philosophysmoker-Mstarz

As has been noted elsewhere and repeatedly (and yearly), updates to the Phylo wiki seem to be both erratic and inconsistent, with listings sometimes moving back and forth between categories. This may just be SOP for wikis, what with trolls and mischief-makers being about. But, if you're fucking around with the wiki, please stop ruining it for everyone. If you're legitimately and honestly updating the wiki, please continue because you're awesome. If you're not updating the wiki (and you are legit and honest and have legit and honest updates), please do so.

That said, anyone else feel like they don't want to be the first one to post an update?

Does it seem like the PFOs are going out early this year, or is it just me?

~zombie

This was posted by Anonymous on the previous thread, and warrants attention:

Wow. So I just read a letter of rec for a job candidate (I'm on a SC). Absolutely brutal. It wasn't just unenthusiastic; it outright insulted the candidate along numerous dimensions. Why would you agree to write a letter if you are going to go out of your way to say that the person is bad? I understand not going in for hyperbolic praise. I read tons of letters like those where it is clear that the letter writer isn't giving full support. But a letter this damning is a rare find.

Obviously, pretty scary.

I have questions:

• Were the other letters equally bad? Was this just one rotten letter from someone who really did not like the student? (One must wonder, as well, why the student didn't know this person thought so poorly of him/her. Was s/he being set up? Was this a personal vendetta? Sexism/racism/bias?)
• What moral/legal/professional duties do SC members have in such matters? Are they prohibited from writing to a candidate and saying, e.g. "One of your letters really stinks -- maybe you should ask someone to look into that." Or some such.
• What moral/legal/professional duties do letter writers have to the persons for whom they write letters? If you are asked for a "letter of recommendation," that seems, to me, to imply that, at minimum, you are going to recommend the subject of the letter. Insulting, demeaning, trashing, and not recommending would seem to be excluded from the mission of the letter of recommendation. Which is not to say that you have to offer a complete and unqualified endorsement of the student, but you have to endorse them to some extent. It would seem that this letter writer engaged in deceit and intentionally undermined the student under the guise of "recommending" them, unless they actually told the student that they could not and would recommend him/her. But then why write the letter at all?

So, this also points to the value of having someone look at your letters before they're sent out. My school/dept did not do this (the placement help was pretty lousy). I was tempted, a few times, to use Interfolio to send my letters to myself or a friend. But I couldn't convince myself that it was ethical to break the confidentiality, so I never did it. I'm curious though, to know from those who have had their letters evaluated by a third party, whether there were bad letters among them, and what happened.

~zombie

I've been following this discussion at Leiter about how Philosopher's Imprint is charging a $20 submission fee. I didn't have much to say about it, except the obvious--it seems like a really bad idea that would unfairly burden the unemployed, underemployed, non-tenure-track people, and graduate students. I strongly agree with "Third year on the job market," who writes:

I get the sense that people are making nuanced points here whereas it gets ignored (or understated) how TERRIBLE this move is for those of us who don't have a TT job and who are either grad students or doing temp jobs in a bid to secure a TT job (and, arguably, this is the group of philosophers that are the most desperate to have a publication in an excellent journal like PI).

Someone has to say this: Don't do that, Phil Imprint, just don't.

Part of the appeal of Phil Imprint was its democratic vision: everyone can read the papers published in this journal. But this new move cancels out this democratic vision as now not everyone can submit to this journal...*

I strongly disagree with David Wallace, who writes:

Actually, just picking up on Daniel Kaufman's point (which appeared while I was writing my last):

(A) I don't have a problem with the idea that the institution of a contributor to a magazine should pay the magazine to print that contribution.
(B) I don't have a problem with the idea that the institutions of junior faculty should have to pay their journals in order for junior faculty to submit to them.

If your institution isn't meeting your legitimately-incurred work-related expenses, that's a different matter, but it's not clear journals can do much about that.*

What Wallace doesn't seem to understand is that, for those of us not on the tenure track, this is not how it works at all. At all. My job comes with no research requirement or any official expectation that research will be done. If I want to do research, I am free to do so. But obviously I have to do research if I ever want a better job or if I want to stay in this profession long-term. Research is a practical necessity. But if I do research, I have to do it on my own time, and I am on my own. They're not going to pay any submission or contributor's fees for me. And so this idea leaves me and everyone like me completely stranded.

