Digressions&Impressions

On Orphaned Papers: Haldane and the Fate of Scientific Eugenics

This paper was submitted to the Annals with an accompanying letter to the Editor, Professor Lionel Penrose, dated 17 February 1960. It has lain as item 136 of the Penrose Papers in the Manuscripts and Rare Books section of University College Library until recently brought to our notice by Dr K. R. Dronamraju, to whom we wish to express our thanks. We would also like to thank Naomi Mitchison for permission to publish this interesting manuscript of her brother’s. Lastly we gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Ms G. M. Furlong, curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books in the library of University College London. J.B.S. HALDANE (1996), "The negative heritability of neonatal jaundice,"Annals of Human Genetics, 60: 3-5. [HT: David Haig]

By an 'orphaned paper' I mean to refer to a paper accepted for publication in a volume quietly abandoned by the editor and, after years of ambiguity, it becomes unseemly to ask about its fate. Often there is no malice involved in such cases. Editors are humans, after all, and their professional activities may be interrupted for all kinds of (generally sad) reasons. Sometimes journals or presses fold or transition away from existing projects. A recent discussion on social media suggests that having some papers orphaned like this is not altogether unfamiliar to senior scholars.

My advice to younger scholars is not to show infinite patience and to pull your paper and resubmit it with an eye toward tenure clocks (and to archive it at a relevant site). And, this is why I use the language of 'orphan'; because orphans need not die still-born, and may get adopted and find all kinds of lovely homes and have lives that enrich us all. 

Haldane's paper was never orphaned in the technical sense.  For, there is no evidence it was accepted for publication when it was received by Penrose initially. (I return to this below.) Even so, I understand why Prof. Haig thought it a nice example of the phenomenon given the clear family resemblance to it. 

J.B.S. Haldane (1892 –1964), was a famous scientist and public intellectual in his day. For example, as I noted a few months ago, he was one of Ernest Nagel's targets as an anti-exemplar of "malicious" (Marxist) philosophy of science. The quoted passage at the top of  this post is, as should be clear, an editorial note attached to the paper. The paper was submitted while Haldane was at the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta (for background see here). Perhaps he thought the paper got lost in the mail or he moved on to other topics. 

The paper itself has been noticed after publication including by philosophers. So, for example, Peter Godfrey-Smith (65) cites it the make the important point that parents and off-spring may be "anti-correlated." (See also Sober, who credits learning about it from Godfrey-Smith.) More about this below.

An interesting fact about the recipient of the paper, Lionel Penrose, is that he changed the title of his chair from "Professor of Eugenics" (1945-1963) to "Professor of Human Heredity." The wikipedia entry also notes that "the "long delay" in changing this name was due to "legal problems" associated with the original donation from Francis Galton and described how Penrose simply ignored the "eugenics" element of his job title." This raises interesting questions about whether Penrose (who is the father of Roger Penrose) should have accepted the Chair in the first place (although he surely deserves our gratitude for his stance and the name change).* Be that as it may, it also tells us that UCL could have confronted its own entanglement with eugenics more forcefully already over half a century ago (rather than being shamed into incomplete and imperfect action (recall) by Dr. Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, and others recently). 

Haldane himself clearly remained interested in eugenics. I won't attempt here to summarize seriously his views, in part because they seem to have shifted over time. He was a critic of racial eugenics of his age, because he clearly thought much of it unscientific. It is not entirely clear to me if he would have welcomed a scientifically sound racial eugenics.

And at the core of the posthumously published paper, he makes clear the connection between eugenics and his own paper:

This example will, I hope, act as a warning against the assumption that where a character is mainly determined genetically it will be more frequent in the progeny of those who manifest it than in the progeny of those who do not. This assumption is taken for granted in popular expositions of Darwinism and of eugenics. It is doubtless more often true than false. But the case here considered is not trivial. (5)

This made me wonder whether Penrose prevented publication because he wanted to downplay the association between Darwinism, human genetics, and eugenics in the mid 1960s. (One interesting fact is that no referee reports are mentioned; this makes me suspect the paper was not sent out to referees.)

So, I checked some of the works on Haldane by Dr K. R. Dronamraju, who found the paper in the archives (for more on him see here). According to him "Haldane and Penrose enjoyed a lifelong friendship that was both cordial and mutually beneficial" (Popularizing Science: The Life and Work of JBS Haldane (2017) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 249). He also emphasizes that they agreed on eugenics, "They were opposed to the sterilization of mentally defective individuals that was advocated by some eugenic groups. Both shared the belief that the science of human genetics was still in its infancy and could not justify such far-reaching decisions." (250) Oddly, he does not offer any evidence for this claim, so it is hard to say if this was always the case. Unfortunately, after an imperfect search, I have been unable to find discussion of the 1996 paper by Dronamraju anywhere. So, I view my speculation as ungrounded in evidence. 

Haldane's warning that such cases of anti-correlation are not trivial has not, as Hirsch notes by quoting the same posthumously published passage by Haldane I have just quoted, been heard by those who wish to turn eugenics into a mature science. Hirsch is scathing about the inability to confront the limitations of heritability analysis by even the most scientifically serious (and not racist) eugenicists. Hirsch's heart seems to be in the right place, but I have to admit that I feel decidedly ambivalent about the very project of improving scientific eugenics even when purged from its racialist tendencies.+

I wonder, not for the first time, if everything that advances science should be published while recognizing, with a shudder, that apparently I am willing to contemplate not treating the 'rights' of all 'orphans' alike.

 

28 March 1979: Foucault's Rational Choice Analysis of Science (XXXVI)

In the end, is not economics the analysis of forms of rational conduct and does not all rational conduct, whatever it may be, fall under something like economic analysis? Is not a rational conduct, like that which consists in formal reasoning, an economic conduct in the sense we have just defined, that is to say, the optimal allocation of scarce resources to alternative ends, since formal reasoning consists in deploying certain scarce resources—a symbolic system, a set of axioms, rules of construction, and not just any symbolic system or any rules of construction, but just some—to be used to optimal effect for a determinate and alternative end, in this case a true rather than a false conclusion which we try to reach by the best possible allocation of scarce resources? So, if it comes to it, we do not see why we would not define any rational conduct or behavior whatsoever as the possible object of economic analysis.
   In truth, this already extremely extensive definition is not even the only one, and Becker, for example—the most radical of the American neoliberals, if you like—says that it is still not sufficient, that the object of economic analysis can be extended even beyond rational conduct as defined and understood in the way I have just described, and that economic laws and economic analysis can perfectly well be applied to non-rational conduct, that is to say, to conduct which does not seek at all, or, at any rate, not only to optimize the allocation of scarce resources to a determinate end. Becker says: Basically, economic analysis can perfectly well find its points of anchorage and effectiveness if an individual’s conduct answers to the single clause that the conduct in question reacts to reality in a nonrandom way. That is to say, any conduct which responds systematically to modifications in the variables of the environment, in other words, any conduct, as Becker says, which “accepts reality,” must be susceptible to economic analysis. Homo oeconomicus is someone who accepts reality. Rational conduct is any conduct which is sensitive to modifications in the variables of the environment and which responds to this in a non-random way, in a systematic way, and economics can therefore be defined as the science of the systematic nature of responses to environmental variables.
   This is a colossal definition, which obviously economists are far from endorsing, but it has a certain interest. It has a practical interest, if you like, inasmuch as if you define the object of economic analysis as the set of systematic responses to the variables of the environment, then you can see the possibility of integrating within economics a set of techniques, those called behavioral techniques, which are currently in fashion in the United States. You find these methods in their purest, most rigorous, strictest or aberrant forms, as you wish, in Skinner, and precisely they do not consist in analyzing the meaning of different kinds of conduct, but simply in seeing how, through mechanisms of reinforcement, a given play of stimuli entail responses whose systematic nature can be observed and on the basis of which other variables of behavior can be introduced. In fact, all these behavioral techniques show how psychology understood in these terms can enter the definition of economics given by Becker. There is little literature on these behavioral techniques in France. In Castel’s last book, The Psychiatric Society, there is a chapter on behavioral techniques and you will see how this is precisely the implementation, within a given situation—in this case, a hospital, a psychiatric clinic—of methods which are both experimental and involve a specifically economic analysis of behavior.
    Today though, I would like to emphasize a different aspect. This is that Becker’s definition, which, again, although it is not recognized by the average economist, or even by the majority of them, nonetheless, despite its isolated character, enables us to highlight a paradox, because homo oeconomicus as he appears in the eighteenth century—I will come back to this shortly—basically functions as what could be called an intangible element with regard to the exercise of power. Homo oeconomicus is someone who pursues his own interest, and whose interest is such that it converges spontaneously with the interest of others. From the point of view of a theory of government, homo oeconomicus is the person who must be let alone. With regard to homo oeconomicus, one must laisser-faire; he is the subject or object of laissez-faire. And now, in Becker’s definition which I have just given, homo oeconomicus, that is to say, the person who accepts reality or who responds systematically to modifications in the variables of the environment, appears precisely as someone manageable, someone who responds systematically to systematic modifications artificially introduced into the environment. Homo oeconomicus is someone who is eminently governable.--Michel Foucault, 28 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 11, The Birth of Biopolitics,  269-270 (emphasis added)

At the start of the eleventh lecture, Foucault says he wants to go back to the starting point of the year, which (via Freud and Walpole) was (recall) on the liberal art of governing. This is a bit disappointing because he ended the tenth lecture with hints of a new kind of governmental practice. But before we have time to reflect on this, he turns, quickly, to the nature of (what I have been calling following Talcott Parsons) 'economic imperialism. This is odd because it is the topic (recall) he had introduced at the start of the previous lecture. Foucault quickly name-checks Mises Human Action (268) as the fount of neoliberalism, and then goes on to reveal that he has been reading back-issues of the Journal of Political Economy (hereafter: JPE) the house-organ of the The University of Chicago's economics department, from the years 1960–1970, and recommends a "series of articles" from 1962 by "Becker, Kirzner, and others." (268)*

It is by no means obvious what the liberal art of government and the shifting definitions of homo oeconomicus have in common. But, amazingly, by the end of the lecture it is completely clear. To give away the punchline (and to look ahead to some future posts), in Foucault's hands (and this is already clear in what I quote above), Becker's very redefinition of homo oeconimicus effectively betrays the original achievement of liberalism, which consists in not just "limiting the sovereign’s power," but "stripping the sovereign of power" by revealing an "essential, fundamental, and major incapacity of the sovereign, that is to say, an inability to master the totality of the economic field," (292); and the betrayal is, in a certain sense, as Foucault argues during the eleventh lecture, a return to physiocracy. In Foucault's telling Becker throws away the very achievement of Adam Smith, and creates a subject capable of being (to use the phrase Foucault had introduced in lecture 9) programmed, nudged, and shaped by a knowing sovereign.

