Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts

By Justin P. McBrayer
The New York Times - Opinionator
Originally posted March 2, 2105

Here is an excerpt:

In summary, our public schools teach students that all claims are either facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the latter camp. The punchline: there are no moral facts. And if there are no moral facts, then there are no moral truths. 

The inconsistency in this curriculum is obvious. For example, at the outset of the school year, my son brought home a list of student rights and responsibilities. Had he already read the lesson on fact vs. opinion, he might have noted that the supposed rights of other students were based on no more than opinions. According to the school’s curriculum, it certainly wasn’t true that his classmates deserved to be treated a particular way — that would make it a fact. Similarly, it wasn’t really true that he had any responsibilities — that would be to make a value claim a truth. It should not be a surprise that there is rampant cheating on college campuses: If we’ve taught our students for 12 years that there is no fact of the matter as to whether cheating is wrong, we can’t very well blame them for doing so later on. 

The entire article is here.

Mentoring new scientists in the space between how things are and how things ought to be.

By Janet D. Stemwedel
Scientific American Blog
Originally published October 31, 2014

Scientists mentoring trainees often work very hard to help their trainees grasp what they need to know not only to build new knowledge, but also to succeed in the context of a career landscape where score is kept and scarce resources are distributed on the basis of scorekeeping. Many focus their protégés’ attention on the project of understanding the current landscape, noticing where score is being kept, working the system to their best advantage.

But is teaching protégés how to succeed as a scientist in the current structural social arrangements enough?

It might be enough if you’re committed to the idea that the system as it is right now is perfectly optimized for scientific knowledge-building, and for scientific knowledge-builders (and if you view all the science PhDs who can’t find permanent jobs in the research careers they’d like to have as acceptable losses). But I’d suggest that mentors can do better by their protégés.

The entire article is here.

‘Science is our best answer, but it takes a philosophical argument to prove that’

By Andrew Anthony
The Guardian
Originally published October 18, 2014

For some time now the discipline of philosophy has been under something of an assault from the world of science. Four years ago Stephen Hawking announced that philosophy was “dead”. He was referring specifically to the philosophy of science, which he said was still bogged down in epistemological questions from which science had moved on.

But philosophy in general has increasingly been viewed as irrelevant by many scientists. It’s a perspective that may be best summed up by the cosmologist Lawrence M Krauss, who has said: “science progresses and philosophy doesn’t”.

What’s more, science has begun to progress into areas previously occupied by philosophy and the humanities at large. These incursions have not gone unchallenged.

The entire article is here.

God, Darwin and My College Biology Class

By David P. Barash
The New York Times Sunday Review
Originally published September 27, 2014

EVERY year around this time, with the college year starting, I give my students The Talk. It isn’t, as you might expect, about sex, but about evolution and religion, and how they get along. More to the point, how they don’t.

I’m a biologist, in fact an evolutionary biologist, although no biologist, and no biology course, can help being “evolutionary.” My animal behavior class, with 200 undergraduates, is built on a scaffolding of evolutionary biology.

And that’s where The Talk comes in. It’s irresponsible to teach biology without evolution, and yet many students worry about reconciling their beliefs with evolutionary science. Just as many Americans don’t grasp the fact that evolution is not merely a “theory,” but the underpinning of all biological science, a substantial minority of my students are troubled to discover that their beliefs conflict with the course material.

The entire article is here.

Rebooting Philosophy

By Luciano Floridi
Oxford University Press's Blog
Originally published July 12, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Philosophy is a bit like a computer with a memory leak. It starts well, dealing with significant and serious issues that matter to anyone. Yet, in time, its very success slows it down. Philosophy begins to care more about philosophers’ questions than philosophical ones, consuming increasing amount of intellectual attention. Scholasticism is the ultimate freezing of the system, the equivalent of Windows’ “blue screen of death”; so many resources are devoted to internal issues that no external input can be processed anymore, and the system stops. The world may be undergoing a revolution, but the philosophical discourse remains detached and utterly oblivious. Time to reboot the system.

Philosophical “rebooting” moments are rare. They are usually prompted by major transformations in the surrounding reality.

The entire article is here.

Understanding Heidegger on Technology

By Mark Blitz
The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society
Originally published in 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Technology as Revealing

Heidegger’s concern with technology is not limited to his writings that are explicitly dedicated to it, and a full appreciation of his views on technology requires some understanding of how the problem of technology fits into his broader philosophical project and phenomenological approach. (Phenomenology, for Heidegger, is a method that tries to let things show themselves in their own way, and not see them in advance through a technical or theoretical lens.) The most important argument in Being and Time that is relevant for Heidegger’s later thinking about technology is that theoretical activities such as the natural sciences depend on views of time and space that narrow the understanding implicit in how we deal with the ordinary world of action and concern. We cannot construct meaningful distance and direction, or understand the opportunities for action, from science’s neutral, mathematical understanding of space and time. Indeed, this detached and “objective” scientific view of the world restricts our everyday understanding. Our ordinary use of things and our “concernful dealings” within the world are pathways to a more fundamental and more truthful understanding of man and being than the sciences provide; science flattens the richness of ordinary concern. By placing science back within the realm of experience from which it originates, and by examining the way our scientific understanding of time, space, and nature derives from our more fundamental experience of the world, Heidegger, together with his teacher Husserl and some of his students such as Jacob Klein and Alexandre Koyré, helped to establish new ways of thinking about the history and philosophy of science.

The entire story is here.

Thought Experiments

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Substantive revision on August 12, 2014

Thought experiments are devices of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things. They are used for diverse reasons in a variety of areas, including economics, history, mathematics, philosophy, and the sciences, especially physics. Most often thought experiments are communicated in narrative form, frequently with diagrams. Thought experiments should be distinguished from thinking about experiments, from merely imagining any experiments to be conducted outside the imagination, and from psychological experiments with thoughts. They should also be distinguished from counterfactual reasoning in general, as they seem to require an experimental element, which seems to explain the impression that something is experienced in a thought experiment. In other words, though many call any counter-factual or hypothetical situation a thought experiment, this seems too encompassing. It seems right to demand that they also be visualized (or perhaps smelled, tasted, heard, touched); there should be something experimental about a thought experiment.

The primary philosophical challenge of thought experiments is simple: How can we learn about reality (if we can at all), just by thinking? More precisely, are there thought experiments that enable us to acquire new knowledge about the intended realm of investigation without new empirical data? If so, where does the new information come from if not from contact with the realm of investigation under consideration? Finally, how can we distinguish good from bad instances of thought experiments? These questions seem urgent with respect to scientific thought experiments, because most philosophers and historians of science “recognize them as an occasionally potent tool for increasing our understanding of nature. […] Historically their role is very close to the double one played by actual laboratory experiments and observations. First, thought experiments can disclose nature's failure to conform to a previously held set of expectations. Second, they can suggest particular ways in which both expectation and theory must henceforth be revised.” (Kuhn, 1977, p. 241 and 261) The questions are urgent regarding philosophical thought experiments, because they play an important role in philosophical discourse. Philosophy without thought experiments seems almost hopeless.

There is widespread agreement that thought experiments play a central role both in philosophy and in the natural sciences. General acceptance of the importance of some of the well-known thought experiments in the natural sciences, like Maxwell's demon, Einstein's elevator or Schrödinger's cat. Probably more often than not, these, and many other thought experiments have led the careful analysis of their epistemic powers to the conclusion that we should not portray science as an exclusively empirical activity (see Winchester, 1990, p. 79).

The entire entry is here.

The New Scientism

We can value scientific inquiry without viewing the natural sciences as free of politics.

By Kamil Ahsan
Jacobin Magazine
Originally published August 5, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Ever since its coining by conservatives, “scientism” has been used pejoratively, most commonly by the same people who deny evolution and climate change. Consequently, leftists have historically renounced the word, signaling that that they fall on the side of scientific truth and not religion or spirituality.

This is a false dichotomy. One can value scientific inquiry without viewing the natural sciences as unimpeachable truth. And one can assail purported scientific progress without assailing science itself.

But try telling that to Michael Shermer, who, writing in Scientific American, sees in every critique of corporate behavior an anti-science temper tantrum: “Try having a conversation with a liberal progressive about GMOs…in which the words “Monsanto’ and ‘profit’ are not dropped like syllogistic bombs… The fact is that we’ve been genetically modifying organisms for 10,000 years through breeding and selection.”

The tunnel vision brought on by scientism resolves itself in a kind of social apathy, a dismissiveness of “real” problems, for which scientific data is the only antidote. This “just the facts, ma’am” approach excises ethics from the discussion and frames science as an appropriately depoliticized sphere. And in the process, it completely disregards what the humanities or the social sciences are able to tell us.

The entire article is here.

The War on Reason

Scientists and philosophers argue that human beings are little more than puppets of their biochemistry. Here's why they're wrong.

By Paul Bloom
The Atlantic 
Originally posted on February 19, 2014

Aristotle’s definition of man as a rational animal has recently taken quite a beating.

Part of the attack comes from neuroscience. Pretty, multicolored fMRI maps make clear that our mental lives can be observed in the activity of our neurons, and we’ve made considerable progress in reading someone’s thoughts by looking at those maps. It’s clear, too, that damage to the brain can impair the most-intimate aspects of ourselves, such as the capacity to make moral judgments or to inhibit bad actions. To some scholars, the neural basis of mental life suggests that rational deliberation and free choice are illusions. Because our thoughts and actions are the products of our brains, and because what our brains do is determined by the physical state of the world and the laws of physics—perhaps with a dash of quantum randomness in the mix—there seems to be no room for choice. As the author and neuroscientist Sam Harris has put it, we are “biochemical puppets.”

The entire article is here.

Can We Resolve Quantum Paradoxes by Stepping Out of Space and Time?

By George Musser
Scientific American Blog
Originally posted June 21, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

As is evident from von Baeyer’s article, quantum theory truly challenges us to think outside the box—and, in this case, I submit that the box is spacetime itself. If this seems farfetched, consider the eloquent point made by physicist and philosopher Ernan McMullin:

“Imaginability must not be made the test for ontology. The realist claim is that the scientist is discovering the structures of the world; it is not required in addition that these structures be imaginable in the categories of the macroworld.”

Only if we face the strange non-classical features of the physical world head-on can we have a physical, non-observer-dependent account of our reality that solves longstanding puzzles such as the problem of Schrödinger’s Cat.

The entire blog post is here.

Science Faction: Why Most Scientific Research Results are Wrong

Bloggingheads.tv
John Horgan and George Johnson discuss issues related to science

Why most scientific research results are wrong?

Is competition making fudged data more likely?

Science is not a triumphal march

Can academic publishing be reformed?

Essential and inessential skills for young science writers

The Big Bang and the case against falsifiability

The Dangers of Pseudoscience

By MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI and MAARTEN BOUDRY
The New York Times - Opinionator
Originally published October 10, 2013

Philosophers of science have been preoccupied for a while with what they call the “demarcation problem,” the issue of what separates good science from bad science and pseudoscience (and everything in between). The problem is relevant for at least three reasons.

The first is philosophical: Demarcation is crucial to our pursuit of knowledge; its issues go to the core of debates on epistemology and of the nature of truth and discovery. The second reason is civic: our society spends billions of tax dollars on scientific research, so it is important that we also have a good grasp of what constitutes money well spent in this regard. Should the National Institutes of Health finance research on “alternative medicine”? Should the Department of Defense fund studies on telepathy? Third, as an ethical matter, pseudoscience is not — contrary to popular belief — merely a harmless pastime of the gullible; it often threatens people’s welfare, sometimes fatally so. For instance, millions of people worldwide have died of AIDS because they (or, in some cases, their governments) refuse to accept basic scientific findings about the disease, entrusting their fates to folk remedies and “snake oil” therapies.

The entire article is here.

10 ways to create “False Knowledge” in Psychology

By Graham Davey

The Graham Davey Blog

Originally posted September 30, 201

There’s been quite a good deal of discussion recently about (1) how we validate a scientific fact (here, here and here), and (2) whether psychology – and in particular some branches of psychology – are prone to generate fallacious scientific knowledge (here and here). As psychologists, we are all trained (I hope) to be scientists – exploring the boundaries of knowledge and trying as best we can’ to create new knowledge, but in many of our attempts to pursue our careers and pay the mortgage, are we badly prone to creating false knowledge? Yes – we probably are! Here are just a few examples, and I challenge most of you psychology researchers who read this post to say you haven’t been a culprit in at least one of these processes!

Here are 10 ways to risk creating false knowledge in psychology.

1.  Create your own psychological construct. Constructs can be very useful ways of summarizing and formalizing unobservable psychological processes, but researchers who invent constructs need to know a lot about the scientific process, make sure they don’t create circular arguments, and must be in touch with other psychological research that is relevant to the understanding they are trying to create. 

The entire blog post is here.

Thanks to Ed Zuckerman for this information.

Book Review: Moral Perception

Robert Audi, Moral Perception, Princeton University Press, 2013, 194pp.

Review by Antti Kauppinen
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Originally published June 29, 2013

In everyday parlance, we sometimes report having seen that an audience member's standing up to a sexist keynote speaker was morally good or having heard how a husband wronged his wife. In philosophy, the idea that we can literally perceive moral facts has not exactly been popular, but it has had its proponents. In this volume, Robert Audi, who can lay claim to being the leading contemporary moral epistemologist in the intuitionist tradition, develops what is perhaps the most comprehensive defence of the possibility of moral perception to date.

What is moral perception? Suppose I see a teenager drowning a reluctant hamster. I may form the moral belief that the action is wrong straight away, without any conscious inference. This much is common ground between proponents of moral perception and sceptics about it. But where sceptics think that the quick belief is based on non-conscious inference or association or perhaps emotional response, those who believe in moral perception take it to be based on a distinct moral perceptual experience, which can justify the belief in the same way perception in general does.

The first step in making the case is clarifying what happens in perception in general. Audi takes this task up in the first chapter. As is his wont, he makes a series of careful distinctions, starting with three main kinds of perception. They are simple perception (seeing a flower), attributive perception (seeing a flower to be yellow), and propositional perception (seeing that a flower is yellow). The content of perceptual experience is formed by properties that are phenomenally represented in it. Such experience is distinct from belief -- we need not have beliefs corresponding to the content of our perception. For us to perceive something is for it to "produce or sustain, in the right way, an appropriate phenomenal representation of it" (20). We see an object by seeing some suitable subset of its properties. Roughly, an object instantiates an observable property, which causes me to instantiate a phenomenal property (such as being appeared to elliptically).

How about moral perception? Audi does not claim we can perceive that drowning the hamster is wrong in the same way we can perceive that a hat is red. Moral properties are not perceptual like colours and shapes, but they are perceptible. We perceive them by way of perceiving the non-moral properties they are grounded or consequential on. The phenomenal aspect of moral perception is a non-sensory "sense of injustice" (37) or a "felt sense of connection" (39) between the moral property, such as wrongness, and the perceived base property, such as intentionally causing pain to an animal. This representational element isn't "pictorial" or "cartographic" (37) as it might be in paradigmatic cases of perception, but, Audi says, we shouldn't expect that to be the case when it comes to moral properties. Nor are moral properties directly causally responsible for the phenomenal properties; rather, the relevant causal connection obtains between instantiations of base properties and instantiations of the distinctively moral phenomenal states.

The entire book review is here.