Aaron Meskin is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on aesthetics and other philosophical subjects. He was the first aesthetics editor for the online journal Philosophy Compass, and he co-edited Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007). He is a former Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics and is Treasurer of the British Society of Aesthetics.

Roy T Cook is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, a Resident Fellow of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, and an Associate Fellow of the Northern Institute of Philosophy (Aberdeen). He works in the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and the aesthetics of popular art. He blogs about comics at:  www.pencilpanelpage.wordpress.com

Philosopher’s Eye: Why did you two decide to edit The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach?

AM: I thought there was enough good work out there being done on comics that someone could produce a good book on the subject matter. I like to work collaboratively, so when I met Roy it seemed like a good idea to work together. I suppose there’s also a sort of selfish reason–philosophy is about conversation and I wanted more conversation (and more interlocutors) on a topic I care about.

RTC: Aaron was nice enough to ask me – someone with no prior professional experience in aesthetics – to comment on a three-paper session on comics at an aesthetics conference. The volume was conceived over coffee at the same conference, based on the positive response to the papers and resulting discussion.

PE: What’s the central concern of the book, and why is it important?

AM & RTC: The book focuses on the aesthetic issues that are raised by the art form of comics. It is not philosophy ‘in’ or ‘through’ comics–the basic idea is to take comics seriously as an art and explore the philosophical questions that art raises. One of the most useful and interesting thing for philosophers of art to do is to focus on the specific issues raised by particular art forms–this strategy has really paid off in recent philosophical work on film and music.

PE: And what is it that draws you to this broad area?

AM: I care about the popular or mass arts. I particularly like comics. I like working in relatively new areas — I like the freedom and the challenge of figuring out what to say about topics that haven’t been previously explored by other philosophers.

RTC: Aaron and I arrived at this shared interest from completely different directions. While Aaron is an aesthetician who began to explore his interest in comics, I was just a guy really into comics who, as a result, started working in aesthetics (prior to this I had neither training nor experience in aesthetics). I think the different backgrounds and approaches helped when we were putting together the volume.

PE: What comics do you recommend for people who don’t know a lot about the art form?

AM: It’s an obvious recommendation, but Art Spiegelman’s Maus is the unquestioned masterpiece of the form. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Some other great works: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Charles Burns’ Black Hole, Daniel Clowes’ works such as David Boring, Ghost World and Ice Haven. Anything by Chris Ware. The British artist Posy Simmonds is wonderfully literary. I like some things by the (oddly) mainstream comics author, Grant Morrison, very much–Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Seven Soldiers of Victory. George Herriman’s early twentieth-century comic strip, Krazy Kat, is amazing, as is Winsor McCay’s even earlier strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland. The former is strange and profound, the latter is visually stunning.

RTC: Of course, Aaron and I don’t agree about every comic, but I won’t name the comics in his list that I think are overrated! Comics that I would add to the list are Canadian cartoonist Seth’s It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken and Wimbledon Green, anything drawn by either Jack Kirby or by Darwyn Cooke, and anything written by Warren Ellis (who was kind enough to write a preface for the anthology!). Aaron didn’t mention what is, in my opinion, Grant Morrison’s masterpiece – The Invisibles. In addition, I cannot emphasize enough my love for John Byrne’s work on The Fantastic Four and on The Sensational She-Hulk during the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Finally, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts is widely held to be a national treasure here in the States, but it deserves still more attention (and much more academic study).

AM: And I’m not saying anything about Roy’s list. Except that Seth really is worth reading.

PE: What sort of audience did you have in mind for this book?

AM & RTC: The volume should be of interest to philosophers, philosophy students, and anyone interested in comics (i.e., fans, comics theorists, comics makers). Anyone interested in the popular arts. So everyone, basically!

PE: What sort of reaction do you hope the books will get?

AM & RTC: Philosophers and philosophy students who read it will see that there are serious and interesting issues raised by comics. We hope they’re encouraged to think seriously about comics and other under-explored art forms. And we hope that people from outside of philosophy (comics fans and artists and theorists) will come to understand what philosophical aesthetics has to contribute to the understanding of the art form.

PE: Why do you think people should take comics seriously as an art form and topic of philosophical interest?

