Critical Thinking & College

Posted by on May 21, 2013 7 comments
Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines

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With the ever increasing cost of college education there is ever more reason to consider whether or not college is worth it. While much of this assessment can be in terms of income, there is also the academic question  of whether or not students actually benefit intellectually from college.

The 2011 study Academically Adrift showed that a significant percentage of students received little or no benefit from college, which is obviously a matter of considerable concern. Not surprisingly, there have been additional studies aimed at assessing this matter. Of special concern to me is the claim that a new study shows that students do improve in critical thinking skills. While this study can be questioned, I will attest to the fact that the weight of evidence shows that American college students are generally weak at critical thinking. This is hardly shocking given that most people are weak at critical thinking.

My university, like so many others, has engaged in a concerted effort to enhance the critical thinking skills of students. However, there are reasonable concerns regarding the methodology used in such attempts. There is also the concern as to whether or not it is even possible, in practical terms, to significantly enhance the critical thinking skills of college students over the span of the two or four (or more) degree.  While I am something of an expert at critical thinking (I mean actual critical thinking, not the stuff that sprung up so people could profit from being “critical thinking” experts), my optimism in this matter is somewhat weak. This is because I have given due consideration to the practical problem of this matter and have been teaching this subject for over two decades.

As with any form of education, it is wise to begin by considering the general qualities of human beings. For example, if humans are naturally good, then teaching virtue would be easier. In the case at hand, the question would be whether or not humans (in general) are naturally good at critical thinking.

While Aristotle famously regarded humans as rational animals, he also noted that most people are not swayed by arguments or fine ideals. Rather, they are dominated by their emotions and must be ruled by pain. While I will not comment on ruling with pain, I will note that Aristotle’s view about human rationality has been borne out by experience. To fast forward to now, experts speak of the various cognitive biases and emotional factors that impede human rationality. This matches my own experience and I am confident that it matches that of others. To misquote Lincoln, some people are irrational all the time and all the people are irrational some of the time. As such, trying to transform people into competent  critical thinkers will generally be very difficult, perhaps as hard as making people virtuous.

In addition to the biological foundation, there is also the matter of preparation. For most students, their first exposure to a substantial course or even coverage of critical thinking occurs in college. It seems unlikely that students who have gone almost two decades without proper training in critical thinking will be significantly altered by college. One obvious solution, taken from Aristotle, is to begin proper training in critical thinking at an early age.

Another matter of serious concern is the fact that students are exposed to influences that discourage critical thinking and actually provide irrational influences. One example of this is the domain of politics. Political discourse tends to be, at best rhetoric, and typically involves the use of a wide range of fallacies such as the straw man, scare tactics and ad hominems of all varieties. For those who are ill-prepared in critical thinking, exposure to these influences can have a very detrimental effect and they can be led far away from reason. I would call for politicians to cease this behavior, but they seem devoted to the tools of irrationality. There is a certain irony in politicians who exploit and encourage poor reasoning being among those lamenting the weak critical thinking skills of students and endeavoring to blame colleges for the problems they themselves have helped create.

Another example of this is the domain of entertainment. As Plato argued in the Republic,  exposure to corrupting influences can corrupt. While the usual arguments about corruption from entertainment  focus on violence and sexuality, it is also important to consider the impact of certain amusements upon the reasoning skills of students.  Television, which has long been said to “rot the brain”, certainly seems to shovel forth fare that is hardly contributing to good reasoning. While I would not suggest censorship, I would encourage students to discriminate and steer clear of shows that seem likely to have a corrosive impact on reasoning. While it might be an overstatement to claim that entertainment can corrode reason, it does seem sensible to note that much of it contributes nothing positive to a person’s mind.

A third example of this is advertising. As with politics, advertising is the domain of persuasion. While good reasoning can persuade, it is (for most people) the weakest tool of persuasion. As such, advertisers flood us with ads employing what they regard as effective tools of persuasion. These typically involve various rhetorical devices and also the use of fallacies. Sadly, the bad logic of fallacies is generally far more persuasive than good reasoning. Students are generally exposed to significant amounts of advertising (they no doubt spend more time exposed to ads than critical thinking) and it makes sense that this exposure would impact them in detrimental ways, at least if they are not already equipped to properly assess such ads with critical thinking skills.

A final example is, of course, everyday life. Students will typically be exposed to significant amounts of poor reasoning and this will have a significant influence on them. Students will also learn what the politicians and advertisers know: the tools of irrational persuasion will serve them better in our society than the tools of reason.

Given these anti-critical thinking influences, it is something of a wonder that students develop any critical thinking skills.

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On warranted deference

Posted by on May 20, 2013 23 comments

By their nature, skeptics have a hard time deferring. And they should. One of the classic (currently undervalued) selling points for any course in critical thinking is that it grants people an ability to ratchet down the level of trust that they place in others when it is necessary. However, conservative opinion to the contrary, critical thinkers like trust just fine. We only ask that our trust should be grounded in good reasons in cooperative conversation.

