SECOND POST
Jul. 21st, 2021 01:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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Post about fandom or whatever else, meme isn't picky.
(start a comment thread by replying to this post)
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 11:21 am (UTC)Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 11:40 am (UTC)I do enjoy JCJ's takes, and I appreciate that she's capable of ripping conti a new one on their own terms but I really have been wanting to see analytic philosophers do their bit too and that's the need Material Girls filled for me.
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 12:24 pm (UTC)Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 12:37 pm (UTC)But yeah, she writes a lot about women's representation in philosophy and EDI more generally and it'd be very easy to make a reference to tw, and they're notably absent. So I get the impression she's hoping not to poke the hornets' nest but she's also not going to pretend it's full of charming butterflies.
(Also you've probably already seen: https://www.philosophersmag.com/essays/253-material-girls-why-reality-matters-for-feminism-a-review , but I hadn't, and heh)
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 03:46 pm (UTC)That's my impression as well. That wordpress hit a peak for awhile. All the profession could seem to talk about was correcting sexism within the profession but at some point (I'd alnmost say the JKR essay and the transphobia posts, but I distinctly remember the Tuvel issue as a turning point.) And now, silence and focus on transphobia. Or maybe the politics of the profession is subordinate to the politics of student bodies and their current favoured social justice wars, idk.
> But yeah, she writes a lot about women's representation in philosophy and EDI more generally and it'd be very easy to make a reference to tw, and they're notably absent. So I get the impression she's hoping not to poke the hornets' nest but she's also not going to pretend it's full of charming butterflies.
(Also you've probably already seen: https://www.philosophersmag.com/essays/253-material-girls-why-reality-matters-for-feminism-a-review , but I hadn't, and heh)
Yea that's my thought. The silences are telling in the profession. I was grimly pleased by the number of philosophers who didn't want to sign the letter denouncing transphobia where I was. I get that people don't want to deal with the consequences of speaking up and a lack of voiced support is still a promising sign.
Of course, now we say that, there'll be more "THE SILENCE IS DEAFENING YOU'RE TAKING THE SIDE OF THE OPPRESSOR" because that's really where we're headed for right now. The attacks on Stock and Lawford-Smith aren't surprising and matters are coming to a head.
I liked Baggini's review and I'm fine with his work but I've never really forgiven him for retreating in the face of Brian Cox and Robin Ince shitting on philosophy and conceding the only thing the discipline still has an edge in is ethics. That's so much ground ceded for no reason.
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 04:18 pm (UTC)And not just because of my general view that Philosophical Ethics is an underwhelming subset of Creative Writing anyway> Of course, now we say that, there'll be more "THE SILENCE IS DEAFENING YOU'RE TAKING THE SIDE OF THE OPPRESSOR" because that's really where we're headed for right now. The attacks on Stock and Lawford-Smith aren't surprising and matters are coming to a head.
Agreed, and part of why I'd make that observation here but not on a busier forum! Though at least it's only the most desperate TRAs looking for those kinds of "signs" atm. And they can't do much with it. But yeah, the prof I was thinking of had a recent post about women's representation and it mentioned other axes of oppression in passing-- race, sexuality, disability-- and it was obvious what *wasn't* on there. T'was one of those times when the rest of stuff on the page was so much in line with the standard progressive script, the gap *was* actually noisy. I was pleased because I liked her but didn't know her well enough to have any idea where she stood. Then again, I liked her because she was smart. :P
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 04:21 pm (UTC)But like srsly if you're gonna argue for the value of philosophy and you have options like "metaphysics" why would you pick fucking ethics? That was my main issue with The Good Place, tbh, okay it fit the series thematically but otoh they had all the branches of philosophy out there to explore and they picked moral philosophy, who does that.
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 04:37 pm (UTC)I was forced to take an ethics class in college, where the choices were basically philosophy or politics (maybe neuroscience too?). I actually really enjoyed it, maybe because it was a basically an anthropology class except we argued incessantly about definitions. I gained new insights about human behavior and society, and it is probably the single college course that most impacted my politics. So I'll go out there and defend ethics. (Haven't watched The Good Place.) To be fair, it was an ethics class that was less "what were these philosophers' theories on how to Live A Good Life" and more "What are the strategies and systems that cultures use to enforce their idea of Living A Good Life, and how can those systems be altered". But it built on more traditional ethical frameworks, and I can apologetically enjoy Aristotle's musings on How To Live A Good Life even as I toss out so much of his other musings on the trash-heap.
