Author Archives: Matthew J. Brown

About Matthew J. Brown

Professor of Philosophy, Boydston Chair of American Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University.

Descartes Lectures – Day 3 (in Tweets)

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See my tweets summarizing Day 1 and Day 2

I think I went kind of crazy in the amount of tweeting I did today. But I don’t see how to edit it down for this purpose, so here you go. Again, I’ve included some of the talkback, even though it wasn’t all realtime, and some other live-tweeters.

Heather’s Lecture

Typo! That should be “science literacy” not “science literally.”

Commentaries

The explanation here was complicated, but what she was saying was that it is really possible to have the evidence presented in such a way, without all the little bits, e.g., the way that problems for the account of anthropogenic climate change arose, and were responded to.

Afternoon Sessions

https://twitter.com/danieljhicks/status/773536962829488128

Final Panel Discussion

Descartes Lectures – Day 2 (in Tweets)

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See my tweets summarizing Day 1 and Day 3

We had another great day of the Descartes Lectures & Conference on “Science, Values, and Democracy” yesterday. Today generated a little more discussion on Twitter, which I inserted, out of chronological order.

Heather’s Lecture

https://twitter.com/danieljhicks/status/773281220801114112

(As I referenced above, we got to the root of this at our discussion at dinner.)

Commentaries

Afternoon Sessions!

My paper was next. Here is the main upshot of my paper:

Ideal of Moral Imagination: Encouraging scientists to recognize decision-point, creatively explore possible choices, empathetically recognize potential stakeholders, and discover morally salient aspects and consequences of the decision via dramatic rehearsal.

After that, I was moderating, and so I didn’t Tweet. But I had to add this:

On to Day 3!

Descartes Lectures – Day 1 (in Tweets)

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See my tweets summarizing Day 2 and Day 3

Here’s what happened at Heather Douglas‘s Descartes Lectures & the associated conference, today. Or at least, what I Tweeted about it.

Preliminary Stuff

Heather’s Lecture: “Science & Values: The Pervasive Entanglement

Commentary on Douglas’s First Lecture

Didn’t tweet anything else about that, because I was giving the commentary! 😉

Q&A

Afternoon Sessions

It turns out, by the way, that I was wrong about this. “Value-neutral” means something related, but different. There’s no place in Douglas’s view for what Thomas was talking about… but he still wasn’t talking about “value-free expertise”!!

I really like this point.

In part, I think this is because my energy and attention span was really waning.

I won’t post the rest of my Tweets about Alessandra’s talk, because they weren’t very good, due to exhaustion.

Some encouragement

On to Day 2!

Dispatches from Pittsburgh

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Greetings from Pittsburgh, PA, somewhere on the border between the neighborhoods of Squirrel Hill and Greenfield. It is nearing the end of my first full day of a roughly 8 month adventure. I’m here for my sabbatical year and on a visiting fellowship at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, one of the most important institutions in the field still in operation. It’s an honor to be invited to be a visiting fellow. I’m planning to go in tomorrow morning to get acquainted with the Center, fill out paperwork, and properly start my visit.

Since arriving in Pittsburgh, I’ve done a significant amount of walking (and I hope to do a lot more). I have gone grocery shopping and to Target. I’ve figured out the transit system, more or less. I’ve cooked two meals in my rental apartment, which is seeming more homey by the hour.

My plan, while I am here, is to write a book on science & values. It is the area I’ve been working in most since I finished my dissertation, and one where I’ve slowly developed my ideas in bits and pieces in my philosophical articles over the last 7 years. I think I’m finally ready to put it all together, and I think it will take a book to do it. The book will also be informed by the work on ethical decision-making in engineering research and design that I’ve been engaged with for the past several years with my collaborators at UT Dallas.

The book is engaged primarily with the current debates about values in science, but it draws on two other influences. One is the pragmatism of John Dewey, particularly his views on the logic of inquiry, the nature of values, and the role of science in society. The other is the philosophy of science in practice, a tradition that includes (in my view) the early Thomas Kuhn, the later Paul Feyerabend, Norwood Russell Hanson, Nancy Cartwright, John Dupré, and Hasok Chang, and also closely connected with the work of, among others, Peter Galison and Bruno Latour.