Here are two maxims related to deference that are consistent with critical thinking:

(a) The meanings of words are fixed by authorities who are well informed about a subject. e.g., we defer to the international community of astronomers to tell us what a particular nebula is called, and we defer to them if they should like to redefine their terms of art. On matters of definition, we owe authorities our deference.

(b) An individual’s membership in the group grants them prime facie authority to speak truthfully about the affairs of that group. e.g., if I am speaking to physicists about their experiences as physicists, then all other things equal I will provisionally assume that they are better placed to know about their subject than I am. The physicist may, for all I know, be a complete buffoon. (S)he is a physicist all the same.

These norms strike me as overwhelmingly reasonable. Both follow directly from the assumption that your interlocutor, whoever they are, deserve to be treated with dignity. People should be respected as much as is possible without doing violence to the facts.

Here is what I take to be a banal conclusion:

(c) Members of group (x) ought to defer to group (y) on matters relating to how group (y) is defined. For example, if a philosopher of science tells the scientist what counts as science, then it is time to stop trusting the philosopher.

It should be clear enough that (c) is a direct consequence of (a) and (b).

Here is a claim which is a logical instantiation of (c):

(c’) Members of privileged groups ought to defer to marginalized groups on matters relating to how the marginalized group is defined. For example, if a man gives a woman a lecture on what counts as being womanly, then the man is acting in an absurd way, and the conversation ought to end there.

As it turns out, (c’) is either a controversial claim, or is a claim that is so close to being controversial that it will reliably provoke ire from some sorts of people.

But it should not be controversial when it is understood properly. The trouble, I think, is that (c) and (c’) are close to a different kind of claim, which is genuinely specious:

(d) Members of group (x) ought to defer to group (y) on any matters relating to group (y).

Plainly, (d) is a crap standard. I ought to trust a female doctor to tell me more about my health as a man than I trust myself, or my male barber. The difference between (d) and (c) is that (c) is about definitions (‘what counts as so-and-so’), while (d) is about any old claim whatsoever. Dignity has a central place when it comes to a discussion about what counts as what — but in a discussion of bare facts, there is no substitute for knowledge.

**

Hopefully you’ve agreed with me so far. If so, then maybe I can convince you of a few more things. There are ways that people (including skeptics) are liable to screw up the conversation about warranted deference.

First, unless you are in command of a small army, it is pointless to command silence from people who distrust you. e.g., if Bob thinks I am a complete fool, then while I may say that “Bob should shut up and listen”, I should not expect Bob to listen. I might as well give orders to my cat for all the good it will do.

Second, if somebody is not listening to you, that does not necessarily mean you are being silenced. It only means you are not in a position to have a cooperative conversation with them at that time. To be silenced is to be prevented from speaking, or to be prevented from being heard on the basis of perverse non-reasons (e.g., prejudice and stereotyping).

Third, while intentionally shutting your ears to somebody else is not in itself silencing, it is not characteristically rational either. The strongest dogmatists are the quietest ones. So a critical thinker should still listen to their interlocutors whenever practically possible (except, of course, in cases where they face irrational abuse from the speaker).

Fourth, it is a bad move to reject the idea that other people have any claim to authority, when you are only licensed to point out that their authority is narrowly circumscribed. e.g., if Joe has a degree in organic chemistry, and he makes claims about zoology, then it is fine to point out the limits of his credentials, and not fine to say “Joe has no expertise”. And if Petra is a member of a marginalized group, it is no good to say that Petra has no knowledge of what counts as being part of that group. As a critical thinker, it is better to defer.

Philosophy Carnival #151

Posted by on May 18, 2013 No comments

Is now online, over at Camels with Hammers. Check it out here.

Violence & Video Games, Yet Again.

Posted by on May 10, 2013 11 comments
Manhunt (video game)

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While there is an abundance of violence in the real world, there is also considerable focus on the virtual violence of video games. Interestingly, some people (such as the head of the NRA) blame real violence on the virtual violence of video games. The idea that art can corrupt people is nothing new and dates back at least to Plato’s discussion of the corrupting influence of art. While he was mainly worried about the corrupting influence of tragedy and comedy, he also raised concerns about violence and sex. These days we generally do not worry about the nefarious influence of tragedy and comedy, but there is considerable concern about violence.

While I am a gamer, I do have concerns about the possible influence of video games on actual behavior. For example, one of my published essays is on the distinction between virtual vice and virtual virtue and in this essay I raise concerns about the potential dangers of video games that are focused on vice. While I do have concerns about the impact of video games, there has been little in the way of significant evidence supporting the claim that video games have a meaningful role in causing real-world violence. However, such studies are fairly popular and generally get attention from the media.

The most recent study purports to show that teenage boys might become desensitized to violence because of extensive playing of video games. While some folks will take this study as showing a connection between video games and violence, it is well worth considering the details of the study in the context of causal reasoning involving populations.

When conducting a cause to effect experiment, one rather important factor is the size of experimental group (those exposed to the cause) and the control group (those not exposed to the cause). The smaller the number of subjects, the more likely that the difference between the groups is due to factors other than the (alleged) causal factor. There is also the concern with generalizing the results from the experiment to the whole population.

