WMD

    Words of Mass Dissemination

My previous post (“Manners”) was a rather optimistic look at the potential benefits of the academic life for students (and faculty). This post is the other side of that coin.

I currently teach a class in which students are asked to learn. I don’t mean that they are asked to memorize material from a textbook. Indeed, much to their protests, there is no textbook for this class. I mean that students are asked to try to find information out for themselves, and to try to figure out problems on their own, never having seen an example worked in a textbook, in the full expectation of mostly failing on both scores. Struggle and failure are the beginning of learning.

We start slow. The first assignment of the class asks them to look up the meanings of a few key statistical terms, in the library. Here is the answer that one student provided:

I don’t have time to go tramping around in the library, looking for books.

Now, in case you don’t know it, university professors just love to share little nuggets like this. My favorite one from my own classes is this:

Galileo was burned to a steak by Cardinal Bellaring.

There’s no denying it: that’s funny. It’s also a little sad — even after correcting the humorous misspelling of the beleaguered Cardinal’s name, and the even more humorous misunderstanding about the nature of this particular capital punishment, it’s a little sad that after something like 12 or more years of school, someone could be so misinformed about a major event in our past, one that continues to color people’s views about the relationship between science and religion.

I do think that there is an ‘age of responsibility’ with respect to ignorance: there comes a time when, at least in some contexts, people are responsible for their own ignorance. But I don’t think that, for the most part, college freshmen are there yet, and certainly not in a context where they are asked to ‘perform’, as on an exam. When I hear a student say something like ‘Galileo was burned to a steak’, I do get a little sad, but I am not angry, and I don’t put the blame on the student. (Where should one put the blame? I suppose that parents and ‘the educational system’ must bear some of the blame, though that it is a different story.)

But what about “I don’t have time for books”? I will be honest and admit that when I heard that one, and after I got done laughing (a kind of bemused, and slightly distressed, laugh), I was angry, and my anger was focused not on ‘the educational system’, but on the student.

Was my anger misplaced? Who is responsible for ‘attitude’? I don’t know, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I’m going to hold us all responsible for our own attitudes.

I believe that attitude is in fact the biggest problem facing college education today. I’m not exaggerating. Primary and Secondary education faces other problems, perhaps more severe (poorly trained teachers, lack of community support, and so on), but these problems are largely absent from higher education. Our biggest problem is attitude.

My student who won’t go to the library is only an extreme example of what appears to be a very common attitude amongst students, that learning is supposed to be fun, that class-time is about the presentation of information, that homework is about practicing or rewriting (a.k.a. ‘regurgitating’) what was done or said in class, and that it is simply unfair to ask students to do work that they have not already been told how to do.

I hope that I am wrong, but I fear that many of my colleagues have given in to this vision of education — or worse, that they share it themselves. Students regularly complain to me that I don’t put my lecture notes on the web. First of all, I tell them, there are no notes to put on the web. I am teaching this material because I already know it. My notes are reminders to myself about how to teach, not explanations of the material. Second, even if I had such notes, I wouldn’t make them available. I doubt that they would teach anybody much of anything, though they would perhaps make ‘getting a good grade’ somewhat easier, less work.

But learning (as opposed to getting a good grade) is hard work. A nice little book by the biologist (and university professor) Robert Leamnson (Thinking About Teaching and Learning) makes this point well. I don’t agree with everything he writes, but he does nicely describe, from the point of view of neuro-biology, why learning is hard: creating new pathways in the brain is in fact biologically difficult. It requires effort. It literally hurts your head.

But really, we don’t need neuro-biology to tell us why learning is hard. The main point has been well-understood for a long time: the body naturally resists work, and learning is work. The body must be trained to work, and the initial steps of training are painful. It is just hard to break the body’s habit of slothfulness. There’s no way around it.

I don’t mean to suggest that no pleasure can be derived from learning. One can derive great pleasure from a hard job well done: reveling in a beautiful garden that required hours of backbreaking labor to create is sweet, and even sweeter for those who participated in the making of it. So too, one can take pleasure in learning, but it is not the sort of pleasure that one takes in a succulent dinner or a beautiful piece of music. The pleasure that one takes in learning is both different and sweeter, because it includes the enjoyment of the fruits of one’s labor, along with the satisfaction of a job well done.

