Decolonise Philosophy!

The following thoughts, prompted by this article, will (I suspect) almost all be super obvious to anybody who has been thinking about decolonising philosophy for an extended period of time. But my audience is largely composed of people, methinks, who do not regularly think about such things.

Lots of people would agree with the slogan ``We ought decolonise philosophy!'' but, philosophy being what it is, the meaning of the slogan is highly contentious. I'll work with one account thereof, based on this and related papers by Kwasi Wiredu, but bear in mind that it's not the only account of what it would take to decolonise philosophy that is out there. I think this particular account makes my point very stark, but something essentially similar to what I say would go if I had worked with some other prominent accounts. Wiredu begins by saying that what it means to decolonise African philosophy would be  ``divesting African philosophical thinking of all undue influences emanating from our colonial past.'' This is then cashed out in terms of taking conscious control of the concepts deployed in philosophical reasoning, as well as the substantive positions covered and the questions asked, by means of subjecting them to critique via cross cultural comparisons. The idea, basically, is to try and ferret out aspects of philosophical thinking now going on in Africa which can't earn their keep on their own merits but rather persist simply because the colonialists imposed them during their occupations -- and to ferret them out by using the fact that indigenous languages, conceptual schemes, and thought traditions have resources that can make incongruences stark by means of comparison, undermine false claims to necessity by evincing in practice alternate ways of going on, or may occupy regions of logical or conceptual space that the colonists never bothered to explore.

So, for instance, Wiredu argues that there are certain puzzles about existence or the nature of capital-b-Being which simply cannot arise if you are to formulate your thoughts in certain West African languages. In the essay linked, for instance, he argues that the notion of creation-ex-nihilo which has caused so much debate in philosophy of religion is nigh-on-incomprehensible if one tries to discuss it in his native Akan language. It is not that he thinks this therefore proves that those questions of Being are pseudo-puzzles, or that creation-ex-nihilo is impossible, but rather simply that it would be a colonial attitude to simply assume that this difference must be due to an expressive fault with the West African languages rather than a tendency to produce misleading linguistic confusions in the European traditions which concentrate on those puzzles and on the basis of nothing more than this assumption work to import the European concept. If it is a genuine improvement on the indigenous conceptual scheme that must be argued for. Further, having realised the incongruity, and not uncritically accepting the Western mode as just obviously superior, one can see whether and how thinking with the concept derived from one's own linguistic tradition would ramify through philosophical issues -- and in this paper he concludes, for instance, that attempts to harmonise or synthesise religions indigenous to Ghana and Christianity are probably not as coherent as some claim, but are relying on equivocation at key moments. In his own work he has applied this method to a number of other problems to interesting effect -- to give some of the provocative examples, he concludes that Descartes' cogito would fairly immediately have been seen to be an invalid argument had Descrates attempted to formulate it in a West African language, or on other occasions that the correspondence theory of truth is a tautology in an Akan language.

The point, then, is not simply to reject everything associated with the colonialists. (As he says, the emphasis in his initial definition of decolonising philosophy should be on the word `undue' before `influences'.) Rather, the point is to ensure that the tools we think with are up to task, and to use the availability of alternative tools as a means of facilitating test and comparison. So whether or not you one ultimately ends up accepting the problems-in-Western-languages as genuine or pseudo-problems, the decolonised philosophy is that which has used the conceptual resources and intellectual traditions of the former colonised nation to put itself in a position to consciously decide whether or not its inherited problems are worth pursuing in light of consideration of a fuller range of facts, rather than uncritically (or without due consideration of the facts adduced by considering the thought of the colonised) accepting the concepts, problems, and solution space given to it by Western tradition.

Before drawing out my intended moral, some comments on Wiredu's account as an account of decolonising philosophy. I think it does a pretty good job of rationalising a lot of what people tend to actually do under the aegis of decolonising the field (I usually see people try and change: (i) what is taught, and (ii) who does the teaching), since it is basically an attempt to leverage cognitive diversity in a way that tends to align with the various reform efforts now going on. Wiredu would, I think, also be of the opinion that this is a contribution to the broader project of decolonisation -- since the historic task of former colonies at this moment is to deal with the legacy of colonialism by taking the reigns of history and no longer simply having Western modes of life and government imposed, but rather consciously weighing the colonists mode of life against the indigenous tradition and attempting to forge a synthesis that allows for the best of both as far as is possible. That is to say, Wiredu's account of what African nations should be up to during periods of post-colonial modernisation looks a lot like his account of what African philosophy should be up to. He might therefore think that each can reinforce the other. If you do not agree with Wiredu on what broader cultural and political decolonisation means, I think one could reasonably fault this as failing to properly contribute to the broader decolonial project. I am not sure what I think the broader decolonial project will or should amount to, so I am agnostic on this point.

