Digressions&Impressions

On JPP, Wiley, Prestige Production, and Game Theoretic Modeling

[I will phase out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at:  digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

As Leiterreports (and here; here) and Dailynous reported, Wiley (a commercial publisher), got rid of Robert Goodin (a prominent political philosopher) as editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy (JPP), which is (one of) the leading journals in political philosophy in good part thanks to Goodin's long stewardship.  It is no surprise that most of Goodin's fellow editors and board resigned in protest. There has been a lovely closing of ranks.

Because I am going to be rather (sternly) critical of the ranks, I want to stress that Wiley's explanation was ridiculously and scandalously vague. More important, the manner in which they fired Goodin also suggests unwarranted editorial interference that actually risks endangering academic freedom. So, resignation was the right thing to do.

But as the resigning editorial board members' comments started to appear in public, it seems that folk in the know believe that the cause of Wiley's decision is that it wanted to increase the number of published papers rather rapidly up to a tenfold more (see here; here). Immediately one started to read on social media that pursuit of profit is undermining quality. (This show up in the threads I have already linked to above, but also in discussions elsewhere.)

However, a major reason why Wiley is nudging many presses to expand journal space is that universities, libraries, and grant agencies have contracted with them to do so in the context of expanding open access. From the perspective of grant agencies and universities this makes a lot of sense: they are funding research that, if of sufficient quality, needs an outlet. (For those who work in a grant system the absence of slots often becomes visible only after acceptance when one discovers that a journal has no more slots available in a given year!) I am not a fan of these contracts because they basically show what happens when well-connected corporations take advantage of well-intentioned policy shifts: they capture the financial rents. Yet, it doesn't follow that open access or expanding journal space (and so increasing acceptance rates) is a mistake. And in what follows I focus on the latter.

For, as is well known, academic philosophy has incredibly low acceptance rates in its flagship journals (often under 5% acceptance rates).* I couldn't find a recent number for JPP, but it seems to be around 5% and I wouldn't be surprised if it were lower. A quick count suggests, JPP publishes 24 articles a year (give or take). Another leading journal, P&PA "has historically published 12-16 articles per year." And it does not get much better at a journal like CRISPP (about 20). [I make the relationship between slots and acceptance rates more precise below.] The situation is not much better in most areas of professional philosophy (but see below).

I have noted in the past that these acceptance rates only make sense, epistemically, if philosophical activity had enormous inductive risk to society. Nobody believes that as Tim Crane argued in an important essay in TLS (back in 2018; see here for ungated version). Tim helpfully suggests that the real explanation is that "publication in one of these journals may no longer be that sole decisive achievement that will get you that job or grant." That's clearly true, but not wholly right not just because I would add promotion to his list. As Anna Stilz, whose comments were highlighted by Justin Weinberg, notes, publication in these journals is a "signalling device that validates the importance of someone’s work when they go up for tenure and promotion."

However, as should be well known, compared to other disciplines, including the sciences, professional philosophy's acceptance rates is especially low (recall Justin Weinber's discussion). And other disciplines also hire and promote people. Thus, I suggest the real function of such very low acceptance rates is the felt need for prestige production in professional philosophy among the circle entrusted to run leading journals.+ Before I get to the attempt to conflate such 'prestige' or 'importance' with 'quality' that insiders often make, it is worth noting that the needs of such signaling are not evidently co-extensive with the pursuit of truth (leaving wisdom aside) or progress in the field. In fact, they clearly can come apart.

For, there are some (quite predictable and also widely discussed) side-effects of the very low acceptance rates: very fine papers need to be shopped around to many journals before they find a home. This has overburdened the supply of referees, and it has put tremendous pressure on editorial process at many journals. We are a discipline that is familiar with moratoria on submission and backlogs from acceptance to publication at quite a few journals. There is also often a huge delay between submission and verdict. And consequently overall a huge delay between research and actual publication for too many papers. Thus, as organized, prestige generation slows down whatever rate of progress one might hope for in the field. (Yes, I am a skeptic about philosophical progress, so I use 'progress'  here relative to a research frontier or relative to how competent judges in a field would describe it.)** 

The problem with this state of affair is not merely epistemic. It also generates huge additional anxiety for people who are or expect to be on the job market and who are up for promotion. (This is also true in other fields, of course.) With acceptance rates so low, they basically face a (weighted) lottery whether their papers are accepted in a time frame needed. This state of affairs probably reinforces all kinds of structural injustice, again not only relative to other disciplines. The fact that many leading journals have, sometimes for decades on end, been entrusted to a 'safe pair of hands' (a distinguished, often male, philosopher) probably increases the bottlenecks and the risks of such structural injustice, but -- like the fact that we see so little experimentation with journal form (and kinds of review) [something I strongly advocate] -- I leave that aside here.

Now, I am not claiming editors are gaming acceptance rates directly. But they do clearly view number of issue/volume slots or pages as a hard constraint (perhaps regulated by an implicit willingness to let publication not be delayed for more than a year or two after official acceptance). But notice that restricting supply of slots is not the same as selecting on quality. If one really selected on quality alone one would allow the supply of slots/pages to be flexible. So, in what follows (and above) I use 'low acceptance rates' as a proxy for limiting the number of publication slots, or selectivity.

Above I noted that prestige generation trade-offs with progress at the low rates of acceptance in professional philosophy. We don't need to model that. (It gets more complicated as acceptance rates rise significantly because there may well be an inflection point where too much ease of publication undermines progress.) But we need some modeling to help understand that prestige generation or selectivity and quality can come apart significantly.

Luckily for me (and the quality of discussion) I was sent a pre-print of a paper, "Academic journals, incentives, and the quality of peer review: a model," by K. J. S. Zollman, J. Garcıa, and T. Handfield conditionally accepted at Philosophy of Science that has a game-theoretic model exploring possible trade offs between aiming for quality and (you guessed it) for low acceptance rates, in contexts where selectivity is taken to be a measure or proxy for quality. The paper should be publicly available fairly soon. But my discussion won’t turn on technical details and its possible lack of robustness. (I call incentive-alert philosophy of science, ‘public choice philosophy of science.’) In their model quality is an effect of peer review which is costly. And somewhat worrisome they conclude that "journals incentivized by selectivity have strong incentives to maintain worse peer review than those incentivized by their quality." I claim this nicely describes well what happens in professional philosophy. 

Now, they note that aiming for low acceptance or selectivity creates an incentive among editors to discourage "self-selection because a paper which is not submitted cannot be rejected. This results in a strange process whereby journals make peer review worse in an attempt to induce bad papers to submit, but maintain sufficiently good peer review to ensure that a large proportion of those bad papers will probably be rejected." And somebody may well object that referee quality at our leading journals is -- despite the boorish incivility and rudeness -- actually qualitatively great. Let's assume there is a lot of correct testimony to this effect.

One can explain such testimony in light of Zollman/Garcia/Handfield model, if we pay attention to the role of desk rejects (something they ignore.) Let's return to JPP; it is especially famous for two interrelated features: it offered quick (even helpful) desk-rejects (often/always by Goodin) to the vast-majority of initial submissions and then stellar review process on the papers sent out to reviewers which help improve the final publications. (I know important scholars who almost only review for JPP.) And this creates (now quoting Zollman et al) "the appearance of high standards."

One may think that JPP has, thus, hit on a fine equilibrium between balancing peer review costs and quality; and that it actually is a good way to aim for selectivity and quality at once. And people do like to point to the quality of the papers appearing in JPP. (In 2021 its impact factor was according the journal's website 1.881--quite respectable for philosophy standards, but not especially noteworthy. Something fans of selectivity tend to ignore.) Fair enough.

But, of course, desk-reject even by an impartial and distinguished and unrushed editor is a very coarse-grained (and very cheap) peer review system. And the Zollman et al. model explains that this does reduce quality. Obviously, this presupposes that among the desk-rejects are sufficiently many papers that with (costly) peer review would have been as good as the papers that JPP did publish. That's obviously true, but that's because among the papers published in very selective peers of JPP and even slightly less selective journals there is very little difference in overall quality. But the nice thing about working with a game-theoretic model like Zollman et al.'s is you don't have to trust my judgments, it's a predictable effect of the incentives -- artificially limiting supply! -- shaping decisions. Of course, the model may not be robust so here I have used it solely to help think through the issues. But notice that when multiple journals aim to be selective it becomes much costlier to provide adequate peer review because referees get overworked (and perhaps bored by seeing the same papers multiple times).

Now, I am not against prestige in professional philosophy or higher education (although one does wonder if excessive selectivity in admissions to top colleges actually is conducive to society's needs). But from the perspective of the epistemic (and social) needs of the discipline and profession, it is a mistake to have excessive selectivity in philosophy journal publication help produce or coincide with that prestige. It slows down research and, as the model suggests, plausibly hurts quality. (It probably does so by reducing intellectual diversity and increasing risk aversion.) 

So, from my perspective, while the publishers should respect editorial independence and not use heavy-handed practices, nudging our leading journals to accept more papers is the right thing to do even if the motive -- profit -- or honoring flawed open access contracts need not be so. We need such a regime change.

Of course, the increase should be gradual and not tenfold at once. The critics of Wiley have a point! As should be clear most arguments that conflate incredible selectivity and quality in defense of the status quo seem bogus and, I say this politely (these are my friends, after all), seem generally self-serving not the discipline's interest.

