My contribution to linguistics

Longtime readers may recall my dance floor linguistics research from two years ago. I'm happy to let you know that that research has been cited in a conference presentation titled "An Eleméntàry Linguistic Definition of Upstate New York," by Aaron Dinkin and Keelan Evanini (pdf).

Xenophobia, partisanship, and epistemic peer disagreement

[Cross-posted from my political blog, Donkeylicious]

A lot of smart people in America are uncomfortable with the idea that they should treat similarly educated folks from other advanced democracies as generally ignorant, deluded, or crazy on global political issues. Instead, we should treat them as 'epistemic peers' -- people just as intelligent as us, working from the same body of evidence, who are roughly our equals in ability to know the truth. In the case at hand, the bodies of evidence differ somewhat, since we have different news sources. But we can mostly solve this problem by sharing our evidence in discussion. If the evidence conflicts and we try to argue that their news sources are unreliable, all we usually have to go on is our news sources, and they can argue the same against us.

Similarly, a lot of smart Democrats are uncomfortable with the idea that they should regard Republicans as generally ignorant, deluded or crazy on global political issues. Many of the same considerations apply here. If we argue that their news sources are unreliable, they can argue that ours are, they're in possession of a basically isomorphic argument. Ordinarily, treating Republicans as epistemic peers would be a reasonable position, just as treating foreigners that way is. But the trouble at our historical moment is that we're no longer able to treat Republicans and educated people throughout the world as epistemic peers at the same time.

I think the following is a fair characterization of the reasoning that resulted in Obama's recent honor: The Republican Party has gone mad and become so destructive of world peace that you get a Nobel Peace Prize for removing them from power. That's an incredibly strong way to to put the point, and I don't know if the consensus of educated people outside America is willing to go quite that far. But if it stops short, it doesn't stop too far short. The 2008-2009 jump in favorable views of America, especially in Western Europe but including many other nations, is a sign of how differently people see Obama-era America from what preceded it. Foreigners will have many different views of what exactly is going on, but they're generally going to include the idea that Republican views on foreign policy are so tainted by the xenophobia, bloodthirst, and misinformation of influential people in the party that they can't be regarded as epistemic peers.

Republicans regard world opinion as badly as it regards them. You can see it even in their relationship with mainstream American opinion, where they've constructed an alternative news infrastructure in Fox News and talk radio that they regard as free from the distortions of the mainstream media. While Democrats have their own preferred blogs and websites, they haven't built full-fledged Fox-News-style alternative versions of mainstream news institutions. Globally, this becomes even stronger. Republicans' relation to respected international institutions like the UN (on the political side) and the BBC (on the news side) has long been hostile. When international weapons inspectors claimed that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction, Republicans ridiculed them. Thinking the Wikipedia editors of the world are biased against them, Republicans created Conservapedia. If you don't regard educated people throughout the rest of the world as your epistemic peers, this is what you do, and maybe you start ordering freedom fries. Of course, this leaves you in a situation where the rest of the world isn't going to think you're an epistemic peer of theirs.

So where does this leave Americans who aren't Republicans? I don't think it's possible for us to treat both Republicans and educated people throughout the world as epistemic peers. This would involve having some level of trust each group's deeply held belief that the opposite group has gone totally off the rails. This leaves you suspecting that two different groups of people are deluded on the say-so of people who you suspect are deluded about issues like who is deluded. That's a pretty bad position, and not one we can stay in very long. We could also just regard global affairs as a huge area of general confusion where nobody knows what is going on, and withdraw from politics. If we're going to continue doing politics, however, we need to decide which group we're going to treat as epistemic peers and whose opinions we're going to regard as tainted by bias and misinformation.

There's plenty to be said about how exactly we should make that decision. But I'm going to conclude this post by observing that the noble intentions of Democrats and independents to treat both Republicans and educated foreigners as epistemic peers about global affairs can't be satisfied in our unhappy world. If we're going to engage in politics, we have to be either xenophobes or partisans. There are no other options.

SLACRR

The St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons & Rationality looks neat. I'm probably going to be in the States from May 23-25, so if I can get my stuff together in time, I'll go.

Reverse Polish sausage

I'm not enough of a logician to laugh at the latest xkcd, though I did manage to figure out the joke without looking anything up.