But just before Foucault explains the significance of the shift from the Robbins definition of economics ("the optimal allocation of scarce resources to alternative ends") to the Becker definition (the "science of the systematic nature of responses to environmental variables"),** he (that is Foucault) inserts a new analysis of the nature of science. Foucault does this in the first paragraph in the passage quoted above this post.

Now critics of the Robbins definition (itself indebted to Max Weber) tend to notice that it turns economics into a kind of engineering; for the ends are given, and act as constraints on an optimization problem. And since the Robbins definition is topic neutral (neither the resources, nor the ends, nor the implied agent/allocators(s) have to be trading or using money, etc.) it is no surprise that economic analysis so constituted can be applied across many different domains (and economic imperialism is out of the gates). Of course, the critics will see in the Robbins definition a paradigmatic case of instrumental rationality.   

But if one looks at the Robbins definition, as it were, 'formally,' even the pinnacle of substantive rationality -- the inferring of true conclusions from, say, a set of axioms, can be treated, or, better yet, modelled as an instance of it. One is reminded here of Leibniz thinking of the "divine perfection" in terms of God as a perfect geometer in the Discourse of Metaphysics: "He who acts perfectly is like an excellent Geometer who knows how to find the best construction for a problem." (par. 5; Clarke is also tempted by this language.)+ 

So, economic analysis can be applied legitimately to God's choices and to scientific reasoning. Of course, and to be sure, while in God the context of construction/choice and context of justification coincide, one need not claim this about ordinary scientists. So, Foucault, is not here proposing to apply economic analysis to most scientific activity -- what I call 'public choice philosophy of science' of the sort Gordon Tullock and, at Chicago, George Stigler pioneered (and made mature by Sandra Peart and David Levy, now familiar within philosophy in the burgeoning Zollman school of philosophy of science [e.g., O'Connor Weatherall; Kofi Bright, etc.]). To be sure Foucault is not ruling it out. (I follows trivially from what he says.) 

But rather, he is making the more audacious point that economic analysis is a way of conceptualizing disciplined scientific speech speaking the truth (when its claims are justified). And this is a kind of existence proof for the claim that "any rational conduct or behavior whatsoever" is "the possible object of economic analysis" with economic analysis understood in the sense of Robbins' definition. So, economic analysis might be philosophical speech, that is, capable of analyzing itself if and only if it generates "true conclusions." 

I could close with the fate of that lovely sentence hanging in the balance. But I want to note two things here: first, there is a sense in which Foucault agrees with the Frankfurt's school's claim that under capitalism even science becomes conceived as a species of instrumental rationality. But he is not critical of it. He explicitly grants that all rational action can be modelled by economic analysis in this sense. And so, second, he rejects the distinction between instrumental and substantive rationality. For, while Foucault need not accept the much stronger claim that no other form of analysis, no other grid of intelligibility, is possible (he is clearly a pluralist about such matters [Robbins' definition "is not even the only one"]), he does not accept here the possibility that something is a species of rational agency and not capable of falling under the Robbins definition.++ 

And with that, I conclude my seventh full year of solo blogging and will take my customary winter break; I wish you happy holidays my dear reader!

Three Kinds of Clarity in 'early' Analytic (Carnap, Quine, and Nagel)

Philosophers themselves are at variance as to the "proper" task of philosophy. Many students of the history of philosophy agree, however, that the great texts in philosophy are best understood when viewed as so many reflections upon issues raised by the scientific and social developments of their day. The practice, if not always the explicit intent, of a great deal of philosophy has been to function as a commentary on the intellectual life of man - a commentary whose object is to bring some order and clarity into the propositions certified by the sciences or sanctioned by social needs. The commentaries which philosophers have provided have often been confused and unintelligible: they have frequently proved obstacles to clear conceptions of nature and man and have turned out to be fresh occasions for wonder. Nonetheless, the historical fact that so much of philosophy has been a reflection upon science and society suggests that the business of philosophy is not that of adding to the sum of our knowledge of nature, in the sense in which the sciences add to that knowledge, but of clarifying such knowledge. The "wisdom" of Aristotle, accordingly, is not to be identified with his encyclopedic knowledge or with his speculative interpretation of the science and society of his day; it is to be found in the careful distinctions he drew between the meanings of terms current in his day, and in the light his analyses throw on the confusions that arise when the distinctions are not respected. The task of philosophy, on this point of view, is not to supply a cosmogony or cosmology: its task, which may be pursued by professional scientists no less than by professional philosophers, is to serve as a cathartic to men's beliefs and ideas. In other words, according to this conception of philosophy its aim is to perfect principles of logic and method and to exercise them upon the various statements
occurring in everyday discourse and the sciences.--Ernest Nagel (1938) "The Fight for Clarity: Logical Empiricism" The American Scholar 8.(1): 46

Recall that Carnap and Quine have distinct understandings of clarity. For Carnap clarity is a property or by-product of formal systems, of constructed languages. Clarity in the hands of Carnap means to capture a kind of demand for transparency in one's inferential practices, one's commitments, and the use of terms (it very much hopes to prevent equivocation and polysemous use).  Carnapian clarity is really a second-order property of an otherwise esoteric, expert practice.

By contrast, Quine had a tendency, as Greg Frost-Arnold has shown, (i) to associate clarity with more general forms of intelligibility. In later years, Quine might argue that (ii) his program (developed in Word & Object) of the philosopher regimenting scientific language to exhibit its ontological commitments, may also be aiming at a species of clarity (about the 'ontology' of science), alongside systematicity.  He also (iii) came to think of clarity as a more general theoretical virtue of a system. 

The earlier discussion of Carnap and Quine left me a bit puzzled about the to-me-intuitive notion of clarity I had picked up from my teachers as an undergraduate and PhD student. (I assume it is intuitive because of my teachers.) And while I certainly do not want to ignore the contribution of Cambridge (Russell, Moore, etc.) to my intuitive understanding, I think Ernest Nagel gives a sense of where that might have, in part, come from.

The 1938 essay by Nagel that I quote above is, as scholars of analytic philosophy have noted, an important moment in twentieth century philosophy for two reasons. First, the piece partially (re-)introduces logical empiricism to an American audience, while simultaneously defending them from (rather persistent) misrepresentation (in part based on describing the evolution away from strict verificationism). In fact, Nagel puts a kind of neo-Kantian and proto-Foucaultian spin on the mature/more recent version of logical empiricism: "Indeed the proper question is not "what does a statement mean?" but "what are the conditions which empiricists will acknowledge to be necessary for a statement to have meaning? " (51)

Second, the piece aims to contribute to a convergence between what I call the 'scientific wing of pragmatism' (as represented, especially, by Peirce in the essay) and logical empiricism, and so is a signal moment in the development of analytic philosophy. (Regular readers know I treat Nagel as the philosophical prophet of the sociological and conceptual construction, analytic philosophy.) Toward the end of the essay it becomes clear that Nagel sees himself as occupying a (mature) version of the intersection between these two movements.

Okay, while keeping in mind that there are polemical ("fight") purposes being served and that in some sense he is constructing an image of clarity that is to have wide uptake, it may be useful to look at Nagel's version of clarity. For Nagel, the search for clarity is an effect or byproduct from the advanced development and specialization and, so, esotericism of the special sciences. And this means that new criteria of intelligibility distinct from those used in ordinary language are required. As he puts it, "the increased abstractness and generality of modern science require a serious reconsideration and a recasting of those relatively simple canons of intelligibility and validity which are sufficient for the needs of every-day discourse and inquiry." (47-48) So, at a first approximation, Nagel's version of clarity involve the canons of intelligibility and validity apt for  (esoteric) special sciences.

But the reason why this effort at clarification is a philosophical task is, in part, due to a limitation on the professional scientist:

we cannot fall back upon every-day practices and habitual intuitions for aid, and most professional scientists are not sufficiently conscious of their own procedures to enlighten us; special studies must be undertaken by men sensitive to the logical issues involved. Recent methodological studies aim to supply appropriate answers and their main objectives are therefore the following: the careful analysis, formulation and expansion of those intellectual techniques which have been found reliable for controlling our conjectures about the world we inhabit; the appraisal of the import of science and of the conditions for its successful activity; the analysis of scientific concepts and the formulation of logical standards for distinguishing meaningful statements and questions from those which have no accredited meaning.
The movement known at present as "logical empiricism" is a loosely-organized group of philosophers and scientists interested in such problems of method. (48)

We see here (Nagel emphasizes it again later in the essay) the germ of Thomas Kuhn's idea that there is a sense in which ordinary scientists lack proper self-awareness about all there own practices. We might say that a lot of scientific activity (calibration, measurement practices, hidden assumption in the math) is 'black-boxed' and 'taken off-line,' say in the name of cognitive and operational efficiency. To be sure, Nagel is quick to emphasize (and nods to Mach's influence) that interest in the process of clarification, so not just the results, is widespread among "professional scientists" (47 & 58). So, it would be more apt to say that for Nagel clarification is not just developing the canons of intelligibility and validity apt for  (esoteric) special sciences, but also making transparent the methods and practices of science that generate warranted claims. 

What is nice about this notion of clarity, is  that we see in it the significance of normative epistemology and the philosophy of scientific practice ("One of the most valuable and promising tendencies of logical empiricism is the emphasis it places upon the analysis of ideas
employed in special fields of study, so that the procedures which are relevant to those ideas and which alone make them intelligible are made explicit." (57)) These are two areas of philosophy of science that (under the ongoing influence of Reichenbach) are often orthogonal to each other today. 