Tom Hurka suggested that such selectivity allows one to "keep abreast of important new developments and contributions in the field without having to wade through dozens or hundreds of published pieces." This was very true before the age of scholar.google and philpapers. But less so now. I do think we need more outlets like (as Ingrid Robeyns suggested in context) Philosophy Compass that (especially with the disappearance of review chapters in dissertations) give opinionated surveys of recent developments, but that's orthogonal to the present discussion.

Finally, I don't want to claim that increasing, even doubling slots or reducing/halving selectivity (to say 10-20% acceptance rates) solves the profession's social problems. Undoubtedly, if journal publication in particular venues is seen as key, then we cannot prevent an arms race among job candidates and tenure seekers to publish in such journals. And maybe the gains to the referee process will be ephemeral or temporary--only time and experience will tell. But my argument for the epistemic gains from increasing slots remain.

Academic disciplines do need high quality signals for quality in publication for institutional and epistemic reasons; excessive selectivity is a bad mechanism to produce such a signal and it perniciously confers prestige that reinforces all the bad effects of the very steep disciplinary prestige hierarchies. I hope the scholars who nobly and correctly resigned in protest also work to change this bad status quo.

• This first appeared at: <On JPP, Wiley, Prestige Production, and Modeling Quality: (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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*I am going to ignore the pervasive editorial unaccountability and deviations of best scholarly practices that also show in these journals.

**Of course, the salience of significant work seeps out to well connected insiders, but that just strengthens my argument.

+Some field specific journals within philosophy that actually presuppose considerable technical expertise (in the sciences or ancient languages) have much higher acceptance rates without corresponding loss of prestige. I think this is due to the fact that the prestige is already sufficiently accorded to the expertise (and that editors in these fields can focus more on keeping the discussion going aright).

 

On The End of History and the Displacement of Logic

[I will phase out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at  digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

Because we understand ourselves as forward-looking problem-solvers, and recognize with the sciences that through inevitable progress today's ruling views will seem quaint when the research frontier has shifted (as it will), analytic philosophers have no major investment in curating themselves as a tradition. It has a sponge-like character in assimilating doctrines and techniques from without, and, as seen from a distance, appears to reinvent itself continuously. Because it is such a moving target external critics often seem comically out of date to knowing insiders whereas internal critics often end up being domesticated by subsequent generations (without, alas, getting credit for it). That it is a tradition is the effect of intellectual and sociological path dependencies that express themselves in certain aesthetic (clarity, transparency, rigor, etc.) and epistemic values, and the existence of bits of post Frege-Russell-Whitehead logic as a kind of (often tacit) lingua franca long after developments within logic stopped being a source of major disciplinary excitement or much utility elsewhere. 

The move from a logic requirement to a 'formal methods' in Yale University's graduate curriculum [see here at Dailynous; here at Leitterreports] tracks and, as it will be copied, shapes a much larger set of shifts in professional philosophy. In what follows, I, first, say something about how this constitutes the discipline going forward, and, second, I close -- as the previous paragraph hints -- at what predictably will be lost. The shift to 'formal methods' is often articulated in (broadly consequentialist) terms of what is useful to PhD students in their actual research or employment possibilities. It's anodyne to suggest that this actual work is interdisciplinary (with STEM/Social Sciency disciplines) in character in some sense. 

What it (really) is are three different projects (at a certain level of abstraction): (i) the projects that I have called 'synthetic philosophy' which, while using a particular technical/formal model/theory, brings together insights, knowledge, and arguments from the special sciences with the aim to offer a coherent account of complex systems and connect these to a wider culture or other philosophical projects (or both); (ii) the projects one can subsume under 'conceptual explorative research,' which amounts to developing concepts and techniques (including formal) that either are generative of scientific or social projects or help explain/understand perceived foundational problems in them; (iii) the continuous working out of inherited-as-philosophy puzzles. Presumably all three of these projects will involve collaboration with AI as coupled (human/machine/network) systems. With new base-lines, progress is possible. To be sure, the practice of wisdom does not require academic philosophy.

These three projects are at this level of generality not always at tension with each other, and because the fruits can be felt in disciplines outside of philosophy are not always zero-sum (job-wise). But we should expect near continuous hybridization and splitting and reconfiguration among such projects until a new political hegemon reconfigures higher education in the service of new ideals. (I am hinting at the fickleness of student-demand or donors as instruments of permanently shaping the discipline.) What I am, thus, stipulating -- perhaps rashly -- is that we should not expect hegemonic intellectual schools to re-emerge except temporarily. 

At this point one may object that 'argument' is missing in the previous paragraph. Perhaps, it will remain as constitutive element of philosophy. I am pretty skeptical about this possibility once formal logic is displaced from the intrinsic DNA of our professional formation. Yes, there are statistical arguments, but the skill one acquires is not argumentative, but something distinct. (What that is may be beyond my expertise, but I am inclined to say it is a skill at spotting differences that make a difference.) To be sure, I am a pluralist about the nature of 'argument' so it may be safer to predict that what will count as a paradigmatic argument will shift.

Now, before I mention some of the predictable 'losses' that follow from the shift under way, I want to prevent the misinterpretation that I somehow mourn the end of analytic philosophy (in the sense described by Liam Kofi Bright). I see nothing wrong in the fact that the half dozen departments (and the ones that mimic them) that train the influential PhDs of the next generation do not want to defend the intellectual path that got them there. The end of the unfolding history of analytic philosophy turns out to be a historical whimper. So I am using 'loss' analogously to or in the sense of 'Kuhn-loss'--the systematic forgetting of certain results and insights.

Second, it's predictable, for example, that as logic disappears as a (tacit) lingua franca much of the history of analytic philosophy will seem like strange territory and unmotivated to future students, and will become near unreadable. All kinds of moves that seemed obvious or intelligible -- think of the uses of regimentation, or Tarski's account of truth, bound variables, etc. -- will stop being self-evident. I had a glimpse of this when I read Quine's Word and Object a decade ago with Dutch undergraduates who were simply bewildered. 

In addition, I suspect that lacking such a tacit lingua franca, the three kinds of projects I mentioned will become increasingly at least partially estranged from each other and will, thereby, reflect the underlying social pluralism of our societies. That is compatible with each sharing in structural commonalities (including some that may well turn out to be politically or socially problematic). Unfortunately, that will imply that metrics and measures that are orthogonal to (intrinsic) philosophical worth, if there is such a thing, will be increasingly used for purposes of evaluation and advancement. 

• This first appeared at: <On The End of History and the Displacement of Logic (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

On the latest controversy in the philosophical blogosphere.

[Over time I plan to phase out this blog at typepad. This post was first published at  digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

At Leiterreports (here; here; here) and DailyNous another 'philosophy controversy' is playing out. I am sure most of my readers know that it was triggered by an autobiographical essay in Quillette accusing OUP, widely regarded as the leading press in English language professional philosophy [humble-brag: that's where I publish my stuff], of irregular editorial practices with a monograph and handbook chapter on one of the central topics in the contemporary culture wars. (The author has already found new homes for both works.) As has become clear, the handling editor was Peter M., who is widely regarded as the most prestigious philosophy editor within the field. (No, I work with the other Peter, O.) The author of the autobiographical essay is a senior professor at MIT, Alex Byrne.

Nearly all the people crying 'foul' now are people that happily participate in a system that is opaque, riddled with systematic conflicts of interests, editorial unaccountability, and that usually apparently does not cause them any friction. For, when I read Byrne's essay in Quillette, I was stunned by his surprise that he received 'bizarre' referee reports that do not substantiate their claims and that are uncivil. And that, after a life-time in the profession, he sincerely claims "a reviewer is expected to give reasons for her verdict." The tone of referees has been a widely discussed problem in professional philosophy (including in a thoughtful piece unrelated to culture wars in TLS by Tim Crane not so long ago.)

I was bemused to read in Byrne (and some commentators in the blogosphere) that "publication is practically guaranteed" for a handbook article. Twice in the last decade a handbook chapter drafted by me was rejected: once with the suggestion that one of the co-editors could rewrite it with me (I pulled that article and it became chapter 1 of my monograph), and once because my work was not deemed up to par and the editors decided there was too little time for me to improve it. While that stung, for all I know the editors were right about that latter call because another version of that paper was rejected in another special issue. (I can't hate the essay because it was my successful job-talk paper.) I certainly agree with Byrne that receiving editorial word via Twitter is seriously odd; it's probably still marginally better than the time the Monist canceled a special issue with one of my accepted papers without informing me! (We eventually published the paper in Metaphilosophy, where it was published after a year and half (including a mysterious delay because of an editorial mix-up.)) Yes, I did publish a subsequent paper with the Monist. None of my experiences are newsworthy because they are so common and they do not involve the culture wars (although some of my anonymous referees single out my blogging for special ire).

More than a decade ago, I was galvanized into blogging because of a massive plagiarism scandal involving a senior scholar that I sometimes collaborated with that exposed lackadaisical refereeing and publishing practices in an adjoining field. Recently that very same field was rocked by a second major plagiarism scandal (involving a more junior scholar), and dropped the ball in its response in lots of ways. In fact, shortly after NewAPPS was founded several controversies involving Synthese unfolded (we had a 'Synthese Affair' tab): one triggered by a special issue on intelligent design involving editorial improprieties that even made it to the New York Times and one involving inappropriate pictures on a course website by one of the very editors involved in that scandal. A few years later another special issue by Synthese exploded into the news when its guest editor suggested that logical pluralism and homosexuality are linked. This produced a moratorium on special issues at Synthese.

