminar) then if the war had successfully prevented another attack on the scale of 9/11, it ought to be considered, overall, a good thing. Now, as I have recently discovered, the death toll for American soldiers in Iraq stands at “nearly 4,500”, and therefore the example appears to fail on the most basic terms of its calculation. But placing this point to one side for a moment, can we instead ask how legitimate it may be to even ask such a question, or to put such a question in such terms? Would such a consequentialist calculation sufficiently justify a war? Could it? As ever, there is always a game to be played – especially in philosophy seminars – whereby one can repeatedly alter the variables in the calculation in order to find the point at which the consequentialist calculation breaks down. Let’s say Saddam had WMDs, and he was definitely going to deploy them…would the war have been obviously justified? Perhaps so. What if he had them, but wasn’t planning on deploying them…still ok? What about if he didn’t have them? (I won’t wade into that debate…) Intellectually stimulating as this silly little game may be, it doesn’t really hit to the heart of matter does it? And why not, we may ask…

The lens of the international news presents two images of a war: It presents, firstly, the big picture, the numerical information, which largely amounts to the statistics concerning the numbers of casualties, the financial cost of the conflict, and so on. Secondly, it presents the little picture, the human face of the conflict; it shows us the stories of the individuals ‘on the ground’. The news tells us these things because it is the news, and that’s what the news does…it’s the news’ job to tell us about the stuff that we’re interested in, and when it comes to war, we are interested in these things. If it only told us about the stats, we would feel a strong inclination to know more about what it was actually like, ‘on the ground’. If we were only shown the stories on the ground, we would want to know more about how this fits into the big picture. Now though ‘level of interest’ is hardly a philosophically robust measure to base any kind of theory on, it is undoubtedly the case that we are interested in these two things, the big picture and the little picture. That much is obvious.

Returning to our consequentialist calculation, we see that part of the problem of engaging with an issue such as war on such strictly consequentialist terms is that the calculation seems too stuck in the ‘big picture’ perspective. From this point of view, many things can appear to be utterly justified. But from the ‘little picture’ perspective, precisely the same things can appear utterly unjustifiable. Posing a question about the moral status of this war, or any war, in strictly consequentialist terms therefore misses some important elements, and it does this by presupposing that only the big picture counts. Only the big picture can ultimately count, in consequentialist terms; and the truth of that is far from obvious.

How else can I conclude this but with a glib and pathetic point about the likely necessity of involving a profound sense of both perspectives in any moral judgement…? Well, why not.

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