--Mr. Zero

* Emphases added. The ellipsis was in the original.

I've had a number of unpleasant interactions with students in the past couple of months. One in particular involved a student to whom I had to assign an "F" in an introductory ethics course. Although it was a high F, it wasn't close to a D and there was no way in good conscience to give her the benefit of the doubt--there wasn't any real doubt that this was a failing performance. She emailed me as soon as final grades were released to students, informing me that she does not fail classes and demanding to know why I found it necessary to grade her various assignments unfairly.

(I thought this last was kind of interesting. Not that it's literally impossible, but there's a clear sense in which you just can't accept the premise of the question. It's possible, I guess, that The Joker was going to poison Gotham City's water supply unless you gave this student an undeservedly low grade and that's why it was necessary to grade the assignment unfairly. Or that you were just being malicious; but it seems to me that in that case the unfairness was clearly optional, not necessary. Other than that, it seems to me that if you were really trying to grade it, you were trying to grade it fairly. I feel like there's something akin to Moore's Paradox here.)

Anyways, I wrote back with a set of detailed explanations of the grading of her various assignments--her work suffered from the same set of problems all semester. She didn't listen when I had explained what I was looking for, and kept making the same mistakes. She replied a day or two later with an iPhone screenshot of her report card, showing all As and Bs and one F, and some accompanying text about what a shitty teacher I am, what a shitty person I am, how much more valuable to society than philosophy her major subject is, and which contained sarcastic mockery of language I employed in my previous message. The screengrab was taken at 1:00 in the morning; she sent the email shortly after 5 AM.

I thought for a long time about whether to respond, and if so, how. For example, I thought about telling her to try to see this as a learning experience, so that she could understand how this happened and thereby prevent it from happening again. But a) I wasn't sure that it's really my place to offer advice like that, and b) I didn't think she'd accept the advice coming from me, anyways. I ended up just saying that I understand that she's unhappy with the grade she earned, and then I encouraged her to file a formal appeal with the dean's office if she really thinks that the grade is unfair. She didn't write back. I don't know if she went to the dean.

The reason this exchange stood out to me is this: I got a few shitty grades when I was in college, and I got a grade or two that I thought was unfair, to the point where I actually did inquire about filing a formal appeal or grievance of some sort. But I never even considered the idea of throwing a temper tantrum like this. Of sending an insulting letter to a professor and including a copy of my report card. What in the fuck? And although I don't have anything like a set of empirical measurements that would support this claim, I feel like I've witnessed an increasing tendency of students to treat their professors with what I would describe as profound levels of disrespect. I mean, I don't want to be one of those old people who says, what the hell is wrong with the kids today?!?!?!?!. And I'm open to the possibility that there's something I'm doing that is inviting or otherwise failing to discourage this behavior. So I guess I'll just ask: is there something wrong with the kids today? Is there an increasing level of disrespect? Or is it me?

--Mr. Zero

As several people have pointed out, the February JFP is up, and it sucks. 30 jobs in the print edition, a couple more in the web "only" ads. They have added a search function to the web "onlies," but not to the print edition (that I can see, anyways).

Several people have also asked for a "Plan B" thread. Let's have this serve double-duty. Although I periodically find myself wishing for a viable plan B, I have no idea what it would be. I therefore have no advice whatsoever. Sorry I can't be more helpful.

--Mr. Zero

An anonymous Smoker writes with the following stories:

Here were my first two hours at the APA:

1) As I approach the registration desk, the first thing I see is a prominent philosopher whose book is the subject of an author meets critics session telling the person at the desk that the program has the title of her book wrong.  She tells the person at the desk that the mistake is "embarassing".