Hedonism FTW

I've just uploaded a new paper (and submitted it to a journal): The Epistemic Argument for Universal Hedonism. This one is pretty action-packed. First I give an account of moral judgment. Then I present an argument that pushes us towards global skepticism about morality. Then I save us from global moral skepticism by arguing that despite the big skeptical argument, we can know about the goodness of pleasure through phenomenal introspection. Then there's a part at the end where I clean up some stuff about how to go from the epistemic stuff to the metaphysical and moral conclusions. This is supposed to be the first and biggest step in the big argument for hedonic utilitarianism.

I gave this paper at a bunch of places this summer -- Arizona, Tennessee, Illinois State, and King's College London -- and people gave me great feedback everywhere. Thanks, folks!

Pulau Ubin

I went to Ubin yesterday! It's an island a ten minute boat ride from Singapore. Attractions included a wild boar and a mangrove swamp.

Depicted with me are super philosophy undergraduates Zi Wei and Ming De, as well as super philosophy colleague Ben Blumson. I'll be visiting Ben's native Australia in December, as well as New Zealand. I've heard that there is plenty of awesome nature down there, and I look forward to seeing it.

By the way, if you'd like me to give a talk at your department in Australia, let me know! NUS has given me a big grant that I'm supposed to use for exactly that purpose, and I'm told that I put on a good show.

Kanye West bum-rushes the history of philosophy

Via.

My chocolate dream

I had a dream some years ago. I was in a candy store with a couple dollars in my pocket, deciding whether to buy another piece of chocolate. I decided to buy it, and ate it. It was yummy!

Then I woke up. As I thought about my dream, I felt happy about making the right decision, insofar as I made a decision at all. Sometimes dream decisions are real decisions, and sometimes they're not. Dream pleasure, however, is always real pleasure. Dream money is never real money.

Double-Humean paper up!

One of the papers I've been presenting this summer on the Moral Naturalism World Tour, "How Double-Humeans Can Make Room for Error", is now available for download. I'm going to send it off to a journal in about a week, so if you want to read it and correspond with me before I do that, now's your chance! Here's the introduction of the paper:

A concise way of spelling out the Humean theory of motivation is that an agent will do whatever maximizes expected desire satisfaction. And a concise way of spelling out instrumentalism is that it is rational for an agent to do whatever maximizes expected desire satisfaction. Instrumentalism is sometimes called the Humean theory of practical rationality, so one could call the conjunction of the Humean theory of motivation and instrumentalism the double-Humean view.

In “The Normativity of Instrumental Reason,” Christine Korsgaard argues that the double-Humean view makes practical irrationality impossible:

The problem is coming from the fact that Hume identifies a person’s end as what he wants most, and the criterion of what the person wants most appears to be what he actually does. The person’s ends are taken to be revealed in his conduct. If we don’t make a distinction between what a person’s end is and what he actually pursues, it will be impossible to find a case in which he violates the instrumental principle. (230)

If maximizing expected desire satisfaction is what it is rational to do (as instrumentalism says) and also what one will do (as the Humean theory of motivation says) it is hard to see how one can act irrationally. According to Korsgaard, Hume not only says that “people don’t in fact ever violate the instrumental principle. He is actually committed to the view that people cannot violate it” (228). If the instrumental principle is the sole principle of practical rationality, this will mean that practical irrationality is impossible. This would be a strange and surprising consequence, and to avoid having to accept it, we might be moved to reject either the Humean theory of motivation or instrumentalism.

First, I will explain why exactly it would be a problem for a double-Humean view if it left no room for practical irrationality. I will focus particularly on Douglas Lavin's logical interpretation of the error constraint, and Korsgaard's argument that the double-Humean view will have bad consequences for our ability to regard agents as capable of action. Unlike many recent commentators, I hold that an agent can be subject to a principle even if there is no logically possible action she could do to violate it, and I will present examples of such agents. Nevertheless, Korsgaard and Lavin are right that double-Humeans must account for practical irrationality. This is not because of any formal constraints on normativity, but because practical irrationality exists, and our theories need to reflect this fact.

Then I will lay out the two components of the double-Humean view in a more precise fashion and consider the best reasons for accepting them. The Humean theory of motivation should be accepted because it gives the best explanation of how we deliberate and act. While some philosophers have been moved to accept instrumentalism because the considerations it presents as normative have a role in explaining action, this is not a good reason to accept it. We should accept it because it correctly accounts for an important group of our normative judgments.