As an aside [feel free to skip to the next paragraph], after the moratorium ended, I co-edited a special issue for Synthese. My very own contribution to that special issue did not make it through the revamped referee process.  So, I can attest that Synthese has learned its lesson. (It's chapter 13 of my 2017 OUP monograph now.)

I don't mean to leave you with the feeling that professional philosophy has a Synthese problem, or that this journal was/is especially badly managed, or that controversy always only involves then-culture-war issues.  Some of the purportedly best journals in professional philosophy, Nous and PPR went through a phase when they had to put moratoria on submissions for extended periods, in part because they had been edited by the same highly respected editor, who also edited Philosophical Issues. In that very same period, another highly respected long-time editor of Philosophical Studies resigned after 25 years because he was unhappy about how a fellow editor handled a paper critical of a paper (by Byrne) thar he had published in the same journal. (Okay that also involved culture war issues.) After the resignation, stories surfaced that this very editor did not always practice double-anonymous reviewing when it suited him. 

Even when proper refereeing procedures are followed a journal can screw up post publication. By the time the 'transracialism controversy' (which also made the New York Times) had played out, the editorial team, many of the associate editors, and many of the governing board had resigned or been nudged out from the feminist journal Hypatia. (I wrote lots of earnest, widely read blog posts about this case none of them made it into the wikipedia entry.)

The previous paragraphs hint at the proverbial tip of the ice-berg. For much of the post WWII period, analytic philosophy has been characterized by a concerted effort at journal capture and then these journals were subsequently run in a clubby fashion that disproportionally served the interests of people in the network of these journals, which have absurdly low acceptance rates, in a discipline that is characterized by incredibly steep economic and prestige hierarchies. It is, in fact, not uncommon to receive incredibly uncivil referee reports, which, if they do materialize, often are slow in coming. At many journals editors de facto farm out the decision by effectively giving a single, sometimes idiotic referee veto power.

It's not just journals. When I was still very junior a highly respected editor at one of the other leading philosophy presses forced a paper out of the volume I co-edited because one of his/her/their referees was incensed over a footnote in one of the papers (never published) that re-litigated a conference dispute (between the referee and the chapter’s author) decades earlier. The referee revealed himself to me and wisely recused himself, but the editor felt loyalty to the referee and insisted that the chapter be withdrawn. (The author refused to submit a different paper.) I thought it very odd that the editor (with no expertise in the field) took sides in a professional dispute. It didn't stop me from working with this editor again, of course. And when I look into my soul, I recall times that as an editor I was involved in decisions that may have seemed badly motivated to some of the rejected authors.

If we step back from the details of any controversy, such controversy is only to be expected: academic philosophers are humans not sages, who have few reliable measures to navigate a very scarce job environment and informational overload while norms of quality and professional conduct are constantly contestable (and, more slowly, shifting). While there are a lot of truth-guided and earnest people in the profession, whenever we get a glimpse under the hood of how confidential consequential decisions (e.g., publication, admission, appointments) are really made irregularities seem to proliferate. (That is compatible with the vast majority of decisions being defensible on intrinsic and/or procedural grounds.)

Moreover, in each controversy, a very senior figure will gravely and shamelessly intone that other scholars are afraid to speak up because they fear for their careers. It somehow never registers that the structural, cultural, intellectual, and economic conditions that generate such -- let's stipulate -- real fear (sometimes even co-produced by said senior figure) also existed in some shape or another in the lost golden age they cherish, but that then they were on the right side of history in which the people in their network could count on obliging editors, referees, and appointment committees (just ask continental philosophers, or anyone working in other margins of the field).

In our collective behavior we reveal that professional philosophy is, in part, a (modest-in-the-long-term-scheme-of-things) spoils system because during each controversy we go through the same charade sincerely felt debates and sophisticated and laughable arguments (including by world class experts on argument, the working of evidence, inductive risk, deliberative democracy, and ethics, etc.), but we never really risk changing the system and incentives -- our role in a wider political economy of credentialing and knowledge production -- that produce these kinds of controversies (and the many less noticed irregularities that they hint at) so frequently.

The predictability, frequency, and manner of these controversies makes me suspect that such controversies serve a social function. It would be nice if they represented the birth-pangs of a new, healthier intellectual age. But I doubt they are truth-functional because they are characterized by what Mill called ‘vituperative’' speech; I used to think the function was still epistemic: to signal a shift in norm, practice, or attitudes. I increasingly suspect they recur because they drive people without a taste for cruelty and combat away from the discipline (and thereby reduce competition over jobs and prestige, and rid ourselves of sources of dissent) and help entrench the same type of enduring professional hierarchy, even if the tokens at the top move around a bit.

• This first appeared at: <On the controversy in the philosophical blogosphere. (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

 

The Great Endarkenment, Part I

Perhaps eventually an overall Big Picture will emerge—and perhaps not: Hegel thought that the Owl of Minerva would take wing only at dusk (i.e., that we will only achieve understanding in retrospect, after it’s all over), but maybe the Owl’s wings have been broken by hyperspecialization, and it will never take to the air at all. What we can reasonably anticipate in the short term is a patchwork of inference management techniques, along with intellectual devices constructed to support them. One final observation: in the Introduction, I gave a number of reasons for thinking that our response to the Great Endarkenment is something that we can start working on now, but that it would be a mistake at this point to try to produce a magic bullet meant to fix its problems. That turns out to be correct for yet a further reason. Because the approach has to be bottom-up and piecemeal, at present we have to suffice with characterizing the problem and with taking first steps; we couldn’t possibly be in a position to know what the right answers are.
Thus far our institutional manifesto. Analytic philosophy has bequeathed to us a set of highly refined skills. The analytic tradition is visibly at the end of its run. But those skills can now be redirected and put in the service of a new philosophical agenda. In order for this to take place, we will have to reshape our philosophical pedagogy—and, very importantly, the institutions that currently have such a distorting effect on the work of the philosophers who live inside them. However, as many observers have noticed, academia is on the verge of a period of great institutional fluidity, and flux of this kind is an opportunity to introduce new procedures and incentives. We had better take full advantage of it.--Elijah Millgram (2015) The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization, p. 281

There is a kind of relentless contrarian that is very smart, has voracious reading habits, is funny, and ends up in race science and eugenics. You are familiar with the type. Luckily, analytic philosophy also generates different contrarians about its own methods and projects that try to develop more promising (new) paths than these. Contemporary classics in this latter genre are Michael Della Rocca's (2020) The Parmenidean Ascent, Nathan Ballantyne's (2019) Knowing Our Limits, and Elijah Millgram's (2015) The Great Endarkenment all published with Oxford. In the service of a new or start (sometimes presented as a recovery of older wisdom), each engages with analytic philosophy's self-conception(s), its predominate methods (Della Rocca goes after reflective equilibrium, Millgram after semantic analysis, Ballantyne after the supplements the method of counter example), and the garden paths and epicycles we've been following. Feel free to add your own suggestions to this genre.

Millgram and Ballantyne both treat the cognitive division of labor as a challenge to how analytic philosophy is done with Ballantyne opting for extension from what we have and Millgram opting for (partially) starting anew (about which more below). I don't think I have noticed any mutual citations.  Ballantyne, Millgram, and Della Rocca really end up in distinct even opposing places. So, this genre will not be a school.

Millgram's book, which is the one that prompted this post, also belongs to the small category of works that one might call 'Darwinian Aristotelianism,' that is, a form of scientific naturalism that takes teleological causes of a sort rather seriously within a broadly Darwinian approach. Other books in this genre are Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back (which analyzes it in terms of reasons without a reasoner), and David Haig's From Darwin to Derrida (which relies heavily on the type/token distinction in order to treat historical types as final causes). The latter written by an evolutionary theorist.* There is almost no mutual citation in these works (in fact, Millgram himself is rather fond of self-citation despite reading widely). C. Thi Nguyen's (2020) Games: Agency as Art may also be thought to fit this genre, but Millgram is part of his scaffolding, and Nguyen screens off his arguments from philosophical anthropology and so leave it aside here.

I had glanced at Millgram's book when I wrote my piece on synthetic philosophy, but after realizing that his approach to the advanced cognitive division of labor was orthogonal to my own set it aside then.++ But after noticing intriguing citations to it in works by C. Thi Nguyen and Neil Levy, I decided to read it anyway. The Great Endarkenment is a maddening book because the first few chapters and the afterward are highly programmatic and accessible, while the bulk of the essays involve ambitious, revisionary papers in meta-ethics, metaphysics, and (fundementally) moral psychology (or practical agency if that is a term).  The book also has rather deep discussions of David Lewis, Mill, and Bernard Williams. The parts fit together, but only if you look at them in a certain way, and only if you paid attention in all the graduate seminars you attended.

Millgram's main claim in philosophical anthropology is that rather than being a rational animal, mankind is a serial hyperspecializing animal or at least in principle capable of hyperspecializing serially (switching among different specialized niches it partially constructs itself). The very advanced cognitive division of labor we find ourselves in is, thus, not intrinsically at odds with our nature but actually an expression of it (even if Millgram can allow that it is an effect of economic or technological developments, etc.). If you are in a rush you can skip the next two asides (well at least the first).

As an aside, first, lurking in Millgram's program there is, thus, a fundamental critique of the Evolutionary Psychology program that takes our nature as adapted to and relatively fixed by niches back in the distant ancestral past. I don't mean to suggest Evolutionary Psychology is incompatible with Millgram's project, but it's fundamental style of argument in its more prominent popularizations is. 