2) In front of me is a philosopher who pre-registered on November 11th.  His credit card was set to expire on 12/1.  The APA waited until December to run his credit card and thus was not able to proces his payment.  The woman at registration tells him "Just because you submitted your registration on November 11 does not mean that we ran your credit card on November 11."  Okay, fair enough, but it really took you (at least) three weeks?  What is more, this philosopher, realizing that there might be a problem actuallly e-mailed the APA to let them know that his credit card was set to expire in December.  Apparently, they sent him back an e-mail saying that everything was fine, even though it was not.

3) Having registered for the conference, I headed down to placement services to register there.  There were three men sitting in front of computers registering people.  Two of them were only serving candidates who had pre-registered and one was there for candidates who were registering on site.  Virtually no one in line had pre-registered.  Now I understand setting aside a couple computers for those who pre-registered but if there was no one there who had pre-registered, you would think they would help those of us who were registering on site until someone who pre-registered showed up.   But no.  These two men sat there engaging in idle chit chat while the line for on-site registration stretched around the corner.  Only one of three terminals was being used.  The visual was so comical that I thought about taking a picture and sending it to fail blog.

4) After I registered with placement services, I headed to a session, which was scheduled for 6:30.  Someone (presumably from the APA) put a sign on the door saying that the session would start at 7:15.  This resulted in one of the speakers showing up 45 minutes late.

By themselves, any one of these errors are the kinds of things you expect at any large event.  But how could I witness all of these things in my first two horus at the conference and not conclude that the APA is incompetent?

Indeed.

--Mr. Zero

Unfortunately, it's not tenure track. And it's too bad the ad doesn't say anything about which classes the candidate will be responsible for teaching, or what these classes are like. But when you apply, don't forget: you'll need a letter from your pastor. Somehow I get the feeling that this ad is not in compliance with the APA's nondiscrimination policy.

--Mr. Zero

I haven't been keeping up with What's Wrong With the World as much as I used to, but this item caught my attention. In it, Jeff Culbreath passionately objects to the practice of professors allowing students to call them by their first names. He writes that

it's undeniable that an increasing number of academics in the United States prefer to be called by their first names, viewing honorifics as pretentious and arrogant. The blame for this social calamity can be placed squarely at the feet of Marxist sociology, which more or less permeates society today. For the Marxist everything is reduced to power relationships, including titles and formalities. The use of honorifics exposes power relationships that are not supposed to exist (better translated as "you're not supposed to notice") in our egalitarian society, interfering with the liberal's preferred method changing reality by ignoring it.

The first thing we know about any professor who rejects honorifics is that he defines his own position primarily in terms of power and privilege rather than knowledge or accomplishment, regarding the former as instruments of oppression. He feels embarrassed or guilty about this and prefers not to be reminded by his title. He has little respect for his own achievement, considering it something anyone else could do - which sounds deceptively humble. Behind the facade of humility there are some disturbing corollaries. It usually follows that such a man has even less respect for the achievements of others, [emphasis his] which he thinks anyone else might have easily accomplished, most especially himself. He views many of those who fail to reach his own level of achievement with either pity or contempt, as the only legitimate explanations for inequality in his egalitarian mind are: a) oppression; or b) moral fault.

Now, it's awfully amusing how he lays this at the feet of Marx. And then there's the bit in italics, about what usually follows this pernicious informality. These seem to be clear instances of exactly the kind of bad behavior our scientist friends were complaining about last week, where the philosopher asserts that some phenomenon is caused by or correlated with some other phenomenon, but where this relationship has not been subject to empirical scrutiny and has in fact just been made up. Examples of this in the quoted text include: that people who eschew titles view them as pretentious and arrogant; that they do this because of marxism; that they do this because they object to relationships of unequal power; that they nevertheless define the relationship in terms of unequal power, regardless of the details; that they feel embarrassment or guilt over this inequality of power; that they regard accomplishments as oppressive; that they respect the achievements of others even less than they respect their own; that they believe that just anyone could earn a doctoral degree; that the only legitimate reasons for an inequality of achievement are oppression and moral fault. Wowza.