I'm less knowledgeable about other branches of philosophy, and personally any mention of metaphysics usually has my attention start wandering after a few minutes. I've been subjected to philosophy of science lectures and they seemed like smoldering piles of bullshit that had an alternate universe perception of actual science works but allowed academics to puff up their resume by being STEM-adjacent....
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 05:01 pm (UTC)> I'm less knowledgeable about other branches of philosophy, and personally any mention of metaphysics usually has my attention start wandering after a few minutes. I've been subjected to philosophy of science lectures and they seemed like smoldering piles of bullshit that had an alternate universe perception of actual science works but allowed academics to puff up their resume by being STEM-adjacent....
Ow! Tbf I do think the field can be hit and miss depending on who you're reading and where they were trained. Canberra philosophers, analytics to the gills, all of them, will never cease to amaze me with the alternate universes their idea of science comes from.
I think the ones who synch with historians of science and sociologists of science tend to be more sensible but that's still asterisked. Lots of analytics want to just sit back and theorise about a positivist sort of 'success story science' which can be weird because they're not interacting with how science is done, just how science is in their heads. A lot of the theories that get taught in intro classes are also early stuff which was before Kuhn introduced the methodological "what if we just fucking actually did science or looked at what the scientists did" + Edinburgh stuff so they have zero contact with scientific work / realities at all. The result is that most contemporary/competently-done philos sci tends to be out of step with the backwards way analytics look at science. '
But you know you've done fucked up over the suBjeCTivITY oF SCiEnCe when Bruno Latour has to walk back that postmodern shite because he's worried he's fueling climate change denialism. Good stuff /s
It was my spec and I'm into it and I seem to have said more than I'd meant to on the area...apologies nonny!
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 05:13 pm (UTC)Oh, I'm not offended or anything. I'm happy to hear a fullthroated defense of analytic philosophy, despite the fact or indeed because I personally have such trouble understanding the appeal. One can't easily consciously select their nerd passions, after all.
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 05:32 pm (UTC)thank u nonny, indeed, it is hard to consciously select our nerd passions.
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 05:27 pm (UTC)Hm, even our earliest philsci classes were all about comparing and evaluating different models of science itself, comparing Popper et al with Kuhn, issues with demarcating between science and pseudoscience (and issues with NOT doing so), etc. I do see philosophers describe science in romanticised terms sometimes but they tend not to be the philsci specialists.
So yeah, those were the general classes, and then the specialised classes were more "look at this study. They did xyz. They said it proved abc. BUT DID IT???" basically redoing the conclusion part of whatever study because the scientists would jump to conclusions that were out of their lane. (eg: "this shows blah causes blah!", Nope, you've shown a correlation)
> competently-done philos sci
Maybe that's why? :P
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 05:38 pm (UTC)Yea. I think models of science are useful for various reasons. Popper captures a very popular model of how science works and one that continues to beguile the popular imagination despite everything telling us that science doesn't work that way and it's more an idealisation than anything. I think getting a good grasp on how science works is important both because we are so reliant on it, and because I credit some of the science wars (especially over the past few years) with this false picture of science just setting the layperson up for disappointment when they are confronted with scientific messiness. That erodes trust in science which is bad for us if we want public buy-in for effective evidence-based policy-making.
I do see some positivists in philsci but by and large these tendencies, as you say, come from the non-specialists.
> So yeah, those were the general classes, and then the specialised classes were more "look at this study. They did xyz. They said it proved abc. BUT DID IT???" basically redoing the conclusion part of whatever study because the scientists would jump to conclusions that were out of their lane. (eg: "this shows blah causes blah!", Nope, you've shown a correlation)
Yea depends on the type of specialisation too. I really enjoyed getting down to the details of neuroscience and physical chem papers that way. At that level I see philsci and sci as ideally being equals in lending something to the project of sensemaking.
> Maybe that's why? :P
I cannot deny I have strong feelings about how to do this spec and my supervisor has always considered it a character flaw :P
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 05:51 pm (UTC)At that level I see philsci and sci as ideally being equals in lending something to the project of sensemaking.
This is something I just ... can't agree with as stated. It's good when scientists are less sloppy with their words, but it's nowhere near the top ten list of my priorities in terms of improving the field internally. Usually when there's sloppy word usage or people claiming to prove causes instead of correlation, there's an obvious mechanism leading to that sloppiness (need to quickly churn out !exciting! papers to get tenure, need to toss in buzzwords or use this framework to impress this particular bigwig who's a reviewer, etc). It's just backwards for philosophers to critique how science papers are written when the material conditions of producing that science led to the very flaws they're critiquing. Or rather, you can critique all you want, and make good points, but I just don't see how it translates to better science or better science communication.