The experiment in question consisted of 30 boys (ages 13-15) in total. As a sample for determining a causal connection, the sample is too small for real confidence to be placed in the results. There is also the fact that the sample is far too small to support a generalization from the 30 boys to the general population of teenage boys. In fact, the experiment hardly seems worth conducting with such a small sample and is certainly not worth reporting on-except as an illustration of how research should not be conducted.

The researchers had the boys play a violent video game and a non-violent video game in the evening and compared the results. According to the researchers, those who played the violent video game had faster heart rates and lower sleep quality. They also reported “increased feelings of sadness.”  After playing the violent game, the boys  had greater stress and anxiety.

According to one researcher, “The violent game seems to have elicited more stress at bedtime in both groups, and it also seems as if the violent game in general caused some kind of exhaustion. However, the exhaustion didn’t seem to be of the kind that normally promotes good sleep, but rather as a stressful factor that can impair sleep quality.”

Being a veteran of violent video games, these results are consistent with my own experiences. I have found that if I play a combat game, be it a first person shooter, an MMO or a real time strategy game, too close to bedtime, I have trouble sleeping. Crudely put, I find that I am “keyed” up and if I am unable to “calm down” before trying to sleep, my sleep is generally not very restful. I really noticed this when I was raiding in WOW. A raid is a high stress situation (game stress, anyway) that requires hyper-vigilance and it takes time to “come down” from that. I have experienced the same thing with actual fighting (martial arts training, not random violence).  I’ve even experienced something comparable when I’ve been awoken by a big spider crawling on my face-I did not sleep quite so well after that. Graduate school, as might be imagined, put me into this state of poor sleep for about five years.

In general, then, it makes sense that violent video games would have this effect-which is why it is not a good idea to game up until bed time if you want to get a good night’s sleep. Of course, it is a generally a good idea to relax about an hour before bedtime-don’t check email, don’t get on Facebook, don’t do work and so on.

While not playing games before bedtime is a good idea, the question remains as to how these findings connect to violence and video games. According to the researchers, the differences between the two groups “suggest that frequent exposure to violent video games may have a desensitizing effect.”

Laying aside the problem that the sample is far too small to provide significant results that can be reliably extended to the general population of teenage boys, there is also the problem that there seems to be a rather large chasm between the observed behavior (anxiety and lower sleep quality) and being desensitized to violence. The researchers do note that the cause and effect relationship was not established and they did consider the possibility of reversed causation (that the video games are not causing these traits, but that boys with those traits are drawn to violent video games).  As such, the main impact of the study seems to be that it got media attention for the researchers. This would suggest another avenue of research: the corrupting influence of media attention on researching video games and violence.

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The science-philosophy connection

Posted by on May 7, 2013 18 comments

In this article published in the Guardian, the theoretical physicist Michael Krämer says all the right things about the connection between science and philosophy. Here’s a brief summary. He points out that, up until the middle of the twentieth century or so, scientists profited from philosophy. He also points out that post-war physicists do not find much to gain from philosophy, presumably referring to philosophy of science and its cognates. (Actually, this point is not exactly right. e.g., It is difficult to imagine Bohm‘s research project unmoored from his holistic ontological convictions. But I digress.)

From this, one might be tempted to heap scorn on philosophy. One might say we ought to just stop doing theoretical philosophy, since what it gets right is not distinctively philosophical, and what is distinctively philosophical is not right.

Refreshingly, Krämer does not travel this route. He acknowledges that philosophy crafts its arguments around certain general kinds of questions, and hence enjoys a degree of disciplinary autonomy — but also that it is ultimately studying the very same universe that the physicists are, and hence that it overlaps significantly with science. Krämer’s conclusion is even-handed. He concludes that the physicists can benefit from listening to the philosophers only so long as the philosophers keep focused on providing a critical understanding how the actual scientific methods are used. In contrast, if philosophers spend their time making armchair pronouncements about what counts as science, they ought not be listened to.

Like I said, I think Krämer’s got it right, and I think he said it well. And, I might add: my goodness, do philosophers need to hear it. Many of my colleagues and mentors are both actively involved in philosophy and in specialized sciences. They are, to a person, well acquainted with how things go on both sides of the fence, equally comfortable in graduate courses in cognitive science as they are in courses on philosophy of mind, or in courses on anti-realism as they are on theoretical physics. Yet I am heartbroken to hear that their work is often dismissed by reviewers in philosophy journals who have a simplistic normative conception of ‘how science works’. Instead of researching the diversity of methods that scientists actually use, many commentators working in the philosophy of science are interested in policing the boundaries of science through normative fiat. As a result, my colleagues have their papers accepted in top-notch science journals, and turned down by ostensibly top-notch philosophy journals.

One day, the philosophy of science may turn out to be of great importance to science. But that day will not come until philosophers prove themselves willing and able to read the contents of a bibliography.