I allow my students to use my first name. I do this not because I have no respect for my own achievements, but (in part) out of my tremendous respect for the achievements of real doctors. I do not see my role as defined by power and privilege rather than by knowledge and achievement; I see my role as involving all of these things. I have certain powers and privileges, and I am qualified to have these powers and privileges in virtue of my knowledge and accomplishments. But the most important thing about these powers and privileges is that they come with very serious responsibilities. I am competent to do this job in virtue of my qualifications, but they have little or nothing to do with the fact that I can be trusted with the responsibility of doing it.

I have these powers, privileges, and responsibilities, as well as my knowledge and achievements, whether or not I insist on being addressed in a way that accentuates them. I am inclined to suspect that this widespread trend of using first names is a result of the fact that the academic student-teacher relationship is, like a lot of things, now less formal than it was. People don't dress up the way they used to, and they don't use titles the way they used to.

I also have some experience with this practice from the perspective of an undergraduate. My undergraduate professors all permitted students to use first names--some allowed all students to do so, while others insisted on the honorific from students at the intro level while they were more relaxed with students in the upper division. This did not decrease my respect for them, their knowledge, or their accomplishments. I was, and continue to be, in awe of how smart and accomplished these people were and are. They were the smartest people I had ever met in real life, and I declared philosophy as my major, before I had any inkling that I wanted to pursue it as a career, in the hopes that a philosophical education would make me as smart as they were. I did not get the idea that just anyone could achieve what they had achieved.

And so it seems to me that if they respect you only because they call you doctor, they don't respect you. It seems to me that whether they call you doctor or not is irrelevant to whether they respect you. And it seems to me that, in an environment in which nobody else is doing it, insisting on being addressed as doctor will make them respect you less because they will think you're a jackass.

--Mr. Zero

P.S. Cullbreath is really distasteful. Here he is reprimanding a commenter for the "offensive" practice of using the feminine pronoun for a generic person.

In comments here, anon 8:47 asks;

Did anyone do a total count of how many jobs there were this year compared to last year (and the year before)? My impression is that this year was a bit worse than the last year

I haven't done this, but I have the same impression. Did anybody do this?

--Mr. Zero

In the New York Times story about the Synthese hullabaloo, it is mentioned that the philosopher Kelly James Clark of Calvin College wrote to Synthese in May of 2009 to complain about the Forrest article. In a comment on New APPS, Professor Clark has posted the letter in its entirety. It is unbelievably terrible.

[In order to avoid confusion, I have set blockquotes containing material from Clark's letter in boldface type, sections in which Clark quotes material from Forrest's article in italics, and left sections in which Forrest blockquotes someone else plain.]

Clark writes:

[I'm skipping the weird preamble]

Nonetheless, I can't believe that ad hominems (abusive and circumstantial) such as the following have any logical bearing on the author's argument:

What follows is supposed to be an example from the Forrest article of an abusive and circumstantial ad hominem argument:

Although he has been called a legal scholar (Wasley et al. 2006), he is neither a lawyer nor, properly speaking, a constitutional scholar. He lacks the requisite credentials and expertise, holding degrees in philosophy, religious apologetics, and a Master of Juridical Studies (M.J.S.) from the Washington University School of Law (the Discovery Institute financed Beckwith’s research for the M.J.S. with a $9000 fellowship) (Beckwith, n.d.). The M.J.S. “is designed for individuals in career fields who would benefit from limited legal training and do not require a professional degree…. [C]redit earned toward the MJS is not transferable to the JD program. It also does not qualify recipients to practice law” (WA Univ. School of Law 2005–2006, p. 23). Nonetheless, he presents his major pro-ID arguments in two law review articles (Beckwith 2003d,e) and a book, Law, Darwinism, and Public Education (Beckwith 2003b).

Here is what is going on in this much-discussed passage. Forrest points out that Beckwith has been called a legal scholar by Wasley et al., and then argues that because he lacks the relevant credentials Beckwith is, in fact, not to be legitimately regarded as a legal scholar. He's not a lawyer. He does not have a J.D or a license to practice law. He is not presently qualified to obtain such a license. He has a Master of Juridical Studies degree, whatever that is.

