Digressions&Impressions

On Hayek, Entrepreneurs, Elites and Social Change [Guestpost by Erwin Dekker]

[This is an invited guest-post by Erwin Dekker.--ES]

The Austrian tradition in economics/political economy is known for its theory of entrepreneurship. In its Schumpeterian version the entrepreneur is a heroic character who can break routines, innovate, and persuade others to go along in their endeavor. The Mises and Kirzner version of the entrepreneur is a more mundane figure ‘alert’ to profit opportunities which are not yet exploited by others (recall here and here). Both versions of the entrepreneur emphasize the conscious and intentional nature of the innovative acts. Although the entrepreneur’s behavior cannot be captured in a simple maximization framework, it does fit within the teleological means-ends framework of human action which Mises (Hayek’s teacher) developed.

Intentionality fades slowly from Hayek’s later work. In the Constitution of Liberty (1960) he argues: “Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen” (29).[1] Hayek contrasts the ‘countless number of humble steps taken by anonymous persons in the course of doing familiar things’ with ‘major intellectual innovations which are explicitly realized’ (28). Change in his social philosophy is more a process of adaptation to changing circumstances than the result of human imagination or alert actions to improve the everyday run of things.

It has always struck me as surprising that the most famous Austrian thinker is essentially silent on the theme of entrepreneurship. One plausible explanation is that Hayek was worried about a typical version of romantic individualism, which attributed too much uniqueness to the individual mind and will, as Eric has recently suggested here. A contributing factor is that Hayek was always more of an evolutionary thinker who emphasized the market process rather than the actions of individuals within such a market. His famous critique of the static nature of (perfect) competition in neoclassical models therefore does not blame it for lack of attention to entrepreneurship, but for its lack of attention to the dynamic interactive process of competition. More generally he emphasizes mutual adjustments rather than social change through intentional agency.

And yet, upon rereading the Constitution of Liberty for a recent weekend of the Adam Smith Fellowship program I could not help but being struck by the elitist nature of the theory of social change in Hayek. The key chapter in this regard appears to be the innocuously titled ‘The Common Sense of Progress’ (chapter 3), in which he first argues that the rich bear most of the costs of experimentation, because they are the first to buy new goods which come to the market, initially in limited quantities. Hayek, as is typical for him, does not dwell on examples or empirical substantiation, but at least up to this point we might understand this as a stylized empirical fact: new products are first offered to a small elite which adopts them, and if successful the product will be produced in larger quantities at lower costs, and become available to the middle classes.

But Hayek is aware of the fact that economic inequality in this way breeds social inequality, because: “most of what we strive for are things we want because others already have them” (45). The effects of which he calls cruel, but inevitable: “[in a] progressive society, some must lead, and others must follow” (45). To drive the point home as it were, he turns his more narrowly economic argument into a social argument, by suggesting that it is the rich who engage in experimentation with “new styles of living”, which over time will make these new styles ‘accessible to the poor’, without which the poor would advance much slower. It is important to see that we have moved here from a narrower argument about differences in purchasing power to a broader argument about the role of the rich in advancing society.

Hayek then develops this argument into the political realm by suggesting that a similar dynamic plays out among nations. Just like the poor in a given society benefit from the experiments in buying and living of the rich, so the populations of other countries benefit from the experiments in buying and living of those in leading countries. Both the British labor classes and the rest of the world benefitted from ‘a rich class with old traditions [which] demanded products of a quality and taste unsurpassed elsewhere’ (48). It is an argument that Tyler Cowen has occasionally made about the way in which European regulated welfare states benefit from innovation and permissiveness in the United States.

The flipside of the argument that the rich are those who experiment and therefore bear the costs of social change, is that it is only the rich which are truly free. An implication which would bring Hayek surprisingly close in outlook to Schumpeter, who believed that the masses were merely following rules and customs, while entrepreneurs were those who could psychologically break free from these everyday constraints and imagine better alternatives. One might suggest that such a reading is somewhat uncharitable, but Hayek himself asks the reader at the start of chapter eight ‘Employment and Independence’ to wonder whether the arguments he developed still holds in modern times: “in which a relatively larger part of the people, and most of those who counted in the forming opinion, were independent in the activities that gave them their livelihood” (118).[2]

One might expect Hayek to make the argument that rising living standards mean that more individuals are now in a position to engage in economic and social experimentation. Quite to the contrary he suggests that when the franchise was extended to workers, they quite naturally looked to limit the freedoms of the rich for they could not imagine what these were good for. There are moreover important sociological consequences of the fact that wage-laborers do not assume risks or personal initiatives: “A man who works under direction for a fixed salary or wage may be as conscientious, industrious, or intelligent as one who must constantly choose between alternatives; but he can hardly be as inventive or experimental” (120).

In what follows Hayek continues to systematically distinguish two classes in society, the dependent wage-laborers, and the men of independent means, who have ‘an indispensable role to play in any civilized society.’ They are of particular relevance beyond the market: “in the field of cultural amenities, in the fine arts, in education and research, in the preservation of natural beauty and historic treasures, and above all, in the propagation of new ideas in politics, morals, and religion” (125). So essential does Hayek consider the role of this social class, that if it did not exist, he suggest it might have to be created through a kind of lottery which would free a certain group of individuals to exercise true independence and freedom, although these individuals might lack the education and familiarity with wealth that the children of the rich have. In the absence of such a lottery, the merits of this social class provide an argument in favor of inheritance for Hayek.  

The Austrian tradition, Hayek included, is typically known for its emphasis on the heterogeneity of individuals. But in his theory of social change Hayek suggests that such heterogeneity is in fact largely limited to a small subset of individuals who are free of many of the (material) obligations that life in contemporary society brings with it. His own theory that changes come about through a response to changing circumstances which necessitate adjustments for individuals all over society is seemingly contradicted by his suggestion that only the rich are truly free to experiment. Hayek’s plea for the importance of local and contextual knowledge of time and place next to, or even above, general scientific knowledge, has strong democratic undertones, which completely disappear in the way he talks about the generation of new knowledge through market and social experimentation. This surprisingly makes Hayek theory of social change elitist in a way not too dissimilar from that of Joseph Schumpeter, Hayek even refers repeatedly to the rich as an avant-garde, a favorite metaphor of the maverick Schumpeter. Although, it must be said that Schumpeter, like John Stuart Mill before him, puts more emphasis on differences in character and energy between individuals, while Hayek stresses differences in material circumstances.

Another notable difference with John Stuart Mill is that the experiments in living which both he and Hayek discuss, have no intrinsic value for Hayek. In Mill they foster a spirit of individualism and turn human beings into a ‘noble and beautiful object of contemplation’. Hayek worries that such individualism might upset the social order and the process of coordination, but more importantly he is not at all concerned with the value that individuals might derive from experimentation and deviance, or how it might reinforce a liberal spirit.

If there is a real tension between the broader Hayekian tenets of dispersed knowledge, mutual adjustment, and process theory and his theory of social change, this implies that a Hayekian theory of social change is still to be developed. In my book on the Viennese Students of Civilization I noted similarities between the work of Norbert Elias, who essentially developed a trickle-down theory of social change through imitation of the superior ways of the aristocracy and that of some Austrian economists. Later social theorists, including sociologists originally inspired by Elias, have suggested social change originates from the fringes of society, where individuals have either less pressure to conform (and so the costs of deviant behavior are lower) or oppressed so that individuals stand relatively more to gain from experimentation and protest. Especially since Hayek is explicitly progressive on social liberal issues, he praises: “the abolition of slavery, penal and prison reforms, the prevention of cruelty to children or to animals, and a more humane treatment of the insane” (127).

This tension is also relevant for a political economic analysis of power in society. One might expect that those with independent means will primarily be interested in protecting the status quo, rather than changing it. Hayek admits that this class is more likely to produce ‘bons vivants than scholars and public servants’, but he never entertains that they might abuse their economic and social power to corrupt the political system in their favor. Whereas Schumpeter praised the rotation of elites in one of his characteristic metaphors which spoke of the elite as the top floor of a hotel which is always full, but always with different people. Hayek seems more concerned with the disappearance ‘of a cultural elite’ which resulted from the combined effects of inflation and taxation (129).  

Hayek’s own emphasis on heterogeneity and his plea for maximizing the chances for accidents to happen, could equally well be developed into a social theory which suggests that social change is more likely to occur when opposing groups or individuals with different values meet each other, and the necessity for mutual adjustment emerges. This is also what Mill concluded about the reason why pressures for social conformism have not led to social stagnation among the European family of nations. This was not due to the superior excellence in any one nation or class, but a result of: “their remarkable diversity of character and culture. Individuals, classes, nations, have been extremely unlike one another: they have struck out a great variety of paths, each leading to something valuable, their.” This is in line with more recent work in (cultural) economics which suggest that more social diversity is good for growth and  development.