I don't mean to suggest this completes my analysis of what Nagel means by clarity. One question one may well ask is what he means by 'intelligibility.' And I hasten to add that Nagel is no friend of the PSR (in the same period he has a polemic against Blanshard's version of the PSR, internal relations, and monism.).  Rather, I think Nagel means by intelligibility something like showing how and the way terms/concepts (etc.) hang together (he's a holist) and function in a system of knowledge and bodies of ordinary practice. I think this because of remarks like this, "the task of philosophy lies in the clarification of terms occurring in scientific and everyday discourse, by exhibiting their interrelations and function in the contexts in which they occur." (59)*

So, finally, Nagel clarification is not just developing the canons of intelligibility and validity apt for (esoteric) special sciences, but also making transparent the methods and practices of science that generate warranted claims in part by showing how and the way terms/concepts  hang together and function in a system of knowledge and forms of ordinary practice. Now, one may think that Nagel here echoes a kind of underlaborer to the sciences conception of philosophy (but note those ordinary practices.) However, he also endorses some of the political aims for clarification by "some" logical empiricists:

Certainly the least one can say of logical empiricism is that even if it accomplished nothing else it is a powerful force that aims to introduce rational methods into all fields of inquiry. One of its functions, that of serving as a disinfectant to the thinking of men, would alone justify the continuance and spread of the movement. It rests its case not on an appeal to authority or the emotional needs of men but on an appeal to a persistent effort to think clearly. The movement is an important arm in the interminable warfare against obscurantism and for clarity. (59)+

As I noted before (recall), for Nagel government by discussion is not about achieving authoritative consensus, but rather, as his conception of science and democracy reveal, as the ongoing practice of being responsive to reasons and criticisms based on experimentally controlled facts. Our cognitive practices in science and political life are made possible, and developed and improved by, our socially embedded interactions with each other. For Nagel it is clear that "Perhaps no intellectual tendency is more dangerous than that accompanying the claim that knowledge of human affairs is the exclusive property of men endowed with a "higher insight" - which is not subject to the control of well established experimental methods."" (55) For Nagel, the cultivation of clarity is a contribution to a democratic ethos.

 

Clarity, Analytic Marxism, and the Purported Sinking of dialectics (by Sidney Hook)

The only alternative to this procedure is to present one's own theory of dialectic....I shall argue that it would be best in the interests of clarity to let the term sink into the desuetude of archaisms; in fact, I shall try to show that this is the legitimate moral that can be drawn from any critical investigation of the assumptions and types of procedure most frequently designated as dialectical in the history of thought...

There are two generic conceptions of dialectic under which the various meanings of dialectic may be subsumed. The first is the conception of dialectic as a pattern of existential change either in nature or society or man where the "or" is not exclusive. The second is the view that dialectic is a special method of analyzing such change. Usually, but not always, it is held that the method of dialectical analysis in some sense "reflects" or "corresponds to" the dialectical pattern of change. In any case, there is always a distinction drawn, though with no great regard for consistency, between the dialectical type of change and other kinds. When the dialectic is identified with change as such, it is explicitly contrasted with some other natural or supernatural element which is regarded as undialectical, e.g., unchanging form or pattern. Similarly, with the conception of dialectic as method. Whether taken as a method of analysis or discovery or both it is always distinguished from other methods called undialectical, i.e., metaphysical, scientific, commonsensical, etc. This last distinction is of the first importance. For the alleged justification of the dialectic method consists in its power to lead us to the discovery of new truths or to a deeper and more adequate understanding of old truths, not accessible to us by any other method-- Sidney Hook (1939) "Dialectic in Social and Historical Inquiry" The Journal of Philosophy 36(14), 365-366.

A while ago (recall), I remarked with sardonic bemusement -- I am a liberal bourgeois intellectual, after all -- that analytic marxism is founded in an original sin, that is, an unearned dismissal of the dialectical method. That behind the brilliant rhetoric (recall) of G.A Cohen, Elster and the whole gang lies an appeal to clarity often linked to the stipulated superiority of the existing methods of social science. And while their embrace of clarity and rigor helped their careers in professional philosophy, and -- (let's stipulate) advanced academic discussion in a number of important scholarly fields -- it is by no means obvious they advanced marxism as a revolutionary doctrine to be feared by folks like me. For, while clarity is undoubtedly an important value that can be embraced by Marxists (see my treatment of Korsch's articulation of dialectics) it does not have, let's say, lexical priority over overthrowing capitalism.

In fact, I took considerable pleasure in pointing out that analytic marxists' dismissal of dialectics was unoriginal. For the rhetoric and whole style of pseudo-argument dismissing dialectics were anticipated by (recall here; and, for broader context, here and more recently here) the very bourgeois liberal philosopher, Ernest Nagel (who plays a non-trivial role in shaping analytic philosophy as such). But I noted that Nagel was, in turn, relying on Hook's efforts; and so it is worth looking at Hook.  

I often joke (with a note of ruefulness) that oblivion is the fate of all philosophers since the hegemony of analytic philosophy. But I was pleased to learn that our institutional collective memory, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, has an informative entry on Hook, which treats him as a "leading interpreter and proponent of Deweyan pragmatic naturalism" and "polemicist." Hook was once one of the leading New York intellectuals. And, pertinent for us, Hook became after trying initially to synthesize pragmatism and marxism a leading anti-communists as time passes. (His anti-communism increasingly has a McCarthyite tendency.) A key step in Hook's attempted synthesis and eventual turn against marxism is his rejection of the dialectical method.

Now, if we look at Hook's "Dialectic in Social and Historical Inquiry" all dialectic is dismissed. But strikingly we find only a single explicit mention of Marx's dialectic in a footnote: "I have omitted specific discussion of Marx in this paper because, whether or not we regard his findings as valid, I think it can be shown that he made no distinction between the dialectic method, as he understood it, and scientific method as applied to the historical and cultural sciences." (370) The footnote is more informative than it may seem. 

For, Hook's main strategy is to compare dialectics to ordinary "scientific method" which has a "basic unity" (378), and to find dialectics wanting in comparison to scientific method (371-379). But oddly, when he does so, he takes for granted that the metric/measure of comparison are the cannons of success internal to that scientific method. And to give a flavor of these cannons, among the criteria he identifies are "piece-meal verification" (371) and "predicting as closely as we can the specific form of the institutions of to-morrow" (375). 

Now, I don't mean to remind you constantly I am no Marxist, but even I can see that Hook is rigging the comparison against the dialectician. For Hook presupposes, oddly, that the "alleged justification of the dialectic method consists in its power to lead us to the discovery of new truths or to a deeper and more adequate understanding of old truths." But while undoubtedly dialecticians make such claims, and from my bourgois perspective often exaggeratedly so, this is not what the dialectician, is fundamentally interested in. For she is, I quote, Korsch (recall) committed to articulating "a theory of social revolution." It is plausible that if that is one's aim, one may well find that at times one has deeper understanding of social reality than those with more, say, armchair sensibilities.

Even a bourgeois intellectual like me can discern that in/with the ordinary scientific method as embraced by Hook, revolution is at best an afterthought. The scientific method (which is good at describing and predicting states of affairs) then functions as a kind of input into a different process  (i.e., changing the world). But while nobody denies that in this way science can contribute to enormous social transformations, including many unanticipated ones, this way of conceiving it allows capital to have a more than fair shot at shaping these outcomes.+ People like me would consider that a virtue of Hook's approach! 

By contrast, a key methodological move the dialectician asserts to make revolution really possible,  is "the coincidence of reality and consciousness." This coincidence makes marxist dialectic often seem weird. But as Bertell Ollman shows in Dance of the Dialectic,* the weirdness merely echoes the kind of things one finds in the whole tradition of what he calls the 'philosophy of internal relations' -- with Spinoza as one of the paradigmatic exemplars --  which simply rejects what since Tarski has come to be known as the classical account of truth. And so it is, also, no surprise, again quoting Korsch, this is "bound to appear to [critics of dialectics] as theoretically false and unscientific."

I do not mean to suggest there are no other arguments in Hook. But while all of them land serious blows, none of them take 'conduciveness to the revolution' as a fundamental aim. So, I regret to say we have returned to where started. I ruefully conclude that those purportedly most in the know about marxist dialectics (Hook, the analytic marxists, etc.) have produced refutations that ought not convince the would be revolutionary.** And while I have no standing as a score-keeper on such matters, I report as a psychological fact that it strikes me as a true scandal that these purported refutations are so obviously (to use a technical term) Quatsch. 

 

 

 

On Nagel vs Neurath on the Icy Slopes

While Frank and his institute began to lose favor at the Rockefeller Foundation, increasing numbers of his colleagues in philosophy – besides Kallen and Hook, who had led the way in the 1940s – began to voice public sympathy with some of the dominant anticommunist themes and postures of Cold War intellectual life. With regard to the questions of whether and how science (or scientific philosophy) should treat matters regarding values – political, social, or ethical – two general stances were popular. The first called for disengagement and held that philosophy of science should abstain from such debates. The second held that philosophy of science should at least support the view that absolute moral and social values exist, if not also the partisan view that those of the West are plainly superior to those of the Soviets. In the early 1950s, Ernest Nagel and Martin Gardner touched on these issues and illustrated these stances.
In an obituary for Felix Kaufman, Ernest Nagel referred to “the acute issue whether questions concerning public and individual moral values are capable of being settled scientifically and objectively.” Nagel approved of Kaufman’s position, one that gingerly sided with Frank’s: If our “rules of application” of moral terms are made explicit, Nagel explained, then “moral questions are as much capable of objective decision as are questions in physics and biology” (Nagel 1950, 467). When it came to politics and the problem of international peace and stability, however, Nagel was skeptical that science or philosophy had any relevance. Reviewing a book by Lewis Mumford, in which he insisted that we must “learn to participate in a durable universal communion with the whole of humanity,” Nagel wrote in the anti-Stalinist New Leader,

It is extremely doubtful whether such a reorientation by every human being constitutes a necessary condition for the disappearance of the cold and hot wars that [Mumford] so fervently desires. There are surely respectable grounds for believing that this objective could be realized within the framework of current political organizations of men and on the basis of current moral ideals.