Though I think Krämer has got most of it right, I do think that he has got one thing wrong. The fact is, the quips offered by theoretical physicists do not, by themselves, tell us anything about the relationship between philosophy and the sciences. It may be agreed that physics is the most developed among the sciences, and it may also be the case that all sciences will need to cash themselves out in physicalist terms. But even having admitted that much, it should also be agreed that physics is not the spokesperson of all the sciences — natural or otherwise. Even if it were true, you cannot conclude from the fact that ‘physicists don’t need theoretical philosophy quite so much anymore’ that ‘science doesn’t need theoretical philosophy quite so much anymore’. Mind you, it may indeed be the case that philosophy has nothing to say to any of the sciences. My point is that this inference needs to be demonstrated, and cannot be inferred from a single exceptional and arbitrarily selected historical period.

Nussbaum on philosophy, art, emotion, etc

Posted by on May 7, 2013 1 comment

It’s Martha Nussbaum’s birthday, or anyway it was yesterday, and to celebrate, here’s part of an interview she did with The Philosophers’ Magazine a year or two ago.  She talks about the role of philosophy, the importance of the liberal arts, poetry, emotion, Mill, and, just a little bit, what it means to live a flourishing life.  Nussbaum has more thoughts per minute than most people.  Interesting stuff.

Nussbaum has something to say about the role of argument and philosophy in liberal arts education – an entire chapter of her book Not for Profit is devoted to it. She discusses the importance of Socratic pedagogy, questions, self-scrutiny, understanding rather than memorisation, critique, and debate. I wonder if this actually devalues philosophy in a backhanded way, reduces it to a mere means to good citizenship?

“Philosophy is constitutive of good citizenship. It’s not just a means to it. It becomes part of what you are when you are a good citizen – a thoughtful person. Philosophy has many roles. It can be just fun, a game that you play. It can be a way you try to approach your own death or illness or that of a family member. It has a wide range of functions in human life. Some of them are connected to ethics, and some of them are not. Logic itself is beautiful. I’m just focusing on the place where I think I can win over people, and say ‘Look here, you do care about democracy don’t you? Then you’d better see that philosophy has a place.’”

Philosophy has a place not just in keeping democracy alive. Nussbaum argues that a liberal arts education – and philosophy in particular – is important for a meaningful life. We need philosophy, she says, to criticise and analyse, but also to help us make sense of our inner lives – our feelings and attitudes towards one another. That’s part of what it is to live a flourishing life.

“It’s a fast-moving world. There are all kinds of reasons not to look within. Peer cultures, teen age cultures particularly, are so competitive that they discourage looking in, thinking, ‘What am I feeling now? What are the names for this cascade of emotions that I’m going through?’ When you go out into life all sorts of disturbing things happen. You love people and that doesn’t always go smoothly. You have children and that brings with it a complicated set of emotions and relationships. You have to confront illness and mortality, both your own and that of people you love. In all those situations you need to be able to look within and understand what you’re feeling.

“Mill understood from his own experience of depression that being able to read poetry – to think about emotions in connection with a work of literature – was a tremendous part of the cultivation of the inner world. It makes you capable of love and happiness and stability.

“Philosophy tells you that you had better look within. Philosophy the way I do it is closely linked to literature and the imagination. For example, when you’re dealing with philosophical accounts of emotion, how could you think philosophically about them without having powerful examples of what they’re like?

“I’m with Mill in thinking that education with respect to the emotions has to have an aesthetic component. He’s funny about this. He says in England we don’t understand this because we think life is all about making money. There is also the legacy of Puritanism. We think there’s something evil about experiencing emotion in connection with works of art. The result is that we become narrow-minded and ungenerous. We have a strict moral conscience but little sympathy with others.

“That’s right about a lot of people in a lot of places and times. The rigidity of conscience without the capacity for sympathy and love can do great damage when you’re a parent or a friend or a lover. So it’s important for a meaningful life to read about and think about works of art.”

Motives for Terror

Posted by on May 6, 2013 44 comments
MQ-1L Predator UAV armed with AGM-114 Hellfire...

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After the evil and senseless bombing in Boston, there was considerable speculation about the motives of the bombers. Not surprisingly, some folks blamed their preferred demons: some on the left leaped to conclusions involving right-wingers while those on the right leaped to conclusions involving Islam.  As it turns out, the alleged murderers have a connection to Islam.

While some hold the view that there is a strong causal connection between being a Muslim and being a terrorist, the connection obviously cannot be that strong. After all, the vast majority of Muslims do not engage in terrorism. As such, beginning and ending the discussion of the motive for terror with Islam is not adequate.

When it comes to terrorist attacks against the United States, the stock explanation is that the terrorists are motivated by a hatred of our freedom. A common variation on that is that they hate democracy. Another explanation is that they simply hate the United States and other countries.

The explanation that terrorists are motivated by a hatred of our freedom (or democracy) does two main things. The first is that it casts the terrorists as enemies of freedom and democracy, thus presenting them as having evil motives. The second is that it casts the United States and its allies as being attacked because of their virtues. Crudely put, the bad guys are attacking us because they hate what is good.