AM & RTC: Comics have tremendous artistic capacities–they can do pretty much everything literature and painting can. They have a remarkable capacity to tell complex and emotionally rich stories by means of visual narration. And they raise fascinating philosophical questions about representation, narrative, artistic value, authorship and more. Even those who aren’t fans should recognize that they raise interesting philosophical issues.

PE: What’s your current project? What’s next?

AM: I’ve got a lot of things other than comics that I’m working on–some experimental aesthetics, work on relativism and the semantics of aesthetic predicates, work on the short story, co-editing a book on aesthetics and the sciences. But I’m not going to stop working on comics–I’m in the process of writing an introduction to the aesthetics of comics for a forthcoming anthology on the philosophy of art, and I’ve just had the idea for a way of structuring my own book on comics. It has to do with opera! I hope to get round to writing that book sometime in the not-too-distant future.

RTC: After all the work involved with this volume, I need to get back to my day job – logic and philosophy of mathematics. So I am working on two main projects. The first is developing a version of logical pluralism from an intuitionistic perspective. The second is continuing my work defending, and mathematically developing, Scottish logicism, a contemporary variant of Gottlob Frege’s logicism. On the side, however, I am also currently working on a short book examining John Byrne’s use of metafictional strategies in The Sensational She-Hulk, and what this kind of ‘formal play’ has to teach us about how comics work.

A little pet peeve.

So there are a ton of different usages of the word ‘philosophy’.  Leaving aside its double-life as a verb, the OED lists nine noun entries for ‘philosophy’ – and one of them really grinds my gears.  I might be the only philosopher that gets the irritated, nails-on-chalkboard sensation when someone uses the term in this way, but I suspect not.  Not only are philosophers incredibly sensitive to their own use of language, splitting already split hairs, I find that they’re almost preternaturally attuned to the misuse of words in others.  Maybe we’re just all jerks.  Number six in the OED list is the spine-shivering offender, particularly, entry (b): “In extended use: a set of opinions or ideas held by an individual or group; a theory or attitude which acts as a guiding principle for behaviour; an outlook or world view.”

Maybe now you’re starting to sympathize with me.

Maybe now you’re starting to get that nervous twitch at the corner of your eye.  Such usages invariably begin with ‘My philosophy…’ (or worse, ‘our philosophy…’).  Businesses, politicians, and celebrities are, if not the worst offenders of this usage, certainly offer us the most prevalent examples.  Here are some, randomly culled from Google: ‘Our marketing philosophy […] depends heavily on our belief in limitless possibilities’, ‘My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.’, and so on*.

Why is this, and lets not mince words here, offensive to the two ears of (at least this) academic philosopher?  My own suspicion is that it has less to do with an ivory-tower defence of a proper usage of the term, than with the inevitable Crocodile-Dundee-style confrontation between 6B and these proper usages: i.e. ‘That’s not a philosophy, this, is a philosophy.’  To wit, when people start thinking that academic philosophy is the same as gathering and living by a collection of opinions, or indeed, ethical statements, which academic philosophy believes is but a subset of problems under only one (but a major) division of the discipline.  This, at least, is what pushes my button.  Not the use of the term, but that it misleads people about what philosophers actually do on a daily basis.

One might think that definition 6b hasn’t applied to mainstream philosophy since the time of the Ancient Greeks, where one’s philosophical analyses and conclusions really were a world view: things really did look different if you were an Epicurean as compared to a Stoic.   So maybe, what we need to do is isolate this use of ‘philosophy’ and try to slowly replace it with ‘ethos’ or ‘guiding principles’ or ‘firmly held beliefs’.   Would that solve the problem?  I’m not sure, and I’m starting to come round to the fact that this idea is a little misguided.  That really, 6B, and all its usages, even the extremely annoying uses, really does belong with all the other definitions, and that it should not only be used in this way, but encouraged.

Say what you will about David Foster Wallace – but in this area, I think he’s right.  In his doorstop of a book, Infinite Jest, he spills a lot of ink showing the wisdom of common phrases.   He picks up on this theme in the heart-wrenching (and mercifully, much shorter) 2005 Kenyon commencement speech.  What does a liberal art’s education really mean? –and the platitude, that it “teaches you how to think”?  I won’t retrace the article, suffice to say, that “teaching you how to think” has more depth, and more to teach, than you might think a common, bandied-about phrase really should.