Ok here's the thing that Wiredu's account makes especially for me: I have never seen an account of decolonising philosophy that does not make it seem like it is just a generally desirable thing to do. I can understand why it is of especially pressing importance in departments in former colonies. But the thing Wiredu described just sounds like a corollary of enlightenment, assuming you don't a priori limit the capacity for interesting thought or concept creation to Westerners. (This would have to be a corollary of some version of the enlightenment that did not share the patronising assumptions of many actors within the actual historical enlightenment! Enlightenment itself is, of course, famously a concept subject to much critique.) Everyone, citizen or descendent of former (or presently) colonised nation or not, should want to decolonise philosophy in Wiredu's sense. Could we still claim our mantle as true philosophers if we, as a matter of policy, uncritically made use of our inherited concepts? Can we really vow to just set aside pertinent information about the limits or oversights of our own conceptual scheme, or are we so sure that there is no pertinent information to be drawn from the kind of cross-cultural comparisons which examination of various world traditions makes possible? In addition to Wiredu's aforementioned work, I am reading David Wong's Natural Moralities at the moment, which through its comparative approach between Confucian and western liberal ethics seems to be another proof in practice of the possibility of drawing pertinent information for philosophical puzzles from this -- and, by Wiredu's lights, is an instance of decolonising philosophy.

The only people I see talk about decolonising philosophy tend to be people from former colonies or right-on-lefties in the West. But when I read accounts of what decolonising philosophy would amount to it seems like anybody committed to the enlightenment ideals held by most philosophers should likewise find themselves engaged in full sympathy with this activity.

Remonstration

A recent conversation with some friends has me thinking about roles we can fruitfully play as philosophers of science. I just thought I'd write up on a blog post my thoughts on something that came out of that, which is a role we sometimes play that I feel is not often enough highlighted.

In philosophy we learn about tools and methods of critical thinking and argument construction and evaluation. For instance, a standard part of philosophical training is going through some basic logic. You should learn therein what it takes for an argument to be valid, and, going in the other direction, how one can demonstrate the invalidity of an argument by constructing counter-models. (If this doesn't mean anything to you, I will be going through an example later in this post!) That is just part of basic philosopher training. If you go into philosophy of science you will further specialise, perhaps learning about experimental technique, statistical methods, or theories of confirmation along the way. All of these can put somebody in a decent enough position to evaluate the cogency of arguments that scientists put forward, providing one familiarises oneself with the particular theoretical background the scientists one is evaluating are working within.

And it matters that scientists are making cogent arguments! Science has a lot of social cachet; with some well noted exceptions, folk trust scientists and will tend to believe claims that scientists put forward about the world. What scientists conclude is therefore deeply significant to our worldview and senses of self. Further, in many spheres of life we base policies on recommendations from scientific experts. Just the enterprise of science itself involves moving huge amounts of people and resources around, and the opportunity cost of having all these smart folk spend their time in this way rather than on other socially valuable tasks is itself huge. We want scientists to be basing their claims, recommendations, and activities, on sound argumentation and good reasoning, so as to ensure that this cachet and those resources are used as best we can.

So then putting these two together we get a natural thought about how philosophers of science should use our skills. We should monitor the arguments scientists make, and where we find that their methods or modes of argument are not capable of supporting the conclusions or recommendations they are making in light of those arguments, we should bring to bear our expertise in the evaluation of inferences or arguments (broadly construed) on calling this out and suggesting better practice for the future. (I recall reading, but do not recall where I was reading, E.O. Wilson once write that this is exactly what he thought of as the point of philosophers of science, people looking over his shoulder saying `Oh no I don't think this is good enough, what about such and such counter argument, eh?' He noted that while this could be pretty irritating in the moment, on reflection thought it valuable to him.) I call this kind of thing `remonstration', it's a kind of `speak truth to power!' norm, and I think we should see it as a valuable part of our mission as philosophers of science.

I am going to go through an example from my own work in a bit of detail below, but for some more illustrious examples one might want to check out: Clark Glymour's critique of the statistical reasoning that underlay the famous Bell Curve book and much of the rest of social psychology at the time, Nancy Cartwright's long running project critically evaluating the limitations of randomised control trials for medical or social research, or Roman Frigg's work (discussed, say, at the end of this excellent episode of the generally excellent Sci Phi podcast) on over-confident and over-specific claims made on the basis of models of climate change. 

But for an example of remonstration I am most familiar with (and also to allow me to explain and slightly reframe this previously published work of mine) I'd like to go through my paper On Fraud. One of the motivations for that paper was thinking about claims currently being made about how we should deal with the replication crisis in social psychology. Broadly, lots of claims in social psychology that were thought to have been securely established are being found not to stand up to sustained scrutiny when people attempt to replicate the initial experiments which led to their acceptance, or redo the statistical analyses with bigger/better data sets. In thinking about why this is occurring, a number of scientists have come to conclude that one (but not the only) source of the problem is -- scientists are not just seeking the truth for its own sake, but instead being encouraged to pursue credit (esteem, reward, glory, social recognition by their peers in the scientific community) by various features of the incentive structure of science. This pursuit of credit itself incentivises bad research practices, ranging from the careless to the outright fraudulent. If only we could remove these rival incentives which are causing the misconduct, and instead encourage pure pursuit of the truth, we'd have removed the incentive to involve oneself in such research misconduct. Since I had seen some very similar arguments come up before in my more historical scholarship on W.E.B. Du Bois, my interest was very much piqued and I got to thinking about whether this argument should be accepted as a sound basis of science policy.