So what, then, is the diagnosis for a student who can’t be bothered to go to the library for the sake of a little learning? I don’t know, but I wonder whether in fact such a person might suffer from a kind of implicit misunderstanding of the nature of pleasure, a failure to appreciate the sort of pleasure one can dervie from a job well done. It is the sort of failure that certain aspects of our own human nature might even encourage. (I am not, of course, suggesting that ‘it is all about pleasure’. There are many things going on here. But I do suspect that an implicit misunderstanding of the nature of pleasure of the sort descrbed above might be part of what is goin gon.)

Not all hope is lost. By the end of the semester, for the most part, students stop complaining that I am not spoon-feeding them. Maybe they have just grown weary of me; maybe they’ve concluded that I’m a hopeless case. But maybe, just maybe, they’ve also learned a little something.

First posting of the new academic year! I hope some people find this
somehow worth reading.

The following is, more or less, the content of a short talk
that I gave to the entering class of the South Carolina Honors
College, at their 2006 ‘convocation’. I had intended to supplement
the text with a few links to sites on the web, but the information to
which I refer here is very easily available via a quick search on
Google.com or similar search engines, and I’m short on time… Chris Tollefsen and Justin Weinberg made some useful comments on earlier drafts.

I have good news and bad news. I’ve been asked to give a speech
of the ‘If I only knew then what I know now’ genre. That’s the
bad news. Well, the good news is that I’m not going to give that
speech. But there’s more bad news as well: Instead, I’m going
to take a few minutes to talk about manners. Sounds like a dull
topic, and irrelevant to the academic life? It isn’t.

Let’s take the handshake. Why do people shake hands? Cultural
historians seem to think that it was a sign of peaceful intent, that is,
a sign that you aren’t about to pull your sword out of its scabbard and
skewer the shakee. So you see, hand-shaking is just good academic
sense — wouldn’t it suck for you if you forgot to shake your professor’s
hand, and the next thing you know there’s a sword poking through
your belly? (And watch out for those left-handed professors!)

Now, the forms that manners take are culturally relative, and their
practical origins are often obscured in history — I almost never bring
a sword into the classroom anymore. But their practical origins remind
us that manners served — and continue to serve — an important purpose. Good manners aren’t just relics of ancient history. They serve the purpose of civility.
They are, in fact, one of the cornerstones of a civil society.

The word ‘civil’ is from the Latin ‘civis’, city. And as it is now, so also
in Roman times, the city was an odd place, for you are likely to meet
perfect strangers even in your own city, people whose well-being has no
obvious impact on your own, people who, in fact, consume the very
resources — food, land, boyfriends, girlfriends — that you would dearly
like to have for yourself, and yet you are expected not to kill them, or
even to take their boyfriends, and you can often rely on them to do you
the same favor.

Why are cities like that? Well, philosophers and political scientists from
Aristotle to Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls have fretted quite a bit over
that question, and they have different answers, but they all agree on this
one fundamental truth: cities — that is, civil societies — are better for
the citizens than the alternative. We benefit from the non-violent presence
of others. We benefit by respecting them, by respecting their rights as
citizens, despite the fact that respecting them means that we cannot raid
their refrigerators without permission. Hobbes went so far as to say that,
outside of civil society, life would be ’solitary poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.
Doesn’t sound like fun.

The Honors College is also a civil society. Its citizens — you and I — are
obligated to respect one another. ‘Obligated’ not because some University
President, or Dean, or Professor, says we have to — they can’t make us do it.
We are obligated because it is the right thing to do; it also happens to be in
our best interest.

Now, I’m not talking about paying your share of the electric bill, or not ‘borrowing’
your roommate’s shampoo — you’ll have to work those things out on your own.
I’m talking about something more important, and more real, than
electric bills and shampoo: I’m talking about ideas, and reason.

And what exactly is the benefit of respecting the ideas and reason of others?
What is the benefit of living in a civil academic society? Well, the very
possibility of exercising your own reason, and the very possibility of
testing your own ideas, demand it. The figure of the lonely genius is a
myth — despite what you might have read, not even Einstein was a lonely
genius (although a genius he was). Ideas are developed in a context of other
ideas; ideas are developed by allowing themselves to be challenged; reason
demands that opposing views be considered thoughtfully, not dismissed
out of hand. Respect for the reason of others also demands that you in
turn challenge their ideas, thoughtfully and carefully. And because you
live in this academic society, you have the right to expect the same from us.