And this, I think, is the way we should treat number 6B.  It might seem irritating, and a distortion of the ‘real’ uses of ‘philosophy’ – but it is just as real, and just as relevant.  Philosophy was, as alluded to above, once much more than an analysis of the necessary and sufficient conditions, or of supervenience bases and non-reductive explanatory levels: it did capture something about the world, and the way we do (or should) live in it.  And I think we should keep that in mind as we go about our studies, our great tracts of analyses – we are doing more than definition no. 1, creating “[knowledge], learning, scholarship; a body of knowledge”, and doing more than performing 4a “[rational] inquiry or argument, as opposed to divinely revealed knowledge” – that we are attempting to understanding the world by carving it at its joints, and trying to find our place in it – that we are, after all, crafting a world view.

Related:

David Vessey – Gadamer and Davidson on Language and Thought

*I have a suspicion, that the word ‘philosophy’ becomes something of a null search term when attached to most words.  Outside of its specifying usage with words like ‘ancient’ or ‘of law’, I doubt it really adds any great value to the trimming of search results.  I also think there are rules for a drinking game in here somewhere.

The BBC (picked up by Slate) go on to make the link between the discovery of such planets and astral systems, and SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.  With the discovery of more and more of these potentially-hospitable earth-twins, SETI gains a more plausible target to turn its arrays.  With the discovery of more and more of such planets, it is more likely (though I am hesitant to use this term here) that we may discover intelligent life.  Another variable in the Drake Equation starts its climb up in the cardinal numbers.

But wait! What is intelligent life?  The ability to broadcast galactic radio-waves?  Drake, at least, keeps that a separate variable, a tier that only a select group of intelligent critters will ever reach.  But that really seems to operationalize our search for intelligent life.  What if, being impatient, we send a probe (‘Make it so Number One’, etc.) to Kepler 22-B and discover strange, barely congealed bioluminescent areas – would we be right in attributing it with intelligence?  Might our current conceptions of it be too broad? – too exclusive?

Alva Nöe, my usual blogulocutor, seems to think that our current understanding of intelligence is limited.  Drawing on Enactivism (championed by, among others, Evan Thompson and the late Francisco Varela), Nöe argues that we have overlooked plants for too long!  On an Enactive understanding, life and mind and constitutively linked – the organizational structures of life are ‘intelligent’ – and plants are surely alive.  Thus, they are in some way intelligent!  Sure, plants won’t be constructing radio-arrays anytime soon, but they display some kind of intelligent life.  After all they adapt, and adapt to, their ecological niche, they can orient themselves towards nutrients, etc.

There are reasons both to agree and disagree with the organization cum intelligence view.  It certainly gives a deep unity between all living things, and may create a gradational scale of intelligence that, yes, would probably be more useful for our Kepler probe.  But it is less likely to proffer any meaningful observations about what makes human intelligence so unique and powerful – why we have constructed radio-arrays, and are actively looking for other array-assemblers.  Such arguments are very poor at explaining how our level of intelligence could arise: how one could jump from sunflowers to super-sunflowers to humans.

When it comes to searching for intelligent life, I have to agree with SETI: wait and hear.  While it might be unfair to many planets with hypothetical plant-proto-intelligence, if we hear radio waves, we have a pretty good reason to think we’re listening to the emanations of an intelligent creature.

Related:

Scientific Models – Stephen M. Downes

Einstein's Clock

To me, the first of January is always a write-off.  Nothing productive ever happens.  It exists among the days of hangovers and jetlag.  But now it is the day after the first, and it is now (as it was yesterday) 2012, and that means it is the perfect time to discuss, well, time.  And there have been quite a few timely stories lately, from Samoa and Tokelau going back to the future, to the growing schism between international time and astronomical time.  Even the Royal Society has some choice words on tricky temporal travails. And, resolutions aside, I’m going to attempt to be timely myself, and make this a rather short post.  I want to share a few thoughts and links about the commercialization of time.

Of course, time is involved in many non-trivial ways in our daily life: the flow and change of seasons that signalled times of growth and harvest; the rotations of the sun that marked out the day’s working hours; the shivers of tide that allow for the gathering of molluscs, and so on.  There is a strain of philosophy, particular the early Phenomenologists, that assert that such relationships to time are primordial, originary.  These initial demarcations of time and change are what allow our mind to grasp a hold on the concept, to bring it to the rarefied reaches of reason, and to gain a measure of control over it.  This is a rich field of thought, but I want to make just a few remarks about one aspect of this control: when time becomes part of – a tool, even – of our commercial and economic spheres.