Second, and this aside is rather important to my own projects, Millgram's philosophical anthropology is part of the account  of human nature that liberals have been searching for. And, in fact, as the quoted passages reveal, Millgram's sensibility is liberal in more ways, including his cautious preference for "bottom-up and piecemeal" efforts to tackle the challenge of the Great Endarkenment.+

Be that as it may, the cognitive division of labor and hyperspecialization is also a source of trouble. Specialists in different fields are increasingly unable to understand and thus evaluate the quality of each other's work including within disciplines. As Millgram notes this problem has become endemic within the institution most qualified to do so -- the university -- and as hyper-specialized technologies and expertise spread through the economy and society. This is also why society's certified generalists -- journalists, civil servants, and legal professionals -- so often look completely out of their depth when they have to tackle your expertise under time pressure.** It's his diagnosis of this state of affairs that has attracted, I think, most scholarly notice (but that may be a selection effect on my part by my engagement with Levy's Bad Beliefs and Nguyen's Games). Crucially, hyperspecialiation also involves the development of languages and epistemic practices that are often mutually unintelligible and perhaps even metaphysically incompatible seeming. 

As an aside that is really an important extension of Millgram's argument: because the book was written just before the great breakthroughs in machine learning were becoming known and felt, the most obvious version of the challenge (even danger) he is pointing to is not really discussed in the book: increasingly we lack access to the inner workings of the machines we rely on (at least in real time), and so there is a non-trivial sense in which if he is right the challenge posed by Great Endarkenment is accelerating. (See here for an framework developed with Federica Russo and Jean Wagemans to analyze and handle that problem.) 

That is, if Millgram is right MacAskill and his friends who worry about the dangers of AGI taking things over for rule and perhaps our destruction by the machine(s) have it backwards. The odds are more likely that our society will implode and disperse -- like the tower of Babel that frames Millgram's analysis -- by itself. And that if it survives mutual coordination by AGIs will be just as hampered by the Great Endarkenment, perhaps even more so due to their path dependencies, as ours is.

I wanted to explore the significance of this to professional philosophy (and also hint more at the riches of the book), but the post is long enough and I could stop here. So, I will return to that in the future. Let me close with an observation. As Millgram notes, in the sciences mutual unintelligibility is common. And the way it is often handled is really two-fold: first, as Peter Galison has argued, and Millgram notes, the disciplines develop local pidgins in what Galison calls their 'trading zones.' This births the possibility of mutually partially overlapping areas of expertise in (as Michael Polanyi noted) the republic of science. Millgram is alert to this for he treats a lot of the areas that have been subject of recent efforts at semantic analysis by philosophers (knowledge, counterfactuals, normativity) as (to simplify) really tracking and trailing the alethic certification of past pidgins. Part of Millgram's own project is to diagnose the function of such certification, but also help design new cognitive machinery to facilitate mutual intelligibility. That's exciting! This I hope to explore in the future. 

Second, as I have emphasized in my work on synthetic philosophy, there are reasonably general theories and topic neutralish (mathematical and experimental) techniques that transcend disciplines (Bayesianism, game theory, darwinism, actor-network, etc.). On the latter (the techniques) these often necessetate local pidgins or, when possible, textbook treatments. On the former, while these general theories are always applied differently locally, they are also conduits for mutual intelligibility. (Millgram ignores this in part.) As Millgram notes, philosophers can make themselves useful here by getting MAs in other disciplines and so facilitate mutual communication as they already do. That is to say, and this is a criticism, while there is a simultaneous advancement in the cognitive division of labor that deepens mutual barriers to intelligibility, some of this advance generates possibilities of arbitrage (I owe the insight to Liam Kofi Bright) that also accrue to specialists that help transcend local mutual intelligibility.** So, what he takes to be a call to arms is already under way. So, let's grant we're on a precipice, but the path out is already marked. 

 

 

When Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand became Coupled.

"That to these causes, thus necessarily proceeding from this great principle, we are to ascribe in particular both the opulence and prosperity of our own nation, and the necessary diffusion of the arts, manners, language, and race, with which they are connected, and in which they are embodied, over the remotest regions of the globe. That thus, although men in marrying seek only their own good, they nevertheless adopt that course which is most to the advantage of society; and here too , as in many other instances, are led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of their intention. That, therefore, as the revenue and power of a nation can only increase as its population increases, and as the increase of population tends to give a beginning to every useful art, and to carry it to the highest perfection, legislators act a very absurd and culpable part in attempting, in any instance to restrain it , or to check what is undoubtedly the natural, and apparently the most beneficial course of events."--John Rae (1834) Statement of Some New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy,

It's well known, at least since 1971, to students of Adam Smith that Adam Smith uses the phrase, 'invisible hand' three times in his oeuvre.+ In print Smith first used it in 1759 in Part IV, Chapter 1 The Theory of Moral Sentiments (hereafter TMS; see here). He then used it in 1776 in Book IV of An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations (hereafter WN; see here). And the third time it appeared in print was in 1795, in his (posthumously published) Essays on Philosophical Subjects (hereafter EPS), in his essay on the "History of Astronomy" (see here). Almost certainly the latter essay was, at least partially, composed first.

Each of Smith's three uses occur in rhetorically complex passages that have different explanatory purposes and different implied targets. In WN Smith is quite explicit that he is criticizing what he calls the 'mercantile system.' But the point and target of the passage in TMS is disputed. Finally, in EPS the 'invisible hand' is explicitly attributed to 'Jupiter,' but this is done by Smith and explicitly not by the heathen polytheists that he is describing! Unsurprisingly, this state of affairs has not generated consensus among scholars about what Smith means by 'invisible hand' when he uses it. (The Wikipedia entry gives a tasting of the diversity of approaches to it.) Somewhat annoyingly, when we look at eighteenth century uses of 'invisible hand' that would have been familiar to Smith we find no uniform use that can help settle this case.

As an aside, in chapter 10 of my book, I have offered a detailed analysis of Smith's three uses, and much to my own surprise I offer a unified interpretation of all three, which (on my view) describes a very particular kind of (social) mechanism: any given iteration of such a mechanism is a relatively short-term process in which the agent produces unintended and to him/her unknown consequences. Crucially, the consequences are, in principle, knowable to the right kind of observer at the time (either because of theory or by accumulated common sense). And I contrast such invisible hand mechanisms to the much more dominant model of large-scale unintended consequences that Smith deploys much more frequently throughout his work (and that Mandeville and Ferguson also made famous). For a careful and generous summary of my views, I happily refer you to one of the doyens of Adam Smith scholarship, Jeffrey Young who wrote a sympathetic review of these issues here. But despite Young's endorsement of my position, I don't expect other scholars to fall into line.*

In cases like this, it can be highly instructive to look at the reception of an author. I expect Glory M. Liu excellent and illuminating Adam Smith's America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism to provoke more reception studies of Smith.

When we do so for the invisible hand we are immediately struck by  a quite stunning fact. To the best of my knowledge, none of Smith's early readers ever mention the invisible hand in print! It seems to have inspired no commentary or reflection. I suspect this is what led the distinguished scholar, Emma Rothschild, to treat the 'invisible hand' in deflationary manner as a kind of ironic joke by Smith originally in a famous (1994) article. (You could ask her if you doubt this!) For, she writes, "The evidence for this view is indirect. Smith makes no other mention of the invisible hand; it is interesting that commentators on his work, too, mentioned it only infrequently prior to the 20th century." (319)

Now, when Rothschild wrote that sentence, the internet was in its infancy. And that claim was highly plausible, and if you do a Ngram search, you'll see that only after 1917 does the phrase 'invisible hand' become influential.  But when we start digging into the databases, we discover it's not quite right. Between 1810-184o there is definite interest in an 'invisible hand' (see here). Part of that bump is the publication, and re-publication of Invisible Hand: A Tale by W. Clayton. I have found little about this book or author anyway. (It's charming by the way.) But most of that bump reflects the republication (with commentaries) of Smith's works and the use of 'invisible hand' in theological works of some kind or another.

However, the coupling of "Adam Smith" with the invisible hand only starts to pick up in the 1840s. We see this first in French from 1845 onward where, the economist Eugène Daire (1798-1847) does this casually in a book review of a book by Ferdinand Duran (Des tendances pacifiques de la société européenne et du rôle des armées dans l'avenir). In Daire, the invisible hand is a mechanism that, in the presence of the possibility of profit, connects the interests of individuals with that of society. This use fits the larger widespread, 19th century liberal view of the (potential) harmony of interests. (In my book I  deny this is Smith's own view; short version, the interests of merchants and those of workers & landholders are opposed.) I return to this below.

In 1848 a work attributed to the author of Theodore appeared. Theodore was a young adult crusader story written by Barbara Hofland, who died in 1844. The 1848 work is The Island of Liberty; Or Equality and Community and is said to be written during the Monmouthshire Riots of 1839-1840. I think this refers  to what is known as the Newport Rising. The Island of Liberty is a substantial work (and I am somewhat sad I have found no literature on it), and fits no genre easily: it is a mixture of utopian novel, adventure story, and didactism. It advocates, inter alia, colonization for Malthusian reasons, and it has a somewhat feminist tendency. Smith's TMS supplies the epigraphs of the first two chapter headings, and the invisible hand passage is found at the start of the first.  (And, while this is quite tentative, it seems Hofland, if it is really her, that it signals with Smith that the rich trample on the poor and that -- although I doubt Smith really endorses this -- providence will guide us.)