Alas, our larger society seems to teach otherwise. Recently, at Ohio State
University, it was revealed that dozens of engineering dissertations were
largely plagiarized from earlier dissertations. The University is
seeking to rescind the students’ degrees, but many have come to the
defense of the students, arguing as the former students themselves have,
that they didn’t know better. But knowledge has nothing to do with it.
It is a question of respect, of respect for the ideas of others.
It is ‘good manners’ to cite others when you use their ideas, just as it is
good manners to ask before you raid the refrigerator. In
both cases, there is reason for the manner.

Outside of academia, things are perhaps worse. I was recently sent
several transcripts from interviews by a
television host named ‘Bill O’Reilly’, who, I gather is rather popular.
(Please forgive my utter ignorance about television. I have one, but
it isn’t plugged in.) Well, if you’re familiar with this guy, then you’ll
know that whatever he does, it isn’t an interview.
In one of the interviews I read, he told the guest to ’shut up’ at least
four times, eventually cutting off the guest’s
microphone, apparently, as far as I can tell, for no other reason than
that the guest was attempting to express
a view contrary to O’Reilly’s.

Did those engineering students improve or benefit intellectually by
copying a dissertation from someone else? Probably not. Does Bill
O’Reilly learn anything from his so-called guests? Probably not.
Does his audience? Probably not.
The result of this sort of machine-gun-fire rhetorical trickery is,
inevitably, to spawn either silence or the
same in return; just check out the web site orielly-sucks.com. How
many of us would like our intellectual legacy to
be the existence of web site devoted to why we suck?

My point is not that O’Reilly’s views are right or wrong. I don’t
really know what his views are anyway, and I could
easily have picked on somebody else. My point is that in a civil
academic society, manners matter, and they matter for a reason —
they matter for the sake of reason.

Enjoy your new intellectual city. It’s a great place to live an
intellectual life. Be well-mannered. Be civil. Tell us — respectfully —
what you think, whether you agree or disagree, or aren’t sure,
or just have a question. We’ll do the same for you.

Last night, I drew cards from a deck. The first card was the Ad. Then came 2d. Then 3d, 4d, 5d, 6d, 7d, 8d, 9d, 10d, Jd, Qd, Kd. The next card was the As, followed by 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, 6s, 7s, 8s, 9s, 10s, Js, Qs, Ks. And then, believe it or not, the cards ran through hearts and clubs, in order again. The probability of that happening is unimaginably low. In particular, the probability of getting that Ad on the first card was 1/52. The probability of getting the 2d next was then 1/51. So the probability of getting just the first two cards (Ad followed by 2d) was 1/52 x 1/51 = 1/2652. Following through this reasoning, the probability of drawing the entire deck in the order that I just described is about 1.24 x 10^-68. Wow. That’s low. If you shuffle and draw once every second (quite a feat!), you’ll be reasonably likely to draw the cards in this order after about 10⁶⁰ years. (The current age of the universe is believed to be around 10⁹ years.)

Well, with that information, you’re probably a bit skeptical of my story. But trust me, it’s true. What do you make of it? Almost certainly, somebody put that deck in order before I picked it up.

But must we really draw that conclusion? Suppose, instead of the order that I reported above, I told you that I drew the cards in this order: 4c,8d,10h,2h,8s,Ad, and so on. What is the probability of that result? Well, it is exactly the same. Every possible ordering of the cards has the same extremely low probability as every other. (The probability of getting the 4c on the first draw was 1/52. The probability of then getting 8d was 1/51, etc….)

What is the real difference between the ordered and unordered decks? Why is it, after all, correct to say that the first ordering is somehow unlikely, while the second is unsurprising. Many will say that the relevant distinction here is the distinction between a random and non-random sequence of cards. So the correct question to ask is not ‘what is the probability that we draw that particular sequence?’ but ‘what is the probability that we draw a non-random sequence?’ The first sequence (the ordered one) is non-random and the second is random. The random sequences are far more likely than the non-random ones. Hence we are correct to believe that the first result, but not the second, is in some need of further explanation.