Harvard Professor Peter Galison, and his book, Einstein’s Clocks and Poincare’s Maps, helped me make sense of how time was reigned in.  Until the late 19^th century and early 20^th, every major urban central had its own ‘local time’, most often set to accord with astronomical time, where noon corresponds to the apex of the sun in the sky.  But with the introduction of telegraph lines (and predominantly their use in calculating longitudinal maps), among other reasons, time was brought under international purview, and regulation.

We can find in these telegraph lines the beginning of time’s integration into our economy.  This shouldn’t be taken to mean those aspects of our economy ‘where time is of the essence’ in expediting parcels, or trading stocks – where time, or the lack thereof, is prized – but in date-line jumping and satellite calculations (the modern day telegraphy).  Time is no longer just a way of marking change, or an absolute stream, or the meaning of the structure of care – and maybe it never has been just these things – but now it’s not just something we value, but an integral part of our economy, something to be debated over in terms of dollars and cents, part of what makes the world as we know it go round.

Related:

Matthew McGrath – Temporal Parts

Sonia Roca-Royes – Essential Properties and Individual Essences

Better Than a Lump of Coal

Fritz Allhoff, Scott C. Lowe

From the blurb:

From Santa, elves and Ebenezer Scrooge, to the culture wars and virgin birth, Christmas – Philosophy for Everyone explores a host of philosophical issues raised by the practices and beliefs surrounding Christmas. Offers thoughtful and humorous philosophical insights into the most widely celebrated holiday in the Western world Contributions come from a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, theology, religious studies, English literature, cognitive science and moral psychology The essays cover a wide range of Christmas themes, from a defence of the miracle of the virgin birth to the relevance of Christmas to atheists and pagans

 

As the last of the United States’ armed forces withdraw from their prolonged engagement in Iraq, an observer can pause to reflect and consider the moral status of this conflict. Two recent experiences – incredibly trivial though they may be – inform my analysis. Firstly, I happened to chance upon In the Valley of Elah (a 2007 film whose story aims to highlight some of the terrible psychological effects that can result from throwing young individuals into such a conflict) the other day, and I found it quite compelling. Secondly, in a recent philosophy seminar that I was overseeing, a student attempted to raise the war in Iraq as an example that might offer support for a more general point about the validity of a consequentialist justification in moral reasoning; at the time I didn’t have any knowledge of the numbers involved, so I couldn’t say much about the nature of the example as regards a strictly consequentialist calculation. Due to my role, I felt compelled to stay silent at the time, and it left me frustrated.

I shall elaborate upon this second instance first. The war in Iraq was mentioned because – so the student asserted – America’s action was a reaction to 9/11, the war being started in order to prevent future attacks; therefore given that fewer Americans had died in the war in Iraq than in the 9/11 attacks (or so it was believed in the, as it turns out, rather ignorant context of the seminar) then if the war had successfully prevented another attack on the scale of 9/11, it ought to be considered, overall, a good thing. Now, as I have recently discovered, the death toll for American soldiers in Iraq stands at “nearly 4,500”, and therefore the example appears to fail on the most basic terms of its calculation. But placing this point to one side for a moment, can we instead ask how legitimate it may be to even ask such a question, or to put such a question in such terms? Would such a consequentialist calculation sufficiently justify a war? Could it? As ever, there is always a game to be played – especially in philosophy seminars – whereby one can repeatedly alter the variables in the calculation in order to find the point at which the consequentialist calculation breaks down. Let’s say Saddam had WMDs, and he was definitely going to deploy them…would the war have been obviously justified? Perhaps so. What if he had them, but wasn’t planning on deploying them…still ok? What about if he didn’t have them? (I won’t wade into that debate…) Intellectually stimulating as this silly little game may be, it doesn’t really hit to the heart of matter does it? And why not, we may ask…

The lens of the international news presents two images of a war: It presents, firstly, the big picture, the numerical information, which largely amounts to the statistics concerning the numbers of casualties, the financial cost of the conflict, and so on. Secondly, it presents the little picture, the human face of the conflict; it shows us the stories of the individuals ‘on the ground’. The news tells us these things because it is the news, and that’s what the news does…it’s the news’ job to tell us about the stuff that we’re interested in, and when it comes to war, we are interested in these things. If it only told us about the stats, we would feel a strong inclination to know more about what it was actually like, ‘on the ground’. If we were only shown the stories on the ground, we would want to know more about how this fits into the big picture. Now though ‘level of interest’ is hardly a philosophically robust measure to base any kind of theory on, it is undoubtedly the case that we are interested in these two things, the big picture and the little picture. That much is obvious.