The tentative title of the book is “Science and the Moral Imagination.” I’m sure I will post again about the content of the book. The basic ideas behind the project are (1) that the scientific quest for knowledge and the ethical quest for a good life and a just society are deeply interrelated pursuits, ultimately inextricable from one another; (2) that scientific inquiry involves a series of interlocking, contingent, and open choices, which can only be resolved intelligently and responsibly through a process of value judgment; and, (3) that “research ethics” or “responsible conduct of research” should be a process not merely of compliance with prior given principles or edicts, but should involve the creative projection of consequences (in the broadest sense), and evaluation of those consequences. It is this latter (clumsily expressed) point that I hope to capture with the phrase “moral imagination.” To put the point differently, I seek to explicate and defend an ideal for science according to which “seekers of knowledge” ought to “use their creativity to make the world a better place in which to live.”

What I’m reading this week: John Dewey & Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics by Steven Fesmire and Science, Values, and Democracy (Descartes Lecture Draft) by Heather Douglas.
What I’m writing: My commentary on Heather’s Lecture #1 on “Science and Values,” and my presentation for the Descartes Lectures Conference. (Why did I say I would do both??)
Other stuff I’m working on: Learning my way around Pittsburgh; establishing a routine; improving my diet and exercise; getting into the habit of blogging more.
What I’m doing for fun: Walking; reading The Waste Lands by Stephen King; meeting new people.

Science and Pop Culture

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Tonight’s the first meeting of my Science and Popular Culture class, and I am super-friggin-thrilled about it. Tonight we’ll be enjoying and discussing:

Next week: The Island of Doctor Moreau by HG Wells, Dr Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog, clips from Frankenstein (old and Young), Jekyll and Hyde: The Musical, the Protomen, and much more.

It’s going to be a fun semester.

A question of authorship

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I am trying to finish my paper on William Moulton Marston, and I am having significant difficulty deciding how to credit the scientific writings usually attributed to Marston alone. Here’s how I describe the problem in the paper:

Marston’s work and his personal relationships were deeply intertwined. Elizabeth Holloway held steady work most of her life, including a long editorial stint at Encyclopedia Britannica, supporting Marston when he was having trouble finding (and keeping) work. She was not only an inspiration and silent collaborator in much of Marston’s work; he often gave her credit. In Emotions of Normal People he reports on the results of experiments they had designed and performed together (370); elsewhere he reports that she “collaborated very largely” with him on the book (Lepore, 144). She is a credited co-author of the textbook Integrative Psychology. Olive Byrne received a master’s degree in psychology from Columbia, and she pursued but did not complete her PhD there (Lepore 124-5). Emotions of Normal People incorporated not only the research that Byrne had assisted Marston with at Tufts, but her entire master’s thesis on “The Evolution of the Theory and Research on Emotions” (Lepore 124-8). When it comes to authorship, Lepore points out:

[T]here is an extraordinary slipperiness.. in how Marston, Holloway, and Byrne credited authorship; there work is so closely tied together and their roles so overlapping that it is not difficult to determine who wrote what. This seems not to trouble any of them one bit. (ibid 127).

Thus, when examining the work of “William Moulton Marston,” it is crucial to keep in mind that said work is likely a collaborative production of (at least) Marston with Holloway or Byrne, if not both. It is tempting, then, to refer to “Marston, Holloway, and Byrne” or “Marston et al.” or “the Marstons” when describing “Marston’s” psychological contributions.

After this point, and throughout the paper, I have to discuss Marston’s record of publications, his psychological theories, his experiments, and so on. Currently, I refer to “Marston” in discussing works which list him as sole author, as well as the ideas cited in those works, and “Marston et al.” only in his one major co-authored publication (co-authored with Elizabeth Holloway Marston and C. Daly King). I’m unhappy with this approach, but also feel that doing one of the other things suggested above would be rather cumbersome.

Perhaps the fact that Marston, Holloway, and Byrne didn’t care much about it means I shouldn’t care much either. But what was expedient in their time is much more blatantly sexist in ours. Obviously, the citations in the bibliography should remain as they are, but the discussions in the text are a different story.

