Here are a few thoughts about what I’ve learned from interdisciplinary research.

The more interdisciplinary investigation I do, the clearer it becomes that different disciplines have quite different standards for evidence and argument. Some very traditional analytical philosophy papers on happiness (or whatever) are next to useless, so thoughtless are they, despite their impressive dialectical rigor, in the assumption that philosophers’ intuitions about the meanings of words, or about our judgments in counterfactual cases, is any kind of reliable guide to truth. Thankfully, this is dying in philosophy. Economists are exceedingly careful about their formalisms, but exceedingly careless about what their formalisms are supposed to be about. Psychologists are (well some of them) very careful about experimental design, on one level. But they are often stunningly naive about the interpretation of the data they have gathered. It is perhaps my own disciplinary prejudice, and perhaps I am being self-serving, but I find that the most enlightening work is often by analytically trained philosophers who are skeptical of traditional analytical methods, and apply their diaectical and analytic skills to the interpretation of scientific results. I’m thinking of philosophers like Daniel Dennett, Stephen Stich, the Churchlands, Kim Sterelny, Paul Griffiths, Andy Clark, Jesse Prinz, David Buller, J.D. Trout, etc. There are a bunch of philosophers of biology and physics that one could add here, but they don’t leap to my mind, since those aren’t my areas. But I think it’s worth pointing out that philosophy and philosophical training really are good for the advancement of real knowledge. And I think we’re going see more and more philosophers, armed with a kind of conceptual training that scientists do not normally get, making the transition into primary empirical research, and making major contributions. Here for example is a paper of U of Maryland philosophy professor Chris Cherniak. Where did the “philosophy” go? Who cares!

I think we see similar value-adds from other disciplinary fusions. Economists like Kevin McCabe who have moved into neuroscience are making real contributions to neuroscience as well as economics. It is getting increasingly difficult to tell the difference between some forms of political science and economics. This kind of convergence is very, very good. Despite the stupid institutional impediments caused by the departmental structure of universities, we’re on a track to see the resurgence of the old fashioned “moral sciences.” It is getting and harder harder to tell the difference between philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, economics, political science, and the worthwhile branches of anthropology and sociology. There is considerable value in disciplinary differences in the precise way questions are tackled. But there is even greater value in the fact that all these disciplines are increasingly tackling overlapping sets of questions with increasingly compatible intellectual tools.

If you haven’t read Anthony de Jasay’s The State, then do. (“What would you do if you were the state?”) There is a class of books that I like to call “smartifying.” That is, you are actually smarter after reading them, by which I mean you can think better about a set of issues and problems. You can better find the edges of arguments, the contours of assumptions, better feel the rhythms of inference. The State is one of those books, as are all de Jasay’s books. Thomas Schelling is smartifying. So is Nozick. The first blog I visit each day is Marginal Revolution, because I leave there smartified more often than from any other blog. Now I’m trying to think of other smartifying authors, and I guess I think game theory is smartifying, since I just came up with David Gauthier and Ken Binmore. Derek Parfit! There you go. Also liable to leave you smartified. David Lewis, too! Will leave you smartified and incredulously staring.

Anyway, I meant to give you a de Jasay quote:

When we think we are opting for equality, we are in fact upsetting one equality in making another prevail. Love of equality in general may or may not be inherent in human nature. Love of a particular equality in preference to another (given that both cannot prevail), however, is like any other taste and cannot serve as a universal moral argument.

. . . Very few of the countless inequalities people are liable to resent lend themselves to levelling, even when the attack on difference is as forthright as Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It is no use making everyone eat, dress and work alike if one is still luckier in lover than the other. The source of envy is the envious character, not some manageable handful of a countless multitude of inequalities. Envy will not go away once chateaux have all been burned, merit has replaced privelege and all children have been sent to the same schools.

“The souce of envy is the envious character.” That is our lesson for today.

One of the thinest spots in the classical liberal corpus is the role of the family in a free society. Steven Horwitz steps up to offer us “The Functions of the Family in the Great Society.” [pdf]

ABSTRACT. Criticisms by Hodgson and others that Hayek and other Austrians cannot offer a theory of the family are responded to with a discussion of the functions of the family in a market society. The family can be understood as a bridge between what Hayek terms ‘organisations’, or face-to-face social institutions and ‘orders’, or the anonymous social institutions of the Great Society. The family’s necessary role is then linked to familiar Hayekian themes of knowledge and incentives. Families help us to learn the explicit and tacit social rules necessary for functioning in the wider world, and families are uniquely positioned to do so, because it is those closest to us who have the knowledge and incentives necessary to provide that learning.

Looks like good stuff.

Daniel Dennett’s NYT essay on intelligent design is spot on from beginning to end. If you’re confused about this issue, this is the place to go.

Dennett concludes:

Since there is no content, there is no “controversy” to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrated?

OK, that’s a good high school question. But how about a question for adults? Has the hegemony of secularism in public institutions, such as the schools, generated it’s own backlash? Is intelligent design a symptom of a much deeper problem: the failure of our public institutions to embody the ideals of liberal neutrality?