Returning to our consequentialist calculation, we see that part of the problem of engaging with an issue such as war on such strictly consequentialist terms is that the calculation seems too stuck in the ‘big picture’ perspective. From this point of view, many things can appear to be utterly justified. But from the ‘little picture’ perspective, precisely the same things can appear utterly unjustifiable. Posing a question about the moral status of this war, or any war, in strictly consequentialist terms therefore misses some important elements, and it does this by presupposing that only the big picture counts. Only the big picture can ultimately count, in consequentialist terms; and the truth of that is far from obvious.

How else can I conclude this but with a glib and pathetic point about the likely necessity of involving a profound sense of both perspectives in any moral judgement…? Well, why not.

Related Articles:

Recent Work on the Ethics of Self-Defense

Tyler Doggett

Consequentializing

Douglas W. Portmore

Source: Wikimedia Commons

So the big news is the Eurozone crisis and what to do about it. This obscures the bigger question, which is what to do about the system of international finance. I have an idea. Let’s get rid of it. Something seems simply wrong with the idea of a system of giant, closely integrated lending firms, backed up by nationally-owned central banks. New regimes of regulation, or the ‘utility model’ – where credit institutions are treated like nationalised water or electricity suppliers – are weasly halfway houses. Let’s go eliminativist. Why not? Think Distributism, without the anti-Semitism, the leanings towards theocracy, and the social conservatism. Ok, don’t think Distributism. Just think very, very different from the way things are now.

But I’m just a historian of philosophy. I have no idea what I’m talking about. I just feel like that would be the right thing to do. Before you accuse me of being naïve, however, consider what you’re accusing me of not knowing. Is the accusation that I don’t understand economics? The problem with that is that there is no reason to think that if I did understand economics I’d be any better placed to legislate for the future. At the risk of raining on a great ongoing parade, we don’t have a social science with predictive power. We don’t even, as Jerry Fodor said in a different context, know what it would be like to have a predictive social science. If I don’t know what the consequences of a policy will be, I take comfort in the fact that nobody else does either.

Remember that this is a question of knowledge. In the Meno, Socrates reminded Anytus that Pericles himself could not teach his sons to be statesmen. That meant that Pericles did not himself know how to be a statesmen. He had true opinion with respect to leadership. But to have had knowledge he would have to have known why his opinions were true. And if he’d known that he could have taught it to his sons. Now, many governments have managed to guide their countries into periods of high growth and low inflation. Supposing that that really is what we all want, how did they do it? If we knew, we’d be doing it too. And we’re not. Ergo, there is true opinion about these things but no knowledge.

Glancing at the Times opinion pages yesterday, I saw one piece by Matt Ridley, arguing that the strategies of the rich democracies has been the opposite of what it should have been: regulating the finance sector and deregulating ‘the market’ (meaning the markets in everything besides credit). That feels plausible enough, but so does my idea. Ridley doesn’t know his plan would help anyone. I then saw another piece, by Ed Balls, arguing that the announced VAT rise by the British government weakened consumer confidence in a way that undermined its plans for deficit reduction. Plausible again. But he doesn’t know it. Neither – perhaps especially not – does the government he attacked know that they are right in rejecting his attacks or anybody else’s. They blame unforeseen contingencies for the failures of their policy so far, but this is precisely the point: when a model can’t take into account the relevant contingencies, there is the telltale sign that the theory driving the model has no predictive power.

When any of these figures defend their predictions and associated recommendations, they do so, inevitably, in terms of neoclassical economic theory. I don’t mean here to criticise neoclassical theory as such; there are many things we know that we wouldn’t know without it. But as a predictive social science, it faces a great difficulty, which is the threat of triviality. It tells us that people will, on the whole, adopt the most rational course of action in a given economic scenario. But, for that very reason, it must regard the course of action actually taken by economic agents, whatever that may be, as the rational one. What you would need to make neoclassical theory predictive would be some local criteria, in each case, determining what should count as the rational course of action, beyond the vacuous criterion of being the course which most economic agents will take. But here neoclassical theory is stuck with either making predictions that are so generic they are useless for guiding policy (imposing a price ceiling on a market may cause some kind of shortage), or so specific they are inevitably false (the prospective shortage is represented by this demand curve, over this exact period, calculated using these exact PED values, etc.).