Nagel did not accept Mumford’s utopianism because history did not support it:

As for Mr. Mumford’s suggestions concerning the establishment of intimate neighborhood organizations, of public-work groups, or of international travel fellowships, there is little evidence to show that such devices have contributed much in the past to the creation of a world community, or that without fundamental political and economic reorganization on both a national and international level they are likely to do so in the future. (Nagel 1951, 22)

Nagel agreed with Kaufman and others (including Frank, Morris, and Dewey) that science and philosophy of science could illuminate values and related questions about human conduct. But with respect to the Cold War, he was resigned to quietism and disengagement. Only political and economic restructuring, and not resources offered by philosophy, could advance a “world community” or reduce international tensions.
Martin Gardner followed Hook and Kallen more closely  than Nagel. When he reviewed books in the New Leader, he urged philosophers of science take up the cause of anticommunism and not retreat to any apolitical posture. George A. Reisch (2005) How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic (CUP) 310-311

I was a PhD student when I first encountered Reisch's brilliant, archive based demolition of conventional wisdom and self-serving myths in the profession often based on anecdotal evidence or hearsay. His book (hereafter Icy Slopes) is one of the towering achievements of various intellectual communities (HPS, HOPOS, History of Analytic, 'the fans of Carnap' etc.) that I have self-identified with over a good chunk of my professional life. Unlike much history of analytic philosophy it unsettles comforting narratives. And like many much nobler souls, I applauded and continue to admire his intellectual rehabilitation of those that gave analytic philosophy its original moral and political purpose. 

So, with an intro like that, you know I am going to disagree with Reisch.

Icy Slopes has a rise and fall structure. The passage I quoted is part of one of the key turning points in the book where the unity of science program (initiated by Neurath and left Vienna, and then still promoted by Frank) collapses. And while Nagel is not portrayed as himself a villain, he is treated as an exemplar ("illustrated these stance") of a certain retreat from more ambitious and nobler aspirations. I think Reisch misunderstands Nagel's position, and the misunderstanding is illustrative of a wider problem of his conceptual framework. But at the end of this post I am also going to suggest that in a certain sense Reisch's misunderstanding is not surprising given the way the profession evolved.

So, Reisch is absolutely right that Nagel is an anti-communist (recall; and here on his reviews of Cornforth); see also his withering 1939 review in The Nation of Haldane's The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences which Nagel republished in Logic Without Metaphysics (1956; hereafter LWM). But it is worth noting, first, that Nagel was not just an anti-Communist. His polemical targets in this period, also include folk who may now classify as sympathetic to the right: these include not just an assortment of neo-Thomists and the obscurantism popular in Nazi Germany, but also harshly negative reviews of the realist theorist Hans Morgenthau's Scientific Man vs Power Politics (in The Yale Law Journal 1952) and (recall) the rhetorically devastating review in (1952) The Journal of Philosophy  of Hayek's The Counter-Revolution of Science both re-published in LWM.

So, even in his anti-communism Nagel did not give fellow critics of Marxism a pass. In that sense Nagel does not fit the stereotype of a cold war intellectual. This gets me to second point. Reisch is, thus, a bit misleading to imply that anticommunist themes and postures shaped Nagel's thought or that he conformed to them. His philosophical politics, if we may call them that, were not centered on anti-marxism as such. Rather his anti-marxism is an expression of his underlying views about philosophy and political life.

As I have discussed (here and here), Nagel's political stance in the period echoes the liberal ideal of rule by discussion. In Nagel's case his political position was ground in and mirrors his metaphysics and, in particular his philosophy of science. While science contains differential expertise and skill, Nagel views it as an open-ended conversation responsive to public criticism and reasons and, thereby, self-corrective. Crucially for Nagel over time the norms and criteria change, even improve. Not unlike say, Polanyi, he treats this idealized conception as a useful model for a political life worth having. This is a progressive conception of the possibilities of political life that, in practice, recognizes many improvements are the consequence of local, accumulating incremental change.+

Nagel indicates something like the image I have just sketched in many places, including, I should note in the rather moving (!) memorial to Felix Kaufman quoted by Reisch! Here is a passage I have in mind:

[Kaufman] was impressed by the fact that empirical science is a potentially ceaseless process of evaluating propositions in the light of changing evidence for them. And very early in his own intellectual development he recognized as an essential feature of scientific method the tacit use of the principle he came to call the principle of permanent control, according to which no proposition dealing with matters of fact is beyond criticism and revision. He employed this principle, which admirably expresses the self-corrective nature of modern science, in his trenchant criticism of atomistic sensationalism, of philosophies of self-evidence, and of dogmatic claims to finality. The principle was indeed an expression of an essential trait of the man himself: of his native abhorrence of authoritarianism, of his readiness to receive as well as to give criticism, and of his disciplined humility in recognizing the difficulties that stand in the way of obtaining warranted knowledge...(466)

And while the point of Nagel's description is to characterize Kaufman's position, and he sometimes disagrees with Kaufman, this part, as Reisch recognizes, he clearly endorses ("admirably expresses...") I know of no reason to assume Nagel ever gave up on this. 

Now it is worth noting that Nagel's view of science was less naive then it may seem now. At the time science was much smaller and the government's role in shaping science underdeveloped. In addition, while Nagel emphasizes the self-corrective nature of science (and may seem to buy into a kind of efficient market in ideas hypothesis), he is not unaware, and calls attention to the fact, that correcting for social and political bias, even in the natural sciences, is often not easy in practice (as he notes in well known material excerpted from The Structure of Science (and circulating as "the value-oriented bias of social inquiry.")* 

Okay, with that out of the way, let's look at Reisch's analysis. It is notable the for Reisch the two (anti-communist) alternatives to the unity of science are (i) quietism or disengagement; (ii) extolling of objective superiority of the West and its values. This leaves a lot of alternatives unexplored. 

For, the point of establishing the possibility of, and reflecting on the form of the of, objective values is not, in Nagel's hands, intended as an uncritical vindication of the status quo. They also provide the possibility of standard of criticism from which one can evaluate (and now I use one of Nagel's favorite words) the "warrant" of one's beliefs. That is to say, the question of, say, demarcation between science and not science is supposed to be able to be mirrored in social and political sphere. And, say, unlike conservative anti-communists, Nagel (and again he praises Kaufman this) firmly believes that tacit rules and commitments of our social practices, including science and induction, must be made explicit and articulated in order to allow for rational evaluation, justification, and correction/improvement.

Now if we turn to Reisch's treatment of Nagel's review of Mumford, something odd happens. A casual reading of Reisch may leave one with the impression that Mumford is a spokesperson for the kind of utopian thought we might associate with the unity of science movement. But Mumford's approach is, and now I quote Nagel himself, more consistent with being a "spokesman for one phase of intellectual and moral liberalism." (LWM 409) Mumford (who is fascinating) is as non-marxist as Nagel is (as Nagel recognizes LWM 410). And Nagel leaves no doubt he is quite familiar with Mumford's wider views.

And if we look at the passage that Reisch quotes in light of that, it is clear that they are criticized not for being politically wrong-headed. But rather that they do not help solve the (recall) transition problem from here to there and so are, at bottom, a "counsel of dark despair," (LWM 411). Such transition problems do not merely beset marxists, but as Nagel clearly recognizes, liberal thinkers too (something recently emphasized (recall) by Scott Scheall). If one's solution to the transition problem requires "wholesale and simultaneous victory over all problems" (LWM 411) then by Nagel's lights (and i am inclined to agree) that's no solution at all. (One can agree to that without always caving to demands of feasibility!) That is to say, a political philosophy that cares about changing the world is bound to confront the transition problem and take it seriously. This fits with Nagel's larger views on (recall) the "demands of responsible discourse."

For, more subtly, Nagel recognizes, thus, that a certain kind of revolutionary stance is not political at all, but a species of "moralizing exhortations." And, in fact, Nagel is explicit that the quetism is Mumford's: "He therefore proposes....the cultivation of the personal withdrawal and solitary reflection." (LWM 412, he then goes on to quote Mumford). So, the very criticism Reisch lodges against Nagel is Nagel's criticism of Mumford!

Now, Reisch and the friends of revolution, inspired by Neurath, need not agree with Nagel's incrementalist position, which embraces a "realizable process of indefinite approximation" (LWM 413, quoting Plato approvingly!) And I recognize that for some Nagel's charge that Mumford does not offer a "serious contribution to the solution of our present social dilemmas" may be unfair or unduly 'realistic' in a conservative way. But Nagel's willingness to work "within the framework of current political organizations...and on the basis of current moral ideals" (414) it is not a withdrawal from the world or a quietest, complacent stance even in international affairs.** (In 1951 the United Nations had been founded, and the Bretton Woods structure was being developed.) It is neither glorification of the American way nor antipolitical.

There is an important issue that ends up obscured by the limitations of Reisch's particular criticism (and may help explain them). One may well wonder, fairly, how Nagel's approach to philosophy of science, and the professionalism that it helped promote, may contribute to the solution of social dilemmas. And from the other end, the philosophical profession Nagel helped shape and bequeath does seem a fair target for Reisch's criticism. We may still wonder how Nagel's "convictions of a people confident that a bold but disciplined intelligence is still a creative power in the world" is actualized in a life of philosophy of science... 

 

On Being a Boring/Bored Academic (Via Huemer and Ernest Nagel)

It wasn’t until much later that I started to get annoyed with the field of philosophy. We give the good stuff to undergraduates — free will, the existence of God, the objectivity of morality, etc. The boring, unimportant material is saved for the academic journals, meant to be read by professors — arguments about whether professor x’s objection to y’s version of such-and-such argument shows that that version of the argument fails to establish its conclusion, etc. The issue of free will, for example, is super-interesting, but the free will literature is some of the boringest stuff you’ll ever encounter. I feel drowsy just thinking about it.--Michael Huemer (Colorado) "What's good and bad about philosophy" [HT DAILYNOUS]

During the past year Huemer wrote a number of blog posts that inspired much buzz (approval and scoffing) in the philo-blogosphere. But while they were on topics of interest to me and known to provoke me into digressions, I did not feel much urge to chime in. In part, my reticence was due because it seemed that his underlying sensibility was one of misery. And I was imaging Yoda telling me to stay away from the dark side. But because I have been miserable during the pandemic, and to the best of my knowledge I had never met Huemer, I also worried that I was projecting my state of mind on to his blog persona. I don't mean to suggest I thought it was merely projection: my virtual diagnosis of him was prompted by his post on the terrible nature of academic writing, in which he writes (inter alia) "academic style isn’t fun to read, and it isn’t fun to write. So who is making us do this?" That reads like an authentic expression of misery to me (perhaps -- now I am glancing over the details of his argument -- prompted by justified rage at referee 2).