The explanation that the terrorists simply hate the United States and its allies also does two main things. The first is that it casts the terrorists as simply being haters without any justification for their hate. The second is that it casts the United States and its allies as innocent targets. Crudely put, the haters are attacking us because they are haters.

In both of these approaches, the United States and its allies are presented as innocent victims who are being attacked for wicked or irrational reasons. What certainly helps support this narrative is that the terrorists engage in acts that are wicked and certainly seem irrational. After all, the people who are killed and injured are usually just random innocents who simply happen to be in the blast area at the time. Because of this, it is correct to condemn such terrorists as morally wicked on the grounds that they engage in indiscriminate violence. However, the fact that the direct victims of the terrorists are generally innocent victims of wicked deeds does not entail that the terrorists are motivated to attack innocent countries because they hate us, our freedom or our democracy.

One significant source of evidence regarding the motivation of terrorists is the statements terrorists make regarding their own reasons. In the case of the alleged Boston bomber, he claims that he was motivated by the United States’ wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In the case of other terrorists, they have generally claimed they are motivated by the actions of the United States and its allies.

My point here is not to justify the actions of the terrorists. Rather, the point is that the terrorists do not claim to be motivated by the reasons that have been attributed to them. That is, they do not regard themselves as being driven to attack us because they hate our freedom or democracy. They do often claim to hate us, but for rather specific reasons involving our foreign policy. As such, these stock explanations seem to be in error.

It might be countered that the terrorists are lying about their motivations. That is, that they are really driven by a hatred of our freedom or democracy and are just claiming that they are motivated by our foreign policy and associated actions (like invading countries and assassinating people with drones) for some devious reason.

The obvious reply to this is that if terrorists were motivated by a hatred of freedom or democracy, they would presumably attack countries based on their degree of freedom or democracy. Also, a non-stupid terrorist would take into account the ease of attacking a country and what the country could and would do in response. Hitting the United States to strike against freedom or democracy would thus be a poor choice, given our capabilities and how we respond to such attacks (invasions, drone strikes and so on).  To use an analogy, if someone hated athletes, it would not be very sensible to get into a fist fight with a professional mixed martial artist when one could go beat up a marathon runner (who is not also a martial artist).

It might be countered that the United States is the symbol for freedom and democracy, hence the terrorists want to attack the United States even though they know that this will result in retaliation of the sort that many other democratic states cannot or would not engage in.

While this is not impossible, the more plausible explanation is that the terrorists are motivated by their hatred of our foreign policy. After all, invasions, assassinations and such tend to motivate people to engage in violence far more so than some sort of hatred of freedom or democracy.

It might, of course, be wondered why the motivation of terrorists matter. What matters is not why they try to murder people at a marathon but that they try to do such things.

While what they do obviously matters, why they do it also matters. While I obviously believe that terrorism of the sort that took place in Boston is evil, this does not entail that there are no legitimate grievances against the United States and its allies in regards to our foreign policies. To use an analogy, if Bob blows up Sam’s whole family because Sam killed Bob’s son, then Bob has acted wrongly. But this does not prove that Sam acted rightly in killing Bob’s son. In the case of the United States, the fact that we have been attacked by terrorists does not thus make our invasions or drone assassinations right. Now, it might turn out that our actions are right, but we cannot infer that they are just because terrorists do terrible things.

Sorting out what motivates terrorists is also rather useful in trying to prevent terrorism. If we assume they are motivated by their hatred of our freedom or democracy, then we would have to abandon our freedom or democracy to remove their motivation. This is obviously something that should not be done.

However, if some terrorists are motivated by specific aspects of our foreign policy (such as drone strikes that kill civilians), then it seems well worth considering whether we should change these policies. To use an analogy, if someone keeps trying to attack me because I am virtuous, then I obviously should not abandon my virtues just to stop these attacks. But if someone keeps trying to attack me because I keep provoking him, then I should consider whether or not I should be doing those things. It might turn out that I am in the right, but it might turn out that I am in the wrong. If I am in the wrong, then I should change. But if he is in the wrong, then I would be warranted in not changing (but I would need to be honest about why he is attacking me). For example, if he goes after me because I am stealing his newspaper and dumping leaves in his yard, then I should probably stop doing that. As another example, if he is going after me because I run past his house, then he should stop doing that.

The same would seem to apply to terrorists. If we are engaged in unjust actions that provoke people, then we should stop those actions. If, however, we are acting justly and this provokes people, then we should continue to the degree those actions are warranted and necessary. But we should be honest about why they area attacking us.

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Gun Research

Posted by on May 2, 2013 10 comments
English: Logo of the Centers for Disease Contr...

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One important component of rational decision making is acquiring the best available evidence regarding the subject at hand. This is because there are two main components to having a good argument. The first is the quality of the reasoning being used (that is, how well the premises support the conclusion). The second is the quality of the premises (that is, whether they are true/plausible or not). Assuming the goal is to reach the truth, it is essentially irrational to intentionally ignore available evidence. Of course, truth is only rarely the goal that people seek.