I am not making the behavioural economist’s criticism, that people are irrational (though predictably so) in many situations. What I am proposing is that even granting the standard neoclassical assumptions like perfect rationality and symmetric information the theory would have no predictive power. Indeed the theory has rather impressive retrodictive power (Ben Bernanke would have been a great person to have around during the Great Depression). But this is actually a bad sign regarding its potential predictive power: the possibility of retrodiction shows that the problem is not that the theory doesn’t handle the data properly, but rather that we can’t access it ahead of time. And this may be for a variety of reasons, not least the clichéd problem that the conditions that provide the environment determining rational decisions are continually modified by those decisions. Moreover, taking Alex Rosenberg’s line, the rationality assumptions themselves predict an inevitable arms race between social scientists and those agents who stand to gain from not having their behaviour predicted (think hedge funds, then generalise).

Now bear in mind that it is not only governments that have to build predictive models based on neoclassical theory (or neoclassical theory kitted up with behavioural and experimental innovations). Banks need to as well. Banks cannot simply respond to prices; they have to make guesses about the future of the economy. And every time they leverage up risk, they layer on more guesses. In fact governments in the rich democracies pretty much are banks; the aim of their strategies is to profit (in votes rather than in money) by correctly predicting behaviour in the general economy. (This, incidentally, is one argument against treating banks as public utilities.) The reason they fail so often is because they guess so much. Wouldn’t it be a nicer world if we didn’t all have to live with the consequences of these astronomically scaled guesses?

I suppose this all sounds a little Austrian, so let me do some distancing. Ludwig Von Mises’ 1949 book, Human Action, sets out a case against the idea of a predictive social science. But his conclusion is that economics ought to be regarded as an a priori science, comprised of analytic judgments following a set of intuitions about human rationality that are taken as axiomatic. Here I can’t follow, because I think that if people were made in accordance with my intuitions about rationality, economics wouldn’t exist. ‘All men are mad’, A.J.P. Taylor once wrote, ‘who pursue power when they could be fishing, or painting pictures, or just sitting in the sun.’ Replace ‘power’ with ‘profit’ and the point, to my mind, stands even firmer. If economics exists at all it must be an a posteriori science, and as such it faces the difficulties Von Mises noted (as did Hayek in his classic paper ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’). Anyway, the Austrian position is too strong; I don’t think there are insurmountable epistemological barriers to a predictive social science. I just claim we haven’t surmounted them, and we can’t imagine what things would look like on the other side.

Readers of my last post on this blog, if there were any, would complain that I’ve contradicted myself. I don’t feel compelled to reply to criticisms from such a distant possible world, but if I did I would say this: There I supported top-down social policies based on large-scale aggregative models, as opposed to localist, ‘Big Society’ ideology. I still think the former comes out better in the comparison. I haven’t even changed my mind about the ‘based on aggregative models’ part. I just no longer think we have a clue how to build them.

But remember that the primary impulse behind social reforms has never been social science. The great reforms of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century did not come out of Utilitarianism or welfare economics. They came out of general instincts, such as those which told people that making children work in factories is pretty demented when you think about it, or that Dickens seemed to have a point, or that women don’t really seem very stupid at all, or that watching your children die slowly seems an excessive punishment for not being able to find a job. Of course the justification behind rolling back so many social reforms today lies in the belief that pursuing increased prosperity will make all measures to protect the vulnerable unnecessary. It would be wonderful if anybody had the vaguest idea how to ensure prosperity. Until we do, I don’t think it would be a terrible idea to switch back from ‘outcome-oriented’ approaches to doing what we feel is right. If somebody points out here that there is no reason to trust my instincts as reliable guides, I reply that this is something I really do know – better than you ever could. But at least when I guess I know I’m guessing.

When a body of theory is full of elegant models and formidable equations it doesn’t follow that it explains anything, let alone predicts anything. If governments and banks were setting the course of our lives according to some favourite theory of quantum gravity, we would, I think, regard them as being somewhat irresponsible. And yet what is ‘border science’ in physics is far closer to complete than what is guiding orthodoxy in the social sciences. The arguments are as strong as ever that our social science still has the status Kant ascribed to metaphysics: that of blind groping in the dark. To be fair, that sounds like a great party. But I think the party is over.