Duck Genitals and Feminist Science Studies

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Spring 2013 saw another round of misguided right-wing attacks on basic scientific research in the U.S. Congress, a political tactic that purports to demonstrate the wastefulness of the federal government by showing off the price tag (often small in terms of scientific research budgets) for obscure research that can be described in ways that make it sound goofy or idiotic. This time around, it peaked my interest a good bit more, because it brought national media attention to one of my favorite bits of biological research: Patricia Brennan’s work on duck genitalia. (Brennan wrote a wonderful defense of her research for Slate. Even the Union of Concerned Scientists weighed in.)

Why do I love this research so much? The biology is interesting, yes (more on that in a minute), but also, as a philosopher of science with a long-standing interest in feminist science studies, I see it as following the exact structure of some of the classic cases from that literature. That is, Brennan’s work exemplifies the pattern of research of women entering a field of research dominated by men, revolutionizing and improving the methods and theories in that field. It is thus similar to the earlier cases of primatology as described by Donna Haraway—where scientists hadn’t paid much attention to the behavior if female primates and ended up with theories where their roles were entirely passive—and reproductive cell biology as described by (inter alia) Emily Martin—where the “Prince Charming/Sleeping Beauty” theory of sperm/egg fertilization was a going idea, I kid you not.

To get the basics, let’s start with this “True Facts” video by Ze Frank:

Continue reading →

Excerpts from Socrates’ Journal

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From recently discovered fragments, sent by Socrates to Plato in his capacity as editor of the right-wing conspiracy journal, The Dialogues:

Socrates’ journal, October 12, 399 BCE.: Dog carcass in agora this morning. Chariot tread on burst stomach. The city is afraid of me. I have seen it’s true face…

Socrates’ journal, October 13: …On Friday night, a poet died in Athens. Somebody knows why. Down there…somebody knows. The dusk reeks of unclear ideas and bad definitions. I believe I shall take my exercise.

October 21: Left Glaucon’s house at 2:35 A.M. He knows nothing about any attempt to discredit Parmenides. He has simply been used. By whom? Spartans seem obvious choice…

November 1: If reading this now, whether I am alive or dead, you will know truth. Whatever the precise nature of this conspiracy, Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon responsible. Have done best to make this legible. Believe it paints a disturbing picture. Appreciate your recent support and hope world survives long enough for this to reach you. But phalanxes are in Piraeus and writing is on wall. For my own part, regret nothing. Have lived life, free from compromise…and step into the shadow now without complaint.

Philosophy, Funding, and Conflict of Interest

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A couple of weeks back, Justin Weinberg at the Daily Nous posed a really interesting question. The context was Daniel Dennett’s review of Alfred Mele’s book Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will. Dennett gives a relatively standard story about conflict of interest in science funding using a hypothetical story of saturated fat research funded by “the Foundation for the Advancement of Bacon.” On standard accounts, we are right to apply a higher level of scrutiny towards research whose funding displays a potential conflict of interest, and this is why, e.g., we have COI reporting requirements in certain journals and for federally funded research.

Dennett then points out that Mele’s work is funded by the John Templeton Foundation, which (simplifying a bit) has an ultimate agenda the integration of science and religion, and lately has been funding large projects that involve philosophers, scientists, and theologians working together on a shared theme, like Free Will or Character. Mele has received and managed two such grants.

Here’s Justin:

Mele’s project is not the only Templeton-funded philosophy project, nor is Templeton the only source of funds with an agenda. Dennett is claiming that funding from ideological sources casts a shadow on philosophical research in much the same way that funding from industry casts a shadow on scientific research. Is he correct?

Unfortunately, the question was lost as the thread got hijacked by a lot of nonsense, specific details about Templeton and Dennett’s neo-Atheist anti-Templeton agenda, as well as some understandable pragmatic implications of Dennett’s statements on Mele’s character. Most egregious were the many denials that conflict of interest is an issue in science, that they somehow amounted to a fallacious ad hominem argument. For instance, Terrance Tomkow and Kadri Vihvelin claim “the motives of the researcher or his employers are always beside the scientific point.” Dennett answered this point well when he said,

As for Tomkow and Vihvelin’s high-minded insistence that one is obliged “to ignore” the sponsorship of research, I wonder what planet they have been living on recently. Why do they think that researchers have adopted the policy of always declaring the sources of their funding?