Finally, I will respond to Korsgaard by showing how the double-Humean view can account for just as much practical irrationality as there is. The Humean theory of motivation and instrumentalism should be filled out in ways that measure the agent’s actual desires differently. When determining how agents will be motivated, we should look at the balance of motivational forces that desire produces in them at the moment of action. When determining what it is rational to do, we should look at dispositional desires. As I will argue, this way of setting up the double-Humean view leaves exactly the right amount of space for practical irrationality, while achieving the desiderata that motivate both sides of the position.

Seattle!

I fly to Seattle tomorrow! I'll be there from July 27-31, hanging out with Donkeylicious co-blogger Nick and grad school friends Justin and Ariela. Probably I'll be in Tacoma for the latter half of that. Then it'll be back to SF for a couple more days before I go back to Singapore.

Econostarstrucklunch

I just had lunch with Brad DeLong!

The counterfactual in his post came up in conversation when I was explaining Possible Girls to him. Discussing that paper with famous people in academia will, I suspect, be a recurring source of joy in my life.

What is the answer to a riddle?

Julian Sanchez writes:

“In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the one word you must under no circumstances use?” The question comes from Borges’ short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in which the narrator’s ancestor (we’re told) aspired to create an infinite labyrinth. He ultimately constructed his labyrinth not in space but through time and narrative, writing a great sprawling novel in which many possible—and contradictory—futures coexist, converge, and splay off into variegated chaos again. The forbidden word, of course, is “chess”—making that opening question a riddle in violation of its own rule.

I was thinking that the use/mention distinction would save the riddle from self-violation. We should regard the word "chess" as being mentioned and not used by Borges in stating the riddle. (For the time being, let's set aside the issue of whether the question actually counts as a riddle.)

Might we instead say that the locution "A riddle whose answer is X" involves the use of X, rather than the mere mention of X? Well, I would've thought that answers were linguistic entities, so when you talk about the answer to any riddle you're talking about a linguistic entity, and thus mentioning the term rather than using it.

Also, it would be a surprise if questions and answers had different ontological status. While there's a theoretical option of considering answers to be nonlinguistic entities, since they refer to things, I don't see a similar option with questions. A question has to be a series of words, or some abstract entity expressible in words. Unlike an answer, there's no object it can be taken to refer to. If there's good reason to regard answers as the same things as questions, we should regard both as linguistic entities.

Inter-philosophical sloth

After giving nine talks this summer, I'm now back in San Francisco visiting Mom and Dad. I've been sleeping and blogging about politics and generally being unproductive. Maybe later this evening after dinner I'll get to revising my paper on the double-Humean view. Or maybe tomorrow. Anyway, it's going to be revised and sent off to a journal before I go back to Singapore. Mark my words.

Today it turned out that conversations about my research (in particular, stuff on dispositional desires and rationality that's in my paper about the double-Humean view) informed other people's political blogging! They were talking about requirements that restaurants print calorie information on their menus. How is this relevant? Well, I wrote a big post at Donkeylicious explaining it so you can go there and see.

England and Scotland

I'm in Edinburgh now, and I've got to pay my respects at Hume's tomb. And when I get back to London, I'll make sure to see Jeremy Bentham at UCL.

Mostly, I'll be hanging out with people at Oxford after I get back. If you're in the London or Oxford or Edinburgh area and want to hang out, I'd be happy to meet up! Send me an email or comment or something and I'll see if we can get in touch.

The talk at KCL went really well. I was happy to meet M.M. McCabe, the dissertation advisor of my senior thesis advisor, Raphael Woolf. It was also a nice feeling to give a big defense of hedonism not far from where Jeremy Bentham's body is displayed.

If I'd been to London earlier, I would've asked Bentham to be the external reviewer on my dissertation committee. We have similar views on a variety of issues, and I'm sure he wouldn't have said no. Getting him to provide comments on my work or write a good letter of recommendation would've been difficult, but that's always a risk when you have famous people as your outside committee members.

(Update: I couldn't find Hume's tomb, though I did find his statue and get my picture taken with him.)

Holbo/Waring Plato Volume

NUS Philosophy colleague John Holbo and classics master Belle Waring have a Plato book online. It's intended for introductory audiences, and contains the Meno, the Euthyphro, and Book I of the Republic, along with lovely illustrations.

Song for Philippa Foot

This is Kate Nash covering the Arctic Monkeys' "Fluorescent Adolescent."  I first heard it around the time I was teaching Philippa Foot's "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives."  Foot would give up the bold morality/reasons externalist thesis in that paper twenty years after writing it, having abandoned the Humean theory of practical rationality.  But I'm still totally into the young wild Philippa Foot who thought that all our reasons come from our desires.

