The Sooty Empiric

Recently I read this post -- " Behavioural Science Needs to Return to the Basics " -- and I didn't like it. In this blog post I am going to complain about it. To be clear my complaints are not going to dispute that there are lots of tiresome prigs in academia, that given the general demeanour of academics tiresome moralists tend to be of the liberal left variety, and even less that in work (both ideological and not) there is a lot of slapdash reasoning. All of those claims are certainly true, and (aha) the lived experience of any academic will confirm them adequately enough. (If you don't believe me then see here .) These are pretty central claims to the linked piece, so that's a substantial amount of agreement! But alas in academia we don't just care that you say true things, we care that you say true things for the right reasons. The old joke that philosophers are the kind of people who say "I know it works in practice but does it work in theory?"

So I decided to rank the races. In particular, I wanted to see just how many more white philosophers there are on the list of the 376 Most Cited Recent Philosophers in the Stanford Encyclopaedia compiled  by Eric Schwitzgabel.  I didn't have any way of telling more sophisticated than using my background knowledge plus google images search to examine the exact shape of people's brows to work out their ethnic background. So I am sure I made some mistakes (is Richard J. Arneson just really swarthy or what? And no link to ethnicity but shout out to Will Kymlicka's moustache it's great) -- but on the whole I think I am at least roughly correct. So I think there are 8* non white philosophers on the list:  Jaegwon Kim, 59th most cited. Amartya K. Sen, 83rd most cited. Richard Sorabji, 111th most cited. Kwame Anthony Appiah, 158th most cited. Linda Martín Alcoff, 260th most cited. Mohan Matthen, 272nd most cited. Charles W. Mills 335th most cited. Sahotra Sarkar, tied for 335t

This is literally happening right now at universities across the world. Exactly this. There has been another round of discussion online about evil humanities professors disordering our political life by spreading pernicious relativism about truth and objectivity. I remain convinced that this is a distraction, that in fact none of our disputes in political and social life are actually about the nature of truth. Apparently I have not persuaded people! So today I try a different approach. I will try to persuade you that all the sorts of things people do to actually create trouble for claims of objective truth are, in the main, unobjectionable, or even where controversial not really the sort of thing that divides us politically. When philosophers discuss truth we have a stock example of a true sentence -- "snow is white". This is because of the role the claim played in a classic, really genre defining, paper by the polish logician Alfred Tarski . In the serene peace of academic

The American educational system teaches children to distinguish between "facts" and "opinions". A recent paper in Misinformation Review  has even made mastery of this distinction a marker of civic political competence. Per this paper facts are those statements that "can be proved or disproved with objective evidence" whereas opinions are those statements that "depend on personal values and preferences". I think this is a bogus distinction and should not have any role as a marker of political competence or as part of children's education.  Now, this is a topic other better philosophers have handled and I agree with their critiques. Corvino outlines the trouble with trying to draw the distinction in any coherent fashion. The NYT piece by McBrayer linked above correctly points out there is no way this could sensibly divide all claims in the manner sometimes suggested. Jenkins-Ichikawa points out the kind of category error involved, how the d

Starting the year off right with a reactionary screed. One thing that regularly causes internet squabbles is casting of fantasy and sci-fi characters with non-white actors/actresses. There was a bit of that for the Lord of the Rings show on Amazon, a bit of that when Boyega was cast as Finn in Star Wars, and even (ok it's not really fantasy but whatever) with a recent adaptation of the Famous Five. Since I am a huge nerd these often revolve around worlds or settings that I am interested in. So in this blog post I will try and classify the different kind of settings that this sort of thing can happen in and my broad attitude to what's going on in these cases. Now, of course, anything can be done well and anything can be done poorly, so ultimately a lot will depend on skill of the person doing the adaptation. Still though I think there are facts about how settings work that push in certain directions, and these should at least be taken into account. Still unclear what I mean?

A recent Matt Yglesias post  contained some discussion of concerns people have about the contemporary humanities. For those not subscribed he included a screenshot of the discussion in a recent tweet . The basic idea is that there are some core values underlying American society (the context from which he writes, but I think we can fairly generalise this to at least other liberal democracies) and that people expect educated people to be inculcated into these values. By way of example he mentions ideals of religious freedom and  "a philosophical lineage from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes and Locke and Mill and Rawls". He says that while it is good to hear about radical critiques of such ideas and such a tradition, and that can even be from some who endorse the critiques (intelligent advocacy for the view points being a good way of hearing them at their strongest) in the end the broader society will not long put up with funding institutions that are too hostile to these things.