There are two features of this argument that are in need of further examination. The first concerns the manner of defining the notion of a non-random sequence. The second concerns the inference from ‘low probability’ to ‘in need of explanation’.

What makes the sequence Ad, 2d, 3d, 4d, 5d, 6d, … non-random and the sequence 4c, 8d, 10h, 2h, 8s, Ad random? There are different approaches to this question, but the philosophical disputes about the nature of randomness need not detain us, for they all rely on some way of identifying the relationships amongst the cards, so that judgments can be made about the appearance of ‘non-random patterns’. For example, the sequence Ad, Ah, As, Ac, 2c, 2h, 2d, 2s, 3s, 3c, 3d, 3h, … is non-random. Why? Because any card with an ‘A’ on it is taken to be ‘the same rank’ as any other such card, and so on for ‘2′, ‘3′, etc…. Hence there is a ‘pattern’ in this sequence, and it is, essentially, the appearance of ‘patterns’ that makes a sequence non-random.

If, on the other hand, the card with an ‘Ad’ on it and the card with an ‘As’ on it were not taken to be related to one another in any particular way — and so on for the others — then the sequence above would not be considered to have any ‘patterns’. In other words, the cards themselves ‘know nothing’ about patterns. They are just as likely to produce one sequence as another. But given the meaning that we attached to the symbols on the cards, some of these equally likely sequences are random, others not.

The general idea, then, is that the set of all non-random sequences — given some account of what counts as random, and in particular what counts as a ‘pattern’ — is much smaller than the set of random sequences. Hence, if we get a non-random sequence, we can assert, with some truth, that something with low probability occurred, something (namely, a non-random sequence) that was ‘unexpected’, whereas if a random sequence occurs, then we can say that something with high probability occurred, something (namely, a random sequence) that was ‘expected’. (Of course, every particular sequence has the same probability as every other.)

The point here is quite analogous to the following situation: imagine a jar with 10,000 black jellybeans and 2 red jelly beans. Your friend is about to reach in and grab a jelly bean for you. It comes out red. Well, on the one hand, each jelly bean in the jar had the same probability of being chosen as every other. So if we describe the result as ‘having grabbed this particular jelly bean’ (as opposed to one of the other jelly beans in the jar), then yes, it has very low probability (1/10,002), but so did every other possible result. But, on the other hand, if we describe the result as ‘having grabbed a red jelly bean’, then we can characterize the ’specialness’ of our result in a way that does not apply to every other possible result: Given the proportion of black to red jelly beans, we would expect to get a black jelly bean, and yet we got a red one.

Does this unexpected result demand some explanation? (I have now reached the second feature of the main argument that needs some examination, namely, whether ‘low probability’ implies ‘in need of explanation’.) We have two options, here. If we say that the result does not require explanation, then we are willing to say ‘it was just luck’. If we can repeat the experiment many times, we can even test that hypothesis, to some extent. (Replace the jelly bean, shake up the jar, and draw again. Repeat many times. If the friend keeps grabbing red out of the jar, then something funny is going on. If the friend grabs vastly more black then red, then our first draw of the red was probably ‘just luck’.)

On the other hand, we might be inclined to search for an explanation. What might prompt this search? That is, what might incline one to say that ‘it was just luck’ is not sufficient? I submit to you that low probability is not enough. Low probability events happen all the time. Flip a coin ten times. The sequence of results that you got (whatever you got!) has probability less than 1/10^th of 1 percent. But nobody thinks that your result is in need of any further explanation. It was just luck. Clearly what makes the difference between any old low probability event and the low probability events that need explanation has something to do with our first point, above, namely, that the low probability event in question can be characterized as ‘unexpected’ relative to some larger class of ‘expected’ results.

Not just any such characterization will do, however. So suppose that you flip that coin ten times. You get: H,H,T,T,H,T,H,T,T,T. I am inclined to say ‘just luck’. But then you point out to me that this sequence is in fact quite special, for it is a member of a small class of sequences with the following property: the longest sequence of tails is half the total number of tails. Very few of the possible sequences have this property. We would have expected to get a sequence without this property, and yet we got one with it. So doesn’t this result need some explanation?