First off, Time reports on the first three-dimensional movie of a female orgasm.  Captured by a team of researchers led by Barry Komisaruk at Rutgers University, the movie shows the brain activity correlated with the orgasm of a single subject.  Like most fMRI captures, the ‘heat’ of the colours is correlated with oxygenated blood movement, and thus brain activity – the more rufous the colour, the higher the activation.  In the case of an orgasm, the entire brain is dense with activity.  (By the way, if you are interested in what it is like to achieve an orgasm in an MRI – the guardian has the scoop here)

In his as-of-yet-unpublished findings, presented to the Society for Neuroscience conference, Komisaruk speculatively links the sequence of brain activation to (presumably, though not mentioned) first-person experiences of such orgasms, third-person observations, and previous literature on orgasm and brain circuitry.  This yields some pretty titillating conversation for a scientific finding, such as:

…facial expressions during orgasm (the “O face”) are often indistinguishable from those made in pain, and suggests this may be explained by activity in the insula.

Funny, but general and speculative.  And more to the point, I don’t believe that there will be anything earth-shaking (aside from… well, you get the idea) to come from this study.  But this is far from undervaluing this kind of work: gaining an understanding of a normal or average female orgasm will help not only with understanding why some women can achieve orgasm and others cannot, but, as Time rightly notes, will also aid understanding those wider situations where desire and motivation get tangled into pathological snarls.

But already, Komisaruk’s work faces a challenge: there are large differences between his research, and that of Gert Hostelge at the University of Groningen (referred to in Time as so many ‘Dutch researchers’).  Working along a similar train of thought, Hostelge’s work has found that brain activation actually decreases during orgasm (a good summary here, and why you should wear socks, courtesy of the BBC).

So what are we to make this discrepancy?  Well, Komisaruk speculates that at least some of the difference comes down to the fact that in Hostelge’s work, orgasm was initiated by partners, and that the act of ‘surrender’ may account for some decrease in brain activity.  Pretty thin, if you ask me.     More likely is the fact that we just don’t know.  At the moment, there are so many intervening variables that such wild speculation is all one can do.

And this brings us to the second, and much shorter, part of this blog post.  What are we supposed to do with neurological findings such as these?  Writing on the particularly hot-topic of sex-based differences, William Saletan at Slate, discusses ten aspects of research (and popular reporting on said research) to watch out for.  This article is relevant not only for its lucid remarks on suggestion and interpretation in research, but also for those on the politics and promotion of scientific results that deal with gender and sex, both in the academic sector and the public press.

Read more:

Evidence in Medicine and Evidence-Based Medicine – John Worrall

The Paradox of Confirmation – Branden Fitelson

Information First
By Luciano Floridi
Professor of Philosophy and UNESCO Chair in Information and Computer Ethics, University of Hertfordshire
 & Oxford University
Editor of Philosophy & Technology

On 23rd of April 2010, Bill Gates gave a talk at MIT in which he asked: “are the brightest minds working on the most important problems?” By “the most important problems” he meant “improving the lives of the poorest; improving education, health, nutrition”. Unfortunately, the list should probably include improving peaceful interactions, human rights, environmental conditions, living standards… and this is only the beginning. Clearly, the brightest philosophical minds should not be an exception, but turn their attention to such pressing challenges. The first question is how. Of course, one may stop philosophising and start doing something about this messy world instead. We may, in other words, close down our philosophy departments and never corrupt our brightest youths philosophically. Yet, such solution smacks of self-defeat. It would be like deciding to burn the wicker basket in which we are travelling, because our hot air balloon is descending too quickly. Philosophy is what you want to keep in a good world, not what you want to get rid of in a bad one. So there must be a different way forward. The fact is that philosophy can be extremely helpful, for it is philosophy, understood as conceptual design, that forges the new ideas, theories, perspectives and more generally the intellectual framework that can then be used to understand and deal with the ultimate questions that challenge us so pressingly. In the team effort made by the brightest minds, the philosophical ones can contribute insights and visions, analyses and syntheses, heuristics and solutions that can empower us to tackle the most important problems. Every little effort helps in the battle against idiocy, obscurantism, intolerance, fanaticisms and fundamentalisms of all kinds, bigotry, prejudice and mere ignorance. If this sounds self-serving recall that the longer the jump forward is, the longer the run-up to it should be. Or, with a different metaphor, philosophy takes care of the roots, so that the rest of the plant might grow more healthily.