Closer to Hayek’s own epistemological liberalism there is increasing attention in the philosophy of science for the benefits of cognitive diversity (see Ryan Muldoon's overview). Most importantly, it would take more seriously the stylized facts which Deborah Coen in her Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty made central to Viennese liberal thought: the increasing heterogeneity between all individuals in an increasingly complex society, spurred on by the division of labor and the resulting division of knowledge. I think with Mill that a liberal should find such heterogeneity on its own desirable, but it also supplies a better starting point for theorizing social change, than the one that Hayek provides.

Ernest Nagel’s Commemoration of Morris Raphael Cohen [Guest post by Joel Katzav]

[This is a guest post by Joel Katzav [University of Queensland].--ES]

Cohen did not think of philosophy as a discipline competing with the various sciences for obtaining authentic knowledge of the world about us. He did not believe that philosophy yields positive information about the primary subject-matters of the sciences, or that it possesses special sources of truth which enable it to pass judgment on the factual claims of science and to set bounds to the scope of its methods. As he conceived and practiced it, philosophy is the disciplined critical reflection upon the interpretations men place on the primary materials of their experience-interpretations which are codified in the bodies of knowledge we call the sciences, in the system of rules we designate as morals or positive law, or in the evaluations of art we label as literary and esthetic criticism. Philosophical reflection, as Cohen understood it, seeks to make explicit the logical articulation of claims to knowledge, the grounds of their credibility and validity, and the import of their content for an inclusive view of nature and man (Nagel 1957, p. 548).

Morris Raphael Cohen was one of the most prominent philosophers in America in the 1930s and 1940s. He died in 1947. Nagel, writing to commemorate Cohen, his teacher, notes that “if frequency of references to him in the current literature is a safe basis for judgment, it must be admitted that few professional philosophers continue to read Cohen or to be influenced by his ideas” (1957, p. 548).[1] Nagel laments this situation and, after doing so, explains, in the excerpt given above, that Cohen was not a speculative philosopher. In 1950s speak, Cohen was kosher.

But Nagel is–and this equally applies to the rest of the commemoration text–misrepresenting Cohen. Cohen was a passionate proponent of a pluralistic form of speculative philosophy. 1910 saw the new realists calling for a philosophical platform–roughly, a party centred around consensual truths and rigorous, logical analysis–one that would guide philosophical research in America. Cohen, among many others, objected and argued that philosophy should be inherently pluralistic and speculative. Here is an excerpt from Cohen’s 1910 plea for speculative philosophy:

A philosophy which would recognize its kinship with literature and with the social sciences would be truly humanistic. It would aim to be scientific, but it would not be afraid to go beyond science just as life and conduct must go beyond knowledge. This, however, would be only a reassertion of the old ideal of philosophy as mediating between the lebenisantschauung of literature and the social sciences, and the weltanschauung of the natural sciences. We may laugh at system building as much as we please, but some such ideal must be held up by somebody if the present anarchic tendency to overspecialization is to be controlled in the interests of sanity (Cohen 1910, p. 409).

Cohen’s pluralism about philosophy, and indeed about science, was underpinned by a form of perspectival realism, one according to which there are a variety of alternative, insightful perspectives on reality. At the base of his perspectivism was a metaphysical principle, the principle of polarity:

 [The principle of polarity] is the principle, not of the identity, but of the necessary copresence and mutual dependence of opposite determinations. It warns us against the greatest bane of philosophizing, to wit: the easy artificial dilemma between unity and plurality, rest and motion, substance and function, actual and ideal, etc (Cohen 1927, p. 679).

For Cohen, the principle of polarity underpins the goal of understanding the substantial truth in the various philosophical systems, e.g., positivism, idealism and materialism.

Nagel, to be sure, had his own metaphysics, one that acknowledges that a “manifest plurality and variety of things, of their qualities and their functions, are an irreducible feature of the cosmos” (1956, p. 7). This metaphysics superficially resembles Cohen’s. But Nagel’s metaphysics is not intended to open the door to a plurality of legitimate metaphysical perspectives; Nagel was pushing for a philosophical platform, much as the new realists were. Nor is Nagel’s metaphysics supposed to embrace the need to go beyond science and thus to be speculative. His position supposedly “articulates features of the world which, because they have become so obvious, are rarely mentioned in discussions of special subject matter” and which are “meagre in content” (1956, pp. 6-7). While Cohen admits that, as a metaphysician, he must go beyond science, Nagel denies that he must and insists that he is just articulating what we already know.[2]

One reason Nagel might have had for misrepresenting Cohen was to promote Cohen’s work to an audience of analytic philosophers. But it is hard to see Nagel’s intent as serious if this motivation is attributed to him. Nagel’s text includes nothing concrete about Cohen’s thought or achievements that might motivate one to read his work. A less obvious possible motivation is Nagel’s own reputation. For one thing, Cohen belonged to the first generation of professional American philosophers of science. Nagel’s reputation as a key source of American analytic philosophy of science may have benefited from a lack of knowledge of Cohen’s work in the field. Nagel does not do more than intimate that Cohen was a philosopher of science (Nagel does not do much better when, in his books, he mentions Cohen; Nagel’s own citations of Cohen’s work are very limited). For another thing, supporting one’s reputation in 1957 required, especially for those who, like Nagel, belonged to pre-1950s American philosophy, distancing oneself from speculative thought.

It would not have been hard to tempt some future readers into learning more about Cohen. Cohen taught quite a few of the second generation of American, professional philosophers of science, including, in addition to Nagel, Sidney Hook, Lewis Feuer, Milton Munitz, Joseph Ratner and Philip Wiener. Moreover, as Cohen’s Reason and Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Scientific Method (1931) makes clear, his students will have found in his teaching and writing many of the issues, positions and modes of proceeding that later constituted analytic, which was perceived to be ‘logical-empiricist’, philosophy of science. If we avert our gaze from some of the sections in Cohen’s book–especially to the critique of positivism, the chapter on speculative philosophy and the treatment of ethics–we find a template for analytic philosophy of science, including a familiar understanding of the role of logical analysis in philosophy of science, of the issues it faces, of the positions to be examined and much more. Indeed, it is striking how close the topics, and order of topics, in Cohen’s book are those of Nagel’s 1961 book The Structure of Science: a general discussion of the logic of science (laws of nature, explanation, confirmation), followed by the philosophy of physical science, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of the social sciences and the philosophy of history). Nagel’s book, of course, was one of the key textbooks of early analytic philosophy of science. Cohen and Nagel’s joint book from 1934, An introduction to logic and scientific method, is a logic textbook rather than primarily a book in the philosophy of science, but here too the formative influence of Cohen’s 1931 book is clear, e.g., in the half of the book which does focus on applied logic and the philosophy of science and in the conception of logic, which is Cohen’s and which Nagel rejects in his later work.

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That dog – called aptly Dog – has a status that’s uncertain. He was dumped two years ago at the homeplace of a neighbor some few hundred yards away. Because the neighbor neither ran him off nor shot him, Dog counts in the calculus round here as belonging to that man. Dog accedes to this some days and patrols the yard around the neighbor’s trailer, but he is more usually just a rambling presence, a creature mysterious in his ways and unaccountable to any. Some days no one sees him, some days he never leaves our porch. Most days, he likes some petting, but some days, not – he once showed up carrying a slice a pizza and kept his distance lest I try to steal it. One day he cornered an armadillo only to sniff it with disdain and walk away. On another he tortured a groundhog, mortally wounding it but declining to finish what he started. I then went for my rifle and did the work he wouldn’t. Every night they’re near and howling, he answers the coyotes with his voice – in this at least, Dog is reliable. I suspect he is unsure if he wants to count himself as feral or as tamed. He is, in short, about what someone might expect from a dog that has learned Zhuangzi.--Amy Olberding

In order to save my marriage, and to get some research done, I rented a small office -- yeah don't cry for me -- in a different part of town a few weeks ago. I go there every day, and when I am not needed in zoom meetings, I work on my Newton's Metaphysics manuscript. The tube runs on a frequent schedule and the ride is under fifteen minutes.  Most of the time it's very easy to social distance inside the carriages. 