Or as Richard Zach said, “It’s as if the past few decades of work on values in science didn’t happen.”

I think Justin’s original question is interesting, though, because it encourages us to think past the specific details of Mele’s book, Dennett’s critique, and the Templeton foundation. Maybe it is because I work at a STEM university, but I often hear talk that the humanities are going to have to move more towards extramural funding. For philosophers, Templeton is where the big money is, but there are also plenty of smaller private foundations, donors funding endowed Chairs (as Zara pointed out), and so on. It’s a timely question. And it is one that invites us to reflect on the similarities and differences between the sciences and philosophy (or the humanities more broadly). I wish more commenters had taken up the call.

I would suggest one analogy and one major disanalogy between science and philosophy in regards to conflict of interest. The analogy is, if I understood him right, what Dennett was getting at: funding applied on a large scale can alter, or even distort, the research agenda of a discipline. And evaluating that will require us to think about what the research agenda ought to look like.

The importance of research agendas in science is the centerpiece of Philip Kitcher’s Science, Truth, and Democracy and Science in a Democratic Society. He describes the ideal research agenda for science or a scientific discipline as well-ordered science (WOS), and he argues persuasively that not only epistemic and internal disciplinary values, but also practical and ethical values are central to determining what counts as WOS. Further, he argues that WOS should be evaluated democratically, in some sense. Because science is a social institution, it is ultimately responsible for serving the public. Kitcher also rightly recognizes the roles of funding sources and individual choices in actually setting research agendas, and argues that individual sciences have a duty to stand up and fight for change when the research agenda in their field is very far from well-ordered.

Likewise, we could ask about what “well-ordered philosophy” would look like. Presumably, many philosophers (like many scientists) would argue that notions of intrinsic intellectual/philosophical merit, strength of argument, and freedom of research should determine the ideal research agenda. I, and I suspect Kitcher as well, would prefer pragmatic, ethical, and political considerations to play a role. Either way, we can ask whether and how funding sources are moving us towards or away from a well-ordered research agenda.

Mele’s work discusses Free Will, argues that contrary to some triumphalist claims, the sciences haven’t settled the question yet, criticizes some of those claims by scientists, and is agnostic about whether free will is compatible with determinism. I’m not sure how those things fit with the ideological agenda of Templeton, though I can understand the feeling that they do, somehow. And insofar as Templeton wants to stay a major player in funding research on Free Will, we could see more of this sort of thing, less of other approaches. Zooming out to the context that Justin invites us to consider, it is worth wondering what the effects of funded research can be on the research agenda of philosophy, and it is worth deliberating about whether some funding sources should be considered a problematic conflict of interest, Templeton included. (My own view, held tentatively, is that Templeton is alright in this respect but should be closely monitored.) But also note, that until one has a sense that funding agencies are having a systematic effect, it doesn’t seem reasonable to criticize individuals in the way that Dennett does (if implicitly).

The disanalogy I would like to mention has to do with the different types of arguments that are made in empirical science and in philosophy. Philosophical arguments are usually scholarly while scientific arguments are generally technical. I mean these in a specific sense inspired by Bruno Latour’s Science in Action (N.B., these terms aren’t the ones Latour uses). To make an argument in philosophy requires nothing more than a library card, writing implements, the ability to adopt the current style of the literature in the field you wish to contribute to, and the ability to craft an argument. Scholarly arguments can be evaluated on their surface—you need only to examine the content of the text itself, and perhaps the cited sources, to understand the argument or produce a counter-argument.

Some elements of scientific texts can be evaluated in this way. But scientific arguments are also technical. In particular, much of the argument hangs on what Latour calls inscriptions—tables, charts, graphs, and figures—produced by instruments. There are hard limits to how far one can interrogate a technical text. One can raise questions about certain inferences and interpretations, and one can examine the equipment and materials that produce the data and the inscriptions, at least, as long as one has an invitation to the relevant laboratory and the patience of one’s host. But past a certain point, making an effective counter-argument requires a counter-laboratory with instruments producing inscriptions that can be used in arguments. To a large extent, the technical nature of modern science is a major source of its power and effectiveness; but a cost is that we have to rely on trust to a greater extent. And conflict of interest is at least a pro tanto reason to withhold that trust, whereas trust is not at issue in philosophical arguments in the same sense.