Of course, it does not. What has gone wrong here? Why does the sequence of heads and tails above not need an explanation, and yet the sequence of cards with which I started this discussion need an explanation? Let’s return to the jelly beans to get a clue. Suppose, in addition to the information I already gave you, I mentioned to you that my friend (who will draw the bean) knows that I hate black jelly beans, and for whatever reason wants to make me happy. With that information, we now have some reason to wonder whether the result (a red jelly bean) was not brought about intentionally somehow. In other words, if we have reason to believe that the results in the unexpected set of results are picked out as special by somebody, or something, involved in the production of the result, then there are good reasons to think that if one of these unexpected results occurs, it could very well have been not ‘just luck’.

This principle applies to the two other cases we have considered. Why should we say that the sequence H,H,T,T,H,T,H,T,T,T is ‘just luck’ even though it is a member of the rather small class of sequences whose the longest sequence of tails is half the total number of tails? Because there is no reason to think that the process or people involved in flipping the coin picks out this property as special. Why, on the other hand, should we say that the sequence Ad, 2d, 3d, 4d, 5d, 6d, 7d,… of cards drawn from a deck is not ‘just luck’? Because there are plenty of people in the world, who handle decks of cards, who think that this sequence is special, or more generally who consider the cards to be related to one another in such a way that this sequence is non-random. So the most likely story, in this case, is that one of those people (maybe me!) put the deck in this order before I ever drew a card from it. In other words, there is nothing intrinsically special about this sequence. It is special because some relevant people take it to be so. For suppose that, instead, we happened to ‘order’ decks of cards like this: 4c, 8d, 10h, 2h, 8s, Ad,…. Then drawing the cards in that order would raise the suspicion that somebody produced that result intentionally, while drawing the cards in some other order (e.g., Ad, 2d, 3d, 4d, 5d, 6d, 7d,…) would not arouse the same suspicion.

This whole discussion is, of course, a thinly veiled description of one of the disputes between advocates of ‘intelligent design’ and their opponents. My intention here is to explain why there is an unavoidable stalemate between them, on this point. I am adamantly focused on just this narrow point. There are many other disputes between them. For example, some advocates of intelligent design make empirical claims, or offer interpretations of empirical evidence, that are disputed by some evolutionary biologists. I am no expert on such matters, and set them aside as irrelevant to the present concern, which concerns probability and explanation.

The analogy goes as follows. Advocates of ‘intelligent design’ argue that certain events that have occurred (e.g., the appearance of life on earth) have extraordinarily low probability. For example, they argue that of all of the possible ways of combining atoms, there are only a very few that could ever have resulted in the formation of the sorts of molecule required to support life. Hence the appearance of life on earth was an event of extremely low probability.

But of course, in perfect analogy with the case of drawing the cards from a deck, any particular combination of atoms is a low-probability event — there are many, many, atoms int he world, and they can combine in many, many ways. (The various possible combinations might not all have the same low probability in this case, because there could be physical laws at work that favor some combinations over others, but the general point is the same, unless, of course, those laws make the combinations that have actually occurred overwhelmingly likely. In that case, however, we can just discuss the initial conditions in the universe that gave rise to the result, and a similar discussion would take place. If, finally, the laws are such that any initial conditions would lead to life, then the discussion would probably look very different.) So in order for the particular combination that occurred to be in need of some explanation (other than ‘it was just luck’), it must (i) be a member of an ‘unexpected’ set of results in the sense described above, and (ii) the results in the unexpected set of results must be picked out as special by somebody, or something, involved in the production of the result.

Let’s assume (though the matter is disputed) that the set of possible combinations of atoms that would lead to life on earth is so small (relative to the set of all possible combinations) that the occurrence of life on earth by now has extremely low probability. Hence condition (i) above is satisfied.

(We must say ‘occurrence of life on earth by now‘ because the atoms get more than one chance to combine in the right way. So we have to make some estimate on how many chances they get, say, per year, and how many years they would have had, i.e., how many total chances that they would have had. If the probability that any single event of combination would lead to life is low enough, this total number of chances can be quite high, and yet the probability that any of those chances would have resulted in life might still be quite low. For example, give a monkey a billion chances to type randomly on a keyboard, and the chance that any one of the results is the first page of Hamlet is still unimaginably small, around 1 in 10⁹⁰.)