I came to conclude that the psychologists and sociologists of science making these arguments were making a subtle mistake in how they reasoned about policy in light of scientific evidence. They were doing good empirical work tracing out the causes of much of the research malpractice we witness in science. But on the basis of this they were concluding that if we removed the actual causes of fraud we'd see less fraud. That is to say, they were establishing premises about the causes of fraud in the actual world, and concluding that a policy which intervened on (in fact removed or greatly lessened) these causes would mean that there would be less fraud after our intervention. After all, it's a natural thought; if X was what was causing the fraud and now there's no more (or much less) X, well you've removed the cause and so you should remove the effect, right?  Not so. Such arguments are not valid -- their premises can all be true, while their conclusion is false. So I constructed a counter-model, which is to say a model which shows that all of their premises can be true while their conclusion is false.

Without going into too much detail, I produced a model of people gathering evidence and deciding whether not to honestly reveal what evidence they received when they go to publish. Fraud is an extreme form of malpractice, of course, but it would do no harm to my arguments to interpret the agents as deciding whether or not to engage in milder forms of data fudging or other research malpractice. We can model the agents as pure credit seekers, they just want to gain the glory of being seen to make a discovery. Or we can model them as pure truth seekers, they just want the community to believe the truth about nature. (We can also consider mixed agents in the model, but set that aside.) In the model credit seeking can indeed incentivise fraud, and for the sakes of the counter-model we may grant that in the actual world all fraud is incentivised in this way. But what I show is that in this model, even if suppose that there were some policy that could successfully turn all scientists into pure truth seekers, it does not guarantee that there is less fraud -- in fact truth seeking can, in some especially worrying circumstances, actually lead to more fraud!

There is a general lesson here, in fact, that I wish I had done more to bring out in the paper. The point is: if you are basing policy on empirical research, it is tempting to think that what you need to know is whether the policy would be effective in the actual world. That, after all, is where you will be implementing the policy! But that's the wrong causal system for evaluating the effects of your proposed policy. What you need to know is whether the policy would be effective in the world (or causal system) that will exist after the policy is implemented. In the actual world -- sure, credit seeking is causing malpractice. But the fact that you remove that incentive to commit fraud does not by itself mean you've removed the incentive to commit fraud. It may be that in the world that exists after this intervention there are new temptations to commit fraud. Truth seeking itself may be one of them. Policy relevant causal information must include counter-factual information, information about the world that will exist after a not-yet-implemented policy has been carried out.

If you want the real details of my argument -- read the paper! But what I want to note here is how this is me trying to be the change I want to see in philosophy of science. I found some scientists making policy recommendations in virtue of their empirical research (in this case it was policy affecting science itself). I thought about the structure of their arguments, and realised they were making implicit assumptions about counter-factual reasoning. A general philosophy education gives you tools for reasoning about counter-factuals, so I could bring that to bear. What is more, general critical thinking (or logic) training that is part of being a philosopher points the way to counter-model construction as a means of critiquing arguments. Finally, disciplinary specific training in the philosophy of the social sciences gave me training in tools for building models of social groups, which was what was of particular relevance here. I was therefore able to remonstrate, to bring to bear my training in calling attention to an error in scientists' reasoning, and what's more an error that (since it was supposed to be the basis of policy) has the potential to be of some social and opportunity cost. I don't claim, of course, that this is the best example of remonstration in the literature (c.f. my illustrious colleagues above!) -- but I hope going through an example I am intimately familiar with in depth gives people a better example of how philosophy of science as remonstration is a good use of our disciplinary tools and expertises.

Now, it is certainly not my claim that only philosophers of science engage in this kind of remonstration. Statisticians very often engage in a very similar activity -- Andrew Gelman's blog alone is full of it. There is also a fine tradition of scientific whistleblowers who call foul when misconduct is afoot. Remonstrating with scientists whose reasoning has, for one reason or another, gone astray, ought not be, and fortunately is not in fact, left to philosophers alone. And, in case it needs to be said, nor is this (or nor ought this be) all of what philosophers of science get up to. Most of my own work, for instance, is not remonstration.

But when I see accounts of the tasks of philosophy of science they typically fall into one of three categories. Concept construction or clarification, where the goal is something like producing or improving a tool that it might help scientists do their job better. Scientific interpretation, where the goal is to do something like provide an understanding of scientific work that would make sense of the results of scientific activity, and tell us what the world would be like if our best evidenced theories were to be true. And meta-science, where the goal is to do something like provide an explanatory theory which tells us why it is that scientists reason (or ought to reason) in some ways rather than others. All of these can be valuable and I hope philosophers of science keep doing them. And I can even understand why people aren't keen to advertise the disciplinary mission of remonstration: it makes us into the stern humourless prigs of science, somewhat akin to Roosevelt's critic on the sideline hating on the folk actually getting stuff done. But, since I think it can be good and necessary, I hope that, even if it doesn't win us friends, and along with our comrades elsewhere in the academy and with our eye on the social good, we hold true to the mission of remonstrating against scientific overreach, malpractice, or just plain old error, where-ever we should see these arise.

The Diversity of Formal Philosophy

I've just come back from the Formal Epistemology Workshop! It was a lovely conference, and I highly recommend it to up and coming formal epistemology folk who want to get a sense of what's going on across the field. I was struck by the diversity of projects, and also by the interesting fact that multiple people said something like ``I feel like I am the least-formal formal-epistemologist here.'' So! I invented a taxonomy of projects in Formal Philosophy, which I'll present here with examples then comment on below.