That same year, in 1848, the American, Calvin Cotton, a professor of "public economy" at Trinity College,  in a substantial treatise, The Public Economy of the United States, quotes the WN's invisible hand passage while using Smith's principles to argue for protectionism! To be sure, he makes clear that "Smith and his followers" all claim that protectionism is a tax (and so to be rejected).  But the invisible hand plays no role in Cotton's argument. (For wider context of Smith's role in the debate over protectionism you should read Liu's book!) But after 1850, it becomes not uncommon to couple Adam Smith and the invisible hand (go through here) in an economic context, although in Germany this occurs only after 1870. And then the invisible hand often operates in the marketplace or through markets. I don't mean to suggest there is a single late 19th century interpretation of the invisible hand. On the contrary, if you trace out all the uses you see a proliferation of meanings and interpretations!

In reflecting on all these data points, I was struck by two thoughts. First, for close to a century Smith was treated and read (quite widely) without an immediate association with the invisible hand. That's a very different Smith we have now! Second, I was puzzled by the casualness of Daire's use. For he clearly seems to assume that his audience (he is writing in a political economy journal) is familiar with his move. Now, this is not strange, of course. For example, in 1843, WN was republished in a very useful edition in French because it collected the notes of many important commentators on Smith. It would be natural for Daire to assume that Smith's ideas were familiar to his audience. Even so, the natural seeming coupling in Daire bugged me.

Now, in 1834, John Rae published a quite remarkable book,  Statement of Some New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy. This John Rae (who is writing in Canada!) is not the same (as I belatedly realized) as the biographer of Smith (Life of Adam Smith (1895)). Now Rae's Statement is quite critical of Adam Smith. To the best of my knowledge this book was not very well known in the 19th century, but was rediscovered by the end of the nineteenth and then had quite an important role to play in both the social theory of economics (in what sociology) and what is now known as endogenous growth theory. (So, for example, I had hoped to find Cotton cite Rae!)

But it was not wholly unknown because in a draft letter by J.S. Mill assures Rae that " I have made more use of your treatise than you appear to have been informed of, having quoted largely from it, especially from your discussion of the circumstances which influence the " effective desire of accumulation ", a point which you appear to me to have treated better than it had ever been treated before." (1854)

Now, it's absolutely central to Rae's interpretation of Smith that in Smith there is an "exact identity of ends which nations and individuals pursue." This axiom (my term) gives Smith's system its coherence and unity, according to Rae. And Rae had introduced this claim by, rather briefly, quoting Smith's WN passage with the invisible hand. But after articulating this axiom which Rae rejects and attributes to Smith and his followers, Rae writes, "It might, perhaps, in support of such a view of the subject, be said," and then follow a whole number of quotations. Some of these are familiar passages (from Virgil), but others I have been unable to identify a source.

In particular, the passage quoted at the top of this post, which Rae puts in quote marks (because, recall, "in support of such a view [as Smith's] of the subject, be said,") seems to be Rae's own invention! (I welcome refutations of this claim, even if it would detract from my story.) Now, what's neat about the passage is that it is a creative synthesis of the TMS and WN passages of the invisible hand, and these, in turn, synthesized with Malthus (who is, in many respects, an insightful Smithian--as Ross Emmett noted back in 2020). And while I think it is a false interpretation of Smith, what Rae is right about, and this is prescient, this the dominant account of nineteenth century liberalism (especially in the context of population ethics and political economy) and this, in turn, often gets backwardly projected onto Smith in the nineteenth century and by later scholars of the nineteenth century!**  Now, I wouldn't bet that Daire had read Rae (such providence probably does not exist), but I think Rae's comments helps explain why a decade later these kind of ideas are merged together without it worth remarking on.

 

 

On What we Owe the Future, Part 3

To illustrate the claims in this book, I rely on three primary metaphors throughout....The second is of history as molten glass. At present, society is still malleable and can be blown into many shapes. But at some point, the glass might cool, set, and become much harder to change. The resulting shape could be beautiful or deformed, or the glass could shatter altogether, depending on what happens while the glass is still hot. William MacAskill (2022) What We Owe The Future, p. 6

This is the third post on MacAskill's book. (The first one is here which also lists some qualities about the book that I admire; the second one is here.)

A key strain of MacAskill's argument rests on three contentious claims: (i) that currently society is relatively plastic; (ii) that the future values of society can be shaped; (iii) that in history there is a  dynamic of “early plasticity, later rigidity” (p. 43). Such rigidity is also called "lock-in" by MacAskill, and he is especially interested in (iv) "value lock-in."

Before I get to criticizing these three claims, it's worth stating that in a previous post I noted that from (ii) MacAskill and the social movement he is creating (pp. 243-246) have (v) claimed for themselves the authority to act as humanity's legislators without receiving authority or consent to do so. It's quite odd that MacAskill doesn't reflect on the dangers in the vicinity here because most of the examples MacAskill offers of relatively long-lasting 'value lock-in' are, by his lights, the effects of "conquest." (p.92) Not to put too fine a point on it, but in general the project of 'value lock-in' is team evil (as MacAskill notes, this is the project of imperialists, colonialists, religious monopolists, etc.) You would hope that one of the lessons one takes from this fact is that it's not a good idea to be on team lock-in. I return to this in the future.

On (i) I don't think MacAskill ever offers a metric of social plasticity or even really provides thorough evidence that our age is genuinely molten. (And, in fact, I have noted that at times he undermines this claim by suggesting that our age is characterized by "homogeneity" (p.96) and the effects of "modern secular culture" or a "single global culture." (158)) But it's worth looking at how MacAskill articulates the first claim:

In China, the Hundred Schools of Thought was a period of plasticity. Like still-molten glass, during this time the philosophical culture of China could be blown into one of many shapes. By the time of the Song dynasty, the culture was more rigid; the glass had cooled and set. It was still possible for ideological change to occur, but it was much more difficult than before.
We are now living through the global equivalent of the Hundred Schools of Thought. Different moral worldviews are competing, and no single worldview has yet won out; it’s possible to alter and influence which ideas have prominence. But technological advances could cause this long period of diversity and change to come to an end.--(p. 79)

Not unlike MacAskill, I am fascinated by the period of the Hundred Schools of Thought. Each year I spent some time on it with my undergrads. But I never fail to point out that this era is also known as the 'Warring States period.' (In fact, I observe, as a puzzle, that the intellectual fertility and relentless war within a  relatively fractured political system is something it shares with the Italian Renaissance of Machiavelli and, perhaps, Kautilya's age in India.) The absence of empire is beneficial to value pluralism. 

I don't mean to suggest that value pluralism is a necessary effect of multi-polar world. Presumably there are other social and institutional sources. Max Weber thought such pluralism was the effect of the advanced division of labor, Plato and Al-Farabi seem to have thought it was the effect of the diversity of human passions that flourish in democratic societies alongside freedom of speech and lack of educational uniformity. That's to say, one may obtain value pluralism without context of permanent war.

So, if one thinks cultural plasticity is worth having -- or at least if one thinks rigidity is something threatening -- then one should be thinking about the practices and institutions that prevent empire and that promote enduring cultural diversity. MacAskill is rather fond of thinking about society in terms of cultural evolution. But, as I have repeatedly noted, he is thoroughly uninterested in thinking of the role of institutions -- as selection mechanisms or ecological structures-- in generating and sustaining such pluralism.* And the effect of this is to flatten (to use his lingo) the cultural fitness space. For MacAskill treats technology as a determining cause of value lock-in.

Now, I don't want to suggest technology never shapes values, but it is peculiar that MacAskill doesn't notice that technology can be neutral among competing values and that technology is often shaped by values. I call it peculiar because (a) the hot topic in AI ethics today is that even neutral algorithms often reflect and amplify existing structural (that is, institutional) injustice(s); and (b) lots of military technology gets used for competing  ends. We can observe this peculiarity in the very next paragraph:

When thinking about lock-in, the key technology is artificial intelligence. Writing gave ideas the power to influence society for thousands of years; artificial intelligence could give them influence that lasts millions. I’ll discuss when this might occur later; for now let’s focus on why advanced artificial intelligence would be of such great longterm importance.--(p.79)

Let's stipulate that it's true that "writing gave ideas the power to influence society for thousands of years" but writing itself does not limit the number of ideas that can be expressed. From the perspective of cultural evolution, the invention of writing creates an explosion of cultural variation. And while, surely, some technologies may be homogenizing along some dimensions (including as instruments of empire), it is simply not intrinsic to technology to be value-homogenizing. (As an aside, it is notable that in his work MacAskill draws on economists who think about productivity, but that he has ignored the rich area of philosophy of technology and what we might call STS studies. MacAskill is engaged in (what Nathan Ballantyne calls) epistemic trespassing without realizing, it seems, which fields he has ignored.) 

In fairness, MacAskill cites this paper (here). But a key premisse in the argument is this: "If a large majority of the world’s economic and military powers agreed to set-up such an institution, and bestowed it with the power to defend itself against external threats, that institution could pursue its agenda for at least millions of years (and perhaps for trillions)." The dangerousness of AGI would be a possible effect of (near) world peace. So, even if one grants that the probability of AGI in the next fifty years is "no lower than  10%," (p. 91) the whole argument for (iv) relies on the utopian thought that in the context of the stress of rising climate change the great powers of humanity opt for world peace!