So while it is incorrect for Jim Griffis to say that “If the ‘science is impeccable, carefully conducted and rigorously argued’ there would be no problem with who paid for the research,” because of the technical nature of science, he is right to say that “for philosophical works, either the argument is cogent or it’s not.”

Full disclosure: I have previously applied for (but not received) Templeton funding.

Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth

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I’ve just begun reading Jill Lepore’s new book about Wonder Woman and William Moulton Marston. So far, I’m finding it to be really thorough and excellent! [Edit: My final assessment was much more mixed.] I was a little disturbed, though, to discover that on the first page of the preface, Lepore makes a basic mistake about one of the key features of the early Wonder Woman comics:

“She had a magic lasso; anyone she roped had to tell the truth”(xi).

She repeats the point in one of the color plates in the middle of the book, which does show Wonder Woman compelling a thug to tell the truth. The accompanying text that connects this work to lie detectors and Marston’s work on deception is ultimately misleading, however.

What’s the problem here? Isn’t it called “the Lasso of Truth?” The problem, as Brian Cronin pointed out a couple of years ago at Comic Book Resources, is that this is actually anachronistic. Marston called this iconic element of Wonder Woman’s gear the “Magic Lasso” or sometimes “Golden Lasso,” not the lasso of truth. And its power has nothing specific to do with the truth, but rather with compelling obedience.

Lasso1

LieDetectorAIt’s a tempting connection to make Marston, after all, invented the lie detector test, or at least, he’s one of its most recognizable developers and proponents. It’s a common and tempting connection to draw:

Here’s Geoffrey Bunn, one of the few historians of psychology to write in detail about Marston:

“Anyone caught in the lasso found it impossible to lie. And because Wonder Woman used it to extract confessions and compel obedience, the golden lasso was of course nothing less than a lie detector.” (Bunn 1997, p. 108)

slaveThe real story behind Wonder Woman’s magic lasso is much more interesting and much stranger. Marston was an experimental psychologist who developed a theory of emotions. According to his theory, the four basic emotions were Dominance, Compliance, Inducement, and Submission. According to Marston, submission was a matter of giving over one’s will to a basically friendly stimulus; not only was it necessarily a pleasant emotion, but it was a necessary component of love and thus of a healthy psyche. What the magic lasso was able to do, it seems, was to place the person bound in an automatic state of submission to the will of the lasso’s wielder, making them happy to do whatever you asked. Including, occasionally, to tell the truth when they intended to deceive. Lasso2

However, more often than not, when Wonder Woman wanted to know whether someone was telling the truth, she’d make use of the very tool that Marston invented for that purpose, a lie detector test based on systolic blood pressure measurements.

LieDetector1

 

Above I called the mistake an anachronism, because while Marston never used the term “Lasso of Truth,” present day comics do refer to it by that name. According to Cronin, this usage began in Wonder Woman volume 2 #2 (1987; Writer: Greg Potter, Artist: George Pérez, Editor: Karen Berger). This is the post-Crisis reboot of Wonder Woman, meaning that it occurred after the Crisis on Infinite Earths mini-series that altered the continuity of the DC Comics universe. Presumably, the creators knew about Marston’s interests in lie detection, and decided to change the powers and name of the lasso accordingly. (On the other hand, the commenters on Cronin’s piece suggests that the usage comes from the Wonder Woman TV show starring Linda Carter, so perhaps the connection was made by the creators of the show.)

UPDATE: Noah Berlatsky gets it right in his new book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948.

Besides her superstrength, superspeed, superendurance, and other physical prowess, [Wonder Woman] also has bracelets that she can use to block bullets, an invisible plane, and a magic lasso that compels obedience to her commands (in later iterations, the lasso’s power is often downgraded so that it forces people to tell the truth rather than forcing them to obey any command).