About -- some formal system that touches upon matters of prior philosophical interest is either itself the object of study, or some feature of it or result therein is, or it is useful for stating/reformulating a prior philosophical problem. One does not reason within the system, but rather one either reflects on it, or some aspect of it, or draws out morals from it and reflects upon how they bear upon another problem.

Examples of work of this sort: Bertrand Russell's On Denoting, Plato's Meno, Audrey Yap's Idealization, Epistemic Logic, and Epistemology, Jason Stanley's Know How, David Lewis' On The Plurality of Worlds, Kenny Easwaran's Why Physics Uses Second Derivatives, Beall and Restall's Logical Pluralism, Danielle Wenner's The Social Value of Knowledge and the Responsiveness Requirement for Biomedical Research, Michael Weisberg's Who Is A Modeller?

Within -- the author(s) themselves use an established formal framework to prove results which are of philosophical interest. Perhaps they are taken to be interesting because of what they tell us about the formal system which is itself taken to be philosophically interesting, or how various such systems can be related, or perhaps because the result is itself intrinsically interesting or part of a family of results which collectively are taken to be interesting. The point is that Within projects gain whatever philosophical interest they have because of the relationship between a result the author has proven and something which is taken to be of philosophical interest.

Examples of work of this sort: Ruth C. Barcan's The Identity of Individuals in a Strict Functional Calculus of Second Order, Christian List and Philip Pettit's Aggregating Sets of Judgments: An Impossibility Result, Robert Stalnaker's On Logics of Knowledge and Belief, Catrin Campell-Moore's How To Express Self-Referential Probability, Cailin O'Connor's The Evolution of Guilt, Bertrand Russell's eponymous Paradox, the Marquis de Condorcet's Jury Theorem (and related results), Amartya Sen's The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal, David Lewis' Probability of Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities, I. J. Good's On The Principle of Total Evidence, Harsanyi's Utilitarian Theorem (and related results).

Without -- the author invents or constructs a novel formal system that allows us to generate results or extract information about a new area of discourse not previously amenable to formal analysis, or which if there was a previous formal theory it took a markedly different form.

Examples of work of this sort: Aristotle's syllogistic, Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, Turing and Post on computability, Ruth Barcan's A Functional Calculus of First Order Based on Strict Implication, Kripke's A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic, Carlos E. Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors and David Makinson's On The Logic of Theory Change, David Lewis' Convention, Frank P. Ramsey's Truth and Probability. Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour, and Richard Scheines' Causation, Prediction, and Search.

Some comments on this, starting with remarks about the examples.

1 ) While I didn't put too much thought into constructing the example lists (which probably resulted in a demographic skew, alas, in what I highlighted -- on this see point (7) below) I did want to highlight a couple of points. Formal philosophy as a whole interacts with very diverse areas of philosophy and very diverse sets of formal tools. As has recently been discussed, logic gets the bulk of pedagogical attention in philosophy graduate programmes. But at a glance the above list contains work in ethics, social and political philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of physical, social, and biological sciences and mathematics, and epistemology. (I don't know of any formal aesthetics, but I would have liked to have been able to include that.) And the formal theories touched upon or deployed do indeed include logic, but also include probability theory, game and decision theory, statistical reasoning, calculus, social choice theory, and geometry.

2) I also wanted to use the examples to highlight that each of the sections contains work that would presumably be thought of as classical or canonical, as well as recent work by younger scholars.... This latter was a bit harder for the third section, since (for, I guess, reason discussed in (4) below) one hears about such work less. I decided that in the grand scheme of intellectual history though late 20th century is extremely recent philosophy, so it suffices to make my point. Which is that each of these modes of formal philosophy has shown itself both capable of making classic contributions and generating novel work. This is not a hierarchy of value, and none of these streams are yet dry. (When I reflected on my own work, I think I have some papers in the About category, and some papers in the Within section.) On the flip side, each of these is part of the grand tradition of formal philosophy, and there's no reason to think that some is more properly formal philosophy than the rest.

3) These are of course fuzzy categories. Gödel's incompleteness theorems are to some extent Within, but (if I understand the history correctly) the technique of Gödel-numbering was developed during these proofs and that was probably a significantly novel enough contribution to be its own Without work. For more recent work, I wanted to include more ethics, but couldn't decide whether this was About or Within. Is this Within or Without? Nothing, I think, really turns on subtleties here, I just wanted to acknowledge that there are plenty of edge cases. However, just to give people something to disagree with me about: I hereby claim that while this is fuzzy in the sense that some work can plausibly be in multiple categories, anything that could be called Formal Philosophy will recognisably fit into at least one of the categories.

4) While I don't think this is a hierarchy of value, my sense is that in terms of credit or repute the Without category is the high-risk high-reward category. It's the kind of work that is most likely to fail, but most likely to secure one's lasting glory if one can pull it off.

5) Work in the About category is probably the easiest sell to philosophers who don't work in formal philosophy. When formal philosophers are designing introductory lectures, outreach-y summer programmes, presentations for conferences in which there will be mixed company, or just in general interacting with a field that can be territorial and sceptical about things which fall outside the recognised boundaries, I think there is some reason to be cognisant of the distinction between About and Within work, and opt for About work. Nobody is going to argue that Plato's Meno isn't real philosophy.

