That’s a good point. Looks like an oversight on my part. I was probably overly focused on the formal side that aims to describe normatively correct reasoning. (Even doing that, I missed some things, e.g. decision theory.) I hope to write up a more detailed, concrete, and positive proposal in the next couple of days. I will include at least one—and probably two—courses that look at failures of good reasoning in that recommendation.
JonathanLivengood
I don’t want to have a dispute about words. What I mean when I talk about the logic curriculum in my department, I have in mind the broader term. The entry-level course in logic does have some probability/statistics content, already. There isn’t a sub-program in logic, like a minor or anything, that has a structural component for anyone to fight about. I would like to see more courses dedicated to probability and induction from a philosophical perspective. But if I get that, then I’m not going to fight about the word “logic.” I’d be happy to take a more generic label, like CMU’s logic, computation, and methodology.
Because I see those things as part of logic. As I see it, logic as typically taught in mathematics and philosophy departments from 1950 on dropped at least half of what logic is supposed to be about. People like Church taught philosophers to think that logic is about having a formal, deductive calculus, not about the norms of reasoning. I think that’s a mistake. So, in reforming the logic curriculum, I think one goal should be to restore something that has been lost: interest in norms of reasoning across the board.
I definitely agree that evolutionary stories can become non-explanatory just-so stories. The point of my remark was not to give the mechanism in detail, though, but just to distinguish the following two ways of acquiring causal concepts:
(1) Blind luck plus selection based on fitness of some sort. (2) Reasoning from other concepts, goals, and experience.
I do not think that humans or proto-humans ever reasoned their way to causal cognition. Rather, we have causal concepts as part of our evolutionary heritage. Some reasons to think this is right include: the fact that causal perception (pdf) and causal agency attributions emerge very early in children; the fact that other mammal species, like rats (pdf), have simple causal concepts related to interventions; and the fact that some forms of causal cognition emerge very, very early even among more distant species, like chickens.
Since causal concepts arise so early in humans and are present in other species, there is current controversy (right in line with the thesis in your OP) as to whether causal concepts are innate. That is one reason why I prefer the Adam thought experiment to babies: it is unclear whether babies already have the causal concepts or have to learn them.
EDIT: Oops, left out a paper and screwed up some formatting. Some day, I really will master markdown language.
That seems like a very different question than, say, how humans actually came by their tendency to attribute causation. For the question about human attributions, I would expect an evolutionary story: the world has causal structure, and organisms that correctly represent that structure are fitter than those that do not; we were lucky in that somewhere in our evolutionary history, we acquired capacities to observe and/or infer causal relations, just as we are lucky to be able to see colors, smell baking bread, and so on.
What you seem to be after is very different. It’s more like Hume’s story: imagine Adam, fully formed with excellent intellectual faculties but with neither experience nor a concept of causation. How could such a person come to have a correct concept of causation?
Since we are now imagining a creature that has different faculties than an ordinary human (or at least, that seems likely, given how automatic causal perception in launching cases is and how humans seem to think about their own agency), I want to know what resources we are giving this imaginary Adam. Adam has no concept of causation and no ability to perceive causal relations directly. Can he perceive spatial relations directly? Temporal relations? Does he represent his own goals? The goals of others? …
When you ask (in your koan) how the process of attributing causation gets started, what exactly are you asking about? Are you asking how humans actually came by their tendency to attribute causation? Are you asking how an AI might do so? Are you asking about how causal attributions are ultimately justified? Or what?
What do you think about debates about which axioms or rules of inference to endorse? I’m thinking here about disputes between classical mathematicians and varieties of constructivist mathematicians), which sometime show themselves in which proofs are counted as legitimate.
I am tempted to back up a level and say that there is little or no dispute about conditional claims: if you give me these axioms and these rules of inference, then these are the provable claims. The constructivist might say, “Yes, that’s a perfectly good non-constructive proof, but only a constructive proof is worth having!” But then, in a lot of moral philosophy, you have the same sort of agreement. Given a normative moral theory and the relevant empirical facts, moral philosophers are unlikely to disagree about what actions are recommended. The controversy is at the level of which moral theory to endorse. At least, that’s the way it looks to me.
Though it doesn’t yet exist, if such a course sounds as helpful to you as it does to me, then you could of course try to work with CFAR and other interested parties to try to develop such a course.