One area where we need rational decision making is in regards to gun policy. While I am not anti-gun (far from it-I have been a gun enthusiast since my childhood), I do hold that it is proper for there to laws regulating guns. Being rational, I want the decisions about the laws to be based on the best available evidence. Naturally, I also want the laws to match my core political values (life, liberty, property and justice).

In some cases, people are not interested in having the best available evidence because of irrational reasons: laziness, prejudices, and so on. In other cases, people are rather interested in preventing others from acquiring the best available evidence for what are pragmatically rational reasons. For example, a criminal certainly has a pragmatically rational reason to ensure that others do not acquire evidence of her crimes. As another example, a company that stands to benefit from the ignorance of consumers would have a pragmatically rational reason to keep them ignorant.

While it is estimated that there are 30,000 gun deaths and 70,000 gun injuries in the United States each year (which makes guns about as dangerous as automobiles), there is a shortage of data regarding these deaths and injuries. This is not due to a lack of interest or concern. Rather, it is mainly due to the fact that  the NRA’s lobbying efforts effectively limited research into gun violence.

In 1996 the CDC was planning to conduct additional studies of gun-related deaths in the context of public health. These studies were intended to be a follow up on studies conducted since 1985 which all concluded in favor of stricter gun control.  In response, Republican Jay Dickey saw to it that the funding for the research was removed from the CDC’s budget. While the funding was restored, it was steadily reduced and the CDC elected to spend the money on studying traumatic brain injuries.

In addition to the tactic of cutting funding, a law was passed that states that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”

As might be inferred, these tactics have had the desired impact, namely a significant reduction in research on gun-related deaths and injuries.  This is not to say that there is no research. There have been studies regarding guns and gun ownership and some results indicate that gun ownership is a health risk-especially in regards to children of gun owning parents.  This, as might be guessed, suggests the desire on the part of the NRA to prevent scientific studies of gun-related deaths and injuries.

On the face of it, this attempt to impede research on gun-related deaths and injuries would seem to be immoral. First, there is the moral concern with intentionally trying to impede the acquisition of information that could be very useful in preventing needless deaths and injuries. It is, of course, interesting to contrast this intentional impediment of scientific research with the willingness to intrude on rights and liberties under the banner of national security. In the case of matters linked to terrorism, the stock argument is that these rights and liberties must be sacrificed on utilitarian grounds. That is, it is claimed that the benefits of such intrusions is worth the harms done. However, if  the need to prevent the harms of terrorism warrants intrusions on basic rights and liberties, then it would seem rather inconsistent to attempt to prevent public research into gun-related violence.

Second, there is also the general moral concern with intentionally trying to impede the search for truth. While it is understandable that the NRA and certain other folks would rather that ignorance be maintained, this hardly makes it right.

One possible reply is to make a moral case on utilitarian grounds. Those who wish to prevent the funding of such studies could contend that they might be used to argue successfully in favor of expanding gun control and this would create more harms than benefits.

One obvious problem with this reply is that if the studies did show that gun control would be beneficial for society as a whole and thus provide a reasonable basis for gun control, then it would be the case that the studies would create more overall benefits than harms. This could be countered by adopting an ethical egoist position, namely that the folks who regard gun control as contrary to their interests are acting morally by opposing such studies. Naturally, the folks whose interests are served by gun control (such as potential victims of gun violence) would be equally right in supporting such research. So, if one is willing to accept ethical egoism as the correct moral view, then all the parties who are acting in their interest are right. This does, however, come with its own problems.

Another reply is to contend that such studies would lead to intrusions on the second amendment by providing evidence that would justify expanding gun control. As such, this evidence must be intentionally suppressed in defense of the second amendment.  This is certainly an interesting variant of the stock second amendment arguments regarding gun control.

While the idea of defending rights via imposed ignorance has a certain magic to it, this does seem problematic. The obvious reply is that such rights are not absolute and they can be justly limited. To use the usual stock example, the right of free speech does not extend to slander. As such, some additional limitations on the already limited second amendment rights could be justified by such studies.  Also, it seems rather odd to justify imposing ignorance on the grounds that studies might reveal some information that might prove useful in arguing for expanding gun control. After all, such studies might reveal that there is no need for any expansion of gun control laws. Then again, the fact that the NRA has lobbied to prevent such studies strongly suggests that such studies would reveal information that would provide rational support for expanding gun control laws.

Since the above attempts have failed, perhaps another tact could be taken in defense of the law restricting funding for research into gun violence.

The specific wording of the law, it should be noted, does not forbid funding studies of gun violence. Rather, it states that  “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”

One, perhaps naive, way to interpret this is that the folks who had the law written are merely trying to prevent public money being used to advance a specific political agenda, namely that of gun control. On this interpretation, the funding could be used to study gun violence provided that none of the funding is used in advocacy or promotion. This seems reasonable enough. After all, using public money to advocate or promote a particular agenda (such as traditional marriage) would surely be wrong.

The first reply to this is that whatever the interpretation,  the effect of the law has been to take away the funds for research into gun violence as a public health issue. As such, the law is effectively a band on federal spending to research gun violence.