6) I am less confident here, but I know there are metaphilosophical debates about what counts as experimental philosophy. I feel like a similar taxonomy would work there, with experimental philosophy being work that either is centrally based upon reflections on empirical work, is founded upon novel discoveries made by the authors, or comes up with a new way of testing things or generating results.

7) I didn't max out on demographic diversity in constructing the example lists, since it wasn't really to my point here. But I did find when making the lists that white blokes came to mind much more easily in all of the categories, and I guess especially dear to my heart given previous work -- I could scarcely think of any black folk! On reflection I can think think of more I didn't include -- for instance Kwasi Wiredu's Logic and Ontology (I cannae find a link!) could have gone in the About section, and I just met Lisa Cassell at the Formal Epistemology Workshop that sparked this very post. Still, even as I try hard not many brothers and sisters come to mind. This does not tell one much about the actual demographics of the field -- maybe I am just bad at remembering people, and I am myself very much trained in a certain tradition. But it is what it is.

On The Conceptual Penis

Another day, another hoax paper published! For those who don't know, these hoax papers pop up every now and again, wherein academics deliberately write nonsense, submit it to an ostensibly serious journal, and find that lo and behold they can get it published, despite the checks that are meant to ensure only rigorous scholarship makes it through to the published literature. This is a worry, because in theory being part of the scholarly literature is meant to be a guarantee of quality and a sign that the scholarship can be relied upon.

It's always pretty hard to know what to conclude from these hoax papers -- I think it is over-determined that one should not, ever, take the fact that an individual paper has passed peer review to mean its conclusions are secure. Where one wants to be guided by academic work, one should form one's opinion on a matter based on a review of the literature, not just one or two papers therein. Too many journals reviewing too many papers by too many authors in too many fields -- all run by fallible humans. Even with the best of intentions (which is far from guaranteed) there is no way the peer review process could filter out all bad work, and by dint of the sheer size of the enterprise there is going to be plenty of rubbish out there even if a low proportion of the bad papers make it through. What's more, the replication crisis shows us that things can actually go pretty systematically wrong, and there's some theoretical reason to be a bit pessimistic about the quality of the average paper. So, one read of hoax publications is that they just dramatically illustrate this point. Whatever guarantee of quality the scholarly literature and its processes of review and double checking provide, it does not do all that much at the level of individual papers -- look to the collective beliefs or consensus arising out of such literatures, if there is reliable results to be found anywhere it will be therein.

The authors of this particular hoax, however, want a different conclusion to be drawn. They think their paper shows that a ``problem lies within the very concept of any journal being a “rigorous academic journal in gender studies.”'' Their reasoning is that their article sailed through peer review because it ``portrayed a moralizing attitude that comported with the editors’ moral convictions'',  namely ``an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil''. Basically the paper kind of strings sentences together which loosely suggest that maleness is tied to a certain kind of abstract idea of the penis and this abstract idea of the penis is responsible for a great many social ills, inclusive of climate change. It really is largely nonsense, but an overall effect is conveyed and which is indeed suggestive of the almost religious belief they note. They think that it was because this effect was conveyed that they were not subject to serious peer review.

Predictably enough (pious left wing academical that I am!) I am not convinced by their account of what happened here. I'll set aside the fact that some of what the paper suggests would probably be considered morally offensive by the sort of people they have in mind -- it's reading tea-leaves to try and work out what the paper is really suggestive of, since it is, by design, genuinely nonsensical.  Rather, my objections to their account are as follows. First, boringly, I just don't think journal hoaxes provide the kind of evidence that could support their conclusion. A paper published in a journal is just poor evidence for conclusions concerning the practices of an entire field. Second, this paper was actually first rejected by NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies! Why should the one accept count for more evidence of typical field practices than the one reject? Especially when you consider that, third, a relevant difference between the journal that accepted (Cogent Social Sciences) and the one that rejected was that the journal that accepted is a pay-to-publish journal. To my mind, we already have some reason to be highly suspicious of pay-to-publish journals. If one searches around one will find plenty of controversies about these journals, just going to link to a story about my favourite such controversy here. So, given where my priors are at, once I found out this detail it immediately suggested an explanation of what went wrong here! Personally, I am sufficiently suspicious of this business model that I think we as an academic community should institute some communal norms against publishing in pay-to-publish journals, and demand that any article that is published in such a journal is suitably marked as such and refuse to credit work so marked -- in fact, given the wider social role of academic work, I wouldn't even be opposed to legislation banning the business model.

Now, the authors do spend some time discussing the third of these worries. They acknowledge that indeed pay-to-publish journals might be a source of the problem. But they respond that, (A), NORMA's editor actually recommended transferring their paper to CSS in such a way that helped it get through the review process there, suggesting that even serious academic journals are in cahoots with these mobsters. (B), CSS did seem to actually implement peer review, (C), the journal is published by the apparently respectable Taylor and Francis group. These considerations move them to think that the problem is not mainly a general one with pay-to-publish journals, but rather the field. Again, I am not convinced. Regarding (B) -- editors have a lot of power in who they pick as reviewers, so they can just pick hacks to ensure things sail through, and in any case we don't know how the reviewers were themselves incentivised. Regarding (C), let's just say I am not too impressed with academic publishing groups more generally.