I found an excellent espresso bar a seven minute walk from my new office in the heart of Fitzrovia. It's one stop on the tube, but because the weather has been so nice, as it has been this whole pandemic year, it's a lovely amble through the back streets of the neighborhood. I enjoy the blue plaques with the names of former (mostly nineteenth century) prime ministers and (mostly twentieth century) authors and social reformers. Sometimes I first get a wrap at a very fine middle eastern hole in the wall on Goodge street.

On Tuesday, at my favorite espresso bar I noticed he had no sweets on offer. When I asked about the lack of brownies, the barista/owner mentioned that his supplier had stopped delivering because his orders fell below the minimum. I quietly wondered whether there were payment issues. I said that must cut into your profit margins. Behind his face mask I guessed a dry smile, because I was told that he just broke even. Emboldened by the small talk, I asked the barista whether the landlord had offered a discount. Indeed he had, 50%. But this had been declined because it was supposed to be added to next year's rent. The purpose behind this offer struck me as a bit dubious, too. I wondered if his rolex was a fake.

I mentioned the story about the brownies to the building manager on the way back. In response she told me the Pret around the corner had stopped selling her favorite tuna mayo sandwiches. She had complained to the store-manager, who informed her they stopped selling it because too few people were coming into the store. 

Anyway, today, i walked through the rain, to find the espresso bar closed. (This will not have surprised you, my perceptive reader.) I looked around and suddenly I realized the street was near empty. I checked my watch (no, not a rolex). It was 3:15pm. On the way back to my office I started counting closed bars and shops. Many were, in fact, boarded up; I stopped at two dozen. I found a bakery near Warren St. with decent espresso. On my way back to the office, on Euston Road, I registered the half a dozen homeless people hiding in front of a (closed) furniture store.

One of my son's favorite classmates' step-dads drives a real London black cab. It has the largest sky roof I have ever seen in a taxi. Anyway, recently he told me (the cabbie, not the son) that he was doing one third the business he did last year. This is no surprise: London is a city that thrives on international travel (tourism and business), and wealthy expats for a lot of its traffic.

A few weeks ago the official unemployment rate in the UK was 4,1% (that was up  to July). All kinds of temporary measures have ended since then. In August 2020 "the number of employees in the UK on payrolls was down around 695,000 compared with March 2020." It's getting worse. 

Let me change tack for a second. 

A few novelists -- Arnon Grunberg, Zadie Smith, and Niña Weijers -- tell the story of my social habitat especially well. (I leave you to guess who have satirized me effectively,) But during this pandemic I have been drawn to Amy Olberding and her epic Ozark Stoics. While I once commented on one of her papers, and am proud she has guest-blogged for me, I have never met Olberding. But as my life has closed in on itself, I have grown needy of her story-telling. 

I imagine her in her pick-up truck in the parking lot of a giant Wallmart, stealing wifi; after she has responded to student emails, and has uploaded her lecture, she writes up her intellectual diaries, with her rifle and her laptop on her lap. One of my favorite passages is this one:

The region around our farm is a lacework of gravel roads that trace through hill country, and what happens when families like ours just can’t keep it all going is told everywhere upon these roads.  Abandoned farmhouses sit in fields given over to elaborate beef cattle operations held by wealthy ranchers who buy up old places when a family can no longer keep them.  In these places, the fencing is bright and taut, well maintained but by people who live elsewhere.  The tarpaper and rock homes that once sheltered families working the land become just bits of a landscape, too much trouble to tear down when the elements will eventually do the work for you.  Some old homeplaces don’t even have the care of wealthy ranchers but instead sit nested in trees that have come up since the families left, the houses now effectively forested.  Bereft of the people who kept the houses whole, they become home to all manner of wildlife, though given the area, some also come to host meth cookers.  But the most haunted examples, I find, are the old family farms where no house at all still sits.  On spring’s arrival they emerge like ghosts across the landscape, as vast armies of yellow daffodils arise to tell of what once was.  The daffodils stand in fragile, temporary signal, their patterns marking out where a house once stood – now lining a path where no path sits or surrounding where a porch once stood.  The daffodils stubbornly outlast the ones who planted them and abide as the only sign of what was once a homeplace. 

Without thinking, I turn left to the tube station. It's slightly longer that way in the shadow of the BT tower. On the sidewalk I evade two boys  on their electric step-scooters who seemed indifferent to the possibility of running me over. It's pouring.

It's been a decade since Lehman. I see myself reflected in the window of another abandoned shop. I am clean-shaven today; not quite an old man yet, but when I look around I see an older man shuffling in a Zimmer-frame. He is drenched. I know I see the dreary future staring at me. He smiles. It's the first maskless smile from a random stranger in months.

As I walk to the entry of the station, all I can think of are those vast armies of yellow daffodils filling Fitzroy Square.

Susan Stebbing’s critique of Marie Collins Swabey’s Logic and Nature (Guest post by Joel Katzav)

[This is an invited guest post by Joel Katzav--ES]

Susan Stebbing reviewed Marie Collins Swabey’s Logic and Nature in 1930.[1] According to Stebbing, Logic and Nature’s main purpose is to vindicate the idea that logic can teach us metaphysics and to use logic to teach us metaphysics. In addition, writes Stebbing,

“Swabey is anxious to protest against the metaphysic which appears to be implicit in Behaviourism, and which is here called "Naturalism." The present reviewer is in agreement with this protest. Professor Swabey well says: "Whereas it is the merest platitude to assert that our biological make-up has something to do with the character of our thinking, it is the extremest dogmatism to claim that all thought finally expresses nothing but an activity of adjustment on the part of the organism to its surroundings" (1930, p. 620).

Stebbing’s agreement with Swabey about the rejection of behaviouristic naturalism is the only positive remark Stebbing makes about Swabey’s book. Stebbing could, however, have learnt much from Swabey. To begin with, Stebbing endorsed a version of (non-holistic) verificationism (1933, p. 15) while Swabey presents significant alternatives to, and criticism of, verificationism. One alternative Swabey presents is the kind of holistic naturalism that, due to Willard V. Quine’s appropriation of it, became so influential in undermining logical positivism, along with its verificationism, in the 1950s.

More important, Swabey’s criticism of naturalism is not, contrary to Stebbing, merely a criticism of behaviouristic naturalism. Swabey’s criticism is intended to apply to any view according to which there is no synthetic a priori knowledge, including verificationism and empiricist holism; much of chapter 2 of Logic and Nature and much that follows in the book makes this clear, so much so that one gets the feeling that Stebbing did little more than glance at the chapters following chapter one of Swabey’s book.[2] Like more recent influential critiques of naturalism, Swabey is worried that any position which, with naturalism, does not recognise the existence of synthetic a priori knowledge is doomed to scepticism. So too, she worries that naturalism will end up undermining itself by assuming precisely the kind of non-empirical metaphysics it aims to reject (see here).

Stebbing’s main complaint about Swabey’s book is that it confuses between notions of identity in a way that is obvious and that undermines its arguments. Claims of confusion, however, either miss their target–contrary to Stebbing, for example, Swabey clearly differentiates (1930 p. 15 & p. 17) between (roughly) identity of reference (what she calls ‘analytic identity’) and predication (what she calls ‘synthetic identity’)–or are irrelevant, because the distinctions Stebbing brings up are not needed by Swabey. Let me illustrate this irrelevance using one of the few places in the review where Stebbing engages with Swabey’s arguments, rather than simply dismissing them. Here is Stebbing:

This insufficient analysis of the notion of identity is all the more serious since Professor Swabey attempts to derive the other logical principles from the principle of identity. It must be sufficient here to indicate how Professor Swabey derives the law of non-contradiction from the principle of identity. She says: "If change (A) is itself (A), it cannot be what is not itself (non-A); since, if it could be at once both the same and not the same, both itself and something else, it would apparently cease to be anything definite. By being both change and not-change, it would lose self-reference, since it would violate the law of identity that change cannot change its nature." It is surprising that Professor Swabey fails to realize that this derivation is circular (Stebbing 1930, pp. 621-622).