What am I missing?
Re: BOOKS
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2021-10-08 06:56 pm (UTC) - ExpandRe: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 05:10 pm (UTC)Opposite experience I'm afraid, my experience of philsci was great; it was mostly "look at how this conclusion these scientists (and/or sci media) drew from their study did not follow from their premises. What *did* they show?". Then metaphysics was more "what's going on with... everything?". Meanwhile Ethics was mostly men trying to argue that their feelings had some great cosmological significance. I find discussions of practical ethics fun but I don't really think of it as philosophy because the foundation is fuzzy; it's closer to law, maybe. But then I'm basically an emotivist so pros in the field would ignore me anyway. From their perspective it'd be like arguing ontology or epistemology with a radical skeptic. You have to agree some common ground to play with the thought experiments and I just get hung up on "this is all significance we've just superimposed on the world based on our feelings tho" so any rules people derive then feel arbitrary. And instead I'm like, hey dudes it's okay, you're allowed feelings, you don't need a giant house of cards of your own devising to prove them Right. I have the same attitude to Aesthetics. I don't care about what other people deem Good or Beautiful because they're not me and they're all just arguing from their intuitions anyway, which are no more worthwhile than mine-- but they're arguing with a hundred extra steps and pretending they're doing something more noble. I don't care about their frameworks because they've worked them out backwards from those intuitions. The moment their intuition contradicts the framework, they'll ditch or revise it. In theory I only care at the point where people are having to decide some question of practical ethics and want to select a framework to use as a foundation, so it becomes a practical problem based on the needs of a society (and as you say closer to an anthropological question). But in practice people tend to default to utilitarianism anyway.
tl;dr: I'm happy to say the ultimate guide on ethics in my world is my gut feeling when I'm educated on the situation in question, and there is no requirement for consistency or abstraction into generally applicable rules. Thus I make a bad student of Ethics.
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 05:19 pm (UTC)I don't care about their frameworks because they've worked them out backwards from those intuitions. The moment their intuition contradicts the framework, they'll ditch or revise it.
Yeah, this is a great way of distilling our mental mismatch. As someone trained in STEM, that approach makes total sense to me and doing it any other way is confusing. I can hang with some relativist arguments - there's even good science that the way we extrapolate emotions from physical sensations is wildly dependent on whatever cultural ideas we've absorbed - but at the end of the day I want a "takeaway" that I can plug into other settings.
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 05:44 pm (UTC)Where for me it differs is that with STEM, you have some common assumptions about the world. Short version: you all agree to a materialist, empiricist view. Great. You can say "it's possible to be skeptical of this, but this has worked so far so I'm sticking to it. Screw the problem of induction. I will trust my eyes and ears to give me info about the world. I will trust that it'll be much the same tomorrow as today." There's a pragmatic foundation held together by faith. Then you build off that. If the laws of nature change tomorrow your body of research is in trouble, but then we'll all have bigger problems anyway.
But Ethics doesn't have that shared foundation, it's just floating around all the way down. So I agree practical ethics is much the same kind of activity, but not metaethics. And the closest thing practical ethics has to a foundation == people's feelings, which differ and have no reason to mean anything.
So when it comes to ethics, I'm not a relativist, I'm a me-ist. Where my educated opinions on the ethics of some situation differ from others', my opinions are correct and everyone else's are wrong. This is not a framework a society is willing to adopt, which is a pity, because it's the right one. :P
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 05:57 pm (UTC)Ah, this is interesting but I have to go back to work now and hopefully respond tomorrow? I think you're pretty on the nose re: scientists' empiricist assumptions, but I have basically the same outlook on ethical dilemmas as you espouse in your last paragraph but actually that's exactly why I love ethics -- so there's more to say!
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 05:44 pm (UTC)We're opposites! I'm trying hard to be a naturalist but idk if the position is tenable but I find myself rejecting emotivism after I was introduced to Frege-Geach (tho I know it's not insurmountable.)
> I have the same attitude to Aesthetics. I don't care about what other people deem Good or Beautiful because they're not me and they're all just arguing from their intuitions anyway, which are no more worthwhile than mine-- but they're arguing with a hundred extra steps and pretending they're doing something more noble.
Tbh I once said something like that in aesthetics class and then the lecturer told me it wasn't about whether it was Good or Beautiful but whether it was rational of us to consider it Good or Beautiful or what we could rationally consider Good or Beautiful. I don't fully agree with this framing because it seems a retreat from the initial project of identifying the Good and the Beautiful but it seems to capture for me the heart of the analytic project which has always fundamentally been concerned with rationality, even if we concede people generally aren't ideally rational.