In an actually useful HuffPo post, Michael Shermer discusses intelligent design, offering an updated version of Philo’s objections in Hume’s Dialogues. Namely, if the best explanation of various phenomena is design, then we require a theory of the designer. And the best theory may simply be a committee of super-intelligent but fallible aliens. Which, clearly, get us no closer to the God of Abraham than we were before.

Here’s Hume:

Now, Cleanthes, said Philo, with an air of alacrity and triumph, mark the consequences. First, By this method of reasoning, you renounce all claim to infinity in any of the attributes of the Deity. For, as the cause ought only to be proportioned to the effect, and the effect, so far as it falls under our cognizance, is not infinite; what pretensions have we, upon your suppositions, to ascribe that attribute to the Divine Being? . . .

Secondly, You have no reason, on your theory, for ascribing perfection to the Deity, even in his finite capacity, or for supposing him free from every error, mistake, or incoherence, in his undertakings. There are many inexplicable difficulties in the works of Nature, which, if we allow a perfect author to be proved a priori, are easily solved, and become only seeming difficulties, from the narrow capacity of man, who cannot trace infinite relations. But according to your method of reasoning, these difficulties become all real; and perhaps will be insisted on, as new instances of likeness to human art and contrivance. . .

And what shadow of an argument, continued Philo, can you produce, from your hypothesis, to prove the unity of the Deity? A great number of men join in building a house or ship, in rearing a city, in framing a commonwealth; why may not several deities combine in contriving and framing a world? This is only so much greater similarity to human affairs. By sharing the work among several, we may so much further limit the attributes of each, and get rid of that extensive power and knowledge, which must be supposed in one deity, and which, according to you, can only serve to weaken the proof of his existence. And if such foolish, such vicious creatures as man, can yet often unite in framing and executing one plan, how much more those deities or demons, whom we may suppose several degrees more perfect!

Or, try this. ID, even if true, puts us in an explanatory spiral, an unclosed regressive loop.

Assume ID is the best explanation for ordered complexity. That means, our best theory of ordered complexity posits the existence of an intelligent designer, meaning that we posited intelligence as an explanatory fundamental. However, intelligence as we know it is a property of biological beings, and a form of the kind of ordered complexity we initially sought to explain.

If it is suggested that “higher” intelligence is not a form of ordered complexity analogous to our own intelligence, then there is no ground for calling it intelligence after all. If it is itself a form of ordered complexity, then we have made no explanatory advance, for we will be left positing an even higher order intelligent designer for each higher order intelligent designer.

If it proposed that we stop the explanatory spiral by positing an undesigned designer then a new question arises: What explains the emergence of the undesigned designer? Whatever the explanation for the ordered complexity of the undesigned designer may be, then it seems that that explanation could be applied to first order ordered complexity, and Occam demands we excise the useless proliferation of higher order designers.

If it is replied that there is no mechanism that gave rise to the undesigned designer, then first order ordered complexity is still unexplained, only it is now more elaborately unexplained.

Even if it’s the best explanation, ID would get us nowhere, which means its probably not.

My take on ID is that if there were any evidence for it, then the probability of intelligent extraterrestrial life would be non-zero. We would then have a proximate explanation for ordered complexity as it appears on Earth. But we’d be no closer to an account of ordered complexity as such.

Camille Paglia attempts to explain the absence of women in the BBC’s ridiculous philosopher popularity contest.

I feel women in general are less comfortable than men in inhabiting a highly austere, cold, analytical space, such as the one which philosophy involves. Women as a whole – and there are obvious exceptions – are more drawn to practical, personal matters. It is not that they inherently lack a talent or aptitude for philosophy or higher mathematics, but rather that they are more unwilling than men to devote their lives to a frigid space from which the natural and the human have been eliminated.

OK. There may be something to this. But she goes deeper.

Today’s lack of major female philosophers is not due to lack of talent but to the collapse of philosophy. Philosophy as traditionally practised may be a dead genre. This is the age of the internet in which we are constantly flooded by information in fragments. Each person at the computer is embarked on a quest for and fabrication of his or her identity. The web mimics human neurology, and it is fundmentally altering young people’s brains. The web, for good or ill, is instantaneous. Philosophy belongs to a vanished age of much slower and rhetorically formal inquiry. Today’s philosophers are now antiquarians.

Fascinating. But as far as I can tell, philosophy as traditionally practiced is at its high water mark. If I had to bet, I would put money on the claim that more books of philosophy were published in the last ten years than in any other ten year period of history. There are, without a doubt, more people well-trained in rigorous methods of philosophical inquiry than ever before. And as travellers to this little piece of the information superhighway may be aware, philosophical conversations and debates can be conducted over the internet, and they are. It’s probably a good bet that there were more words written last year in online discussions of philosophy than were written about philosophy in any other year of human history.