Stebbing’s criticism turns on a supposed circularity in Swabey’s argument rather than on any confusion about identity. Further, Stebbing appears to be begging the question by assuming classical logic. Her thought appears to be that Swabey is using a classical reductio in deriving the law of non-contradiction from the principle of identity and thus relying on the law of non-contradiction. So, perhaps Stebbing thinks that Swabey is arguing along something like the following lines (where ‘A’ denotes the universal change):                   

1. A = A & ¬(A = A)                [assumption for the purposes of reductio]
2. (A = A)                                  [from 1]
3. ¬(A = A)                                [from 1]
4. ¬ ((A = A)&  ¬ (A = A))      [On the basis of the contradiction between 2 and 3, we deny 1]

Swabey, however, is arguing for one part of classical logic and thus cannot simply be taken to be assuming classical logic. Her Cornell (Hegelian) background should provide further reason for caution on this matter. Indeed, she does not appear to be offering a circular argument. If we stick to her text, she appears to be arguing thus:

1. A = A &  ¬(A = A)
2. ¬ (A = A) --> Absurdity[3]
3. ¬ (A = A)                              [from 1]
4. Absurdity                          [from 2 & 3]
5. ¬ (A = A &  ¬ (A = A))         [on the basis of the principle that whenever our premises lead to Absurdity, we can negate one of the premises]

Stebbing thus fails to understand Swabey’s argument. This too is unfortunate, and not only because it was a missed opportunity to reflect on non-classical logic and its relation to classical logic. Swabey’s strategy, of which the argument just examined is a fragment, appears to be twofold. On the one hand, she aims to argue for ontological claims on the grounds that they are presupposed by certain logical principles. On the other hand, she aims to establish some logical principles on the basis of the absurdity of certain ontological claims, such as that change is not identical with itself. Her goal appears to be a system of mutually supporting ontological and logical principles. This form of rationalist metaphysics is an alternative to the kinds of metaphysics Stebbing considers in arguing for her own analytic approach to metaphysics (see Stebbing 1932). A rationalist alternative was particularly valuable in 1930s America, when rationalists were very few and far between.

Stebbing’s review of Swabey’s work might be set aside as a one-off lapse in judgment. But there is a different way of viewing her review. Stebbing is writing in 1930. This is just a few years after G. E. Moore, who converted Stebbing to analytic philosophy, excluded speculative philosophy from Mind, thus taking the first step to excluding speculative philosophers from ‘reputable’ company (Katzav and Vaesen 2017). Stebbing herself, in helping to found Analysis in 1933, the first Anglophone journal that explicitly excluded speculative philosophy from its pages, was part of a further significant step in the marginalisation of speculative philosophy (Katzav 2018 and here). From this perspective, Stebbing’s review of Swabey can be thought of as part of a broader pattern in which the work of speculative thinkers is not taken seriously, irrespective of its merits. Swabey is one of the many speculative philosophers whose contributions to philosophy are not remembered at least partly because they belonged to the wrong tradition.

 

On philosophical love (or why I fell in love with Iris Murdoch) {Guest Post by Fleur Jongepier.}

[This is an invited guest post by Fleur Jongepier.--ES]

Have you ever fallen in love philosophically with a philosopher? Do you know the reasons why (not)?  Is there even such a thing as philosophical love? I believe there is such a thing, and that having such intellectual emotions is vital to philosophy as well as one’s own academic wellbeing. I also believe it’s intricately related to inequalities of various sorts, and that we also need to think about the sociology, if you will, of philosophical love.

Let me start with a confession: recently, I fell in love with Iris Murdoch. One can fall in love with someone after years of friendship, but this was not like that. I knew of her, but was never really ‘into’ her. I don’t think I was ready fall in love with someone like Iris, someone who worked on the topic of love and someone for whom the loss of faith constituted an important personal-philosophical theme. Back then I thought such topics were too personal to constitute proper philosophy. Also, she was never on any of my syllabi as a graduate or undergraduate student and none of my lecturers talked about her in any serious or respectful way. Happily things are different these days (see e.g. women in parenthesis, the Iris Murdoch research center at the University of Chichester, the journal Iris Murdoch Review, etc.).

In preparation for a lecture on ethics and aesthetics, I recently watched an interview with her on Youtube, and I was smitten. When asked whether she believed one can do philosophy in novels, she said that, at best, a novelist would be engaged in “idea play”. Dostojevski involved in idea-play, the audacity of it! I loved the concept of “idea play”, and I loved her mischievous smile when she said it. (I didn’t really love her accent, but we would get over that.) She said things like “I feel in myself such an absolute horror of putting theories as such into my novels,” and I thought that was excellent. It resonated strongly with my own emerging views on philosophy and literature. But I also wondered whether she really believed it, that the two were so separate even in her own case. And then I wondered if I really believed it, and whether they were so separate in my own case. And so I wanted to get to know her better. I soon bought The Sovereignty of Good, a large pile of her novels, and listened to hours of excellent podcasts. So far, I’ve only read part of the third essay from Sovereignty, and none of her novels. I’m a little afraid I might fall out of love with her, and I’m not ready for that. That’s because I have reasons for loving Iris.

I don’t know if one might have reasons for romantic love, or parental love, or love for one’s friends. As yet I have no explicit views about the relation between love and rationality. All I know is that there are reasons for philosophical love in my own case. There’s a sense in which I needed to fall in love with someone who reflected explicitly on the very discipline of ethics and on how certain ways of doing and teaching ethics can be ineffective if not harmful. I had reason to fall in love with a philosopher who cared about how teaching ethics matters to how persons might (fail to) become better beings. On the importance of distinguishing between theories about the good, and actually being a good person. Given that I recently took up fiction writing again, I also wanted to fall in love with a philosopher who wrote novels and who was (happily?) prepared to make philosophical sacrifices to do that.

I have reason to fall in love with a philosopher who cared deeply about topics that human beings outside of academic philosophy typically also care about. I want to feel passionately about a philosopher who believes that working on humanly important questions is compatible with being a rigorous philosopher. I need to feel close to someone who could show me that writing well and clearly is compatible with embracing ambiguities and complexities in one’s writing. I want to fall in love with a philosopher with different and refreshing conceptions on what rigor and clarity in philosophy and ethics amounts to. I want to be together with someone with whom I might further explore freer ways of doing philosophy; to explore the boundaries of philosophy and fiction; to explore the role of language, rhythm, emotions and real life in my academic work. I want to love a philosopher who loved those things, and I want it to be Iris. 

I had another reason to fall in love with Iris, which has to do with my reasons for wanting to (continue to) be an academic philosopher in the first place. Philosophical love can make that one is unprepared to “let go” of certain positions when confronted with objections, like a dog unprepared to let go of a stick (even when it cannot pass through the gate). The distinct type of doggedness that accompanies philosophical love can – like any other type of love – create serious problems of having myopic views and whatnot. However, it can also constitute a form of intellectual virtue and an important factor to the vitality of certain debates and disciplines. It’s a good thing that, due to intellectual love and passion, some people are prepared to go to great – all too great – lengths, and it’s often because of love that they are so prepared.

Intellectual emotions are important to one’s academic wellbeing. For me, in any case, philosophy is something I want to remain genuinely passionate about, at least sometimes. I’m not prepared for philosophy to become a purely cognitive or instrumental affair of finding good “niches” to publish in.^[1] And even though I see the dangers of philosophical love slipping into heroism – and I’d prefer, with Liam Kofi Bright, there to be #noheroes in philosophy – I still want to be able to fall in love philosophically, with all that that entails. I want to be able to defend certain views, or indeed someone’s work, to irrational lengths. I want to be able to be sometimes epistemically vicious, as Quassim Cassam calls it. I want to be able to be dogmatic, closed-minded, prejudiced, overconfident, gullible, and I definitely want to engage in wishful thinking every now and again. Just as love can be blind (fortunately enough), so too can philosophical love. Such blindness can be a good thing, both for the discipline and the progress and vitality of debates, but also for one’s intellectual wellbeing. I started doing philosophy because I was passionate about it, and I want to keep it that way. But it’s getting more difficult, given the increasing specialization of the discipline and instrumental thinking and publishing strategies. And so I needed fire, I wanted to lose myself in intellectual passion like I used to, and so I had to fall for Iris.

I also had reason to fall in love with a woman, specifically. Widespread sexual harassment and all other types of behaviours in its vicinity in academia has acutely obvious consequences, but also has negative effects that are much harder to identify. I believe being able to (allow oneself to be) passionate about philosophers and their work, especially if they are male, in a position of power, and alive, is one such hard to identity consequence. Due to all sort of incidents near and far, and the disappointment and disgust I feel in response, I’ve come to realize that experiencing philosophical love and passion for male philosophers is not really an option for the time being. Not even dead ones. I’m genuinely sad I (appear) to feel this way, and I feel uncomfortable about how these unreflective disinclinations generalize against all philosophers (m) despite knowing full well there are many lovable philosophers (m) around. But that’s the way it is, and I fear I’m not the only women who has become rather reserved with respect to experiencing intellectual passions. Even if, for some, the disappointment is less acute, it seems we all have reason to be aware of the dangers and inequalities surrounding philosophical love. If only because some philosophers themselves are apparently unable to recognize the not-so-difficult distinction between romantic love and philosophical love, and are incapable of behaving appropriately when intellectual passion comes their way. It wouldn’t surprise me if the safest and most uncomplicated type of philosophical love is, if you would allow me, homoerotic (in acute contrast to romantic homoerotic love, needless to say).