The second question is which. Which ideas, theories, perspectives and, more generally, which intellectual framework should philosophers be designing now and for the foreseeable future, so that their contribution will be timely and helpful? The answer lies in the conceptual threads that run across so many of our “most important problems”. In a global information society, virtually any of crucial challenges that we are facing is linked to information and communication technologies, in terms of causes, effects, solutions, scientific investigations, actual improvements, or even just the wealth required to tackle them, as Bill Gates’ example clearly shows. Obviously, information resources, technologies and sciences are not a panacea, but they are a crucial and powerful weapon in our fight against so many evils.

This leads me to the last question, the what. What can enable humanity to make sense of our contemporary world, respect it and improve it responsibly, and hence help in solving “the most important problems”? The answer seems quite simple: a new philosophy of information. Among our mundane and technical concepts, information is currently one of the most important, widely used yet least understood. The brightest philosophical minds should turn their attention to it in order to design the philosophy of our time properly conceptualised for our time. This is a quick and dirty way of introducing the philosophy of information (PI) as a much needed development in this history of philosophy. Let me now sketch the longer story.

The development of new philosophical ideas seems to be akin to economic innovation. For when Schumpeter adapted the idea of “creative destruction” in order to interpret economic innovation, he might as well have been talking about intellectual development.  Philosophy flourishes by constantly re-engineering itself. Nowadays, its pulling force of innovation is represented by the world of information and communication phenomena, their corresponding sciences and technologies and the new environments, social life, as well as the existential, cultural, economic and educational issues that they are bringing about. This is why PI can present itself as an innovative paradigm that opens up a very rich and helpful area of conceptual investigations. Academically speaking, PI is the philosophical field concerned with the critical investigation of the conceptual nature and basic principles of information, including its dynamics, utilisation and sciences, and with the elaboration and application of information-theoretic and computational methodologies to philosophical problems. More concretely, PI appropriates an explicit, clear and precise interpretation of the classic “ti esti” question, namely “what is information?”, the clearest hallmark of a new field. As with any other field-question, this too only serves to demarcate an area of research, not to map its specific problems in detail. PI seeks to expand the frontier of our philosophical understanding, by providing innovative methodologies to address our most important problems from a contemporary perspective.

The scientific revolution made seventeenth century philosophers redirect their attention from the nature of the knowable object to the epistemic relation between it and the knowing subject, and hence from metaphysics to epistemology. The subsequent growth of the information society and the appearance of the infosphere, as the environment in which millions of people spend their lives nowadays, have led contemporary philosophy to privilege critical reflection first on the domain represented by the memory and languages of organised knowledge, the instruments whereby the infosphere is managed – thus moving from epistemology to philosophy of language and logic – and then on the nature of its very fabric and essence, information itself. Information has thus arisen as a concept as fundamental and important as Being, knowledge, life, intelligence, meaning or good and evil – all pivotal concepts with which it is interdependent – and so equally worthy of autonomous investigation. It is also a more impoverished concept, in terms of which the others can be expressed and interrelated, when not defined. This is why PI may explain and guide the purposeful construction of our intellectual environment, and provide the systematic treatment of the conceptual foundations of contemporary society.

The future of PI depends on how well it will engage both with “the most important problems” of our time and with classic philosophical issues. I am optimistic. The Baconian-Galilean project of grasping and manipulating the alphabet of the universe has begun to find its fulfilment in the computational and informational revolution, which is affecting so profoundly our knowledge of reality and how we conceptualise it and ourselves within it. Informational narratives possess an ontic power, not as magical confabulations, expressions of theological logos or mystical formulae, but immanently, as building tools that can describe, modify, and implement our environment and ourselves. From this perspective, PI can be presented as the study of the informational activities that make possible the construction, conceptualization, semanticisation (giving meaning to) and finally the moral stewardship of reality, both natural and artificial, both physical and anthropological. PI enables humanity to make sense of the world and construct it responsibly. It promises to be one of the most exciting and beneficial areas of philosophical research of our time.

References

Video: The Fourth Revolution x TED

Video: Seventeen Answers x FreedomLab

The Philosophy of Information (OUP, 2011)

Information – A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2010)