I am interested. Should I contact Julia directly or is there something else I should do in order to get involved?
Also, since you mention Alexander’s book, let me make a shameless plug here: Justin Sytsma and I just finished a draft of our own introduction to experimental philosophy, which is under contract with Broadview and should be in print in the next year or so.
Good point.
I didn’t realize the link I gave was not viewable: apologies for that. Also, wow. That PHYS 123 “page” is really embarrassingly bad.
I was going to say that the problem from the instructor’s point of view is deciding whether the student really has the necessary background, but Desrtopa is probably right that some sort of testing system could be set up.
In one sense, I agree that there shouldn’t be any gating. It is overly-paternalistic. Students should be allowed to risk taking advanced classes as long as they don’t gripe about their failures later. But on the other hand, the actual result that I see in my classes is that many—and here I mean maybe as many as half—of the students in upper-division courses are not prepared to do philosophy at that level. They don’t know how to engage in discussion appropriately or productively; they don’t know how to write clearly or criticize arguments effectively; etc. If they only affected themselves, I could put up with it. But they don’t affect only themselves, they affect the other students as well.
The content is informal logic: discourse analysis, informal fallacies (like ad hominem, ad populum, etc.). Depending on who teaches it, there might be some simple syllogistic logic or some translation problems.
I like the idea of requiring logic along with the intro course. I’ll keep that one in mind.
I strongly agree with your comment. What concrete steps would you take to fix the problem? Are there specific classes you would add or things you would emphasize in existing classes? Are there specific classes that you would remove or things you would de-emphasize in existing classes?
You might be right that I’m reading too much into what you’ve written. However, I suspect (especially given the other comments in this thread and the comments on the reddit thread) that the reading “Philosophy is overwhelmingly bad and should be killed with fire,” is the one that readers are most likely to actually give to what you’ve written. I don’t know whether there is a good way to both (a) make the points you want to make about improving philosophy education and (b) make the stronger reading unlikely.
I’m curious: if you couldn’t have your whole mega-course (which seems more like the basis for a degree program than the basis for a single course, really), what one or two concrete course offerings would you want to see in every philosophy program? I ask because while I may not be able to change my whole department, I do have some freedom in which courses I teach and how I teach them. If you are planning to cover this in more detail in upcoming posts, feel free to ignore the question here.
Also, I did understand what you were up to with the Spirtes reference, I just thought it was funny. I tried to imagine what the world would have had to be like for me to have been surprised by finding out that Spirtes was the lead author on Causation, Prediction, and Search, and that made me smile.
The head of your dissertation committee was a co-author with Glymour on the work that Pearl built on with Causality.
I was, in fact, aware of that. ;)
In the grand scheme of things, I may have had an odd education. However, it’s not like I’m the only student that Glymour, Spirtes, Machery, and many of my other teachers have had. Basically every student who went through Pitt HPS or CMU’s Philosophy Department had the same or deeper exposure to psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, causal Bayes nets, confirmation theory, etc. Either that, or they got an enormous helping of algebraic quantum field theory, gauge theory, and other philosophy of physics stuff.
You might argue that these are very unusual departments, and I am inclined to agree with you. But only weakly. If you look at Michigan or Rutgers, you find lots of people doing excellent work in decision theory, confirmation theory, philosophy of physics, philosophy of cognitive science, experimental philosophy, etc. A cluster of schools in the New York area—all pretty highly ranked—do the same things. So do schools in California, like Stanford, UC Irvine, and UCSD. My rough estimate is that 20-25% of all philosophical education at schools in Leiter’s Top 25 is pretty similar to mine. Not a majority, but not a small chunk, either, given how much of philosophy is devoted to ethics. That is, of course, just an educated guess. I don’t have a data-driven analysis of what philosophical training looks like, but then neither do you. Hence, I think we should be cautious about making sweeping claims about what philosophical training looks like. It might not look the way you think it looks, and from the inside, it doesn’t seem to look the way you say it looks. Data are needed if we want to say anything with any kind of confidence.
Term logic is my only mention of Aristotle.
Your pre-1980s causation link goes to a subsection of the wiki on causality, which subsection is on Aristotle’s theory of causation. The rest of the article is so ill-organized that I couldn’t tell which things you meant to be pointing to. So, I defaulted to “Whatever the link first takes me to,” which was Aristotle. Maybe you thought it went somewhere else or meant to be pointing to something else?