It’s not just women that philosophical love affects differently, it’s also people of colour and persons with mental or physical disabilities. Philosophical love and academic passion can be a privileged thing to feel, to allow oneself to feel, to be open to, to (dare to) act on. Given the importance of being able to experience philosophical love and passion at no cost to oneself, it’s tragic that it’s likely to be less open to some.

Philosophical love is thus likely to be implicitly (or perhaps on occasion explicitly) sexist, racist, and ableist.  This should be evident when one regards the typical receiving end of philosophical love: male, white, abled. That’s simply the result of a lack of diversity in most syllabi, curricula, and department staff. That’s part of the reason why I didn’t have the chance to fall in love with Iris before: I never encountered her during my undergraduate or graduate years, and was taught to love the “cooler” type. I taught myself to be passionate about depressingly analytic styles of writing, where the joy of playing around with language and real life had no place. I eventually fell in love with Dennett, whom I thought was analytically respectable and an engaging writer, thus a fine compromise for my intellectual heart and mind. But not being able to love Iris may well have meant not being able to flourish philosophically more fully, or earlier on.

One might think that the fact that I have so many reasons to love Iris – many of which have rather little to do with her and all the more with me, with feminism, and with various disappointments – is love-debunking. Love-debunking, as one might think of it, is when there are explanations for why you love someone or something that aren’t actually good reasons to love. If you come to see and accept those reasons for love, they would undercut your love. But there’s no reason to think my love for Iris can be debunked (I know, that’s precisely what smitten people would say). It’s true that I have reasons to love her, and know that I do, but that fact in itself isn’t love-undermining. Explaining something doesn’t always have to involve explaining it away (pace, Dennett). For one thing, reasons to love and feelings of love might be different things running parallel: I (sometimes) love philosophy for instance and I recognize, looking at myself from a distance, that being the sort of person I am, philosophy is the sort of thing I must love, tied as it is to my self-conception, and so on.

The point here is this: we do not need to be so worried about the fact that we fall in love with certain philosophers for all kinds of personal and social reasons, good or bad. The fact that philosophical love is often explainable doesn’t make one’s love any less real, deep, or indeed any less of a valuable academic-philosophical drive. Maybe you fell in love with a philosopher because your PhD supervisor not so coincidentally shared the same love. Maybe you fell in love with a certain topic because someone whom you greatly admire was passionate about it. Maybe you fell in love with a book because you thought you needed to love that book to be a “serious” philosopher. I think we all have philosophical love stories like these, and I don’t think they are “fishy” love stories. It’s only to be expected that philosophical love will often, or always, have robust social and personal-level explanations. And it’s not “unscientific” to recognize the reasons why one falls in love with certain debates, books, articles, or philosophers and their work.  It’s better to recognize and acknowledge these socio-personal love-explanations than to pretend, on the basis of some naive idea of academic neutrality and objectivity, that there’s such a thing as pure philosophical love, that is, a purely content-induced love.

Given the dangers of philosophical love and academic passion more generally, one might want to try and root out these emotions and try to avoid them in ourselves and our students and strive towards “impassionate philosophy”. I think that would be a mistake. Such intellectual emotions are crucial to deciding to (try and) become an academic philosopher in the first place, and – for me – to (want to) remain one. Such passions are integral to philosophy and science (see also the recent piece by Helen de Cruz on the importance of awe). One’s relation to philosophy and science requires both the head and the heart. And so instead we need to design our institutions and behave in such ways that we, including our students, can safely fall in love with concepts and debates and, yes, to also fall in love, non-romantically, with philosophers and their work. We need to make sure, by taking diversity seriously on all levels, that there are concepts and debates and philosophers for us to safely fall in love with.

Do I really love Iris though? One might think philosophical love is, at best, love in scare quotes. If one thinks that, then I fear one must be prepared to narrow down the love domain to rather impoverished ends. If one can’t love philosophers but only ‘love’ them, then it seems one can’t love Bob Dylan either, or Bessie Smith, or Francis Bacon, or Sofonisba Anguissola. I’m not prepared to only ‘love’ Bob Dylan, and by modus tollens/ponens, I don’t just ‘love’ Iris either. But if philosophical love is anything at all, what might it be? Philosophical love meets many characteristics of romantic love, though not all (and importantly so!) One importantly shared characteristic is “depth” which makes love different from mere liking. Philosophical love will involve being prepared to dedicate oneself to certain (shared) values and courses of action, even at cost to other projects that one values. Also, loving someone typically involves knowing their faults and loving them regardless (see this Digression).

For me, loving Iris involves being non-instrumentally curious in her work and a willingness to find out who she is, to have a “softer view”, as Julia Driver puts it, on her flaws, and not to try and mold her into my ideal image of her. Most importantly, love, as Murdoch tells us, is a way of getting “away from the self” (or “unselfing”) and to focus wholly and lovingly on the other. One is directed “towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability to so direct attention is love”. If suddenly seeing a kestrel is, for Murdoch, a way of unselfing, then Iris is my kestrel. Loving Iris is a way of focusing wholly on philosophy, seeing strands of philosophy I didn’t even notice before, of forgetting about misbehaviours in academia and to be mindfully passionate in philosophical thought, to forget about my laundry, the bills I need to pay, my own existential worries and self-interested concerns.

And so, for all these reasons, and many others besides, I’ve fallen in love with Iris. I’m well aware that I want to love her, for my own academic wellbeing, philosophical vitality, and fiction-writing enthusiasm. Being Iris, she might be rather displeased that I love her for reasons, she might even think this means I don’t love her, but I love her all the same. (I hope we’ll get through the holidays; I’m not looking forward to the baked beans with olive oil.)

Marie Collins Swabey’s critique of naturalism [Guest post by Joel Katzav]

[This is an invited guest post by Joel Katzav--ES]

Marie Collins Swabey completed her PhD at Cornell in 1920, under the supervision of James Edwin Creighton. Her topic was the nature of laws of nature. She subsequently translated, with her husband, Ernst Cassirer’s Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity into English as well as wrote five books, including Logic and Nature (1930), Theory of the Democratic State (1937), The Judgement of History (1954) and Comic Laughter: A Philosophical Essay (1961).

My focus here is on her criticism of naturalism in her 1929 paper, ‘Reason and Nature’, a paper which is largely reproduced in Logic and Nature. Her criticism includes the worry that naturalism is paradoxically committed to taking nature to be the cause of, and a product of, our minds, and the worry that, given a commitment to naturalism, the theory-laden nature of observation undermines the theory-fact distinction. This criticism, we will see, targets two kinds of naturalism, one (‘extreme naturalism’) is close to Dewey’s naturalism and the other (‘sophisticated naturalism’) fits that of Creighton. Further, her critique of these forms of naturalism is part of a broader, early twentieth century response to pragmatism and other early forms of naturalism, a response that includes the development of the naturalism (recall) of Grace and (recall) Theodore de Laguna. Finally, Creighton’s naturalism, and Swabey’s and the de Lagunas’ responses to his naturalism, are mirrored in the second half of the same century by Quine’s naturalism and responses to it.[1]

According to Swabey, extreme naturalism posits that all action, including that of reason, is a response to a specific environment, a response that serves the evolved function of self-preservation and that can be explained as an evolutionary adaptation. Since this form of naturalism takes reason to be an adaptive response to specific evolutionary circumstances, it “denies the pretensions of reason to envisage genuinely formal and universal, as opposed to material and particular, objects. Concepts or generic notions are accounted as nothing more than “generalizations”; while theoretical grounds and reasons are denied causal efficacy, being considered as idle compensatory “rationalizations” after the event” (1929, p. 399). Swabey sees a number of obvious criticisms of extreme naturalism. Chiefly, she complains that, by its own lights, it is a kind of idle, compensatory rationalization. The hypothesis that life has the teleological function of maintaining life is “a teleological-metaphysical theory about the world which goes far beyond the warrant of direct experience, yet which seemingly must be granted if the results of the sciences are to be construed as either trustworthy or significant” (1929, p. 400). The problem here, according to Swabey, is that naturalism of this kind presupposes, but cannot justify, its own truth.