But what about condition (ii)? Here, alas, we are destined for stalemate. If you antecedently believe that the production of life is picked out as special by something or somebody involved in the production of chemical events, then the occurrence of this special event gives you some reason to wonder whether it was not just ‘by luck’. But if you antecedently believe that the production of these chemical events occurs via processes that in no way pick out life as special, then the correct answer to ‘Why did this low probability event (life) occur?’ is ‘by luck’.

I don’t see any relevant difference between this situation and those described above involving coins and cards. If you do, please send me a comment. If your reaction to what I’ve said here is that ‘the probability of life is so unimaginably small that I just don’t see how it could have happened by chance’ then please reread. If your reaction is that you independently believe that God exists and therefore find it quite likely that God is the origin of human life, you have not (necessarily) disagreed with anything I’ve said. Similarly, if you believe that life is a chance occurrence, that it happened ‘by luck’ (lucky for us!), that there is no point to our existence, etc., then again you have not (necessarily) disagreed with anything I’ve said. If you are fascinated by the prospect of bringing about an event yourself with incredibly small probability, you can be cured. Shuffle 10 decks of cards together, then draw all 520 cards. Your result has probability 1 in:

17610403417821111561460117109879578542911478279626
82515835641902026635013531629049250745289405517992
17492000052911460700851554388506384179657281543248
46728407158333741072487686882930286404967263861328
00905110061351548170024622024983851028980182317268
95681397709425453375071010486886852728967058125963
62498604753026067474836458847095056257533018986923
32700214042981663219274624546482874260801256152782
44807894746803821196970541914927652072207588214838
87707171135570628153647781446524174581916029042277
69668577211157141090782282183940792659802623387773
74065758813337082961068321380721337829277256701491
65229214676654388845288996613236416988679986260143
97661325645202793456690465818078307134319818775325
25575007083897838744272967188911132035890748607857
40418626069545051663666604213934440278998174513866
31912726243989647203455807340483476375101139676265
91761063168892577208286546625327996720369649293722
53320946090105491544711017929034021882046954442464
94414641879321328704507798451597203731365688705702
00042478970118285935361664694673759165844683475607
68565149696000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000000000000

WARNING: This post is really just a little philosophical essay. It is also quite inconclusive. Moreover, it would not pass muster with professional philosophers. There are, for example, no references to what other people have said about this matter. And so on. However, for all of these faults, I do in fact believe what is said here, and I think that the arguments — often merely intimated here — are not bad arguments.

Over the past few years, I have become very interested in the question

What counts as evidence in philosophy?

So suppose that I am defending some philosophical position. Let’s call that position ‘P’. (In a moment, I’ll consider a real case of a real philosopher defending a concrete philosophical position.) The question is: What counts as evidence bearing on the acceptability, reasonableness, truth, etc., of P? If you assert not-P, then what would, or should, count as evidence in favor of your position over mine?

I am purposefully being somewhat non-committal about exactly what evidence is supposed to do for us. Let E be evidence for P. Does this mean that E makes it certain that P? Does it mean that E makes P more probable than not? I am inclined to answer ‘no’ to both questions, for a variety of reasons, but this issue is difficult (and addressed at some length in the context of scientific evidence by various philosophers of science). So let’s just leave the relationship between E and P as mentioned above: E is evidence for P just in case it bears on the acceptability, reasonableness, or truth, of P. To put it in terms of ‘epistemic obligation’ (i.e., the sorts of thing one ought to do if one is reasonably going to make claims about P): E is evidence for P if E is something that should be taken into account when considering whether to assent to P. So, for example, the color of my dog’s ears is not in any way evidence for (or against) the (philosophical) proposition that ‘every event has a cause’. It makes no difference whatsoever to whether one should accept that proposition.

What counts as evidence for claims of a particular sort has a lot to do with what those claims are about. The color of my dog’s ears is not evidence relevant to the claim that all events have a cause, because, I guess, that claim has nothing whatsoever to do with the colors of dogs’ ears — it is not in any way about the colors of dogs’ ears. (’Being colored thus-and-such’ is presumably not an event, nor a cause, nor does it seem to imply much about events and causes.) Hence, I’d like to broach the question ‘what is philosophy about?’ by asking the question at the start: What counts as evidence in philosophy?

