Certain Doubts

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The website for the 22nd European Summer School of Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI 2010), University of Copenhagen, Denmark, August 9-20, 2010, is now available at: http://esslli2010cph.info

Deadline for course proposals: September 7, 2009.

New Poll Shows Correlation is Causation.

This is horrendously unfair as a portrayal of experimental philosophy, but it was such a wonderful cheap shot that I couldn’t resist…

We believe, disbelieve and suspend judgment based on reasons all the time. I think these reasons are best thought of as mental states of the subject. Other people think that they’re best thought of as propositions.

Suppose Peggy believes that God exists (Q) only if there is no unnecessary suffering in the world (~P). And she suspends judgment (i.e. withholds) on whether there is no unnecessary suffering in the world. She consequently withholds on whether God exists. We can represent her transition in thought like so.

B(Q → ~P)  [ed. note: added a missing tilde here]
W(~P)
W(Q)

This seems like a perfectly sensible bit of reasoning.

Peggy’s withholding is reason-based. What are the reasons that form its basis? I say: her belief that (Q → ~P), along with her withholding on ~P. I cite two of her mental states. My view doesn’t endanger the observation that Peggy’s reasoning is perfectly sensible.

Now suppose that you wanted reasons to be propositions instead of mental states. On the most straightforward version of this view, you’d simply identify Peggy’s reasons with the propositional contents of those mental states which I say form the basis of Peggy’s belief. But it seems to me that this view gives a very odd result in Peggy’s case, to wit, it entails that Peggys withholding on Q is based on: [(Q → ~P) & ~P]. But reasoning that way certainly isn’t sensible!

How could someone who thinks that reasons are propositions effectively handle this example?

Charles Pidgin weighed in with some thoughtful advice on best refereeing practices. Said he:

I’ve  had a lucky publishing career, most of my papers having been published in the first or second journal that I have sent them to, usually without major revisions. But I have from time to time encountered pain-in-the–ass referees, and I think the profession would benefit and the refereeing process would be speeded up if referees tried NOT to be pains-in-the-ass. So here are some hints on how do it.

1) Generally speaking, if you think a paper that you have been asked to referee is publishable but suffers from what you consider defects, don’t say ‘Revise and Resubmit’ or  ‘Publish subject to certain revisions’. Say ‘This paper is good to go as it stands, though there are some points the author might like to consider’. Reserve ‘Publish subject to certain revisions’ for papers with a DEFINITE MISTAKE that can easily be corrected. Reserve ‘Revise and resubmit’ for papers which really are not up to snuff but contain a good idea of which something might be made. Why do I think that this would save time? Because people with good papers would not be having to wend their way between the contradictory requirements of diametrically opposed referees. The comments will be there should the author wish to make use of them, but s/he won’t have to explain to the editor at tortuous length why s/he paid attention to this comment but not to that. The risk is of course that more than usually arrogant or tenure-pressed authors won’t pay attention to the comments, and some papers will be published which would have been a lot better if the authors had conscientiously tried to improve them. But I think that this is a cost that the profession can bear.

2)  Try NOT to write comments of the following form:
a) This paper is too long;
b) The author doesn’t say enough about X
At least you should only write comments of this form if you accompany them with helpful suggestions about which bits should be cut to accommodate the new material.

3) Don’t make dopey hat-doffing suggestions. Occasionally I used to get comments complaining that my paper did not doff its hat to some philosophical bigwig of whom I had a poor opinion. The reason I did not was usually because I was applying the modified Thumper principle ‘If you can’t say nuthin’ nice about Professor Big don’t say nuthin’ at all – unless the chief object of the paper is to expose Professor Big’s errors.’ The fact that Professor Big has written something vaguely relevant does not mean that Professor Big’s name has to be ostentatiously dropped. ONLY demand a reference to a famous  Name (or for that matter to a relatively obscure Name) under two conditions:

a) If you think that that Name has put forward a GOOD argument, which poses a direct challenge to one  of the author’s central claims.
b) If Professor Big has partially anticipated the author’s opinions.

4) My last suggestion (unlike the others) would slow things down but in this case, I think it would be worth it. Don’t tolerate obscure and pretentious writing. There are many famous philosophers who  are, if truth be told, wretchedly incompetent writers, obscure, turgid and long-winded, with long involved sentences with multiply nested parentheses. Often they are also affected and pretentious. Some of them are good philosophers despite their bad writing, others obscure their intellectual deficiencies behind the defects of their style. If referees had been a bit tougher on this sort of thing  of thing early on in their careers, we would all have been spared a lot of bad writing and a fair bit of bad philosophy. So if the paper is badly written say so and insist on revisions even if you think that the content is good. Here I think there are exceptions to principle 1) above.

I’d add:

• Stop procrastinating.
• Lead with the positive.
• Don’t raise a substantive objection unless you’d be comfortable raising it non-anonymously. (Objections about style and clarity are a bit different, I think.)
• Take your motivation to write a long and complicated objection to be an indication (defeasible, of course) that the paper is worth responding to, and so merits publication. (We might still be left with the question ‘does it merit publication in this journal?’.)

Gregory Wheeler also suggested in an earlier thread that referees take the time to summarize, in their own words, the gist of the paper under consideration.

Any other advice (or objections)?

Here.

(Thanks to Josh Knobe for the pointer.)

Fordham University will be hosting a two-day workshop on Epistemic Normativity, on April 16th and 17th, 2010.  The keynote speakers will be John Greco, Tom Kelly, and Linda Martin-Alcoff, and the workshop will be held at Fordham’s Lincoln Center Campus in Manhattan.  For a full list of speakers and chairs, see below.  (more…)

Apropos of the recent threads on journals, there is an interesting paper by Eric Gilbert and colleagues that I posted on over at Choice and Inference.

Many have conjectured that blogs are echo chambers in which communities insulate themselves from dissenting opinion. Gilbert et. al. devised an empirical study of blog comments to see whether there was evidence for the hypothesis. (There was.)

This isn’t to take away the points raised in those threads, or other discussions which elicit strong opinions, but it does raise a question about whether the degree of agreement or strength of the signal is accurate. It is an interesting paper, which should open an interesting line of research.