According to sophisticated naturalism, reason is still a proper part of nature but is distinguished by its ability to address general problems. Reason makes use of abstract schemas of objects without grasping them as particulars and is able to do this because of the relational nature of its concepts (ibid., p. 402). Another mark of reason, on this form of naturalism, is that it tends to organise data into systems, thus disclosing previously unknown relations between objects. Further,

[i]n conformity with this inclination, understanding never apparently accepts a “fact” off-hand at its face value or takes an isolated judgement as more than provisional; but requires that each shall be confirmed by linkage with other facts and judgments which mutually sustain and support it….

In the end, although reasoning presumably never realizes the ideal which is that of a single, all-inclusive system with no grounds outside of itself, it is customary to assume that, other things being equal, the more comprehensive a coherent body of judgments is and the richer in interconnections, the more reliable it is likely to be (ibid., pp. 402-3).

Swabey, however, thinks that sophisticated naturalism, no less than extreme naturalism, undermines itself. On her view, if we assume that our minds are proper parts of nature, we will be committed to the paradoxical assumption that nature is both the cause of, and a construct of, our minds (pp. 403-404). She offers a number of supporting arguments for this claim. Here is one: if we are proper parts of nature, our experience of any aspect of nature will be partial. But then any theory of any aspect of nature will always extend beyond what experience might by itself support. In particular, experience will then never be able to provide any reason to suppose that survival value is a test of the truth of our theories. So, the naturalist will be forced to conclude that nature is, contrary to her initial assumption, a construct rather than a cause of our minds (ibid., pp. 405-406). Another of Swabey’s supporting arguments tells us that even the distinction between theory and fact will have to be taken to be a construct of the mind once the naturalist accepts that “our contact with facts is always in the context of theory” (ibid., p. 404).

Swabey names no proponents of extreme naturalism, but its assumption that reason is designed to address specific problems and is limited to empirical, as opposed to theoretical, phenomena is close to John Dewey’s pragmatism. Indeed, Swabey states that one variant of extreme naturalism is committed to the idea that the reflex arc is the unit of ‘functional activity’. Dewey, famously, articulates this idea in his 1896 paper on the reflex arc (Dewey 1896). The more sophisticated naturalism described by Swabey, including its meaning and confirmation holism, is close to that of Creighton and has affinities with the naturalism of two other early twentieth century critics of pragmatism and of Creighton’s holism, namely Grace and Theodore de Laguna (Katzav forthcoming).

The theory of meaning and confirmation underpinning the sophisticated naturalism that Swabey targets is, of course, also close to the meaning and confirmation holism adopted by Willard V. Quine decades later in his paper, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Moreover, her criticism of sophisticated naturalism is close to later criticism of Quine’s naturalistic epistemology. Barry Stroud and Michael Williams, like Swabey, think that sophisticated naturalism will, when applied to itself, lead to scepticism (Stroud 1981; Williams 1996). Interestingly, the de Lagunas’ 1910 criticism of Creightonian holism, e.g., their objection that it fails to recognise the existence of contextual standards of justification in science, is also mirrored by later criticism of “Two Dogmas” (see Katzav forthcoming and here).

 

Peer review: necessary but not sufficient; Guest post by Neil Levy

[This is a guest post by Neil Levy (Oxford; Macquarie)--ES]

One thousand scientific papers are retracted every single year. Is peer review broken? I don’t think it is. It’s still serving a useful function (at least in science). The retractions are evidence that peer review needs supplementation. It’s getting that supplementation, but it needs to be more systematic than it is.

Right now, philosophers might be aware of three ongoing scandals (or what some peope might regard as scandals) involving peer review. The first concerns the drug hydroxychloroquine, touted by President Trump for COVID-19. The Lancet published a paper that appeared to show that it increased risk rather than lowering it. The paper and a related NEJM paper have now been retracted, after the data on which they were based were found to be unreliable. Meanwhile, a paper at a very prominent psychology journal has been, um, raising eyebrows due to its claim that without religion, human groups with low IQ tend to engage in much higher rates of homicide, and that sub-Saharan Africans have average IQs at least one standard deviation below the mean for developed nations. Finally, in philosophy there is a brouhaha over the publication of Robin Dembroff’s reply to Alex Byrne in Philosophical Studies.

All these papers were peer reviewed. Holly Lawford-Smith has cast doubt on this claim with regard to Dembroff’s paper, because it was accepted “mere months” after Byrne’s paper appeared, so Dembroff must have written the paper and revised it in the light of comments very quickly. That would make their experience of peer review an unusually happy one, but I’ve gone from paper idea to acceptance that quickly on occasion. We now know that Philosophical Studies used only one reviewer, which speeds up the process.[*] You  might worry that the use of a single reviewer risks arbitrariness and therefore casts doubt on the quality of accepted papers: that worry applies equally to both papers, however.

It’s too early to see how things will shake out in the end with regard to these papers, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if when things die down, all and only the ones I regard as unreliable are retracted. We might think that’s the system working as it should: occasionally bad papers get through peer review, but their errors are picked up and all is well.

In fact, while the Psych Science paper may end up being retracted, it won’t be purely because it’s bad science. On Twitter, defenders of the paper portray support of retraction as “woke demands”. In one sense, they’re right: the paper’s flaws are not of a kind or degree that is really much worse than lots of other work published in psychology and in many other areas too. It’s not because it is bad science it might be retracted; it’s because it’s bad science about a politically sensitive topic. Lots of other work goes uncorrected and unretracted.

Does that mean that peer review is failing? The problem in science is too many false positives (in philosophy, the main problem is the opposite: too many perfectly good papers are rejected).  I don’t think we should expect peer review to fix that problem. Here’s the problem (spoiler alert): science is hard.  Peer reviewers often lack the time or the incentive to look very carefully at the data and the methods. Papers are produced by multiple authors and they often have different areas of expertise. Any two peer reviewers won’t be able to match that. They should be expected to miss things. They won’t always have the statistical expertise to detect problems in the analysis. They won’t always have expertise in the methods by which the data were gathered. They won’t always have expertise in the theoretical waters the paper treads in. They can’t be expected to, because there are always multiple areas of expertise relevant to a paper; more areas of expertise than it is practicable to have reviewers.

That doesn’t mean peer review is a waste of time. We should think of peer review as nothing more than a certification that a paper appears to meet a certain minimum standard. It doesn’t seem to be the work of cranks or the incompetent. It is an effort at serious science by people who seem to have used appropriate sorts of methods to gather data they have analysed in a way that makes prima face sense. If we look at peer review in that kind of way, we’ll have lower expectations, and we shouldn’t be disappointed.

If we think of peer review as minimal certification, we won’t be tempted to think that the fact that a paper has passed peer review is evidence that it is really reliable. Lots of unreliable work is more or less competently produced. For example, Cailin O'Connor and James Weatherall have shown how competent scientists can deliberately or inadvertently produce unreliable work through competent procedures, by taking advantage of the normal distribution of results and the use of small sample sizes. If peer review is a certification of competence, this kind of work will often sail through (given prevailing standards), producing unreliable peer-reviewed science. But we do want to be able to rely on science: we want to know what work should be given significant weight (rather than simply accepted uncritically). We can’t depend on peer review to certify reliability, and we can’t depend on unreliable work being retracted.

Here there is a role for a more formal post-publication review process. The twitter wars and blog discussions that lead to retraction, when it happens, are post-publication review. They reflect the work of hundreds of people (with a truly diverse range of expertise) poring over a paper. Politically sensitive work tends to get more of this sort of attention, but it’s by no means limited to such work. The result, at the moment, is that a small community of scholars comes to have a good idea which papers in their field are unreliable, but the rest of us may have no idea (and philosophers may then go on to cite these unreliable papers; I’ve certainly done it myself).

Eric Schliesser himself has suggested combing peer-review with post-publication. His suggestion is that after an initial stage of peer review, both the submission and the reports should be posted publicly and opened to comments from those who are suitably qualified. That might be worth doing (its benefits would have to be weighed against costs, in terms of slowing down the process and the danger that many papers simply would never be scrutinized), but it wouldn’t address the issue I’m concerned with. While it might increase the overall quality of publications, it wouldn’t allow us to distinguish the unreliable but good enough for publication from the work that should be given significant epistemic weight.

A more formal post-publication review process might be built around a paper archive,  perhaps along the lines suggested by Marcus Arvan (most scientific papers are already posted as preprints). Those with the right credentials (what credentials? That’s a hard question) would be able to post discussion and also to rate papers. We could use a star system, or a pass/fail system. That large mass of papers which are insufficiently reliable to be cited as genuine evidence for a claim, but not bad enough or sensitive enough to be retracted, would remain visible, but with their low rating would be seen for what they are.