I pragmatically care about consistency in ethics because I think that if you aren't consistent, it's less defensible, and people accuse you of adhoccery and won't get on board. But ive never been much of an ethicist either, it's too much fucking around with systems for my liking.
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 07:01 pm (UTC)> I find myself rejecting emotivism after I was introduced to Frege-Geach
Can't remember if I've read or not so will have to look!
> I pragmatically care about consistency in ethics because I think that if you aren't consistent, it's less defensible, and people accuse you of adhoccery and won't get on board.
Agree there, as a rhetorical device I think consistency matters, I just think whether or not one finds a framework where things can fit consistently has no bearing on the 'truth' of ethical claims, because it's not how we decide they're true in practice and I don't believe there's some other authority. So I take occams razor to frameworks. (But not in persuasive writing :p)
> But ive never been much of an ethicist either, it's too much fucking around with systems for my liking
Yep. And I find the same with aesthetics. Like even switching over to "is it rational", then introducing some construction of rationality and then saying "here is set of rules for rational views, does it match these rules?"... just felt like game-playing, tweaking the rules to suit the intuitions etc. I enjoyed reading some of the arguments but it never felt like more than playing a game
and dear fucking god do aesthetics profs take themselves seriously. Whereas even for something well-worn like "are we in a simulation?", well at least it leads somewhere more interesting than just "my taste in films is better than urs: an essay" masquerading as a deep question.Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 04:53 pm (UTC)> Agreed, and part of why I'd make that observation here but not on a busier forum! Though at least it's only the most desperate TRAs looking for those kinds of "signs" atm. And they can't do much with it. But yeah, the prof I was thinking of had a recent post about women's representation and it mentioned other axes of oppression in passing-- race, sexuality, disability-- and it was obvious what *wasn't* on there. T'was one of those times when the rest of stuff on the page was so much in line with the standard progressive script, the gap *was* actually noisy. I was pleased because I liked her but didn't know her well enough to have any idea where she stood. Then again, I liked her because she was smart. :P
Kind of? I think philosopher social networks are odd places now. I feel like Kukla, Ichikawa, Jenkins, and Lance are some of the reliable shit-starters that come to mind who would demand condemnation, and I know this guy at my former institution tried to get some people to condemn Stock and just got a half-hearted "k" from people so that was neat. Happy to be proven wrong tho.
I'm glad there are some other philosophers keeping their heads down though. Definitely a really obvious gap.
> But like srsly if you're gonna argue for the value of philosophy and you have options like "metaphysics" why would you pick fucking ethics? That was my main issue with The Good Place, tbh, okay it fit the series thematically but otoh they had all the branches of philosophy out there to explore and they picked moral philosophy, who does that.
Probably because he's an ethicist first and foremost I guess. Yeah that's my beef with The Good Place too. People don't seem to know what to do with philosophy. It's like how pop culture science is always physics. It's always ethics or the eudaimonia stuff, minus the Greek.
I'm a philos sci spec and from the tradition that actually requires familiarity with science. I did my primary training in STEM and so did those who taught me. There's stuff I don't want to get into because of doxxing fears but the past couple of years of people handwringing about science and all the pseudoscience and misinformation has basically been my kind of work in a nutshell. So yea I'm also like "Bags, why the f would you not mention other areas" but I do have a horse in the race.
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 07:11 pm (UTC)Yep! And it intersects with the peculiar (US?) TV obsession with asking "how to be a good person?". I've literally never cared about this question. It's meaningless. It doesn't come up. The world isn't split into Good People and Bad People because that's toddler logic. But everyone on TV is always angsting over being in the right part of their false dichotomy like it's important.
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 05:32 pm (UTC)Went to check Daily Nous on a whim:
https://dailynous.com/2021/10/08/students-at-sussex-campaign-to-get-philosopher-fired/
Looks like Weinberg is still trying to both sides this, but he also shut down comments so he likely doesn't want to deal with a trashfire. Given the last time he had a 'philosophy is transphobic' dispute, I am not actually surprised this is his reaction.
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 05:46 pm (UTC)LOLLLLLL IT ALREADY IS A TRASHFIRE
https://twitter.com/DailyNousEditor/status/1446459881125449748
One comment does not a trashfire make but bring on the drama. And P's not wrong. Weinberg is definitely conflating the right of the students to make their views clear with immunity from criticism.
Re: BOOKS
Date: 2021-10-08 07:24 pm (UTC)