A lot of people find this discussion of Beckwith's credentials distasteful, because the focus should be on the quality of his arguments, not the academic degrees he does or does not hold. Although I am generally inclined to agree with this way of thinking about things--whatever problems there may be with, say, Kripke's views, the fact that he does not hold a Ph.D. in philosophy is not one of them--I am not convinced that a discussion of credentials is unwarranted in this particular case. (NB I am also not convinced that they are warranted; see below.)

Allow me to illustrate with a partially fictional example. Richard Dawkins discusses the cosmological argument for the existence of God in The God Delusion, and he has a perfect right to do so in spite of the fact that he has no advanced degree in philosophy and is not a "scholar" of philosophy. These facts about his credentials are not really relevant to assessing the quality of his writing on this topic; what is relevant is the (low) quality of his writings on this topic. But suppose that Dawkins had an MA in philosophy, and that he had been described as a "scholar of philosophy" on that basis. I think that such a thing would be silly and possibly worth remarking upon, especially if Dawkins's activism had public-policy-related consequences. Even more so if a political think-tank had paid his tuition for the philosophy MA. The suggestion by Clark and others that there is literally no possible way that any discussion of Beckwith's credentials could be relevant to any philosophical discussion is clearly false.

On the other hand, the Wasley, et al. 2006 reference is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about Beckwith's tenure denial case, not a partisan attempt to use Beckwith's MJS to lend credibility to his views about the constitutionality of teaching ID as science. If there are places where partisans use Beckwith's MJS to lend credibility to his legal views, it would have been better to cite them instead of Wasley et al. It seems to me that this makes the passage in question less worthy of inclusion. Possibly unworthy of inclusion.

Such character assassination is beneath Synthese.

Having said all that, when I read this last thing, I thought to myself, ''Maybe I don't know what "character assassination" is supposed to be." So I looked it up. Wikipedia says that it's "an attempt to tarnish a person's reputation [that] may involve exaggeration, misleading half-truths, or manipulation of facts to present an untrue picture of the targeted person." Which is good, because that's what I thought it was. (Wikipedia goes on to point out that one of the most serious problems with character assassinations is that it can be difficult or impossible to undo the damage they cause. Once the insinuation is out there, it never fully goes away. You can't get the toothpaste back in the tube. This potential permanence of effect is why it's called a character assassination, instead of a character knuckle sandwich.)

It is obvious that this passage is not a character assassination. Maybe it's weird; maybe it was not worthy of inclusion in the article; maybe it is indicative of a nasty tone that has no place in the pages of Synthese. But it is not a use of exaggeration, misleading half-truths, or manipulation of facts designed to present an untrue picture of Beckwith. It says that Beckwith lacks credentials he in fact lacks.

The idea that Beckwith's good name will be forever unfairly tarnished by the fact that Forrest has accurately pointed out that he isn't a lawyer is absurd; the repeated claim that this represents a character assassination on Beckwith is itself a character assassination on Forrest.

[I'm skipping the discussion of red herrings.]

There are also misleading, and apparently obviously false interpretations of Beckwith's [sic] views:

Spoiler alert: the passage from Forrest that Clark is about to quote as his example of a misleading and "apparently obviously" (whatever that means) false interpretation of "Beckwith's" views does not contain any discussion of Beckwith's views whatsoever.

Dembski's desire to use his faith hegemonically predates his entry into the ID movement. His [that is, Dembski's] article, “Scientopoly: The Game of Scientism,” written for the Fall 1989–Winter 1990 Greek Orthodox journal Epiphany (a special anti-evolution issue), is in total alignment with Epiphany’s purpose:

To proclaim the …Gospel of Jesus in the contemporary world. To promote an … Orthodox Christian world view, based on the Holy Scriptures…as the salvific alternative to godless secularism. To provide the foundation for the restoration of a fully Christian way of life…To preserve the heritage …of traditional Christian culture …To defend the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church …in an age of apostasy. (Epiphany 1989–1990)

Dembski interweaves the same strands here as in his later work: science provides knowledge, but theological knowledge trumps science. Modern science has become a weapon against theology; an example is Darwin’s theory of evolution, although “current evolutionists reject much of Darwin’s original formulation” (Dembski 1989– 1990, p. 112). Science ridicules God and rejects evidence of his activity in the natural order—miracles.