Now, one might believe that this question is too broad, that the class of all purported facts that are, or would be, evidence bearing on some philosophical question is not a class that can be delineated in any useful or illuminating way. I really do not mean to be making any commitment on that question. Indeed, I shall now simply consider an example, albeit one that I believe to be representative of a lot of what passes for ‘philosophy’.

The example is the first chapter from a classic book (The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism) by the philosopher Barry Stroud. The chapter is a defense of something like Cartesian skepticism, the view that we know nothing about the external world, because for all we know, we could be dreaming (or, in the modern context, we could be ‘brains in a vat’). Part of his defense involves defending something like the following principle:

Principle of Knowledge: In order to know that Q, you must know the falsity of everything that is incompatible with your knowing that Q.

(Stroud does not name his principle in this way — I do it here just for convenience.) For example, let Q be ‘I am now sitting in a chair’, and suppose, as Stroud does, that if you are currently dreaming that you are sitting in a chair, then you in fact do not know that you are sitting in a chair (even if, as a matter of luck, you are sitting (and sleeping!) in a chair). Then, in order to know that Q, you must also know that you are not dreaming. But, so the argument goes, you cannot know that you are not dreaming, and so you cannot know that Q.

Why should we accept the principle? Stroud makes the following case:

[The principle] cannot be avoided if it is nothing more than an instance of a general procedure we recognize and insist on in making and assessing knowledge-claims in everyday and scientific life. We have no notion of knowledge other than what is embodied in those procedures and practices. So if that requirement is a ‘fact’ of our ordinary conception of knowledge we will have to accept the conclusion that no one knows anything about the world around us.

And Stroud does think that the requirement is a fact of our ordinary conception of knowledge. But why? Here he relies on examples. I’ll mention one of them (slightly modified, but more or less the same as Stroud’s example). Imagine, that you are on a jury, and that the defendant in the case has an alibi — he was in Cleveland at the time of the crime (which occurred in London). Moreover, several witnesses corroborate the alibi. If, on the basis of this testimony, you claim to know that the defendant was in Cleveland, you will rightly be challenged about the veracity of the alibi, which, to this point, is your sole evidence. After all, perhaps these witnesses are all part a crime ring, of which the defendant is also a member. In that case, even if in fact the defendant was in Cleveland, you might not reasonably claim to know this fact, because you have not taken reasonable steps to determine the reliability of the witnesses (and if they are unreliable, then anything you claim to know in virtue of their testimony should not be counted as genuine knowledge, even if it happens, by luck, to be true). In other words, in order to claim that you know that the witness was in Cleveland, you need to satisfy the Principle of Knowledge.

OK, one may acknowledge that the jury ought to satisfy this particular application of the Principle of Knowledge, in this case. Does it follow that specifically this principle is what is embodied in our practices regarding knowledge-claims? After all, more than one principle regarding knowledge could imply that in this case the jury ought to take steps to ascertain the reliability of the witnesses. I don’t see how Stroud could ever answer this question without some really hard empirical work, and I will return to that point below. For now, let’s flag this issue as ‘the problem of empirical work’.

Stroud faces another problem: prima facie, the case that specifically Stroud’s Principle (or something like it) is in fact the one that is operative for us, here, is very weak indeed. We can agree that the jury should try to take certain steps to ascertain the trustworthiness of the witnesses’ testimony about the defendant’s alibi. But Stroud’s Principle is not just about taking certain steps. It is not just about ruling out some reasons to doubt the testimony. So let’s consider another kind of doubt one might have about the veracity of the testimony.