Now, continental philosophers have fine theories about the role of boredom in late, or very late, capitalism, say, as a species of alienation for a parasitic class. One can find such theories ending up being marketed in the spectacle of the art world. And it is also easy to become satirical about self-help books that tell us that boredom is the condition of creativity and that letting kids not be bored at all stunts their development. It is also easy to be belittle the sad reality that the very conditions of philosophy are undermined by the dread and nihilist despair of reading the literature. 

For some of you Huemer's diagnoses may not resonate. I have had colleagues for whom digesting and writing for Analysis is sufficient condition for flourishing,--bless their soul. If that's like you, nothing I say is intended to make you feel unhappy about this.

But Huemer's remarks quoted above and his conclusion -- "what we we get is discussions of niggling details, which make no sense and have no interest to you if you haven’t read the specific academic literature from the last 10 years; discussions focused on the literature rather than the issues, filled with qualifications and digressions into potential misunderstandings and errors that you probably would never have been tempted toward in the first place – and all to get to some anodyne, highly qualified claims about incredibly circumscribed questions" -- resonated with me. By contrast, I adore my undergraduate teaching in large part because the material we explore together is so glorious and I love where the students take me as their minds expand. I rarely feel anything like this in reading even the scholarly papers I admire most.* 

As it happens, yesterday I read the following passage in Ernest Nagel back in 1935:

Santayana remarks in one of his books that he would be ashamed to hold views in philosophy which he did not believe in daily life, and that he would deem it dishonest and cowardly to sail under colors in an argument which were not those under which he habitually lived. The precept implied by these comments can serve as a criterion for evaluating the quality of integration which a thinker achieves in his own life but more significantly, it helps to fix the subject matter and task of philosophy, and so to disclose the relevance of the philosophic pursuit to the society which nourishes it. It is a precept which I take for my own wholeheartedly, and one which I wish were taken as a guide in all philosophic inquiry. "Notes Toward a Naturalistic Conception of Logic, republished in Logic Without Metaphysics (1956), p. 39.

Now, 1935 was in the midst of the great depression. And so the question of nourishment was not merely a metaphor. Nagel himself was about to embark on a funded tour of Europe where he would discover and partially help, as I have argued, legislate a very different philosophical scene. 

Even so, it is pretty clear that the conception of philosophy inspired by Santayana, fairly or not, is less likely to be boring than the pointless and dull activity memorably described by Huemer in his post. Nagel discerns a way in which existential concerns with integrity between thought and deed (recall here) are connected to the social purposes of one's society. I recognize that Nagel has anticipated an idea that I have digressed on (and distinguished from other notions in the neighborhood), that a philosopher's philosophical integrity involve the way(s) in which one's professional arguments, professional credit, and public utterances and comportment cohere. 

I do not mean to deny that there are tensions in Nagel's position. His views are (recall here; here) resolutely pluralist, and, if his "all philosophic inquiry" is not meant to refer to his own, he may be thought inconsistent with his other views here. And he is a bit quick, too quick, to assume that the disclosure to society of the relevance of one's philosophical pursuit will be met by approval of that society. Even a democratic philosophy may irritate, even bore, the masses, after all. 

Now, Nagel is relevant here because there is a sense in which he gave up, in practice, on the commitment he just described. And, there is a further sense that, together with Carnap, as Abe Stone has emphasized (here; here), he helped inaugurate the professional turn of philosophy so familiar to us now and that drives the Huemers among us to existential despair (okay, that was over the top; sorry). Nagel himself recognized all of this, and he discusses it un-sparingly, and appropriately, at the start of a presidential address to the APA in December 1954, where he discuss this feature of "recent analytical literare":

The past quarter century has been for philosophy in many parts of the world a period of acute self-questioning, engendered in no small measure by developments in scientific and logical thought, and in part no doubt by fundamental changes in the social order. In any event, there has come about a general loss of confidence in the competence of philosophy to provide by way of a distinctive intellectual method a basic ground-plan of the cosmos, or for that matter to contribute to knowledge of any primary subject-matter except by becoming a specialized positive science and subjecting itself to the discipline of empirical inquiry. Although the abysses of human ignorance are undeniably profound, it has also become apparent that ignorance, like actual knowledge, is of many special and heterogeneous things; and we have come to think, like the fox and unlike the hedgehog of whom Mr. Isaiah Berlin has recently reminded us, that there are a great many things which are already known or remain to be discovered, but that there is no one "big thing" which, if known, would make everything else coherent and unlock the mystery of creation. In consequence, many of us have ceased to emulate the great system-builders in the history of philosophy. In partial imitation of the strategy of modern science, and in the hope of achieving responsibly held conclusions about matters concerning which we could acquire genuine competence, we have tended to become specialists in our professional activities. We have come to direct our best energies to the resolution of limited problems and puzzles that emerge in the analysis of scientific and ordinary discourse, in the evaluation of claims to knowledge, in the interpretation and validation of ethical and esthetic judgments, and in the assessment of types of human experience. I hope I shall not be regarded as offensive in stating my impression that the majority of the best minds among us have turned away from the conception of the philosopher as the spectator of all time and existence, and have concentrated on restricted but manageable questions, with almost deliberate unconcern for the bearing of their often minute investigations upon an inclusive view of nature and man.
Some of us, I know, are distressed by the widespread scepticism of the traditional claims for a philosophia perennis, and have dismissed as utterly trivial most if not all the products of various current forms of analytical philosophy. I do not share this distress, nor do I think the dismissal is uniformly perspicacious and warranted. For in my judgment, the scepticism which many deplore is well-founded. Even though a fair-sized portion of recent analytical literature seems inconsequential also to me, analytical philosophy in our own day is the continuation of a major philosophic tradition, and can count substantial feats of clarification among its assets. Concentration on limited and determinate problems has yielded valuable fruits, not least in the form of an increased and refreshing sensitivity to the demands of responsible discourse.

Nagel reminds us that the very best criticisms of analytic philosophy have been stated within the tradition. More subtly, his idea that ignorance is not univocal strikes me as worthy of ongoing rediscovery. More pertinent here, Nagel grants de facto that philosophical professionalization and specialization necessarily involves generating the conditions of mental mutilation. Huemer's spleen was foreseen by the legislators/prophets of our tradition and - oh amor fati --  willed eternally in the name of the greater good and responsibility. 

Nagel thinks the bitter medicine worth our pain. He does offer some remedy: "a philosopher...owes it to himself to articulate, if only occasionally, what sort of world he thinks he inhabits, and to make clear to himself where approximately lies the center of his convictions." Allowing for the unfortunately gendered language, this is salutary advice. I suspect the readability of many philosophy papers would be helped, and the sanity of their authors enhanced, if it were normal to add a paragraph, say at the end of the introduction, that linked the minute arguments to follow to the geography and significance of their philosophical convictions. While this would be undoubtedly comical too, I hope referee 2 can get behind this as an innocent convention. With online publishing the political economy of this modest proposal should be not too constraining.

Contextual Naturalism, Ernest Nagel, and The Philosophy of a Free Society.

It follows that the human scene is as much an integral part of nature, and as valid a subject for the philosopher's concern with basic features of existence, as is any of its other sectors. As contextualistic naturalism views them, man and his works are not inexplicable occurrences, incomparable in every respect with other natural processes. Men come into being and act the way they do only because of the operations of natural forces, and they perish or cease to behave as men when forces no less natural disrupt the normal organization of their bodies and of their fields of behavior. On the other hand, though the conditions of man’s life are thus continuous with the rest of nature, his behavior exhibits features which are discontinuous with other parts of existence. For man is not simply another odd item in the inexhaustible catalogue of created things. He possesses the apparently unique gift of an inquiring mind, which enables him not only to act under the compulsion of internal springs of action and external pressures, but also to direct his impulses and to master many of the forces in his environment.

This gift of intelligence man owes to the organization of his body and the character of his environment, and no supernatural agency or disembodied soul is required to explain it. It is this organization, complicated by the structure of his surroundings, which also accounts for men’s moral and evaluative behaviors. The possession of needs and preferences, and the exercise of reflection upon them in the interest of fulfilling and harmonizing them, are as natural to man as is, for example, the property of a magnet to repel or attract another magnet. In any event, it is in the radical plurality of men’s needs and in the limitations which their physical and social environment impose upon their fulfillment, that contextualistic naturalism locates the source and urgency of moral problems. Accordingly, it does not conceive the primary moral problem to be that of discovering or actually instituting some fixed set of ethical norms valid everywhere and for all time. For basic moral problems are plural in number and specific in character, and are concerned with the adjustment, in the light of causes and consequences, of competing impulses occurring in specific environmental contexts. There can therefore be no general or final solution to the moral predicaments of mankind; the moral problem is the perennial one of finding ways and means for eliminating needless suffering and for organizing in a reasonable manner the energies of men.

The advocacy of a responsible intellectual method, especially in matters pertinent to social and ethical issues as well as in philosophy, is thus an emphatic strain in the writings of contextualistic naturalists. For reliable knowledge is the end-product of a reflective process, involving the use of experimental controls over ideas which initially have the status of tentative hypotheses; and it is this procedure which must be employed if reliable knowledge and reason- able evaluations are to be attained in the settlement of social and moral conflicts. This method of science supplies no guarantees against error, it does not preclude alternative solutions to problems, and it certifies none of its conclusions as eternally valid. But since it is in essence a self-corrective method, and involves the continued criticism of its findings in the light of evidence capable of public inspection, it is a method which can discover its own errors. It is in any case the sole method which has historically shown itself able to yield intellectual and practical mastery over various segments of nature. From the systematic extension of the use of this method to the problems of men, contextualistic naturalists confidently anticipate an increased moral enlightenment. Compared with many fashionable philosophies contextualistic naturalism is almost prosaically sober. It contributes to the current intellectual scene no apocalyptic visions, no thunderous absolutes, no unshakeable certainties. It offers no spectacular promises of salvation. It is essentially scientific and secular in temper, but confident that the concentration of scientific methods upon specific problems will yield a rich harvest of genuine knowledge. It is sane and reasonable at a time when the tides of irrationalism run high in the world and when substitutes for the Appolonian virtues are at a premium. It expresses the convictions of a people confident that a bold but disciplined intelligence is still a creative power in the world.--Ernest Nagel (1947) "Philosophy and the American Temper" reprinted in Sovereign Reason (1954), pp. 56-7 (emphases added).