The second reply is that the law mandates that funded studies cannot conclude that gun control would be beneficial to the health of the public. Such a conclusion would presumably all under advocating or promoting gun control. As such, studies can be funded provided that those conducting the studies promise to draw no conclusion involving positive effects of gun control. As such, studies that conclude that gun control is bad or useless would be just fine. As such, researchers would be free to pursue the truth, provided that this pursuit did not lead to a truth indicating that gun control would be beneficial to public health. That certainly appears to be an immoral and unreasonable limitation.

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Losing your illusions

Posted by on April 28, 2013 22 comments

Analytic philosophy has been enormously influential in part because it has been an enormous philosophical success. Consider the following example. Suppose it were argued that God must exist, because we can meaningfully refer to Him, and reference can only work so long as a person refers to something real. Once upon a time, something like that argument struck people as a pretty powerful argument. But today, the analytic philosopher may answer: “We have been misled by our language. When we speak of God, we are merely asserting that some thing fits a certain description, and not actually referring to anything.” That is the upshot of Russell’s theory of descriptions, and it did its part in helping to disarm a potent metaphysical illusion.

Sometimes progress in philosophy occurs in something like this way. Questions are not resolutely answered, once and for all — instead, sometimes an answer is proposed which is sufficiently motivating that good-faith informed parties stop asking the incipient question. Consider, for instance, the old paradox, “If a tree falls in the forest, and no-one is around, does it make a sound?” If you make a distinction between primary and secondary qualities, then the answer is plainly “No”: for while sounds are observer-dependent facts, the vibration of molecules would happen whether or not anyone was present. If you rephrase the question in terms of the primary qualities (“If a tree falls in the forest, and no-one is around, do air molecules vibrate?”), then the answer is an obvious “yes”. A new distinction has helped us to resolve an old problem. It is a dead (falsidical) paradox: something that seems internally inconsistent, but which just turns into a flat-out absurdity when put under close scrutiny.

Interesting as those examples are, it is also possible that linguistic analysis can help us resolve perceptual illusions. Consider the image below (the Muller Lyer illusion, taken from the Institut Nicod‘s great Cognition and Culture lab). Now answer: “Which line is longer?”

mullerlyer-illusia

Fig. 1. Which line is longer?

Most participants will agree that the top line appears longer than the bottom one, despite the fact that they are ostensibly the same length. It is an illusion.

Illusions are supposed to be irresolvable conflicts between how things seem to you. For example, a mirage is an illusion, because if you stand in one place, then no matter how you present the stimuli to yourself, it will look as though a cloudy water puddle is hovering there somewhere in the distance. The mirage will persist regardless of how you examine it or think about it. There is no linguistic-mental switch you can flip inside your brain to make the mirage go away. Analytic philosophers can’t help you with that. (Similarly, I hold out no hopes that an analytic philosopher’s armchair musings will help to figure out the direction of spin for this restless ballerina.)

However, as a matter of linguistic analysis, it is not unambiguously true that the lines are the same length in the Muller-Lyer illusion. Oftentimes, the concept of a “line” is not operationally defined. Is a line just whatever sits horizontally? Or is a line whatever is distinctively horizontal (i.e., whatever is horizontal, such that it is segmented away from the arrowhead on each end)? Let’s call the former a “whole line”, and the latter a “line segment”. Of the two construals, it seems to me that it is best to interpret a line as meaning “the whole line”, because that is just the simplest reading (i.e., it doesn’t rely on arbitrary judgments about “what counts as distinctive”). But at the end of the day, both of those interpretations are plausible readings of the meaning of ‘line’, but we’re not told which definition we ought to be looking for.

I don’t know about you, but when I concentrate on framing the question in terms of whole lines, the perceptual illusion outright disappears. When asked, “Is one horizontal-line longer than the other?”, my eyes focus on the white space between the horizontal lines, and my mind frames the two lines as a vibrant ‘equals sign’ that happens to be bookended by some arrowheads in my peripheral vision. So the answer to the question is a clear “No”. By contrast, when asked, “Is one line-segment longer than the other?”, my eyes focus on the points at the intersection of each arrowhead, and compare them. And the answer is a modest “Yes, they seem to be different lengths” — which is consistent with the illusion as it has been commonly represented.

Now for the interesting part.

Out of curiosity, I measured both lines according to both definitions (as whole lines and as line segments). In the picture below, the innermost vertical blue guidelines map onto the ends of the line segments, while the outermost vertical blue guidelines map onto the edges of the bottom line:

Screen Shot 2013-04-28 at 6.12.15 PM

Fig 2. Line segments identical, whole lines different.

Once I did this, I came up with a disturbing realization: the whole lines in the picture I took from the Institut Nicod really are different lengths! As you can see, the very tips of the bottom whole line fail to align with the inner corner of the top arrow.