In fact,  MacAskill's argument for (ii/iii) rests on the idea that stagnation is inevitable because scientific and technological innovation become harder and harder (pp. 150-151) and as countries grow wealthier fertility drops (and there is an implied absolute plateau to population on Earth (pp. 152-155). MacAskill is clearly influenced by Tyler Cowen's work (147-148), but he cites as authority research by Stanford University's Chad Jones on "longer timescales." (p. 150) And since I try to keep up in philosophy of economics, I thought it useful to take a look at some of Jones' papers (which is, as MacAskill himself notes in an endnote, a dressed up Solow-Swan growth model--these leave considerable known uncertainty in long range forecasting).+

Jones assumes that "a larger population means more researchers which in turn leads to more new ideas and to higher living standards." Something MacAskill also embraces (p. 152).Here's a passage from a conclusion of one of the key papers MacAskill cites:

Of course, the results in this paper are not a forecast—the paper is designed to suggest that a possibility we have until now not considered carefully deserves more attention. There are ways in which this model could fail to predict the future even though the forces it highlights are operative. Automation and artificial intelligence could enhance our ability to produce ideas sufficiently that growth in living standards continues even with a declining population, for example. Or new discoveries could eventually reduce the mortality rate to zero, allowing the population to grow despite low fertility. Or evolutionary forces could eventually favor groups with high fertility rates (Galor and Moav 2002). Nevertheless, the emergence of negative population growth in many countries and the possible consequences for the future of economic growth make this a topic worthy of further exploration.--"The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population" American Economic Review, November 2020

The reason I quote this passage is not to refute MacAskill although MacAskill is not sufficiently attentive to the implied difference between a model-driven scenario and a forecast. But because it helps explain why MacAskill is so focused on artificial intelligence. (Some critics of longtermism suggest that it is the effect of the values of Sillicon Valley and its donors on the EA movement, but while one cannot rule it out, I like to think it's  model driven.) At one point MacAskill writes:

Think of the innovation happening today in a single, small country—say, Switzerland. If the world’s only new technologies were whatever came out of Switzerland, we would be moving at a glacial pace. But in a future with a shrinking population—and with progress being even harder than it is today because we will have picked more of the low-hanging fruit—the entire world will be in the position of Switzerland. Even if we have great scientific institutions and a large proportion of the population works in research, we simply won’t be able to drive much progress. (p. 155)

Neither Jones nor MacAskill really considers the benefits of educating a large part of the world's population at, say, Switzerland's levels. (Go look up, say, its patents or education spending per capita.) Presumably because in the Solow-Swan model such benefits are a one-off and don't generate a permanent productivity spiral. But it seems to have the perverse effect on MacAskill's program/longtermism that the economic development of poor countries (and, say, opening markets to their products) does not figure in What we Owe the Future as an especially important end worth pursuing.  As an aside, in another paper (also cited by MacAskill) Jones and his co-authors notes the significance of the fact that ideas are non-rivalrous. Their model implies that 'educating a large part of the world's population at, say, Switzerland's levels' would be worth doing.

I quote Jones for two other reasons. First, Solow-Swan does not imply that technology driven future productivity or intensive growth is impossible. It's important to MacAskill's general argument that something like "past [scientific/technological] progress makes future progress harder," (151) is true (this is Cowen's influence on MacAskill). And the main empirical argument for it is the record of declining productivity growth of the last half century or so (which gets accentuated by drop in fertility in countries with good education systems). We are at risk of reaching what in the eighteenth century was called a 'stationary state.' But even if we were to really understand what caused the scientific and industrial revolution to happen, there is really no reason to think a future leap in productivity would necessarily have to follow the same underlying causal structure.

As a non-trivial aside, for MacAskill a civilizationa plateau is (if we don't destroy ourselves) inevitable due to physical constraints of the universe. He thinks the number of atoms puts an absolute upper limit on growth (p. 27). But I really don't understand the argument for why increasing value-added per atom is impossible on his view. Again, it is noticeable that institutions are irrelevant to MacAskill's argument.

In a future post, I will explore MacAskill's "ideal" that shapes his argument for (ii). Here I just want to close with the observation that it is odd to see a model, Solow-Swann, which (let's stipulate) is "foundational for all of modern growth theory" (note 18, p. 304) has known problems as a forecasting device because there is considerably room for uncertainty,+ be presented as a reliable guide to very longterm developments. This is a scientific field that is still in its infancy. And the known uncertainty in the error margins of the models don't get eliminated over the very long term, but the sensitivity to even minor modeling mistakes get worse. To sum up, any collective decision for the long term future made on the prospect of world peace and this model is an expression of a lovely faith.

 

On Analytic and Continental Clarity (Collingwood and McGuiggan.)

We have, then, two sorts of project, the scientific and the poetic, and two corresponding norms of clarity. Scientists, whose concepts are additions to our experience or (in other words) discrete from other concepts, properly use strictly defined, technical terms to refer to these wholly new and discrete things. This use of language is appropriate to its subject matter and so is content-directedly clear. Poets, whose concepts expand or develop our experience, appropriately do not use technical terms, which would inhibit clarity for them. What is content-directedly clear in poetry is language that is stretched and grown.

What has this all got to do with philosophy? Well, Analytic philosophers often think that philosophy is engaged in the same sort of project as science. Not (normally) exactly the same project, but a project similar enough to it that similar methodologies, and so similar norms of communication, should obtain. In particular, Analytic philosophers characteristically make a virtue of using technical terms(,) as scientists do. Philosophy that fails to adhere to the norms of communication appropriate to this project—such as Continental philosophy or the more theoretical branches of literary criticism, which often ignore or even flout them—is then branded unclear, with the accusation that this is needless naturally consequent. What I have argued in this paper so far should give us reason to think that this dismissal is too quick, and so let us now take seriously Collingwood’s suggestion that “the philosopher must go to school with the poets” (EPM, 214).---James Camien McGuiggan (2022) Scientific, Poetic, and Philosophical Clarity Metaphilosophy 53:5.

McGuiggan tagged me in a twitter thread (here) introducing the paper I have quoted above. I noticed with pleasure and vanity that some of my blog posts are cited rather prominently in the paper, although (mysteriously to me) not the posts I have written on clarity in analytic philosophy (recall here on Carnap and Quine; here on Ernest Nagel). Despite this modest disappointment, I read the paper, and I am very glad I did so. It's a lovely work with lots of clever illustrations from poetry, has useful distinctions, and you get a nice introduction to Collingwood's ideas from an independently minded, but true believer. (And I found the argument an invitation go back and re-read some Collingwood in the future.)

A key distinction is the one between content-directed clarity and audience-directed clarity. Content-directed clarity involves (presentational) form that is appropriate to the content. Whereas audience-directed clarity involves the aptness/fit of the norms of communication that we adopt given our intended audience. This distinction is part of a wider taxonomy (including presentational clarity, clarity of thought, etc.), so don't complain (yet) it's not exhaustive.

Now, content directed clarity and audience directed clarity need not be opposed to or even fully independent of each other. After all, what counts as the proper presentational form apt for particular content, may well be governed, in part, by the norms our communication falls under given our intended audience. (This seems fully compatible with what McGuiggan writes, but if you think it's silly attribute the view to me.) We may, for example, think rightly that a sonnet would be best for a certain content, but decide that a carefully constructed note in Analysis would be more likely to reach most professional philosophers, and advance our careers. On a less dramatic scale such trade-offs are routine in our professional lives (due to word-count restrictions, citational practices, refereeing practices, etc.), and we make them -- sometimes not without anguish -- almost constantly in our publication practices as well as our lectures/colloquia.

If I understand McGuiggan correctly (see the second paragraph quoted above), on his view analytic philosophers criticize or disparage continental philosophy for violating the norms of audience directed clarity that analytic philosophers adhere to. And the reason analytic philosophers do so is that we (pretend my defense of synthetic philosophy is just a thought experiment) falsely assume that continental philosophers are engaged in the same underlying project, and so miss that continental philosophers are shaped by different content-directed standards. Let's call this McGuiggan's Diagnosis or if you prefer, 'McGuiggan's Diagnosis.'

What's neat about McGuiggan's Diagnosis -- and this also lends it some evidence -- is that it helps explain why some analytic philosophers think it's an okay project to translate continental works into the vernacular of analytic philosophy (say for students and for professional advancement) without thinking something really important is lost. This is a thriving genre, so pick your favorite example. (I am not being too sarcastic here because arguably my present Foucault project falls under this genre.)

As an aside, what's odd about McGuiggan's Diagnosis is that if it's true even the most fair-minded least polemical analytic philosophers somehow never grasp what continental philosophy is up to, or, more insidiously, keep quiet about it when we do and our peers attack it unfairly. So, I was a bit sad he did not engage with (say) Kolodny's work on Foucault's cryptonormativity or some of the analytics that turn Heidegger into a fellow pragmatist (and possibly share his theological aims). 

Be that as it may, since it's not uncommon to insist that continental philosophy is poetry adjacent and analytic science adjacent, I won't complain about this move. (If only because it strengthens my prediction back in 2014 (recall) that Wittgenstein will end up treated as a continental.) One problem with McGuiggan's diagnosis is that he essentializes analytic and continental philosophy. (This is notoriously a dubious move.) In particular, he claims that continental philosophy tries to expand our (possible) experience whereas analytic philosophy tries to account for additions to our experiences. Let me stipulate, for the sake of argument, that this indeed fits, say, Heidegger (an example he repeatedly uses) and your favorite philosopher of logic quite well.