This is a discussion of Dembski, not Beckwith. OMG WTF.

Clark goes on:

I haven't read the Beckwith [sic] article but the title is about scientism not science. So the author's repeated use of the term "science" in her explication surely misrepresents Beckwith's [sic] views.

Read that again. Clark hasn't read the article mentioned in the passage. He hasn't looked closely enough to notice that the article is not even by Beckwith. But he's pretty sure based on the title of the article that Forrest is misrepresenting Beckwith's [sic] views. After all, the title doesn't even mention "science" and clearly indicates that the article is about a totally and entirely different topic. And that topic is something called "scientism."

Apparently it is obvious to Clark that there isn't any relationship between the institution of science and a view called "scientism" (which is the view that the scientific worldview is better than all the others). The author of an article about scientism would apparently obviously have no occasion to identify or discuss the nature of the institution of science. It is so apparently obvious that this would never happen that you don't even have to read the article, or even bother to correctly identify its author, before you write to the editors of Synthese to complain.

Then there's the suggestion of sinister plots, masquerading as logic or, what?, culture criticism:

Such sentiments reflect the alliance of some ID proponents with Christian Reconstructionism
(CR), also called “Theocratic Dominionism,” a far-right form of Christianity with repressive public policy goals.

Should a journal with your explicit aims publish unsubstantiated political alliances?

I checked. Forrest devotes several paragraphs to the substantiation of this political alliance. She connects various of Dembski's (not Beckwith; in this passage, as in the last one, she is discussing Dembski, not Beckwith) views about the proper role of Christianity in public life with those of CR, points out that certain CR honchos are also ID supporters, and that there are financial ties between the two groups. She cites sources.

I could go on, but read the text yourself and see if it lives up to the professed aims of your journal. I can see how this might be published in a rhetoric journal where the goal is to win whatever the cost. But I don't see how it could be published in a philosophy journal that despises sophistry, suggestion and fallacies.

The interesting thing about this passage is that it suggests that the Editors in Chief did not read this article they published and made no attempt to ascertain whether it lives up to the professed aims of the journal they edit they published it. Obviously, this may be true, but if it is true it means that the editors weren't doing their jobs. If this were true, it would be an egregious professional failing on their part. And if I were a recipient of a letter like this I would be deeply insulted by the insinuation.

Sincerely yours,

Kelly James Clark

I hope that when the EiCs received this letter, they threw it straight into the garbage where it belongs. I really hope that this letter did not cause the EiCs to rethink their position on the Forrest piece. I really, really hope that this kind of shit is not what convinced the EiCs to attach the disclaimer.

--Mr. Zero

Is up. If you ask me, it looks like a total disaster. 24 ads. Total.

God help us.

--Mr. Zero

Regarding the Synthese kerfuffle, Anonymous wrote:

I don't know how seriously I can take all this, given the background of the atrociously bad editorial practices I suspect most journals really engage in... So the Synthese editors engaged in what seems to be bad editorial behavior. But until I have reason to believe they alone among top journals behave in this way, why shame them?

One thing the Synthese editors did, it seems, is publish Beckwith's 23 page reponse without peer review. This is based on the fact that it was received and accepted on the same day, Feb 7. This is Synthese's editorial policy:

Synthese follows a double−blind reviewing procedure. Authors are therefore requested not to include their name or affiliation in their submitted papers. Self−identifying citations and references in the article text should be avoided. Authors should thus make sure that their names and/or affiliations are NOT mentioned on any of the manuscript pages. If authors do include their names on submitted papers, anonymous reviewing cannot be guaranteed.

Obviously, Beckwith's response could not be double-blinded, since he refers to himself continuously throughout the essay. And there are fully two pages of references in which he cites his own work. And he put his own name in the keywords. But that the diatribe could not be blind-reviewed does not mean it should not be subject to peer review at all... or does it? He also in places dismissively refers to Barbara Forrest as "Ms. Forrest" rather than Dr. or Professor Forrest. And he writes this: