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Analytic philosophy has a language problem

Thu, 07 Apr 2022 15:32:22 GMT

The roots of its contemporary decadence

English is the language of analytic philosophy. 97% of citations in prestigious analytic philosophy journals are of works written in English, and 96% of the journals’ board members reside in English-speaking countries. That might be simply because of English being the world’s common language, but it’s having a detrimental effect on analytic philosophy itself. Deprived of the perspectives of philosophical traditions written in other languages and excluding those philosophers whose English or type of prose doesn’t pass the test of the journals’ gatekeepers, analytic philosophy has found itself in a state of decadence. From Socrates and Plato to Hume and Kant, and from Arendt to Wittgenstein, none would fit the current stereotypes of analytic philosophy. Filippo Contesi, Louise Chapman and Constantine Sandis offer some solutions to this contemporary malaise.

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Dylan at 80

Mon, 25 Oct 2021 19:43:15 GMT

It used to go like that, and now it goes like this

Bob Dylan did not die young. That still seems a surprise.

Dylan himself has reflected a number of times about his cheating of death, toying with concepts of transfiguration and rebirth. From early on, biographers have recorded Dylan’s thoughts on his own death, speculating what it might mean for him to grow old. At the close of his landmark 1986 biography, No Direction Home – The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, Robert Shelton wondered what Dylan’s future career might be like. Would his creativity come to an abrupt end like that of Rimbaud, or would it flourish in late age, like that of Yeats?

If once an open question, the answer has been clear since 1997’s Time Out of Mind. Dylan at 80, reflects on the evolving creativity across various stages of Dylan’s life and career, from a youthful Guthrie jukebox to elderly statesman with the blood of the land in his voice. On his latest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, the Blakean song ‘I Contain Multitudes’ serves as a piece of retrospective self-reflection upon Dylan’s own many-sidedness, in turn refracted into the many songs on the album. Heartfelt love songs, rowdy blues, mournful reflections on the political past and present, and ruminations on the end of things represent and deepen Dylan’s repertoire ever since Another Side of Bob Dylan.

2021 marks Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday and his 60th year in the music world. It invites us to look back on his career and the multitudes that it contains. Is he a song and dance man? A political hero? A protest singer? A self-portrait artist who has yet to paint his masterpiece? Is he Shakespeare in the alley? The greatest living exponent of American music? An ironsmith? Internet radio DJ? Poet (who knows it)? Is he a spiritual and religious parking meter? Judas? The voice of a generation or a false prophet, jokerman, and thief? Dylan is all these and none. We can now consider what it means for Dylan to be entering his seventh decade as a recording artist. If this book is about anything, it is about reflecting on Dylan at 80. How is he? How is his art? Does he still embody the themes and styles of his younger self, or has he developed a late style that won’t look back? The essays in this book explore the Nobel laureate’s masks, collectively reflecting upon their meaning through time, change, movement, and age.

Unconscious Bias or Deliberate Gatekeeping?

Mon, 25 Oct 2021 19:35:49 GMT

Philosophy's Language Problem

Philosophy has a language problem. A recent study by Schwitzgebel, Huang, Higgins and Gonzalez-Cabrera(2018) found that, in a sample of papers published in elite journals, 97% of citations were to work originally written in English. 73% of this same sample didn’t cite any paper that had been originally written in a language other than English. Finally, a staggering 96% of elite journal editorial boards are primarily affiliated with an Anglophone university. This is consistent with earlier data suggesting that journal submissions from countries that are outside the Anglophone world and Europe have disturbingly low chances of being accepted.

Unless one takes the absurd view that the data reflects who does the best philosophy and where they do it, this is prima facie cause for concern. The recently published “Barcelona Principles for a Globally Inclusive Philosophy” aim at addressing a “structural inequality between native and non-native speakers”, and call on philosophers to take steps like including non-native speakers on editorial boards and not giving “undue weight to their authors’ linguistic style, fluency or accent”.

Schwitzgebel et al.’s study doesn’t tell us what percentage of papers originally written in English were by non-native speakers. However, as Schwitzgebel’s and others’ data suggest, the academic pipeline of Anglophone philosophy is overwhelmingly self-confined within elite Anglophone institutions. Indeed, additional data point to a structural inequality between native and non-native speakers. For instance, preliminary data suggest that journal academic reviewing is in general biased against “non-native-like English” prose and in fact non-native speakers of English appear to be much more poorly represented in prestigious philosophy departments than in equally prestigious scientific departments.

Was Jesus a Moral Particularist?

183:767795201 (Constantine Sandis) — Mon, 25 Oct 2021 19:31:18 GMT

Moral particularism is often defined as the view that there are no universal moral principles. This is sometimes defended by appeal to examples, such as that of lying to a Nazi officer. Defenders of moral principles either bite the bullet and insist that lying is always wrong, or revise the principle in question to include clauses such as ‘unless a murderous Nazi is asking questions’.

Nobody knows how many clauses a principle can withstand before it becomes meaningless. Luckily, it doesn’t matter. The real issue doesn’t concern the possibility of true moral generalisations, but whether such principles can themselves provide us with reasons for action. Particularists answer this question negatively, holding further that moral reasoning is hindered by strict adherence to even the best of moral codes.

The Tablet of Our Overcomings

183:767795201 (Constantine Sandis) — Fri, 21 May 2021 11:07:42 GMT

Nietzsche on the Good of the Guise

There is a famous thesis in moral philosophy that has come to be known as the ‘guise of the good’. According to this ancient doctrine — which remains popular to this day — we only ever desire things that we perceive as being good, in at least some respect. As Socrates puts it in Plato’s Meno: “nobody wants to be wretched”. The problem is that what we take to be good may only be so apparently. We accordingly often pursue terrible things, mistaking them for good. On a stronger version of the doctrine, we not only desire the apparent good but always act on such desires. Taken to the extreme, it states that all wrongdoing is but a form of ignorance.

In a virtually-unnoticed, fascinating twist, Friedrich Nietzsche turns the guise of the good thesis on its head. Indeed, on his account, it would be more appropriate to talk of the good of the guise: we do not desire things because we think of them as good, but, on the contrary, perceive things to be good precisely because we desire them. To think otherwise is to fall prey to the more general ‘great error’ of confusing cause and effect (Twilight of the Idols, V).

Nietzsche’s insight into human nature is that things acquire their perceived worth in proportion to how much we covet and strive after them; the tougher the achievement, the more we value the thing achieved...

Doing Nothing in the time of COVID-19

183:767795201 (Constantine Sandis) — Sun, 16 May 2021 12:59:27 GMT

In the wake of COVID-19, memes asserting that, for the first time in history, we could save the world by doing absolutely nothing went (ahem) viral. The notion that one can achieve a great good by doing bugger all is blindingly attractive. How cool would it be if heroism not only begins at home, but gets to stay there, putting its feet up, watching Netflix, and occasionally donning a mask to pop out for emergency pizza? Not all heroes get to wear masks or stay at home though, because not all heroes can afford masks, let alone the privilege of social-distancing or a home in which to lockdown. Many live in small cramped spaces and/or desperately relying on low incomes from manual labour, such as driving a bus, stacking shelves, or delivering food parcels to those of us staying at home doing nothing ...read more in The Philosophers' Magazine

Enchanted Action

Sun, 16 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

What Fairy Tales Can Teach Us About AI

In Gail Carson Levine’s fairy tale Ella Enchanted , the imprudent fairy Lucinda casts a spell on Ella which causes her to ‘always be obedient’, her behaviour triggered by commands which she literally cannot resist ‘obeying’. Her orders are for reasonably discrete actions such as fetching people items of food but are clearly extendable to complex activities like going on a three-weak horseback trip across the country side. Commands to the do the latter sort of thing leave Ella sufficient space to choose to perform any small acts which aren’t in conflict with her wider instructions, until she’s further commanded otherwise (priority is always given to the earliest command that’s yet to be fulfilled). Here’s how the protagonist describes her own terrible predicament:

Anyone could control me with an order. It had to be a direct command, such as “Put on a shawl,” or “You must go to bed now” […] against an order I was powerless […] I could never hold out for long (9).

The curse envisioned by Levine (who majored in philosophy) transforms a human being into a semi-automaton whose behaviour is easily manipulated through voice-activation. While ultimately powerless, she is nonetheless able to briefly resist any command that doesn’t explicitly request for immediate action. Ella lacks the freedom to do as she wills, insofar as her will is paralysed each time she is ordered to do something...

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Alice in Wolfland

Sat, 15 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

The final story in Angela Carter’s 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber begins with a sentence replete with provisos:

Could this ragged girl with brindled lugs have spoken like we do she would have called herself a wolf, but she cannot speak, although she howls because she is lonely — yet ‘howl’ is not the right word for it, since she is young enough to make the noise that pups do, bubbling, delicious, like that of a panful of fat on the fire (1979:140).

In her introduction to the the 2006 Vintage reprint , Helen Simpson writes that Carter once joked that ‘the advantage of including animal protagonists in her work was that she did not have to make them talk’. But speak some of them do — and in this case it is a human who cannot speak, or indeed barely even howl Had she been able to speak (or otherwise communicate) as ‘we’ do, the reader is told, she would not have identified herself as human but as a wolf. What a deceptively simple thought this is. The we in question might at first appear to refer to ‘us’ humans , a set to which the reader presumably belongs — bar Carter’s writings being enjoyed by alien species. But even then, it presumably doesn’t include toddlers and other human beings who lack the required communicative skills...

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The AI of the Beholder

Thu, 13 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

(with Richard H.R. Harper)

F orget the Turing test. Alan said it best in a neglected paragraph of the original paper in which he first proposed his test:

The original question, “Can machines think?” I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted (442).

Turing’s 1950 prediction was not that computers would be able to think in the future but that we would talk of computers thinking and that, once this happened, what we meant by the term would have morphed in such a way that it would be pretty uncontroversial to say that machines think. Our use of the term has indeed loosened to the point that attribution of thought to even the most basic of machines has become common parlance, at least outside the wretched confines of the philosophy classroom, in which no claim is too obvious...

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Family Games

Wed, 12 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Early on in the Philosophical Investigations , Ludwig Wittgenstein offers his famous example of games to show how many things are united in name by similarities not underscored by any single common feature. He writes:

Consider, for example, the activities that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, athletic games, and so on. What is common to them all? — Don’t say: “They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’” — but look and see whether there is anything common to all. — For if you look at them, you won’t see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities […] I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family a build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, and so on and so forth — overlap and criss-cross in the same way. — And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family (§§ 66–7).

It has since been customary amongst philosophers to talk of some concepts being ‘family resemblance concepts’. This is problematic, but not for the reasons that Wittgenstein’s detractors assume. The most famous of these is Bernard Suits, who in his playful book The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia states that Wittgenstein ‘saw very little’ before putting forward what he takes to be an adequate definition of ‘ game’ in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions shared by anything worthy of the name...

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Nietzsche’s Dance With Zarathustra

Wed, 12 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

In 1885 Nietzsche finished writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which he has the prophet proclaim many Nietzschean ideas in parables and epiphets. Constantine Sandis asks why Nietzsche particularly chose Zarathustra.

In M. Night Shyamalan’s superhero film Unbreakable , the fragile-boned Elijah believes that somewhere out there he has an enemy with the exact opposite property, whom he eventually identifies as the ‘unbreakable’ security guard David Dunn. A similar kind of reasoning led Nietzsche to name the protagonist of his religious parody Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-5) after Zoroaster (‘Zarathustra’ is a Westernised version of the name). Nietzsche viewed the Persian prophet as his arch rival: an opponent of similar power and stature, whom he admired but could never fully overcome. In the character of ‘Zarathustra’, Nietzsche attempts to create his own spokesman worthy of Zoroaster’s greatness. As the psychologist Carl Jung put it in his lectures on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (1934-9), while it is true that “Nietzsche chose a most dignified and worthy model for his wise old man,” he also took him to be “the founder of the Christian dogma” [of moral objectivity] that Nietzsche so vehemently opposed. He also notes that Zarathustra’s recorded age in Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the same as “the legendary age of Christ when he began his teaching career.”

The Mask of Zoroaster

Jung also suggested that Zarathustra manifests a second personality for Nietzsche, which was perhaps awaiting an opportunity to be expressed. This reading is supported by Nietzsche’s claim that during one of his lakeside walks in Sils-Maria in Switzerland, in July 1881, he experienced a vision concerning Zarathustra and the nature of inspiration. He describes the experience as follows in his posthumously-published autobiographical Ecce Homo (which, among other things, is a parody of Wagner’s self-indulgent My Life , which Nietzsche described as ‘an agreed-upon fable’...

No Use Crying Over...?

Tue, 11 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Pedants will no doubt point out that dairy is by definition restricted to mammal-based milk products, thereby dismissing Miyoko’s rhetoric as nonsensical. They have a point, but only up to a point. Language is as language does, or rather as we do with it. If enough people start talking of vegan dairy, the term ‘dairy’ will simply widen its referent over time to cover any product made from milk of any kind. Indeed, we can even imagine a scenario, many years from now, in which ‘dairy’ paradigmatically refers to plant-based milk products, and the old use has become obsolete.

It is interesting to compare the above situation to that of the Swedish company Oatly. In the US, their drink is branded as ‘Oat milk’ . By contrast, in the UK and other EU countries their mottos are ‘ditch milk and switch to oat drink’ and ‘it’s like milk but made for humans’ . Is Oatly contradicting itself? Or is it merely switching from a loose (ordinary) sense of ‘milk’ to a more narrow (legalistic) one?

Philosophy, In a Sense

Sat, 08 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

It is philosophy’s unacknowledged secret that all of its claims are true in some sense and false in another. There is consequently no correct answer to any of the big philosophical questions. This is not because there’s no such thing as truth (in a sense there is) but because the answer will always be ‘in one sense yes, and in another no’: Do we have free will? Can one know anything for certain? Are there moral truths? Can machines think? Does the past exist? And, most importantly, is Die Hard a Christmas movie? and are Jaffa Cakes biscuits or cakes?

It’s no secret that we can artificially render any claim true by giving it a new sense (‘public school’ means private school etc.), but we cannot, à la Humpty Dumpty , re-define all words including those used in one’s redefinitions...

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Do Robots Act for Reasons?

Thu, 06 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

There are reasons why robots and other machines behave as they do at any given time. Knowledge of how they were programmed, combined with knowledge about the environment in which they behaved will give us their structuring and triggering causes , respectively. Information about each of these is, individually of jointly (depending on our standpoint and interests) crucial to the explanation of their actions.

I have argued elsewhere that reasons why we act should not be conflated with the reasons for which we act, but all I shall presume here is that the latter are at most of the former. If I miss a lecture because I overslept, my failing to wake up is a reason that explains why I didn’t make it on time but it is not a reason for which I missed the lecture, in the sense in which oversleeping might be a consideration I act upon (as in the case where I go to see my GP because I’m constantly oversleeping). Our question, then, is whether robots can act in the light of considerations which they take to favour their course of action viz. agential reasons .

The question is important because if machines are going to make important autonomous decisions for us it is important that these are made for reasons...

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Watch Your Language

Sun, 02 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I recently heard someone affirm, as if this were common knowledge, that the essence of language is to communicate propositions. When I questioned this assumption, another person interjected that language was by definition the communication of propositions. I thought I’d entered some weird sci-fi novel in which the very notion of language had been artificially constrained for the purposes of some dystopian plot development but, alas, I was merely at an academic workshop. There are understandable reasons why silly assumptions about the essence of language remain widespread within philosophy, linguistics, and related disciplines. High up on the list is the…read more on Medium

In Conversation with Nassim Taleb

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Knowledge and Scepticism

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has had a run-away success with The Black Swan , a book about surprise run-away successes. Constantine Sandis talks with him about knowledge and scepticism.

CS: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” the Greek poet Archilochus once wrote. Isaiah Berlin famously used this saying to introduce a distinction between two different kinds of thinkers: those who “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory,” and those who relate everything to a “single central vision… a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance.” Nassim, I think you would see yourself as an intellectual hedgehog. I have heard you describe your big idea, which you have had from childhood, as the view that the more improbable an outcome is, the higher its impact (and vice versa ). Many controversial corollaries follow from this one claim, and you have recorded some of the most important in numerous essays, as well as in your books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan . These thoughts range from remarks on the perils of socioeconomic forecasting, to views on epistemology, agnosticism, explanation and understanding, the dynamics of historical events, and perhaps most importantly, advice on where to live and which parties to attend.

As I find myself in the awkward position of wishing to endorse almost all of the corollaries while fiercely disagreeing with the large idea from which they stem, I would like to ask you whether you really think that all improbable events have a high impact, and that all high impact events are improbable, or whether this is simply a misleading way of describing your insight? Are you happy to allow for counterexamples?

NNT: My core idea is about the effect of non-observables in real life. My focus is on the errors which result: how the way we should act is affected by things we can’t observe, and how we can make decisions when we don’t have all the relevant information.

My idea concerns decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, dealing with incomplete information, and living in a world that has a more complicated ecology than we tend to think. This question about justifiable responses to the unknown goes way beyond the conventionally-phrased ‘problem of induction’ and what people call ‘scepticism’. These classifications are a little too tidy for real life. Alas, the texture of real life is more sophisticated and more demanding than analytical philosophy can apparently handle. The point is to avoid ‘being the turkey’. [ There is a philosophical parable about a turkey who on the basis of daily observations concludes that he’s always fed at 9am. On Christmas Eve he discovers this was an overhasty generalisation – Ed. ] To do so you have to stand some concepts on their head – like your concept of the use of beliefs in decision making...

Philosophy’s Influence on Technology Design

Sun, 06 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

and Why it Needs to Change

Philosophy often appears abstract and other-worldly, particularly when compared to the practical technology in our everyday lives. But there is much that technology can learn from philosophy, and vice versa.

Software is typically designed with the efficiency of communicating in mind – whether communication within the software, or software that allows communication between people. But communication is much more than the mere exchange of information. Humans talk or write for a variety of reasons, often simply to stay in touch or just because they are friends.

The history of philosophy and psychology is full of attempts to reduce all human motivation to one ultimate principle or drive – be it survival, sex, power, or desire or satisfaction. Similar approaches are taken to communication: the 16th century English philosopher John Locke suggested we communicate in order to obtain information about each other, which in turn helps us to satisfy our desires...

Anti-Vegan Rhetoric

Wed, 01 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

A vegan sausage by any other name would smell as sweet. Yet France has recently amended its agriculture bill to ban the use of so-called ‘meat and dairy terms’ to describe plant-based products that serve as meat substitutes. These include patties made from soybeans, and dairy alternatives made from oats, coconuts, almonds, cashews, hazelnuts, and soy. The words in question include ‘sausage’, ‘steak’, ‘burger’, ‘milk’, and ‘cheese’. The use of these to describe vegan products will now be subject to fines of up to 300,000 Euros.In defence of this new bill, the French politician and farmer Jean Baptiste Moreau tweeted that:

‘it is important to combat false claims. Our products must be designated correctly.’

Moreau is completely right to highlight the importance of combatting false claims. But the false claims are his own...

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Christmas With Bob Dylan

Fri, 22 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Easy listening that’s difficult to listen to. Not much else can be said of Bob Dylan’s 2009 effort Christmas in the Heart, but I’ll say it anyway. After all, ’tis the season of good will and Dylan apologists have been honing the principle of charity ever since his release of Nashville Skyline , forty ye ars earlier.

The opening bells of ‘Here Comes Santa Claus’ signal at once that Dylan’s Christmas album is going to be a joyously traditional — and traditionally joyous — take on the genre; closer to Elvis’s Christmas Album and Johnny Cash’s The Christmas Spirit than to, say, A John Prine Christmas or Kate Bush’s 50 Words for Snow. The idea behind the album was to take the best known Christmas songs and just play them straigh t, with no irony or new angle:

Isn’t there enough irreverence in the world? Who would need more? Especially at Christmas time.

The thought melts away like snow at first sight of the album’s artwork . In the Guardian ’s review, the cover illustration was characterised as a conventional ‘painting of a horse-drawn carriage speeding through snowdrifts’. But I defy anyone to stare at this Victorian sleigh image (sourced by the Grammy award-winning artist Coco Shinomiya) and not see it as a супер-Stalinist vision of the winter season...

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Conceptual Surveys

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

(with Aryeh Younger)

‘Who will guard the guards themselves?’ asked the Roman poet Juvenal . For many today, the answer is to replace guardians altogether with blockchain technology . Blockchains are designed to be resistant to data modification, with each storage block (viz. record) containing an unalterable cryptographic timestamp. As such, the chain of block can act as a transaction ledger without being overseen by any overarching authority. Originally created to underpin the bitcoin cryptocurrency , it was only a matter of time before other industries began to use it.

One such industry is that of real estate. One of the largest U.S. counties, Cook County, Illinois, has already begun storing land records in the blockchain. A Final Report , issued from the Cook County Recorder’s office , details the results of using blockchain for land recording, most of which have been successful. The report also contains a number of sections detailing the reasons the county has for adopting blockchain in the first place. These stem from an analysis of some of the most commonly used concepts relating to transferring land. No philosopher could read this without reaching for the proverbial red pen...

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Britain Has Kept the ‘Elgin Marbles’ for 200 Years

Wed, 19 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Now it's Time to Pass Them On

It is lunacy to believe you own the moon , and no amount of tomato juice you spill into the sea will make its water yours. Yet we ask the question “ who owns antiquity ?” as if it were a sane one.

There is a reason for this. It’s the reason why Dennis Hope, founder of the Lunar Embassy and self-dubbed President of the Galactic Government, is no lunatic but an entrepreneur who has sold over 600m acres of “extraterrestrial real estate” to over 6m people. It’s the reason why Nestlé has rebranded itself as a corporate water steward , while bottling ground water at the expense of local communities.

It’s also the reason why today, on the 200th anniversary of the British parliamentary vote to purchase the sculptures that Lord Elgin sawed off the Parthenon, the British Museum continues to insist that its trustees are legally entitled to the sculptures. And it’s the reason why human rights lawyers, marshalled by Amal Clooney, have once again advised a Greek government unwilling to put forward a legal claim that it should take this museum to court...

We Don't Want AI that Can Understand Us

Sun, 03 Aug 2014 00:00:00 GMT

(with Richard H.R. Harper)

Forget the Turing test. Computing pioneer Alan Turing’s most pertinent thoughts on machine intelligence come from a neglected paragraph of the same paper that first proposed his famous test for whether a computer could be considered as smart as a human.

The original question, “Can machines think?” I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

Turing’s 1950 prediction was not that computers would be able to think in the future. He was arguing that, one day, what we mean when we talk about computers thinking would morph in such a way that it would become a pretty uncontroversial thing to say. We can now see that he was right. Our use of the term has indeed loosened to the point that attributing thought to even the most basic of machines has become common parlance....

Book Reviews

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Times Higher Education

Read the full reviews here