Now, Paglia wants to say that philosophy is no longer as culturally central as it once was. I think she’s right. But then again, nothing that used to be culturally central is as culturally central as it once was because we’ve got a more polyglot decentralized culture. At her AEI talk a few months ago, Paglia seemed panicked by the breakdown of institutions of cultural hegemony. Hollywwod films aren’t what they once were (and nobody cares about the Oscars). Elite universities have become so so. You can’t get classical music over the radio in Buffalo. Etc. She was agitated because, apparently, she passed into old-cooterism some time around 1994 and evidently doesn’t grasp that the age of centralization and hegemony is definitely over, doesn’t understand the new institutions and mechanisms of cultural transmission (other than the fact that this mysterious revolutionary thing, the internet, exists, and matters), and so sees the decline of HOLLYWOOD, and THE IVY LEAGUE, and NETWORK TELEVISION, and BROADWAY — the old familiar institutions of centralized cultural hegemony — as symptoms of general decline. The fact that philosophers aren’t being interviewed by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News means that philosophy is more or less invisible to Camille Paglia, despite the fact that it is flourishing by any historical standard, and despite the fact that women, such as Martha Nussbaum and Christine Korsgaard, are at the absolute top of the game.

Now, I agree that academic philosophy is insufficiently engaged with the public, and could hold a more priveleged place is the fragmented popular consciousness. And I think this is due to straightforward institutional reasons. Academia as it is presently constituted does reward a kind of bloodless scholasticism. One reason I decided to drop out of academia was that I thought direct engagement with current policy debates and cultural concerns would make me a better philosopher. Greats like Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill, Marx were not academics, but men involved in thinking through the practical political matters of their day. Our political philosophy would be more publicly engaging if more philosphers were directly involved in politics. We would be more likely to produce American BHL’s and latter day de Beauvoirs and Rands. But that is a long, long way from the claim that philosophy is a dead genre.

[Link from Chris Sciabbara, who brings out the Paglia's comments on Rand.]

Eugene Volokh comments on this passage from a Michael Shermer post:

In March of 2001 the Gallup News Service reported the results of their survey that found 45 percent of Americans agree with the statement “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” while 37 percent preferred a blended belief that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process,” and a paltry 12 percent accepted the standard scientific theory that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.”

Eugene says:

Well, if “the standard scientific theory” is that “God had no part” in the process of evolution — not just that human beings developed in a particular way, but that God didn’t guide this — then it seems to me that the theory of evolution is a challenge to many people’s deeply held religious convictions. And that’s so not just as to the young-earthers who believe the Earth was created several thousand years ago, but also to people who are willing to embrace the scientific evidence but see the guiding hand of God in the process.

What’s more, how exactly do scientists come to the conclusion that “God had no part in this process”? What’s their proof? That’s the sort of thing that can’t really be proved, it seems to me — which makes it sound as if scientists, despite their protestations of requiring proof rather than faith, make assertions about God that they can’t prove.

I think Quinean ontological principles can help us properly understand Shermer’s statement, and avoid what seems to me to be a confusion on Eugene’s part.

Quine says that to exist is to be the value of bound variable in the formal statement of our best explanatory theory of the world. That is, if your best theory of something requires you to posit some entity or property in order to state it, then you are ontologically committed to that entity or property; you’re saying it exists. The best explanatory theory of the emergence of life and the development of biological variety is the theory of evolution by natural selection. The statement of this theory does not require us to quantify over, or commit to, any supernatural properties. That “God had no part in the process” is straightforwardly implied by the fact that the theory does not mention God or God-properties. The “proof” that God is no part of the process is simply the statement of the theory, and the fact that the theory is the best, whatever our criteria for “best” are. You can tell that something has no part in the process by checking the list of things one is ontologically committed to by dint of accepting the theory. If it isn’t on the list, it plays no part. Surely Eugene would agree that God is not on the ontological list we would compile by scouring the formulation of the standard theory of evolution to see the kinds of things it quantifies over. But that is, I think, all Shermer is saying.

Now, the fact that the theory of evolution by natural selection doesn’t quantify over God-properties does not, by itself, “challenge” the conviction that god exists, unless that conviction is based on the explanation of biological phenomena. If no part of our OVERALL best theory (or collection of theories) of the world requires God-properties, than that is a challenge to the conviction that God exists, because commitment to God’s existence just is the belief in the claim that Godmaking properties figure in to the best overall theory of the world. If he doesn’t figure in, then he isn’t listed in the catalog of things we have reason to believe in.

It seems that Eugene almost flirts with Meinongian nonsense, where not existing is a property something can have, just like existing, so that something’s not existing requires that it exist, in a superspecial not-existing way, in order for there to be something that is doing all that not-existing. In that case, the claim that something doesn’t exist (or does) is substantive, since one is attributing a property to it, and it makes sense to ask for evidence that it does have that property. But to say that something doesn’t exist is not in fact substantive. It is simply to point out a formal absence, like the fact that there is no ‘p’ in ‘beer’. (If you’re lucky!)