Could a system like this work for philosophy papers? I’m sceptical. I don’t think methods are uncontroversial enough for us to converge on assessments on these kinds of grounds. Philosophy is too diverse in its approaches and too dependent on argument. Premises can always be contested and we can reasonably disagree about whether adjustments are epicycles or justified. Any paper bad enough to generate sufficient agreement in post publication review really shouldn’t have got through peer review at all. No solutions for us, I’m afraid. Still, since philosophers rely on scientific research increasingly heavily, we have a stake in making science more reliable.

Guest Post by Eric Winsberg: Discounting the Future in Pandemic Mitigation Ethics

[This is an invited Guest Post by Eric Winsberg [The University of South Florida]--ES]

“I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” J. Wellington Wimpy

Much of the political debate about how strict our measures to mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2 ought to be has fallen along partisan political lines. People who generally favor strong climate mitigation practices also favor strict legally-mandated social distancing practices and the closure of segments of the economy. This alignment has been natural for a number of reasons. First, both climate mitigation and disease mitigation arguably involve personal sacrifice for the common good and a healthy respect for the advice of experts. Second, Donald Trump, who says climate change is a hoax, appeared to downplay the seriousness of the virus early on. This surely played a role in solidifying, among the people who take climate mitigation seriously, the view that the ethically correct response to the oncoming pandemic was to suppress it at almost any cost.

I would argue that this alignment is far more superficial than it seems. Never mind that the science, and the advice of experts, with regard to the basic parameters of the Covid-19 pandemic, has been far more mixed than the science of climate change. This is to be expected since the problem of climate change has been studied extensively for over thirty years, while the pandemic is only 4 months old. And we still remain ignorant of basic facts about the virus and its degree of spread. The greater strain on the alignment between climate mitigation and pandemic mitigation lies at the heart of a fundamental ethical quandary: how much should we value our present interests against our future interests and the interests of our children? 

In climate ethics, this is often framed in terms of the question of how much we should ‘discount the future.’ Like J. Wellington Wimpy, most of us, at least in our less reflective moments, will gladly sacrifice goods for our future selves in order to receive goods of equal value today.  That’s why people who lend or invest their money expect a positive return in exchange for deferring their consumption until the future. Economists call the rate of return that we ought to use to determine the present value of future cash flows the “discount rate”.  The idea is that I should discount, by a certain amount, the value of the dollar J. Wellington Wimpy is going to give me Tuesday, even if I am morally certain he is going to pay that dollar promptly and in full when Tuesday comes.

Debates about the discount rate loom large in climate ethics. Those who oppose expensive climate mitigation measures, or argue for a very low carbon tax (those, that is, who do not simply deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change) often argue that the discount rate ought to be high.  For such people, even if climate change is going to cost us 20% of GDP in 2120, we should only be willing to pay a small amount for mitigation efforts today to prevent that damage, just as we might expect to have to pay $1.10 on Tuesday for a $1 hamburger today.  Arguments about climate mitigation are sometimes arguments about what the best science says, and sometimes about how much we can trust governments to enact useful regulations, but mostly, they reflect profound disagreements about just how much we ought to discount the future.

Even though it is an observable sociological fact that proponents of climate change mitigation overlap considerably with people who support the current aggressive suppression strategies for SARS-CoV-2, it’s also undeniable that with respect to the question of how much we should discount the future, these two political positions are at odds with each other.  Current Covid-19 mitigation measures massively discount the future. They are diminishing our civil liberties for an unforeseeable length of time, severely damaging the economy, and burning through debt in a way that will cost the younger generations a great deal for a long time. The benefits, in places where the hospital systems are not over-taxed, are to postpone infections for what can at best be a very short period of time--almost surely not long enough to get us to a vaccine. 

Why think that the primary costs of Covid-19 mitigation are born by our future selves?  Many seem to think that there is no cost to shutting down if we simply compensate those who lose their economic opportunities. Or they complain that people who bring this up are only worried about spending money to make up for the loss of economic output. That such people are arguting for austerity. But this is mistaken. The worry here is about the loss of economic output and the loss of the opportunity for young people to participate in it. When you take on debt to compensate those who are locked out of their jobs and businesses, you are giving the people you borrow from a claim on your future economic output.   You are promising them a hamburger Tuesday in exchange for giving you a hamburger today. We can hope that political action will help to direct economic losses so that they will disproportionately fall on those who can bear them best, but this is optimistic.  The US Federal Reserve has just done a study that said that 40% of households with less than $40k/year in income have lost at least one job. And there are wide reports of the stimulus money being raided by the best-positioned and largest American companies.

The point here is completely independent of what you think about the wisdom of the federal government taking on more debt.  $2 trillion (or much more) that we borrow today to offset that loss of economic output is money that could have been spent on new hospitals, schools, green energy, public transportation, etc. So if you believe in modern monetary theory (MMT), or are a Keynesian, then good for you. You think we can absorb the debt. I'm not arguing about that here. I'm simply pointing out that this is consumption being pulled forward from the future in exchange for forcing people to sit idle rather than in exchange for investment in schools, roads, green energy, etc that could benefit the future. And no economic theory, Keynesian, MMT, or otherwise, denies this. 

Spending trillions of dollars mitigating the economic fallout from the shutdowns means not spending trillions in fighting climate change. At some point, we are going to have to spend trillions on climate change, but Covid mitigation means it is not going to happen now or anytime soon. The further we delay climate mitigation in order to address Covid mitigation, the closer the climate gets to points of no return.

There are also many children whose schooling will be disrupted for a long time; and this is something that will meaningfully diminish life prospects for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.  Students who are putting off college for financial reasons are students who may never be able to attend college again. Graduating seniors whose internships and jobs have disappeared will start their working lives later and at a financial deficit.  This leaves aside costs that will be difficult to measure:  children who grow up with inadequate socialization, lack of outlet from domestic abuse, late immunizations, etc. 

And all of this is only looking at things from the point of view of the impact of decisions by states with developed economies on their own states of affairs.  When developed economies go into deep recessions, it causes large harms at home, but it also causes massive harms in developing economies.  In the US, it means people lining up in foodbanks.  In India and the rest of the global south, it means starvation, death from preventable diseases, missed immunizations of children on a mass scale, and so on.

In climate ethics, it is well understood that a frank discussion of how much to discount the future is vital to making good policy choices.  It is time to bring that awareness to pandemic mitigation ethics.

Helen Huss Parkhurst on meaning atomism, unrestricted composition, concrete modal realism and philosophical imagination [Guest Post]

[This is a guest post by Joel Katzav (University of Queensland)--ES]

Helen Huss Parkhurst (1887-1959) was an early twentieth-century, American philosopher.  She completed her MA in 1913 and her PhD in 1917, both at Bryn Mawr college. Her MA supervisors were Grace and Theodore de Laguna. Theodore was also her PhD supervisor (Parkhurst 1917, p. 67). Parkhurst came to be known primarily for her work in aesthetics and wrote two books–Beauty: An Interpretation of Art and the Imaginative Life and Cathedral: A Gothic Pilgrimage–in this field. However, her early work was on various forms of realism. I focus here on her criticism of the realist view that meanings are atoms, her exploration of unrestricted composition, her exploration of concrete, modal realism and her view that what primarily matters in philosophy is the exercise of the imagination.

Parkhurst’s PhD is entitled ‘Recent logical realism’ and appraises logical realism. According to Parkhurst, it was Bertrand Russell who suggested the topic to her when she visited Cambridge on a fellowship in 1913-1914 (ibid., p. 67). As she understands logical realism, it includes, among other premises, the view that “all conceivable acts of judgment and conception” have non-physical correlates (ibid., p. 3) as well as the view that “the meanings expressed by propositions are separate entities, atomic in character” (ibid., p. 4). Parkhurst’s primary target is Alexius Meinong’s work, but she also discusses Edmund Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen in some detail.

In criticising logical realism, Parkhurst draws on the theory of fictions, influentially presented in Vaihinger's Philosophie des Als Ob, on pragmatism and on idealism. Her pragmatist inspired discussion suggests that, even if the pragmatist is wrong in supposing that the meaning of a judgment is constituted by its consequences for action,  “its nature may perhaps be intelligibly ascertainable only by investigating the consequences” (ibid., p. 44). The problem is that, for the logical realist, meanings are atoms and thus implausibly supposed to be graspable independently of any of their consequences (ibid., pp. 40-44). Parkhurst’s idealist inspired discussion of meaning concludes that, contrary to the logical realist’s atomistic view of meaning,

when an individual mind is coerced in its recognition of "the meaning" denoted by its judgment, it is coerced not by a single, isolated, unified entity, but by an entire universe of interpenetrated, systematized meanings in use. 'The meaning' is then, as a unit, merely a convenient term about which to centre one's discourse. As a unit it is a fiction” (ibid., p. 47).