The other day, I called attention to Ernest Nagel's vision for philosophy of science (which is how he is remembered, if remembered at all). I wouldn't call his (1961) The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation especially lyrical. But even if we leave aside his role in constructing what became analytic philosophy, his essays -- mostly reviews, polemics, and serious studies of the major intellects of his day -- are full arresting asides and rhetorical gems (below I quote a few more).

The passage quoted above was written for a "European audience, and appeared in a French translation in the Chronique des Etats-Unis, a bi-monthly publication of the American office of Information in Paris, In April 1947" (309). I have found almost nothing about this periodical, but it stands to reason it was an instrument of the US State Department or the CIA. But I assume here that it was written before the cold war was a reality, although Nagel was already (recall) hostile to Marxism. In the following years he would publish withering reviews (in the Partisan Review; and Jphil) of Cornforth's Leninist attempts at refuting Carnap, logical empiricism, and pragmatism. So, while anachronistic, it would not be misleading to call "Philosophy and the American Temper" (hereafter: American Temper) a philosophy for cold war liberalism.

American Temper is a short essay. Part of the argument of the essay is a denial that there is a distinctive American philosophy. (Nagel shows no interest in indigenous thought.) He claims this follows straightforwardly from commitment to a "democratic way of life," which shows itself in a restraint from top-down imposition of an authorized philosophy and the expectation of pluralism that is, that the freedom to develop "alternative conceptions of nature and man" will be pursued (50). 

While I tend to think of Nagel as the leader of the scientific wing of twentieth century pragmatism, in American Temper, Nagel describes pragmatism as a decaying research program (53). That here Nagel is describing his own commitments as a 'contextual naturalist,' we can accept on no less authority than Isaac Levy (writing in the Routledge Encyclopedia). I mention this because while Nagel's association with contextual naturalism was noted by contemporary readers and reviewers of Nagel's essay (see here; here), the term never caught on. In a beautiful essay, Lawrence Cahoone makes an excellent case that Nagel's contextual naturalism is very indebted to Morris Cohen. In American Temper Nagel himself grants (53-4) that it grows out of later writings of Dewey, Sheldon's (1942) America's Progressive Philosophy, which is a species of process philosophy, and a collection edited by Krikorian (1944) Naturalism and the Human Spirit, which includes many philosophers associated with Columbia at mid century.

The cardinal thesis of contextual naturalism is "the essentially incomplete fundamentally plural character of existence, in which no overarching pattern of development can be discerned, and which qualitative discontinuities and loose conjunctions are as ultimate features as are firm connections and regular cycles of change." (54) This is clearly now an unfashionable, metaphysical doctrine.+ But we can hear in its pluralism echoes in the (dappled world, disunity) commitments of those associated with the Stanford School of the Philosophy of Science.* Since Nagel was Suppes' supervisor the connection is not wholly coincidental. 

The point of calling it 'contextual' is explained by the "emphasis upon the contextual conditions for the occurence and for the manifested properties of everything whatsoever--upon the fact a quality an objective constituent of nature even though its existence depends on the relations in which it stands to other things." (55) This generates an anti-reductionism and a general mistrust of eliminativist strategies. (How this fits with so-called Nagel reduction is not my present concern.)

Now, I noted recently, that Nagel's philosophy of science is not attracted to the idea that science is a means of silencing others in the name of a unified authority. Kuhn's philosophy of science is not just a methodological alternative, but also a political alternative. And while science contains differential expertise and skill, Nagel views it more as an open-ended conversation responsive to criticism and reasons. This point is echoed in American Temper: "involves the continued criticism of its findings in the light of evidence capable of public inspection." And in this sense Nagel views science as a model for democratic society worth having. To what degree the science of our day would still be thought of as such an apt model is worth asking.

Alongside this is a rejection of ethics as a monistic, authoritative discipline imposing normative rules on the rest of us. Rather Nagel views ethics more in the spirit of what is now known as mechanism design. Its task is to find local, temporary ethical solutions to practical problems in light of our plural commitments in "specific environmental contexts." If there is an overarching theme it is the elimination of needless suffering. Obviously this slogan does not settle important questions (whose suffering will count; by whose light needless; and at what cost elimination?, etc.), but it gives the sense of the spirit of the project which is really about the never final organization of energy of men. The liberalism on offer is one with affinity to the New Deal.

We can also see that Nagel's vision for the philosophy of science as a template for a democratic society is itself ground in a pluralist metaphysics in which no single perspective is ultimately privileged. In addition this metaphysics provides a kind of template for society: each individual has objective existence, but is simultaneously socially embedded. 

Given that circumstances are constantly changing this is a philosophy of forever-unfinished-business, self-conscious of the fact that any proposed solution in the moment will seem archaic at a later date. As I wrap up, Nagel's comment on this point is worth quoting: 

contextualistic naturalists exhibit a profound distrust of philosophic systems which attempt to catch once for all the variegated contents of the world in a web of dialectical necessity. They are keenly conscious of the limitations of purely formal analysis even when they engage in it. For they recognize that a logic, no matter how subtle, provides no warrant concerning matters of fact unless it is supported by controlled observation. Indeed, they sometimes show an almost pathological fear that those concerned with formal analysis may be deceived into supposing that nature is as coherently organized and as simple as are their intellectual constructions. (54)

I hope readers have noticed that Nagel calls his own contextual naturalism 'sane and reasonable' and a 'sober' alternative to more fashionable and fanciful philosophies. There is an unapologetic willingness to develop the  apollonian edifices of civilization. But this way of framing it, and the acknowledged pathology -- the fear that controlled technique may facilitate a form of intellectual self-deception --, suggests recognition of the fact that some forces in our environment, including our own impulses, have dionysian roots that may haunt us. Nagel's analytic head is conjoined to the heart of a disciplined romantic.  

Ernest Nagel's Meta-philosophy of science (and politics)

Scientific knowledge does not depend on the possession of  an esoteric capacity 
for grasping  the necessary structure of some superior reality, nor does it require 
modes of warranting beliefs which are discontinuous with operations of thought, 
identifiable and effective in the ordinary affairs of human life. The achievements 
of science are the products of a cooperative social enterprise, which has refined 
and extended skills encountered in the meanest employments of the human 
intellect. The principles of human reason, far from representing the immutable 
traits of all possible being, are socially cultivated standards of competent 
intellectual workmanship. The life of reason as embodied in the community of 
scientific effort is thus a pattern of life that generates an autonomous yet 
controlling ideal. That  ideal requires disciplined dedication without servitude to
 any ultimate authority, imposes responsibility for performance upon individual 
judgment but demands  responsiveness to the criticism of others, and calls for  
adherence to a tradition of workmanship without commitment to any system of 
dogma. To many commentators, the ideals realized in the enterprise of science are
 also the ideals  which areindispensable to the successful operation of any society 
of free men. Many thinkers, indeed, like John Dewey in America, have based their 
hopes for the future of mankind upon the extension of the habits of scientific 
intelligence to every stratum  of communal life and to every  form of social 
organization. --Ernest Nagel (1954), "The Perspectives of Science and the Projects 
of Man," in Sovereign Reason 306

In analytic philosophy fame is transient. For example, Ernest Nagel is now largely forgotten; a few contemporary philosophers of science are familiar with his writings on reductionism and a few others are familiar with his work on function statements. But I doubt he is the subject of many graduate seminars, and I suspect almost none of his papers are taught regularly. That Nagel was once an academic celebrity in the sciences, the leader of what we may call the scientific wing of pragmatism for a generation, influential supervisor, prolific author across many philosophical topics, introducing countless students and their teachers to Gödel’s Proof, and an intellectual polemicist of the first order is now merely a historical footnote.

So, for example, Misak calls "Nagel, perhaps Dewey’s best graduate student" (116) in her influential, The American Pragmatists. She discusses  him as "the paradigm of an analytic, logically inclined, philosopher of science in America," (150). But while she uses some of Nagel's writings throughout her work in discussing other thinkers, and hints that he may be responsible for the synthesis between logical positivism and pragmatism, (163) at bottom she devotes little space to him. 

This neglect is a shame because in addition to being technically among the more competent philosophers of his generation, Nagel was widely read, fiercely sought out opposing views, and always makes clear that philosophical disagreement may matter to the fate of civilization. As regular readers know I think Nagel decisively shaped the character of contemporary analytic philosophy, including its orientation on puzzle solving (even though in some senses we have not been as ambitious as he hoped as we'll show below). But today I assume that in the background. Here I focus on his own sense that in the wake of Einstein the "classical conception of scientific knowledge" (302)* had to be replaced with something new.

For Nagel, science shapes the broader culture in two distinct ways: first, as the fount of technologies and medicines. Second, by challenging established beliefs and intellectual habits (297). And while the former is more emphasized, not the least by scientists in their appeals for resources (296), the latter can also help re-shape (amongst others) our "basic aspirations," our "moral commitments," and "the principles" by which "actions" are evaluated (297).

These facts generate a "threefold task" for philosophy: (i) clarifying the bearing of trends in scientific inquiry upon pervasive conceptions of our place in nature; (ii) of making explicit the intellectual methods by which responsibly held beliefs are achieved; and (iii) of interpreting inherited beliefs and institutions in the light of current additions to knowledge. (297-298) This has an interest implication. For all three involve philosophy of science. And while we tend to think of philosophy of science as a fairly focused enterprise (characterized by (ii)) -- e.g., "the clarification of scientific procedures" (307) and the stress testing of concepts (306) --, for Nagel, philosophy of science becomes first philosophy: "the boundaries of the philosophy of science are in fact the boundaries of philosophy itself." (298) And while (i) speaks to what we may call the existentialist call to philosophy, the third (iii) involves, more dangerously, philosophical activity with the life of her (imagined) community. 

The quoted passage at the top of this post leaves it unclear to what degree Nagel agrees with his mentor, Dewey, that society needs to be modelled on the post-classical conception of science (which is fallabilist, embraces the significance of what is now known as Duhem-Quine, and which is aware of possible incommensurabilities). Nagel rejects the cult of genius and thinks that science is a collaborative enterprise, which involves the systematic and socially sustained refinement of ordinary cognitive processes. So, rather than seeing a scientific society as a means toward a technocratic elite, the idea that society needs to be modeled on science is thought be democratic in a non-trivial sense.