Anyway, I know I have a tendency only to criticize, where I should also be flagging agreement. I agree with a lot of what you’re saying here and elsewhere. Don’t forget that you have allies in establishment philosophy.
Help Reform A Philosophy Curriculum
Provocative article. I agree that philosophers should be reading Pearl and Kahneman. I even agree that philosophers should spend more time with Pearl and Kahneman (and lots of other contemporary thinkers) than they do with Plato and Kant. But then, that pretty much describes my own graduate training in philosophy. And it describes the graduate training (at a very different school) received by many of the students in the department where I now teach. I recognize that my experience may be unusual, but I wonder if philosophy and philosophical training really are the way you think they are.
Bearing in mind that my own experiences may be quite unusual, I present some musings on the article nonetheless:
(1) You seem to think that philosophical training involves a lot of Aristotelian ideas (see your entries for “pre-1980 theories of causation” and “term logic”). In my philosophical education, including as an undergraduate, I took two courses that were explicitly concerned with Aristotle. Both of them were explicitly labeled as “history of philosophy” courses. Students are sometimes taught bits of Aristotelian (and Medieval) syllogistic, but those ideas are never, so far as I know, the main things taught in logic (as opposed to history) courses. In the freshman-level logic course that I teach, we build a natural deduction system up through first-order logic (with identity), plus a bit of simplified axiomatic set theory (extensionality, an axiom for the empty set instead of the axiom of comprehension, pairing, union, and power set), and a bit of probability theory for finite sample spaces (since I’m not allowed to assume that freshmen have had calculus). We cover Aristotle’s logic in less than one lecture, as a note on categorical sentences when we get to first-order logic. And really, we only do that because it is useful to see that “Some Ss are Ps” is the negation of “No Ss are Ps,” before thinking about how to solve probability problems like finding the probability of at least one six in three tosses of a fair die. Critical thinking courses are almost always service courses directed at non-philosophers.
(2) You seem to think that philosophers do a lot of conceptual analysis, rather than empirical work. In my own philosophy education, I was told that conceptual analysis does not work and that with perhaps the exception of Tarski’s analysis of logical consequence, there have been no successful conceptual analyses of philosophically interesting concepts. Moreover, I had several classes—classes where the concern was with how people think (either in general or about specific things) -- where we paid attention to contemporary psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. In fact, restricting attention to material assigned in philosophy classes I have taken, you would find more Kahneman and Tversky than you would Plato or Kant. And you would also find a lot of other psychologists and cognitive scientists, including Gopnik, Cheng, Penn, Povinelli, Sloman, Wolff, Marr, Gibson, Damasio, and so on and so forth. Graduate students in my department are generally distrustful of their own intuitions and look for empirical ways to get at concepts (when they even care about concepts). For example, one excellent student in my department, Zach Horne, has been thinking a bit about the analysis of knowledge (which is by no means the central problem in contemporary epistemology), but he’s attacking the problem via experiments involving semantic integration. And I’ve done my own experimental work on the analysis of knowledge, though the experiments were not as clever.
(3) You seem to think that philosophy before 1980 (why that date??) is not sufficiently connected to actual science to be worth reading, and that this is mostly what philosophers read. Both are, I think, incorrect claims.
With respect to the first claim, there is lots of philosophical work before 1980 that is both closely engaged with contemporaneous science and amazingly useful to read. Take a look at Carnap’s article on “Testability and Meaning,” or his book on The Logical Foundations of Probability. Read through Reichenbach’s book on The Direction of Time. These books definitely repay close reading. All of Russell’s work was written before 1980 -- since he died in 1970! Wittgenstein’s later work is enormously useful for preventing unnecessary disputes about words, but it was written before 1980. This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, lots of scientific, mathematical, and statistical work from before 1980 is well worth reading today. Lots of the heuristics and biases literature from the ’70s is still great to read. Savage’s Foundations of Statistics is definitely worth reading today. As is lots of material from de Finetti, Good, Turing, Wright, Neyman, Simon, and many others. Feynman’s The Character of Physical Law was a lecture series delivered in 1960. Is it past its expiration date? It’s not the place to go for cutting edge physics, but I would highly recommend it as reading for an undergraduate. I might assign a chunk of it in my undergraduate philosophy of science course next semester. (Unless you convince me it’s a really, really bad idea.) Why think that philosophical work ages worse than scientific work?