So, I have two reservations (that spring from this essentialization). First, some continental philosophers and some analytic philosophers are manifestly engaged in overlapping enterprises. This is most evident in the revival of post-Kantian metaphysics among continentals and among analytics. When I disagree, say, with Meillassoux's 'speculative realism' or the object oriented ontology of Graham, the disagreements are not primarily about the worth/aims or the presentation of the project(s), it's about the contents of the position. When I disagree with, say, Badiou, I do disagree with the Marxist or revolutionary aims of the project, but I have trouble taking it seriously because of the weight and uses he places on set theory.

To be sure, there are circumstances where there is no overlap in the first order aims. Recently, using Deleuzian tools, Jeff Bell has convinced me that in the 1970s Foucault is trying to state the features that are presupposed such that a stable (what we analytics call) semantics and pragmatics (in Carnap's sense) are or appears to be possible. I don't think analytic philosophers are, at present, really engaged in that project despite our search for grounds or for the conditions of a final language, even if the metaphysical position Foucault arrives at (a pragmatism about pragmatics welded to a kind of realist semantics) is not far removed from ones I am familiar with (say, as Jeff suggests, Putnam at some time.)* That's to say we could get involved in this project. I mention this example because if it is right about Foucault it looks to me as if Foucault's special vocabulary then is primarily due to the need to account for additions to our 'experience.' (I use scare quotes there because we can't really experience directly the conditions that make semantics or even pragmatics possible; perhaps in the latter we can sense their absence when a practice breaks down or has moved on.) I don't mean to deny that, perhaps, Foucault is also interested in creating new additions -- to be a philosophical legislator --, but that's beside the point here.

Second, it's not entirely clear to me that that the contrast between accounting for an addition to experience and for expanding or developing our experience is really all that robust where it matters. By this I don't just mean that there are philosophical poets (Lucretius paradigmatically), but rather that it seems to echo a kind of context of discovery vs context of justification distinction. And the problem with that distinction, for present purposes, is that discovery is never wholly discrete from previously justified or to be justified work. That is, within science (and analytic philosophy) there are going to be moments where new terms are introduced and defined in order to make new experience possible, or to begin to classify/measure (etc.) it (with an eye toward new justification).

For related reasons, I also don't think McGuiggan's approach does full justice to the aims of conceptual engineering or ameliorative analysis in ethics and political philosophy. When 'epistemic injustice' gets complemented by 'epistemic violence' and 'epistemic pollution' these new concepts are introduced to make new diagnoses and new forms of intelligibility of one's experiences possible, but also with an aim to change the conditions that make these experiences possible (even though the term was not around). The point here is not to challenge the coherence of McGuiggan's distinctions, but to suggest that the diagnosis seems to presuppose conditions that are not always present.

 

Machery on Science and Philosophy

How can we be responsible and savvy consumers of science, particularly when it gives us morally and politically pleasing narratives? Philosophers’ fascination with the psychology of attitudes is an object lesson.

Some of the most exciting philosophy in the 21^st century has been done with an eye towards philosophically significant developments in science. Social psychology has been a reliable source of insights: consider only how much ink has been spilled on situationism and virtue ethics or on Greene’s dual-process model of moral judgment and deontology.

...

Hindsight is of course 20/20, and it would be ill-advised to blame philosophers (including my former self) for taking seriously science in the making. On the other hand, philosophers failed to even listen and a fortiori to give a fair hearing to the dissenting voices challenging the relentless hype by implicit-attitudes cheerleaders. The lesson is not limited to implicit attitudes: the neuroscience of meditation, the neuroscience of oxytocin, the so-called love molecule, the experimental research on epigenetics in humans, and the research on gene x environment interaction in human genetics also come to mind.

Philosophers, including myself, have for decades been too credulous about science, being misled by scientists’ marketing and ignoring the unavoidable uncertainties that affect the scientific process: the frontier of science is replete with unreplicable results, it is affected by hype and exaggeration (COVID researchers, I am looking at you!), and its course is shaped by deeply rooted cognitive and motivational biases. In fact, we should be particularly mindful of the uncertainty of science when it appears to provide a simple explanation for, and promises a simple solution to, the moral, social, and political ills that we find repugnant such as the underrepresentation of women in philosophy and elsewhere and enduring racial inequalities in the broader society.--Edouard Machery "Implicit Attitudes, Science, and Philosophy" @Daily Nous

A few years ago (2014), Merel Lefevere and I coined “The-Everybody-Did-It” (TEDI) Syndrome, to discuss symptoms of collective negligence in science and other epistemic communities. We were, of course, not the first to identify group-think nor the first to note that an appeal to TEDI was used by participating individuals as kind of blanket get out of jail card (viz. Machery's claim it would be "ill-advised to blame philosophers"). I mention the date on that paper because it was published before the first study of the The Reproducibility Project was published. In our paper, we draw, en passant, on (1993) Feigenbaum and Levy to alert the reader that different scientific fields have very diverging practices when it comes to replicating results or sharing data and that there are well-known incentives and other formal and informal barriers against publishing replications or dis-conformations.* Our main epistemic point was that one cannot assume that scientific fields are perfectly functioning communicative communities (with a perfect market in ideas). 

This point was not a sudden revelation for me. In my very first (2005) article in the philosophy of economics a decade earlier, I drew on work by Deirdre McCloskey, who had been warning against the cult of statistical significance for a long time, to point out that often, in the absence of robust background theory, the use of statistical significance created the illusion of scientific rigor. I also argued that much of social science, including elite reaches of economics, had a confirmatory bias rather than (with a nod to Popper) what I called a 'stress-testing' attitude.**

In his piece, Machery simultaneously presents himself (and other philosophers) as victims ("misled by scientists’ marketing"), as naïve ("too credulous"), and wishful thinking ("motivational bias") amongst other ills. While I applaud his willingness to take stock and derive lessons from the past, I would argue, by contrast, that Machery and his peers could have done better if he hadn't viewed himself as a "consumer" of science, but as a responsible [since we're in the realm of economic metaphors] co-producer of knowledge. My interest is not to score-keep, but to ensure that we learn the right lessons (some of which Machery also advocates). What do I have in mind?

The consumer model posits a deferential asymmetry between the expert specialist scientist and the philosopher. That's not altogether surprising because the expert is (ahh) an expert whereas the philosopher is not. And so lurking in Machery's narrative is a strict cognitive division of labor in which all philosophers need to do -- when they want to use some bit of social science for their own end -- is sample (say) abstracts and conclusions and then choose the right one that will satisfy their needs. The consumer on this (tacit) model is not or barely responsible for the quality control of the science she selects.

And that's because in the consumer model there is generally a commitment to the proposition that scientific communities have what we might call an efficient market in ideas. And this proposition tends to entail that quality control within science is thorough and rapidly arbitrages away any serious epistemic problems. Machery recognizes that this can't be quite right ("the frontier of science is replete with unreplicable results"), but his main solution (in the post), is to be suspicious of simple solutions for social ills, while undoubted salutary, leaves the consumer model in place.

Now, the previous paragraphs are a bit of caricature (not the least about Machery who has the skillset to engage on quite technical details of science), but treat the consumer model as a provisional ideal type. Here's another norm of science associated with a different ideal type (it's associated with Michael Polanyi's ideas about the republic of science and the role of adjoining disciplines in maintaining quality control in the whole chain of disciplines): when you use science in non-trivial fashion for your own epistemic ends, you re-do the calculations, learn to use the relevant models, and where possible check the evidence and arguments, etc.+ Obviously, that falls short of replicating experiments and being authoritative in the field. (But someone like Hasok Chang may well suggest, go replicate!) If philosophers had done their own forensic job in the uptake of (say) social psychology, the fragility of much of the work would have been transparent to them (or at least noticeable) and could have played a fruitful role in their discussions (and arguably in social psychology). Yes, that's very easy to say after the fact, but as I noted above I was saying some such stuff before the fact.***

Obviously, the kind of work I mention in the previous paragraph is time-consuming and also transforms the nature of expertise of those who use social science for their own ends. On this model philosophers who want to deploy social science for their own ends move from being consumers, who rely on external markers of quality control, to being co-responsible for the 'scientific' supply chain. Of course, there are some epistemic short-cuts (say by teaming up with others, getting advanced degrees in an adjoining field) each with their own risk and rewards, but there are no magic bullets. 

Obviously, there are fields (e.g., climate science, bits of neuroscience, epidemiology, etc.) where the underlying science draws itself on so many kinds of expertise and different kinds of evidence, that a lone philosopher is in a very bad position to do any forensic work. In my view, in such areas to be a responsible co-producer of knowledge requires joining either a research team, an interdisciplinary center with active research meetings, or to cultivate a wide area of diverging scientific 'informants' so that you familiarize yourself with the working discussions of such teams when they evaluate the evidence that the composite parts create and how they evaluate claims of other teams (etc.). 

One way to mitigate the possibility of TEDI, Lefevere and I argue, is to make sure that in epistemic communities dissenting voices are heard and credited. (We think that facilitating this, even seeking out and amplifying critics, is a special role of aggregators [Polanyi calls these (recall) 'influentials']--prominent figures in the field that also interface with other fields and policy areas.) So, I am pleased to learn that Machery agrees (although a bit sad he did not credit us, or Polanyi!) As Machery notes, another way to mitigate the possibility of TEDI, is to seek out directly critics of one's views. 