Crucially, on this model science is not a method of silencing others behind an authoritative consensus, but a mechanism by which one becomes responsive to reasons and participates in a social division of labor that is in some sense self-legislating. And so, this helps generate (through its spokesperson in philosophy of science, and in lived experience) an "attitude, at once critical and experimental, toward the perennial as well as the current issues of human life." (307)

And, in fact, Nagel is explicit that philosophy of science so understood, is "a champion of the central values of liberal civilization." And while in the early 1950s the survival of liberal civilization was more secure than it had been in a generation, it is clear that securing such a civilization is one of Nagel's main aims in all his polemics (recall; and here). And, of course, by providing freedom of thought, liberal civilization is conducive to a humane philosophy of science (understood as first philosophy):

The basis for a general outlook on the place of man in nature is supplied by detailed knowledge of the structure of things supplied by the special sciences— an outlook that contemporary philosophy of science has helped to articulate and defend. In the perspective of that outlook, the human creature is not an autonomous empire in the vast entanglement of events and forces constituting the human environment. Nevertheless, no antecedent limits can be set to the power of scientific reason to acquire theoretical mastery over natural and social processes. Every doctrine which pretends to set such limits contains within itself the seeds of intolerance and repression. Moreover, in the perspective of that scientifically grounded outlook, human aspirations are expressions of impulses and needs which, whether these be native or acquired, constitute the ultimate point of reference for every justifiable moral judgment. The adequacy of such aspirations must therefore be evaluated in terms of the structures of human capacities and the order of human preferences. Accordingly, though the forces of nature may one day extinguish the human scene, those forces do not define valid human ideals, and they do not provide the measure of human achievement. But an indispensable condition for the just definition and the realization of those ideals is the employment and extension of the method of intelligence embodied in the scientific enterprise. A judicious confidence in the power of reason to ennoble the human estate may seem shallow to an age in which, despite the dominant position in it of scientific technology, there is a growing and pervasive distrust of the operations of free intelligence. It may indeed be the case that the temper of mind essential to the exercise of such intelligence has no immediate social future. But the cultivation of that intellectual temper is a fundamental condition for every liberal civilization. By making manifest the nature of scientific reason and the grounds for a continued confidence in it, contemporary philosophy of science has been a servant of men’s noblest and most relevant ideals. (307-8)

It would be tempting to give Nagel the last word. But it is notable that he assigns to philosophy of science also (iv) the task of making manifest "the grounds for...continued confidence" in the nature of scientific reason. The future orientation of this task is quite striking. What could merit that?** So, lurking in Nagel's "naturalist" program is the presupposition that either skepticism can be defeated or, well, that we can be persuaded to it ignore its challenge. 

On How Public and Experimental Philosophy Disappears (as Philosophy), and Reappears

Dewey, this most public intellectual and advocate of progressivism in American politics during its most activist age, repeatedly said that science and technology are the engines of not just material but moral progress. His theory of inquiry is robustly objectivist, and he advocates throughout his career not just the objective value of science but the fostering of the values of objectivity right through all human concerns. Here is Dewey in 1938, writing in the first volume of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, as the storm clouds of fascism formed over Europe:

[T]he scientific attitude and method are at bottom but the method of free and effective intelligence. . . [I]t is intensely desirable and under certain conditions practicable that all human beings become scientific in their attitudes: genuinely intelligent in their ways of thinking and acting. It is practicable because all normal persons have the potential germs which make this result possible. It is desirable because this attitude forms the sole ultimate alternative to prejudice, dogma, authority, and coercive force exercised in behalf of some special interest. (LW 13:279–280)

Indeed, already in 1920, in the wake of the First World War, Dewey argued in Reconstruction in Philosophy (MW 12) that bringing the scientific attitude into ethical and social thought was the task of the twentieth century.
This was a widespread understanding of the task of pragmatism around 1930. There were groups who sought to discharge the tasks Dewey had set. If I were to argue that there was a robustly “objective” pragmatist tradition that was active in American philosophy right into the 1960s, I would not point to the analytic luminaries Misak points to but rather to Edgar A. Singer, Jr., and his students and colleagues and their students: C. West Churchman, Russell Ackoff, Richard Rudner, and Bob Butts. This group was a “hard pragmatist” (Singer’s term) community of scholars who were central members of the American philosophy of science community before and during the time of the alleged dominance of logical empiricism in the philosophy of science. It was a group with its own technical projects—largely in probability, statistics, and experimental inference—but whose technical interests remained robustly within the general purview of the “theory of inquiry” that formed Dewey’s conception of logic and trained on socially useful ends. In the end, Churchman, Ackoff, and Rudner all sought a science of ethics as well.
Singer was an undergraduate engineering student at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1890s who went on to work with James at Harvard and then went back to Penn where he was on faculty for about 50 years. He and his students and colleagues—especially the biochemist William Malisoff, who worked for Atlantic Oil in Philadelphia and lived in the University City neighborhood—were the founders in 1934 of the journal Philosophy of Science; Malisoff, Churchman, and Rudner were the journal’s first three editors, over a time period lasting roughly thirty years. They sought to promote the understanding of science, especially of the details of increasingly technical regimes of statistical techniques in experimental inference, and sought to understand how to mobilize science for social good. They thought of themselves as pragmatists who knew the details of what people like Dewey could only gesture at in phrases like “the scientific habit of mind.”
Unlike Misak’s narrative, the story of these scholars is not that of a continuing pragmatist tradition in American philosophy involving central philosophical figures. Just as pragmatist philosophers like George Herbert Mead ended up being much more influential in American anthropology than American philosophy, Churchman and Ackoff left academic philosophy entirely and took up the cause of establishing new social sciences at leading American business schools: Ackoff at Wharton, Churchman at Berkeley. They were founders of operations research, systems science, management science, the measurement of consumer preference, etc. This is how they sought to bring the methods of science into social and ethical philosophy.
If I were to write a book called Some More American Pragmatists, I would offer a different narrative, then. Not a narrative of a continuing, important strand of pragmatist thought in American academic philosophy, but a narrative of a far-reaching impact of American pragmatism in the new features of the American post-Second-World-War university and the growth of an American “scientific-technological elite”—in education schools, business schools, new social sciences, and new methods in old social sciences. This is neither a story of academic philosophy nor one of academic anti-philosophy but of philosophically-inflected social science, a fitting setting for pragmatism as a mature project.--Alan Richardson (2013) "What Good is a (Indeed, This) History of Pragmatism?"  Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49:3: 411-412.

A few weeks ago I noted (recall) that Feigl's and Sellars' (1949) Readings in Philosophical Analysis. was reviewed in Philosophy of Science by Russell L. Ackoff. I had no idea who Ackoff was, and so looked him up. He became one of the founders of operations research (hereafter OR) and systems thinking in management science. Since I have an interest in the complex interactions between philosophy and economics I made a mental note to investigate further. Also because it reminded me of something I had once picked up, presumably from Alan Richardson, that the institutional founding of philosophy of science, and the journal with that name, Stateside was connected to people who became important in OR.

I couldn't find much written on that from the perspective of the history of philosophy, but there is a neat (2006) volume, Rescuing the Enlightenment from Itself, that gives a sense of how the rather influential school inspired by Churchman and Ackoff understands itself retrospectively. In the most philosophical chapter, "Pragmatism meets systems thinking: the legacy of C. West Churchman" by D Matthews, one can find a lovely account of how Ackoff took a philosophy class with Churchman at Upenn, and how that was the germ of their decades of collaboration.* I was especially struck by the claim that after the war, and after several fruitless attempts at institutional building, that at Case Western, "Churchman and Ackoff established a multidisciplinary faculty group (complete with postgraduate programs for Masters and Doctoral students) for specifically studying the philosophy, methodology and practice of tackling complex organisational and societal problems. By borrowing the appellation Operations Research, from the wartime British and American analysis units set up to help plan operational tactics Churchman, in effect, established the first post-war academic OR group in the US." (Matthews 2006: 184) For several years Churchman and Ackoff kept publishing in professional philosophy, but eventually their professional self-identification and legacy become more and more identified with their academic appointments (outside of philosophy).

Now, Richardson's argument is part of a critical extended review essay of Misak's excellent (2013) The American Pragmatists. And part of the debate between Richardson and Misak is not just about the self-understanding of pragmatism but also analytic philosophy. Regular readers know I am interested in those issues, and so I have to disappoint that in what follows I will not take a stance on their many layered disagreements. But I do think it is interesting Churchman and Ackoff have been nearly forgotten within philosophy, even the history of philosophy. (Rudner is if not still read, at least cited, in the inductive risk literature rehabilitated by Heather Douglas. Butts became an important historically sensitive philosopher of science.)

And this forgetting holds lessons for us, especially those with an interest in the fortunes of experimental philosophy, public philosophy, and interdisciplinary/integrative projects now associated with (say) PPE. For initially, Churchman and Ackoff didn't just understand themselves as pragmatists, but also as adherents of Singer's pragmatist version of experimentalist philosophy (for a philosophical introduction see here). Now what Singer meant by experimental philosophy is not quite what contemporary XPHI has become. But that's for another occasion, perhaps.

Okay, let me turn to the heart of the matter: so one way to understand an important strain of pragmatism just is a species of what we may call (recall) public facing philosophy. And the public here is not just the wider democratic culture (for which Dewey is still famous), but also other forms of knowing. And rather than adopting the philosophy of X model (with X being a special science [POX]), which came to be dominant in philosophy of science generally, Churchman and Ackoff sought not just to shape the special sciences, but to constitute them philosophically alongside the 'technical' machinery mentioned by Richardson. This can be seen in their rather successful efforts at institution building which extended to textbook writing.  