With respect to the second claim, you might be right with respect to undergraduate education. On the other hand, undergraduate physics education isn’t a whole lot better (if any), is it? But with respect to graduate training, it seems to me that if one is interested in contemporary problems, rather than caring about the history of ideas, one reads primarily contemporary philosophers. In a typical philosophy course on causation, I would guess you read more of David Lewis than anyone. But that’s not so bad, since Lewis’ ideas are very closely connected to Pearl on the one hand and the dominant approaches to causal inference in statistics on the other. The syllabus and reading lists for the graduate seminar on causation that I am just wrapping up teaching are here, in case you want to see the way I approach teaching the topic. I’ll just note that in my smallish seminar (about eight people—six enrolled for credit) two people are writing on decision theory, two are writing on how to use causal Bayes nets to do counterfactual reasoning, and one is writing on the contextual unanimity requirement in probabilistic accounts of causation. Only one person is doing what might be considered an historical project.
Rather than giving a very artificial cut-off date, it seems to me we ought to be reading good philosophy from whenever it comes. Sometimes, that will mean reading old-but-good work from Bacon or Boole or (yes) Kant or Peirce or Carnap. And that is okay.
(4) You seem to endorse Glymour’s recommendation that philosophy departments be judged based on the external funding they pull in. On the other hand, you say there should be less philosophical work (or training at least) on free will. As I pointed out the first time you mentioned Glymour’s manifesto, there is more than a little tension here, since work on free will (which you and I and probably Glymour don’t care about) does get external funding. (In any event, this is more than a little odd, since it typically isn’t the way funding of university departments works in the humanities, anyway, where most funding is tied to teaching rather than to research and where most salaries are pathetically small in comparison with STEM counterparts.) Where I really agree with Glymour is in thinking that philosophy departments ought to be shelter for iconoclasts. But in that case, philosophy should be understood to be the discipline that houses the weirdos. We should then keep a look-out for good ideas coming from philosophy, since those rare gems are often worth quite a lot, but we also shouldn’t panic when the discipline looks like it’s run by a bunch of weirdos. In fact, I think this is pretty close to being exactly what contemporary philosophy actually is as a discipline.
I’m sure I could say a lot more, but this comment is already excessively long. Perhaps the take-away should be this. Set aside the question of how philosophy is taught now. I am receptive to teaching philosophy in a better way. I want the best minds to be studying and doing philosophy. (And if I can’t get that, then I would at least like the best minds to see that there is value in doing philosophy even if they decide to spend their effort elsewhere.) If I can pull in the best people by learning and teaching more artificial intelligence or statistics or whatever, I’m game. I teach a lot of that now, but even if I didn’t, I hope I would be more interested in inspiring people to learn and think and push civilization forward than in business as usual.
EDIT: I guess markdown language didn’t like my numbering scheme. (I really wish we had a preview window for comments.)
Even that’s not quite right. There is a tie for 5th place between Harvard and Pitt. The fact that Harvard is listed before Pitt appears to be due to lexicographical order.
That’s an interesting point. How precise do you think we have to be with respect to feedbacks in the climate system if we are interested in an existential risk question? And do you have other uncertainties in mind or just uncertainties about feedbacks?
The first thing I thought on reading your reply was that insofar as the evidence supports positive feedbacks, the evidence also supports the claim that there is existential risk from climate change. But then I thought maybe we need to know more about how far away the next equilibrium is—assuming there is one. If we are in or might reach a region where temperature feedback is net positive and we run away to a new equilibrium, how far away will the equilibrium be? Is that the sort of uncertainty you had in mind?
A more interesting number for the gun control debate is the percentage of households with guns. That number in the U.S. has been declining—pdf, but it is still very high in comparison with other developed nations.
However, exact comparisons of gun ownership rates internationally are tricky. The data is often sparse or non-uniform in the way it is collected. The most consistent comparisons I could find—and I’d love to see more recent data—were from the 1989 and 1992 International Crime Surveys. The numbers are reported in this paper on gun ownership, homicide, and suicide—pdf. These data are old, but in 1989, about 48% of U.S. households had a firearm of some kind, compared with 29% of Canadian households. However, the numbers for handguns specifically were very different. In 1989, only 5% of Canadian households had a handgun, compared with 28% of U.S. households.