Regarding (A)... ok here I agree with the authors of the hoax paper. In so far as journals in gender studies (and for all I know this happens in other fields too) are collaborating with the pay-to-publish journals in this way, they are undermining their own field's scholarly standards. I didn't know this sort of collaboration existed, so for me this is the main thing I have learned from the incident, and I shall be looking out for this in future; maybe it occurs in philosophy too? The overall lesson I draw from this latest hoax is that as a community we should stop collaborating with these sharks, their invocation of the profit motive undermines the scholarly values we strive to maintain and represent, and it is only by our continued participation in the system that they are able to so destroy us.

Dreams of My Ancestors

Short personal blog post -- just a quick reflection on a difference (as it seems to me!) between aspects of the African American experience when compared with people from the African diaspora in Europe. Not sure how widely this will be of interest to people!

It's graduation time, and amidst the celebrations I saw a very talented young African American comrade of mine post a picture of herself in her graduation gown with  a quote from a Maya Angelou poem on her cap -- ``I am the dream and the hope of the slave.'' It was a touching image, and thought, and while I've seen debate about the sentiment, on the whole it's easy to see how one can think as much and take extra pride in one's achievements qua African American.

Such thoughts are, I think, just entirely cut off to descendants of the African diaspora in Europe. Or, at least, so it seems to me when reflecting on my own ancestry in Ghana. While I am somewhat embarrassingly unsure about this, my sense of my Ghanaian ancestry is: my ethnic group were subjects of Asanteman, while not themselves being Asante. My sense also is that their relative status was such that they probably largely participated in the political system as I described previously, and the British colonisation would thus have represented a loss of political freedoms, wealth, and opportunities for advancement for them. Finally, a relevant bit of historical background -- the British and Asanteman fought an alternately hot and cold war through the 19th century for control over `the Gold coast', with the British eventually emerging victorious in 1901. See here for some details: though a note of protest on that wikipedia article, which begins by saying that ``[t]he wars were mainly due to Ashanti attempts to establish strong control over the coastal areas of what is now Ghana'' -- as if it is just natural that the British should have a stake in who control the Ghanaian coastline, and the Ashanti are the only aggressors!

In any case, the point of all this is just -- presumably, it was a reasonable hope and dream for my ancestors that they simply wouldn't have anything to do with the British. Or, if they did (Asanteman was a trading empire after all), it would have been on very different terms from what in fact transpired. They were initially successful in those wars, after all, so had some reason for hope; and what they presumably dreamed of for their descendants would not involve participating as subjects in British society at all. In fact they may have very specifically wished for such participation not to occur, given the long running hostilities and the fact of colonisation going on around them making it very clear this was the consequence of defeat. As it stands, I am who I am, the reason my grandparents could meet each other in the capital of the Imperial metropolis, my achievements being such as they are, are all only made possible by the fact that Asanteman was conquered and absorbed into the British Empire. I am because what they hoped for is not.

Of course, there is an analogue thought in the case of African Americans. Most obviously -- presumably many simply hoped not to be in the Americas at all, and certainly not as slaves, and later on dreamed either of repatriation back to the Mother Africa, or as that dream faded of an independent black nation state. People with such hopes and dreams would also, I guess, not be so happy at the thought that their descendants would be awarded degrees by the white man's institutions or participation in his cultural life, etc. Quite so, I don't mean to deny those traditions their due place and significance in the African American tradition. I just mean to say -- one tradition of thought really did see integration into a transformed nation as a viable and desirable life option, and as one succeeds in American society and contributes to that transformation one can see oneself as in some very small way fulfilling the hopes of those who held onto such dreams. This may not have been the only tradition, but it was one of them, and qua African American descended from slaves, one can take some degree of pride in how one's achievements at least fulfill this strand of thought among the ancestors. Whereas I think it highly implausible that there was any analogue tradition for my ancestors: no significant number who hoped that being colonised by the British, losing one's ability to participate in the democratic parts of Asanteman's life and being subject to military rule by distant oppressors, losing one's traditional rights and economic status... etc.... would constitute an improvement on what was the status quo. Integration into a transformed nation, whatever else is true of it, beats chattel slavery, whereas `integration' into the British empire was just a straightforward loss.

Any such pride or happiness in my own achievements is cut off to me, and the African diaspora in Europe more generally. My participation in the institutional and cultural life of Europe represents only the frustration of my ancestor's hopes and the failure of their struggles.

Bourgeois Theorising

Some of the crowds I run in are the kind of strange places where people sometimes accuse each other of bourgeois theorising. I have been known to indulge in this (both bourgeois theorising and accusing others thereof) myself on a number of occasions. Just so it is clear what it is I am both guilty and accusing you of, here's my very brief attempt at some rough-and-ready conceptual analysis of `bourgeois theorising'.