Parkhurst’s 1924 paper, ‘More Things in Heaven and Earth’ is an examination of a different kind of realism, one she calls ‘radical realism’. Radical realism is the view that “nothing thinkable depends for its being or its nature upon being thought, and that consequently what is to be looked for everywhere is a maximum reality rather than a minimum” (Parkhurst 1924, p. 534). As her starting point, Parkhurst assumes that a radical realist will accept that our world is one “in which matter, space, time, and consciousness are real in their totality and in their ultimate constituents, and together with all that they logically imply” (ibid., p. 534). Relations are real, as are the groups they, with their relata, form. Numbers too are real. She then aims to bring out two implications of these unremarkable, realist commitments. First, she argues that the radical realist’s starting point leads to accepting unrestricted composition, that is, that every plurality of objects comprises a group. According to Parkhurst, since radical realism recognises some groups, e.g., the collections of atoms that constitute physical objects, it should recognise all unions of objects as groups. For these various unions do not differ qua groups. She concludes that, from the radical realist perspective,

there is actually nothing which mischievous imagination can conjure and bind into inharmonious unions which has not already its place in the omnivorous universe! (ibid., p. 536).

Second, Parkhurst argues that the radical realist’s starting point leads to accepting the actuality of every conceivable pattern, including every conceivable pattern of musical notes and every conceivable pattern of words. One argument here is that the patterns that might be recognised on, and in, the physical objects posited by unremarkable realism–atoms, molecules and larger physical objects–must, according to radical realism, be there independently of being recognised. Chiselling brings out an already existing figure. Printing a chequered pattern on the wall brings out already existing patterns of surface areas. Drawing a line on a sheet of white paper makes visible an already existing track of paper. Another argument is that the radical realist recognises the word combinations we have deliberately produced as real but should also, since she thinks that these combinations are real independently of whether they were thought of by anyone, recognise that all conceivable word combinations are real:

what can still be said about the actuality of undiscovered combinations of words composing any one language group? It can be said, on the same principles that we have been using, that those combinations must already have been actual before they came to be thought of (ibid., p. 542).

According to radical realism, the actual world contains, in concrete form, representations of everything that might conceivably be represented by language and art.

Parkhurst’s 1917 discussion of logical realism is instructive about the philosophical environment that she was working in at the time. She presents the idea that the meaning of terms is fixed by their use as a familiar, idealist position. Indeed, the idealist view of meaning she presents is close to that of her teachers’ teacher, the idealist James E. Creighton (see, e.g., his An Introductory Logic), and both of her teachers are explicit that they are committed to the idea that meaning is fixed by use (see here for a discussion of Theodore’s view and Grace’s 1927 book Speech: Its Function and Development for her view). From this perspective, it is not entirely surprising that one of Parkhurst’s teachers, Theodore, thought that the misuse of natural language was why philosophers misguidedly tried to develop substantive theories of truth, identity, property possession and knowledge, and was the first to develop the deflationary view of truth (see here). Similarly, it is not entirely surprising to find her other teacher, Grace, developing a private language argument (see here) and a theory of speech according to which its primary function is the coordination of group behaviour (again, see Speech).

Parkhurst’s discussion of radical realism is of interest partly because of its novel exploration of realism, including the earliest explicit argument for unrestricted composition that I am aware of. Also interesting, however, is the attitude to philosophy that her discussion expresses. While Parkhurst’s PhD thesis is a sober, critical examination of positions, her paper is a humorous, imaginative exploration of a possible world. Her emphasis is not on evaluating radical realism, but on spelling it out in an entertaining way. She writes, reflecting on those who, like her, sometimes tire of disputation, that

[a]rtist-like, we would take canvas or chisel and attempt a portraiture of those ideas for the sheer pleasure in their piquancy. Confirmed controversialists may perhaps be loath to assume even for a moment this care-free, uncritical attitude toward epistemological and cosmological solemnities. For such the following reflections are not intended. Those only who share the mood of peaceful dalliance are hereby invited to participate in the present undertaking (Parkhurst 1924, p. 533).

Parkhurst’s emphasis on the imaginative, artist-like side of philosophy fits well with some of the key trends in American philosophy in the early decades of the twentieth century. While American academia is professionalising and specialising, many American philosophers, including Parkhurst, are worried about their inability to agree even about what philosophy is, never mind on a body of substantive philosophical theses (Parkhurst 1920). An emphasis on the imaginative side of philosophy was one reaction to the disagreements within philosophy.

Guest post: Greg Mikkelson on Divestment & Democracy

[A few months ago Greg Mikkelson made newsheadlines [HT Dailynous; see also here; here; here] by resigning from his tenured position at McGill; I have known Greg since graduate school, and admire his integrity. So, I reached out and invited the following guest post.--ES] 

In September 2001, I started working as a professor with a joint appointment at the McGill School of Environment and Department of Philosophy.  The research and teaching I did in that position for 18-plus years gave me daily exposure to information about the collapsing state of the global ecosystem, driven by an exploding global economy.  In late 2012, a request for help from a then-new student group Divest McGill gave me a chance to join an important part of the struggle to relieve and reverse those adverse global trends.

As of March 2020, nearly 1,200 institutions around the world – including 175 institutions of higher education – have rid their investments, worth a total of nearly $20 trillion (Canadian), of stock in the fossil fuel industry.  In January 2020, more than 11,000 researchers from 153 countries signed on to an article identifying this divestment campaign as one of a few "encouraging signs" amid all the "profoundly troubling" statistics cited in their "World Scientists' Warning of a Climate Emergency".  The goal of this campaign is the same as in other successful divestment efforts, such as from South Africa and tobacco:  to create political pressure for governments to finally take the kinds of action needed to tackle a pressing societal problem.  In this case, strong government action is needed to keep global warming below 1.5° to 2.0°C.  This means compelling fossil fuel companies to abandon the vast majority of the underground reserves they have already discovered.

Over the course of seven years, Divest McGill convinced organizations collectively representing all students and faculty on campus, along with most non-academic staff, to endorse divestment.  Unfortunately the central administration and Board of Governors have bitterly opposed divestment.  That Board decided in 2013, and again in 2016, to continue investing in fossil fuel.  In 2018, I submitted a pro-divestment motion to the McGill Senate – the largest and most representative body for the university community as a whole.  Despite attempts by the principal and provost to prevent it from even being discussed, that motion passed by a large majority.

The Statutes of McGill University – a kind of campus constitution – require that in such cases of disagreement between the Senate and Board, a joint committee convene to resolve it.  Instead, the Board referred the matter back to their own committee, chaired by a former Petro-Canada executive.  After stalling for more than a year, the Board refused for a third time to divest the endowment.  Instead, they proposed to partly "de-carbonize" McGill's investments.  Whereas divestment aims to keep most fossil fuel in the ground, what the Board calls "de-carbonization" only holds fossil fuel companies responsible for how efficiently they extract their product from the ground.  We can compare this insultingly late and weak response with the University of California Board's turnaround to full divestment just two months after their own Senate resolution in 2019.  When the McGill Board defied not only the scientific case for divestment, but also the overwhelming democratic mandate from the campus community, and even the university's own ground rules, I could no longer work there in good conscience.

The McGill travesty is a microcosm of an ecocidal contradiction at the heart of Canadian federal policy:  claiming to cut fossil fuel consumption, while recklessly expanding fossil fuel production.  Both McGill and Canada have committed to ambitious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions over the next few decades.  Meanwhile however, the people who run McGill are directly investing the university's money in roughly 25 of the world's top 200 coal, oil, and gas corporations.  To invest in something is to bank on its expansion.  At the federal level, our government is spending billions of tax dollars propping up failing pipeline ventures, and otherwise expanding some of the world's most polluting extraction projects.  One monstrous example implicating both the university and the government is McGill's several-million-dollar investment in TC Energy – the pipeline company on whose behalf the Royal Canadian Mounted Police invaded indigenous land in February 2020, touching off country-wide protests.

For both McGill and Canada, the fundamental problem is corporate control.  The majority of McGill's governors do not represent students, faculty, staff, alumni, or even Québec or Canadian society.  Instead, they represent a corporate elite, who simply do not care as much as the general public do about our deteriorating biosphere.  Meanwhile, this same ruling class are stifling Canadian environmental policy.  It is time for the rest of us to fight back, and exercise our democratic rights to policies that truly protect and promote life, on the only planet in the universe known to sustain it