In a zero-sum (funding and jobs) contest it's not so easy to ensure that the dissenters are heard. I mentioned the Feigenbaum and Levy paper because I also learned (from Levy) that back in the day, they had trouble obtaining grants for follow up research. Unsurprisingly they switched research focus. 

Often nay-sayers and critics are shut up by demanding that they offer an alternative theory or alternative approach to solve some problem. (If one is shaped by Kuhnian ideas or cost-benefit analysis ignoring critics may well be thought rational.) This norm  asymmetrically rewards the most confident voices. But the burden of proof ought to be on the producers of knowledge not on the critics. 

But if we philosophers are also knowledge producers, as I claim we are when we use science for our own ends, then we, too, must be willing to listen and seek out the critics of particular sciences within philosophy. In fact, lots of philosophy of special sciences house folk with critical attitudes toward reigning orthodoxy in a field they study without in any sense being anti-scientific (here are some examples, feel free to add your own): think of Stegenga's work on medical evidence, Femke Truijens (a former student) on clinical validity of clinical research in therapy, Jay Oldenburg and Anna Alexandrova on robustness analysis, Joel Katzav (and his colleagues) on the role of probabilistic assessment in climate science, and a whole range of philosophers of physics who helped develop challenges to 'Copenhagen.'

Even so, I suspects lots of professional philosophers worry that criticisms of particular ruling orthodoxy in science, slides into a kind of anti-science (familiar of now relatively dormant strains in continental/STS or in America's religious right), or might be co-opted by politically noxious forces. As Eric Winsberg, Neil Levy, and I warned, we saw this play out in the recent covid crisis.

In fact, riding on the coat-tails of hyped new science to tenure has been a rewarding rite of passage within analytic philosophy for a long time now. (No, I am not going to name names.) As Machery notes, it is kind of constitutive of "some of the most exciting philosophy" to do so.

We need to have more tools to think about the forensic role of philosophers as responsible co-producers of knowledge (when we are doing so), and the inductive risks involved. In my experience philosophers tend to resist wanting to internalize the inductive risk of our own work because we tend to model/understand ourselves as pure truth-seekers. The moment you critically introduce the incentive structure of the scientists or of the philosophers deploying that science, you are quickly accused of 'doing sociology' and somehow ignoring evidence or epistemic issues (it's an interesting fact that within philosophy and economics 'sociology' can still be used as a pejorative). About that some other time more (or just google 'methodological analytic egalitarianism'). But if we leave the consumer model in place, and the incentives for how we evaluate some of the most exciting philosophy, it is a means of making future generations of philosophers as credulous as ours. Perhaps, that's the human condition, but it would be nice if we could try to do better.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tremain on The Inductive Risks of Bioethics, Pt 1. (And *In the Shadow of Justice*, pt 4)

My argument is that the academic discipline of bioethics relies on an epistemology of domination and is an institutionalized vehicle for the biopolitics of our time, that is, bioethics is a technology of government that provides intellectual resources designed to facilitate the “strengthening” (read: fitness) of a certain population and the elimination of others. I submit, furthermore, that the implicit and explicit governmental tenor of bioethical inquiries and discussions contributes substantially to the hostile environment that disabled philosophers confront in philosophy.--Shelley L. Tremain (2017) Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (University of Michigan), 160-161.

As the quoted passage suggests, Tremain diagnoses two kinds of inductive risks from the way bioethics is practiced: (i) it is eugenic in character: it promotes the "elimination" of populations with characteristics thought undesirable; (ii) it creates a hostile work environment for disabled philosophers within professional philosophy. Today's post is focused on (i). For on her view, it is constitutive of bioethics to "posit conceptions of the normal from which the possibility and probability of deviations are measured and classified in order to prevent and control their actualization." (169) Within the discipline, the normal is taken to be an objective feature of reality (often understood as something statistical or species functional), and the deviations -- in particular below the norm -- are treated as objective defects or harms (or costly). Following Foucault, Tremain treats the disciplinary articulation of this conceptualization a step in what she calls 'normalization.'

For the articulation of these conceptualizations and their understanding as objective (social) facts constitute a field of inquiry and creates a discursive power with normative authority in the university, the hospital, and in wider society. More subtly, Tremain argues that normalization shapes, by various looping effects (Hacking's terminology) the self-conception of ordinary agents in society and the possibilities available to them as they make, what they take to be, autonomous choices. Such normalization becomes eugenic once it becomes constitutive of (autonomous) reproductive choices by individual would-be-parents and by social (and sometimes legally mandated) technologies of risk-management and prevention to facilitate the creation of populations without characteristics thought abnormal (defective, costly, or not conducive to full participation/cooperation in society, etc.).

Before I offer some critical reflections on Tremain's position, I want to note two things: first, I agree with Tremain that until quite recently contemporary bioethics (both in its Rawlsian and Utilitarian guise) is eugenic in character and that it has badly theorized -- mostly by ignoring -- the inductive risk of its own activity. In fact, while it councils 'do-no-harm' to medicine and patient autonomy, it has been long reluctant to explore the possible harm that is the possible effect of social and institutional uptake of normative theorizing. For most of my adult life, analytic applied ethicists simply disparage those disciplines (Critical X) where inductive risk is taken seriously (recall my criticism of Heath). In so far as it is agreed that normative theory has possible bad social effects that's never due to the theory itself, but only due to bad people or bad social implementation. The character of the foreseeable uptake of a theory is not treated as a legitimate (professional) evaluative feature of the theory.

Second, and only a partial aside, while Tremain uses a Foucauldian framework (and linguistic register) to analyze these features, it converges with the decidedly non-Foucauldian treatment of the development of applied ethics offered by Katherine Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (recall here; here; and here). In particular, I want to highlight a structural feature of applied ethics, the significance of which only became clear to me while reading Tremain. Forrester notes that:

Applied ethics soon also encompassed medicine, law, and business. But the fact that moral thinking about war, with all its extremities and appeals to necessity, was one of the first test cases for applied ethics had a wider impact on the development of moral and political philosophy. Its focus on dramatic and extra ordinary moral choices was soon imported into other realms of inquiry. Crucially, it was imported back into the realm of domestic politics, which was turned into a case of its own: public morality.--Forrester In the Shadow of Justice, pp. 74-75 (emphasis added)

Appeals to the necessity of choosing function as a mechanism to prevent the development of questions about the proper form of thought and its institutional embeddedness. The focus on existential social choice facilitates the rise of casuistry without thinking through what the structure of the demand for casuistry does to the supply of ethical theory (as the worth having). (An analogous problem shows up in normative decision theory.) To simplify greatly, we saw the after-effects of this in the most recent pandemic: bioethicists were primed to discuss the rationing of medical care and the justification of vaccine requirements, but had little guidance to offer on how to think about the integration of many different kinds of fast moving (and sometimes still immature) sciences and the complex trade-offs of major social policies.  

Now, let me return to Tremain's analysis; it is important to recognize that normalization (mediated by various social and governmental practices) produces "people with certain kinds of subjectivities, that is, these practices have constituted subjects whose actions are governed through the exercise of their own capacity to choose in accordance with the norm(al)." (190) And while the structure of Tremain's argument is akin to an ideology critique, she recognizes that there is no sense in which she can claim that these subjects have "been duped by the ideological forces of some distant and overarching external power," nor is she in a position (as she admits) to claim "these subjects make morally bad personal decisions." (190) 

Tremain is a very clear writer, and she puts her assumptions and commitments transparently on the table: she is a nominalist, a historicist, and a relativist. And she makes clear that the problem with ("epistemological and ontological assumptions" embedded in) disciplinary practices that are invested in normalization is that "the potentially detrimental effects for disabled people" is ignored. (192; this is also true of embryo research.) Part of these detrimental effects are the widespread uptake of the thought that the disabled have "diminished lives" and so nudge (and legally facilitate) abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia of them. (200)*

I hinted above that I would offer a criticism. The problem is that acknowledging, even internalizing detrimental effects in a (bioethical) theory is neither necessary nor sufficient to undermine such a theory. Again, I draw on Forrester and the implication of appealing to necessity. It is characteristic of applied ethics to use "abstract, personal, and interpersonal modes of justification to explore the most concrete of existential questions of life, death, and killing— questions that continued to remain at the core of applied ethics." (82) To put the point starkly: the 'heroisms' of applied ethics is precisely its willingness to face up to the existential nature of its questions.** That something is eugenic and has harmful externalities is certainly something that -- once pointed out -- has to be faced, but with theoretical equanimity. 

I'll put the dilemma facing Tremain and her partisans as follows: because she is unwilling to develop a normative theory of her own that can meet contemporary applied ethics on its own terms (I almost wrote 'ethical battlefield' there), merely stating and naming, even unmasking, an inductive risk is not sufficient to change a disciplinary practice. If anything, once it is domesticated as inductive risk her insights can feed into other technologies of biopower. (So she may well rightly object to this whole post.) And because such domestication is always a live risk, Tremain is probably prudential in avoiding the development of a normative theory of her own. But as her own analysis shows, society will confer authority on normative theory (and as Forrester shows it will create all kinds of rewards for those who develop it 'best'), so avoiding the contamination of normative theory seems to consign oneself to political and professional wilderness. But that conclusion would be victim blaming, and to understand that we need to look more closely at (ii), the marginalization of disabled philosophers in the profession. To be continued.