You used to get it in your fishnets
Now you only get it in your nightdress
Discarded all the naughty nights for niceness
Landed in a very common crisis
Everything's in order in a black hole
Nothing seems as pretty as the past though
Bloody Mary's lacking in Tabasco
Remember when you used to be a rascal?

Aseel al-Awadhi goes to Parliament

Congratulations to Texas philosophy Ph.D Aseel al-Awadhi, who is among the first four women to win election to the Kuwaiti Parliament. I overlapped with her in grad school, and we once had a fun multiethnic Super Bowl party together. Kuwaiti women only got the right to vote and run for office in 2005, so things are moving fast. In other good news, Sunni fundamentalists lost a lot of seats.

Now when your students ask you what you can do with a philosophy education, you can tell them: become a member of Parliament in Kuwait!

Moral Naturalism World Tour

Today I arrived in San Francisco. I'm going to be hanging out with Mom and Dad for a view days before starting what I called the "Moral Naturalism Project" in the big grant application that's paying for all my travel. So far I have two papers written -- "The Epistemic Argument for Universal Hedonism" (EA) and "How Double-Humeans Can Make Room for Error" (DH). Here's the places I'm going and the talks I'm giving, as far as I've planned:

May 9 - Fly from Singapore to San Francisco
May 12 - Fly from San Francisco to LA for USC talk on 12th (DH)
May 13 - Fly from LA to Tucson for University of Arizona talk on 13th (EA)
May 14 - Fly from Tuscon to Miami for University of Miami talk on 15th (DH)
May 17 - Fly from Miami to Knoxville for University of Tennessee talk on the 18th (EA)
May 19 - Fly from Knoxville to Austin
June 1 - Fly from Austin to Chicago to see my super-smart sister Supriya Sinhababu. Illinois State talk on the 4th (EA) and Illinois talk on the 5th. (DH)
[Now things get a little hazy. I have some free time between talks and I'll probably go somewhere on the Eastern seaboard for a few days but I don't know where.]
June 9 - Fly to London for King's College London talk on June 10. Chill at Oxford for a while, maybe Edinburgh. Return on June 19 or so.
[More haziness. Hopefully somehow involving girls.]
June 20something - Fly to Grand Rapids for Calvin College talk and subsequent Michigan talk.
Early July - Visit DC
Rest of July - Hang out with family in SF, or wherever they might be at the time.
Late July / Early August - Fly to Seattle for Puget Sound talk
August 5 - Fly from San Francisco back to Singapore

Byron York needs black people to have non-actual modal parts

A Byron York post is being linked everywhere because it contains one of the most fascinating comments I've ever heard on race. It's not a throwaway line -- it's standing right there in thesis-statement position at the end of the first paragraph:

On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.

"more popular overall than they actually are"? Usually, racism doesn't push people to say things that are flatly contradictory. Though we might be able to make it consistent if we take a racialized version of Brian Weatherson's view and assume that black people have non-actual modal parts while white people are wholly actual. It'll be hard to reliably poll people's non-actual modal parts, but that's never stopped Zogby before.

The real issue here is that York doesn't regard black people's input in the political process as having the same legitimacy as white people's. That's the only way you end up saying crazy stuff like that.

Fuck

My friend Ezra Klein has been surfing the archives of the Social Science Research Network, and he found "Fuck", a paper by Ohio State law professor Chris Fairman:

This Article is as simple and provocative as its title suggests: it explores the legal implications of the word fuck. The intersection of the word fuck and the law is examined in four major areas: First Amendment, broadcast regulation, sexual harassment, and education. The legal implications from the use of fuck vary greatly with the context. To fully understand the legal power of fuck, the nonlegal sources of its power are tapped. Drawing upon the research of etymologists, linguists, lexicographers, psychoanalysts, and other social scientists, the visceral reaction to fuck can be explained by cultural taboo. Fuck is a taboo word. The taboo is so strong that it compels many to engage in self-censorship. This process of silence then enables small segments of the population to manipulate our rights under the guise of reflecting a greater community. Taboo is then institutionalized through law, yet at the same time is in tension with other identifiable legal rights. Understanding this relationship between law and taboo ultimately yields fuck jurisprudence.

If I'm on a hiring committee for some kind of legal philosophy search and I see a CV that lists "Fuck Jurisprudence" as an Area of Competence, you can bet that I'll read the rest of the applicant's file with great interest.