It would be wrong to think of what Churchman and Ackoff did as applied philosophy. Because as Richardson hints (okay so this may be taking sides in his debate with Misak), there is a sense in which what they are doing -- public facing, progressive, socially consequential -- just is what pragmatism is, from a teleological perspective, supposed to be.** How to think of their achievement in the context of higher education in American empire is no easy matter and it would require some comparison with another systems thinker (Talcott Parsons), who was shaped by philosophy and in some sense carried it forward within social theory and sociology.+

From the perspective of philosophy's institutional self understanding today this reminds us of something salutary. It is quite possible that the very best (let's stipulate), public facing, even high profile ones, can become of little interest to other philosophers or invisible to other philosophers as philosophy. I am not suggesting great originality here. Writing from an entirely different angle, the insight is fully present in Kristie Dotson's "How is this paper Philosophy?" Dotson argues for valuing multiple forms of disciplinary validation within philosophy to make space not just for those that have been excluded from its ranks, but for different kinds of (what she calls) cultures of praxis. (We can see hints of this, too, in Srinivasan's call for "more capacious notion of both philosophy and brilliance.") And, perhaps if Dotson and Srinivasan have their way, the future of philosophy will be able to be public facing and socially consequential without a choir of disciplinary influential naysayers. History need not repeat.

But if we think about the issue outside of institutionalized [!] philosophy, but from the perspective of public facing and integrative philosophy or synthetic science-- say in the way PPE may develop --, then it's possible that a form of philosophy can just be a certain intellectual practice of the sort that Churchman & Ackoff's OR became. Now, to avoid misunderstanding I do not mean to remind us of the self-serving and widespread myth that philosophy is the mother of science, and that a special science just is an empirically successful discipline that has liberated itself from philosophical roots.

Rather, these new forms of public and experimental philosophy, or integrative PPE (etc.), aim to fuse recent philosophy with special sciences that themselves are the product or sedimentation, at least in part, of past philosophical constitution or shaping. And so today's public philosophy encounters in its integration with the sciences after many what we may call afterimages of forgotten philosophy and, perhaps, not even recognizable as philosophy. 

 

On the Convergence of Economics and Computer Science (with comments on the role of moral reasoning in AI)

We can generalize this idea across our entire model space. Suppose we enumerated all the possible numerical pairs <error, unfairness> achieved by the models we are considering (e.g., SAT cutoffs)....

So each point corresponds to a different model; the x-coordinate of the point is the model’s error, and the y-coordinate is its unfairness score...The key thing to realize is that any model that is not on this boundary is a “bad” model that we should eliminate from consideration, because we can always improve on either its fairness score or its accuracy (or both) without hurting the other measure by moving to a point on this boundary.

The technical name for this boundary is the Pareto frontier or Pareto curve, and it constitutes the set of “reasonable” choices for the trade-off between accuracy and fairness. Pareto frontiers, which are named after the 19th-century Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, are actually more general than just accuracy-fairness trade-offs, and can be used to quantify the “good” solutions to any optimization problem in which there are multiple competing criteria. One of the most common examples is the “efficient frontier” in portfolio management, which quantifies the trade-off between returns and risk (or volatility) in stock investing.

The Pareto frontier of accuracy and fairness is necessarily silent about which point we should choose along the frontier, because that is a matter of judgment about the relative importance of accuracy and fairness. The Pareto frontier makes our problem as quantitative as possible, but no more so.

The good news is that generally speaking, whenever we have practical algorithms for “standard,” accuracy-only machine learning for a class of models, we also have practical algorithms for tracing out this Pareto frontier. These algorithms will be a little bit more complicated—after all, they must identify a collection of models rather than just a single one—but not by much... 

While the idea of considering cold, quantitative trade-offs between accuracy and fairness might make you uncomfortable, the point is that there is simply no escaping the Pareto frontier. Machine learning engineers and policymakers alike can be ignorant of it or refuse to look at it. But once we pick a decision-making model (which might in fact be a human decision-maker), there are only two possibilities. Either that model is not on the Pareto frontier, in which case it’s a “bad” model (since it could be improved in at least one measure without harm in the other), or it is on the frontier, in which case it implicitly commits to a numerical weighting of the relative importance of error and unfairness. Thinking about fairness in less quantitative ways does nothing to change these realities—it only obscures them.

Making the trade-off between accuracy and fairness quantitative does not remove the importance of human judgment, policy, and ethics—it simply focuses them where they are most crucial and useful, which is in deciding exactly which model on the Pareto frontier is best (in addition to choosing the notion of fairness in the first place, and which group or groups merit protection under it, both of which we discuss shortly). Such decisions should be informed by many factors that cannot be made quantitative, including what the societal goal of protecting a particular group is and what is at stake. Most of us would agree that while both racial bias in the ads users are shown online and racial bias in lending decisions are undesirable, the potential harms to individuals in the latter far exceed those in the former. So in choosing a point on the Pareto frontier for a lending algorithm, we might prefer to err strongly on the side of fairness—for example, insisting that the false rejection rate across different racial groups be very nearly equal, even at the cost of reducing bank profits. We’ll make more mistakes this way—both false rejections of creditworthy applicants and loans granted to parties who will default—but those mistakes will not be disproportionately concentrated in any one racial group. This is the bargain we must accept for strong fairness guarantees. Michael Kearns & Aaron Roth (2019) The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of socially Aware Algorithmic Design, Oxford University Press, 80-84 [the linked page should have their diagram]

A few weeks ago, after I started blogging (here and here) about the ethics of algorithms,* I received a Facebook advertisement-notification from Amazon that Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth (the authors of The Ethical Algorithm) had become Amazon scholars. "What an interesting way," I thought, "to advertise books to me." I clicked on the link and read the corporately sponsored interview with them. Perhaps because my expectations were low , but I was surprised how thoughtful -- "the main thesis of our book, which is that in any particular problem you have to start by thinking carefully about what you want in terms of fairness or privacy or some other social desideratum, and then how you relatively value things like that compared to other things you might care about, such as accuracy" -- they sounded and how relevant to my own project. It was clear theirs was a project about thinking about trade-offs (a favored phrase of theirs) about social values in algorithm design. More important to me, since I had just argued that thinking about the ethics of algorithms seems to replicate the very social problems familiar from thinking about ethics in economics, I wanted to see if my hunch was correct. Two clicks later I ordered the book, and a day later it was delivered.

A few years ago (well back in 2012), I used to joke that as even theoretical economists become more applied, becoming (thanks to increasingly cheap computer power) experts at massaging results out of giant "administrative data-sets,"+ economics ran the risk of being displaced by statisticians and, especially, computer scientists. While then I was largely ignorant of deep learning, it was clear to me that fruitful searches for robust and surprising correlations in data didn't require (as Justin Wolfers then suggested) the restrictive assumptions of economic theory. (Think about it: econometrics and economic theory artificially restrict the search space that can be more fully explored with deep learning machinery.) And indeed deep learning can dispense with economic theory.**

But in reading their interview and their splendid The Ethical Algorithm I realized that back in 2012, I had missed a crucial issue: that algorithmic design is conceived in terms of optimization problems under constraints. Since Lionel Robbins (back in the 1930s) this just is the definition of economics (and it enabled a split between ethics and economics). And once in algorithmic design you are interested in more than predictive accuracy, and so have to deal "with multiple competing criteria," a whole set of mathematically precise diagnostic tools familiar from economics can be imported into algorithmic design (as the passage quoted above suggests). So, I now realize that increasingly computer science and economics will merge (as presumably is happening already in finance-notice the passing mention of "portfolio management" in the block quote above). 

The previous is sufficient for a digression. But I also want to call attention to how moral issues are conceived, and not, in the (ahh) paradigm articulated by Kearns and Roth. And, in particular, I want to call attention to four levels, or sites, where they enter in. So, formally moral issues enter into two sites of algorithmic design: (i) first a choice in setting a goal (such as privacy or fairness) or success criterion for the algorithm. In general, Kearns and Roth view this as a constraint on accuracy that generates a trade-off among accuracy and other possible criteria. Kearns & Roth are very good at explaining that the way one makes precise these moral goals need not be univocal or can be very context sensitive. (So, there are different ways to think about fairness or privacy in algorithmic settings.) 

In turn, these trade-offs can be modeled in terms of pareto frontiers. And this generates the second site: (ii) at the level of a decision about ''which model on the Pareto frontier" to use in practice. Conceptually that's a distinct choice from how to encode 'fairness' into an algorithm, but obviously one can imagine that in practice, in the spirit of experimentation, there are going to be interactions between (i) and (ii) within a general goal-oriented design process. (Recall that an algorithm can be understood, even identified, in terms of the functions and goals it serves--something I have promised to return to.) 

Some time soon, I hope to write some more critical posts about their hope of turning algorithm design into a kind of dream of turning ethics into an optimization problem. (That way of putting it is indebted to Kathleen Creel, a young scholar who has written a gem of a paper on opacity in computational systems.) And one can see how the combination (i) and (ii) lend themselves, despite the situationism in (i), to a form of moral reasoning familiar from (and analogous, if not identical to) utilitarianism. Of course, one can let other values enter into the decision of (ii). 

Now, in their argument (ii) tends to happen in algorithm design/development process within, say, a company. But the choice one makes about which model on the Pareto frontier to inhabit generates (ahh) consequences to wider society. Some of these wider consequences -- laws, regulations, social norms, etc. -- are already internalized as constraints, but some are simply outside the company's mission/attention and not anticipated by the legislature.

The point in the previous paragraph fits their general argument. Because the "core concern" of their book is that "optimizing" on some explicit social goals, predictably and foreseeable, has (even in the relatively short term) unintended and perhaps ex ante unknowable side effects. (188) There is, thus, not just (as Kearns & Roth note) a (iii) a prior moral and political decision to be made whether or the extent to which algorithms are permitted or primarily responsible for decisions in a domain or (as they often describe it) norm enforcement (177). In the book they offer as an example, of the former "automated warfare," (175; 178).  But there is also (IV) a question how society should think about, and perhaps compensate for or mitigate, these entirely unintended and perhaps unknowable side effects that are a foreseeable outcome pattern from embracing algorithmic practices. This matters especially if such outcome patterns (recall) create  asymmetric harm patterns to vulnerable populations.

And, not unlike the economists, the way Kearns & Roth have set up their conceptual scheme (IV) turns out to be delegated to policy and so is not part of the ethical algorithm at all (or the responsibility of the firms that profit from them). To put this in their terms, we (now) know that a system with the very best portfolio management can create unexpected, general externalities. Something similar is now foreseeable in their field. (I am not sure what the equivalent term of true Knightian uncertainty in AI is, but they need it!) So given (IV), it would be good to prevent regressive forms of socialization of risk while privatizing profit.