The bourgeois, being society's ruling class, have an interest in presenting things as impossible to alter, and ensuring we do not in fact systematically alter our conditions in such a way as to reliably bring about a better social order that would not be subject to their/(our, being real about who I am and what I do!) misrule. Bourgeois theorising is thus theorising that misleading stands in the way of coming up with a workable causal understanding of social systems, which is to say an understanding that could fruitfully guide democratic policy making or activism towards the creation of a better polity. Some common ways bourgeois theorising expresses itself: presenting as inevitable what is actually subject to human amelioration, thus discouraging policy efforts aimed at changing whatever is at issue. Presenting as unknowable what is in fact knowable, and thus suggesting we could not plan out in advance the actions we ought take to fruitfully democratically govern our social order.

Some notes on this. First, this is super vague, and here are some things that I am not being clear enough on. First, does the theorising have to be obfuscatory in the sense of being inaccurate? Might bourgeois theorising be a better guide to the truth -- maybe some features of social life really are inevitable? Second, what counts as `standing in the way' -- convincing people to the contrary? phrasing things in a manner that is incomprehensible to the vast majority of the population? having as an implication that the relevant sorts of knowledge is impossible even if it does not convince people to the contrary? Third, how insistent am I upon the democratising element -- what if, in present social circumstances, better causal theories would actually empower regressive tyrannical factions, even if in the future such knowledge would be useful to the democratic polity or could also be useful to activists agitating for democracy?

Second, I don't think that bourgeois theorising need be done by people who are bourgeois; though perhaps bourgeois people are more likely to engage in this, I don't know. I don't think people who are not bourgeois are guaranteed to do work that is not bourgeois theorising -- on the flip side, maybe they are not even less likely to do it for all I know. And I don't think it has anything to do with the intent of the theorist. Bourgeois theorising picks out a problem with the theory, not with the theorist.

Third, I think a lot of scholarship that many think of as liberatory or emancipatory is in fact bourgeois theorising. An example I sometimes see in conversation is that an admirable attention to lived experience or life's many complexities can devolve into a kind of pedantic particularism, where accuracy in the details of particular cases are insisted upon and induction is blocked unless one has a very high degree of similarity shown between cases.  In their full rich detail every case is different from every other case, so without some tolerance for inductive error or omission of details we cannot learn about the future from the past, or from each others experiences. But we need to know some things in advance about what happens if one makes various interventions for democratic policy or activist agitation to be better than chance at attaining their ends, and among the things we need to know are general social regularities, and that the experiences of comrades is a good guide to our own future, even where those comrades are in various ways different, and facing situations different from, us and our own. A mode of theorising that makes it harder to gain such knowledge is thus bourgeois theorising. (This interacts with a point made above: I sometimes suspect that many people who engage in this apparently liberatory bourgeois theory are acutely aware of the fact that the near term consequences of accurate general causal knowledge about society being available is benefitting the social engineering projects of neoliberal technocrats.)

Pluralism is Wrong Because it's Right

I am about to attend the second day of a very interesting conference on pluralism. Since everyone at this conference is convinced of some sort of pluralism I thought I ought, as a good pluralist, argue against pluralism. The basis of my sceptical argument shall be that pluralism is correct, so I am confident it shall win assent among my comrades and colleagues.

What makes for a good scientific explanation of a given phenomenon? Is it, perhaps, a valid argument, the premises of which are true and contain at least one law-like statement (without which the argument would not be valid), and the conclusion of which is a description of the phenomenon? Is it, instead, a description or production of a mechanism which, when operative, suffices to produce the phenomenon? Is it, against both those options, a unifying and parsimonious theory, which in-some-sense entails or otherwise predicts the phenomenon in question along with many others of interest? Or is it all of the previous, and perhaps other things besides?

Pluralists favour the last of these options. We need not pick among these options; good scientific explanation can be many things, they say. And, this is a move which crops up in a lot of places in sciencey parts of philosophy (and perhaps other places besides, which I don't comment on out of ignorance). What ontology best fits our physical theories? What sort of methods are most reliable for scientific inquiry? What makes an argument logically valid? These are all questions which have received a similar pluralist treatment to the question of the nature of good scientific explanation -- philosophers (and scientists and mathematicians) offered various accounts, and eventually some wit came along and said that perhaps each can have its place in its own domain, or that each can be counted equally well true (on some understanding of `equally well true'), or that each would be a best fit depending on one's purpose, and so on and so on. In short,  after protracted debate between various accounts, the pluralist comes along and offers an account which says that all or most of the main contenders can be seen as in some sense correct, only chiding them for being over-ambitious in their claims to exclusive possession of the truth.

Ok so now for my sceptical argument. I begin with a word on why I think pluralism is nearly almost correct, or at least the account most likely to be true from those we've yet developed. There are two main reasons for this. First, usually pluralists seem to me to be asserting a disjunction. Where previously there were theories A, B, or C on the table, competing in their attempts to characterise X, the pluralist comes along and finds some way to see things such that the truth about X is that it is A or B or C. At the least, then, the pluralist cannot be doing worse than their disjuncts when it comes to likelihood of being correct! Now, there are many versions of pluralism, and it is always contentious how to characterise pluralism about a domain, and I am sure many pluralists should not like this characterisation. But this is how it often seems to play out in conversations I am party to. Minimally, I think that many statements of pluralist positions about a topic matter leave it ambiguous as to whether their account would be either vacuously true or refuted if it turns out that all the actual cases of X we ever need to care about can be chracterised as of type A. My instinct is that the pluralist in that scenario has it open to them to say that, perhaps so, but none the less Xs of type B or C would have been perfectly good Xs; but others may think that in this case the pluralist really is refuted. (In fact, I think there is more to say here, but it turns on the metaphilosophical point discussed below -- so I'll return to it later!)