As a matter of fact, the bottom whole line is longer than the top whole line. This is bizarre, since the take-home message of the illusion is usually supposed to be that the lines are equal in length. But even when I was concentrating on the whole lines (looking at the white space between them, manifesting an image of the equals sign), I didn’t detect that the bottom line was longer, and probably would not have even noticed it had it not been for the fact that I had drawn vertical blue guidelines in (Fig.2). Still, when people bring up the Muller Lyer illusion, this is not the kind of illusion that they have in mind.

(As an aside: this is not just a problem with the image chosen from Institut Nicod. Many iterations of the illusion face the same or similar infelicities. For example, in the three bottom arrows image on this Wikipedia image, you will see that a vertical dotted guideline is drawn which compares whole lines to line segments. This can be demonstrated by looking at the blue guidelines I superimposed on the image here.)

Can the illusion be redrawn, such that it avoids the linguistic confusion? Maybe. At the moment, though, I’m not entirely sure. Here is an unsatisfying reconstruction of the Nicod image, where both line segment and whole line are of identical length for both the top arrow and the bottom one:

mullerlyer-illusia2

Fig 3. Now the two lines are truly equal (both as whole lines and as segments).

Unfortunately, when it comes to Fig. 3., I find that I’m no longer able to confidently state that one line looks longer than the other. At least at the moment, the illusion has disappeared.

Part of the problem may be that I had to thicken the arrowheads of the topmost line in order to keep them equal, both as segments and as wholes. Unfortunately, the line thickening may have muddied the illusion. Another part of the problem is that, at this point, I’ve stared at Muller-Lyer illusions for so long today that I am starting to question my own objectivity in being able to judge lines properly.

[Edit 4/30: Suppose that other people are like me, and do not detect any illusion in (Fig. 3). One might naturally wonder why that might be.

Of course, there are scientific explanations of the phenomenon that don't rely on anything quite like analytic philosophy. (e.g., you might reasonably think that the difference is that our eyes are primed to see in three dimensions, and that since the thicker arrows appear to be closer to the eye than the thin ones, it disposes the mind to interpret the top line as visually equal to the bottom one. No linguistic analysis there.) But another possibility is that our vision of the line segment is perceptually contaminated by our vision of the whole line, owing to the gestalt properties of visual perception. This idea, or something like it, already exists in the literature in the form of assimilation theory. If so, then we observers really do profit from making an analytic distinction between whole lines and line segments in order to help diagnose the causal mechanisms responsible for this particular illusion -- albeit, not to make it disappear.

Anyway. If this were a perfect post, I would conclude by saying that linguistic analysis can help us shed light on at least some perceptual illusions, and not just dismantle paradoxes. Mind you, at the moment, I don't know if this conclusion is actually true. (It does not bode well that the assimilation theory does not seem very useful in diagnosing any other illusions.) But if it did, it would be just one more sense in which analytic philosophy can help us to cope with our illusions, if not lose them outright.]

Dropping the Ball?

Posted by on April 22, 2013 6 comments
FBI Badge & gun.

FBI Badge & gun. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When it was learned that the FBI had checked up on  Tamerlan Tsarnaev and failed to predict that he would become radicalized, some politicians implied that the agency might have “dropped the ball.”

Given that Tamerlan Tsarnaev did apparently turn out to a threat, it is tempting to infer that the FBI did drop the ball. Now that it is known that he was a threat, people are going back and reconstructing the evidence that he had become radicalized, such as his YouTube links and his outburst at a Mosque.  However, this temptation should be resisted (unless evidence emerges to the contrary).

In regards to tracking people and predicting whether they will become a threat, the FBI faces two main philosophical challenges. The first is epistemic: that is, how do they know that a person will become a threat? This, as might be imagined, can be rather problematic. After all, as some commentators have noted, the FBI checks on many people every year and the vast majority of them do not turn out to be threats.

To use the obvious analogy, some people have mental health issues that might lead to serious violence, but the vast majority of such people never actually engage in such violence. When someone with such issues does engage in violence, people endeavor to backtrack and look for what was missed-and it always seems that the definitive evidence is never found. This might be because people have free will, because behavior is ultimately random, or because we lack the epistemic abilities to find the key evidence. Or something else entirely.

In the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, it might be found that there is no decisive evidence that would have revealed him to be on the (alleged) path to the bombing. That is, given the reasonably available evidence, perhaps the FBI lacked an adequate reason to expend its limited resources in tracking Tamerlan Tsarnaev in detail.

This possibility seems likely. As is often the case, the only definitive evidence that a person will engage in violence is when the person actually does so. Naturally, it would be rather useful to be able to definitively sort out the pre-criminals/terrorists before they act-but this is a rather difficult challenge given our capacity to know.

The second challenge is ethical and deals with such matters as the right to privacy and concerns about having a police state. While the state could keep closer checks on people who are even suspected of being potential wrong doers, there are obviously moral concerns with such an invasive state. The recent battle over expanding background checks for gun purchases showed the extent to which some people are concerned about matters of privacy and rights even in the context of public safety. After all, if there are significant concerns with expanding background checks for buying guns, then one can only imagine to concerns with having the FBI keeping close tabs on people on the basis of a foreign state making an inquiry about them and other such reasons.

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