My second reason for thinking pluralism is true is just a matter of optimism about people, or trust or faith in their ability to inquire, or something of the sort. Usually the dialectic in the development of pluralist accounts of various objects of interest goes as follows. Some non-pluralist begins by offering a theory of X, and showing how their theory of X does ever so well at accounting for the appearance of X in cases 1, 2, and 3. Then, alas, some other non-pluralist comes along and says: well not so fast, for in cases 3 and 4 the first account doesn't do so well, whereas this rival account would get them perfectly -- and perhaps cases 1, 2, and 3 can be brought under the purview of the rival account too, come to think of it... And so it goes, with long-running unresolved-dispute and a proliferation of cases. Until eventually a pluralist descends into the saṃsāra and brings peace to these troubled folk by ending their craving for a single unified and exclusive account of X. (At least such is the plan.) Well, in cases like this, it just seems to me a pretty natural reading of what is going on is that the various non-pluralist disputants, smart and earnest folk that they are, have each got at an aspect of the truth about X, or grasped-how-X-appears-in-some-cases; and in so far as the pluralist is just acknowledging that then I am on the pluralists' side. Think of that trope of the blindfolded folk grasping at the elephant, and all that. Neither of these arguments is conclusive, of course; that's why I am publishing them in a blog post without referees to get in my way! But they sway me towards pluralism in nearly all cases.

So if I think this why don't I like pluralism? Here I think it turns on what I take the purpose of philosophical inquiry to be. To state the matter far too briefly, I don't think the world needs us philosophers (the sentence would be true if it stopped here) to agree upon the truth of the matter regarding our various topics of interest. A lot of the benefit philosophers do comes from the way we refine various conceptual tools, or make available new options, or keep alive old options that folk in other fields think ought be rejected, or produce beautiful and inspiring aesthetic objects.  (This list could be continued -- I am a pluralist about the benefits of philosophy, of course, I only downplay ``produce true theories of philosophical domains''.)  These do not require us to come to consensus about the truth of the matter. At most, the truth about our topic matters can be instrumentally useful to some of these tasks, but on the whole I think this rarely occurs. So the fact that pluralism is most likely to be correct does not seem to me to be a very good reason for philosophers to adopt it. Instead, pluralism often seems to me to make it less likely that we as a community shall attain various of the goods listed.

For, pluralism gets us to accept a truth which can too easily accommodate rival claims. If somebody offers some new theory (even if they insist that they are not pluralists, that this the One Truth about the domain) then a canny pluralist can, in so far as the new theory is plausible, always just extend their disjunction by one more disjunct. Whatever the equivalent to Popperian falsifiability for abstract philosophical claims is -- pluralism lacks that. And I think this constant fear of being wrong, and proven to be so by one's accursed rivals, is a useful feature of philosophical life. Take, for instance, this defence of pluralism about social scientific methodology. Since I speak to the authors, I happen to know that at least one of them was (in part) motivated by a desire to put to rest arguments between those who favour quantitative and qualitative methods in the social sciences. Now, I share this author's irritation with such arguments. But is that a good reason to defend pluralism? For, such arguments seem to me to have been productive in generating interesting novelties, as each side has had to refine its methods in response to the critiques and teasing of others. The development of process tracing in political science seems largely to have been spurred by felt rivalry (and indeed somewhat of an inferiority complex in comparison) with quantitative methods, and I know of an attempt to develop formal tools for reasoning about intersectionality theory that was in part goaded by claims (coming  from qualitative theorists) that it was impossible. The pluralist move in these cases would have, if widely accepted, taken away a significant spur to such inquiry, and does not have anything it obviously offers in the place. Fear, jealousy, pride, overweening ambition -- these are the stuff of philosophical progress. By appealing to the better angels of our nature pluralists will damn us all.

Having said all this, I will end by taking it back. Love and kindness and cooperation and a generally chill attitude have their place in philosophical inquiry too. But one shouldn't let mere truth get in the way of a tweet-sized pull-quote. And some of it was just me trying to extend my love of Feyerabend's counter-induction to the case of philosophy. But the fact that something appeals to my inner teenage rebel hardly seems like a good reason to accept it. What's more, in fact, I think what I say here is even more internally incoherent than it appears on the surface. For, I think this relative indifference to the truth in philosophy is the reason why pluralism seems to me to be asserting a disjunction: I do not much care if accounts A and B of explanation do not really count as good explanations but only C does, if it turns out that along the way to developing accounts A and B various innovations were made that can be useful in other contexts. For my intents and purposes, if you convince me that A and B and C can all be useful or illuminating regarding X in their own way, then it seems to me that one has said that we can accept A or B or C as achieving exactly what philosophy is meant to achieve. But, then, am I not in this relative indifference to the truth undermining any reason for proponents of these respective options to engage in jealous rivalries? Well, no; but only because nobody cares what I say about anything.