Imagine that it has been determined that the witnesses who testified to the alibi in fact did not know the defendant, have no interest in the outcome of this trial, no animus towards the prosecution, are not habitual liars, were able to describe the defendant accurately, and so on. Their testimony is reliable. A frustrated prosecuting attorney, upset by the situation and desperate for a conviction, spins the following tale: while these witnesses thought that they saw the defendant in Cleveland, in fact aliens abducted them yesterday, took them on board their ship, and reprogrammed their brains so that they would, today, ‘recall’ having seen the defendant in Cleveland. Is the jury obligated, in any sense, to discover whether this scenario is true? Suppose that, after taking the measures noted above to ensure the veracity of the testimony, they claim to know that the defendant was in Cleveland. Would normal people challenge them on the grounds that they had not ruled out alien abduction? Is that sort of challenge part of our “procedures and practices” regarding knowledge-claims? I suspect that it isn’t. And yet its relevance and the relevance of more radical challenges still — indeed, the challenge that we might be dreaming, or brains in a vat — do follow from Stroud’s Principle. But why then does Stroud think that the Principle, or something close to it, is operative in our “procedures and practices” regarding knowledge-claims?

Before I step back and consider my original question — remember that all of this talk about Stroud and skepticism is really just an example! — let’s take this point a step further. Stroud says that “we have no notion of knowledge other than what is embodied in those procedures and practices”. But don’t ‘we’ make, and assent to, knowledge-claims all of the time? (I object to this sort of us of the term ‘we’, which is why I’ve enclosed it in inverted commas. See below.) I claim, right now, to know that I am breathing. Would you, normally, challenge that claim? I’m confident that, in the circles that I run in, at least (which includes a lot of philosophers!), such claims are not normally challenged. But then why doesn’t Stroud conclude that skepticism must be wrong? Here is the argument for that conclusion:

Premise 1:

Whatever is a fact about our procedures and practices regarding knowledge-claims is a fact about knowledge.

Premise 2:

It is a fact about our procedures and practices regarding knowledge-claims that we sometimes make, and sometimes assent to, the claim that somebody knows something about the external world.

Conclusion:

Knowledge of the external world is possible.

These premises do not, strictly logically, entail the conclusion, but I think that we could pretty easily patch things up so that they did, and I won’t bother to try here. Note that Premise 1 is quite close to (and perhaps a consequence of) what Stroud apparently asserts. I don’t know whether Premise 2 is true, but I suspect that it is. Restricted in scope to me and the people with whom I normally associate, I am very confident that it is true. But, of course, Stroud wants to deny the Conclusion.

The problem that I have generated for Stroud comes, I believe, precisely from his endorsement of something like Premise 1, and I believe that the problem is quite general. The general form of the problem is this: for any object of philosophical investigation, O, if it is true that

Premise 1*:

we have no notion of O other than what is embodied in our procedures and practices regarding O,

then we are very likely to run into one or both of the following two problems, the first of which I called ‘the problem of empirical work’, above:

• Understanding O will involve extremely difficult empirical questions about “our procedures and practices regarding O”. (For example, what are those practices? What principles, if any, are guiding them? And so on.)
• “Our procedures and practices regarding O” entail, or suggest, or give us reasons to believe, conflicting things about O.

I believe that philosophers who adopt principles such as Premise 1* above very often run into one or the other of these problems. Very often, they appear to ignore the first problem, and simply make assumptions about how the result of such an empirical investigation would go. Often, for example, they will appeal to ‘what we say’, or even ‘what you say’ (somewhat annoyingly, as in most cases they have never even met me).

And very often, they appear to ignore the second problem as well, picking and choosing which apparent consequences of our procedures and practices to take seriously.

But wait! Why can’t philosophy criticize our procedures and practices? Why can’t it pick and choose which apparent consequences of our procedures and practices to take seriously? Indeed, isn’t it part of the point of philosophy to examine those procedures and practices, reveal inconsistencies, and resolve them precisely by picking and choosing so that the inconsistencies no longer arise?

Yes, I believe that this sort of critique is part of what philosophy ought to do. The problem here is that if our only evidence in the philosophy of O (apart, perhaps, from whatever evidence flows from purely logical considerations) is taken from “our procedures and practices regarding O”, then philosophy is, I believe, in no position whatsoever to provide this critique. (It could, perhaps, point out inconsistencies, although notice that even here the problem of empirical work will arise. But it would not be in a position to resolve those inconsistencies.)

Finally, this discussion raises the question that I used as the title of this little essay. What is philosophy about? If “our procedures and practices regarding O” count as evidence for the philosophy of O, then one of two things must be true. Either (a) philosophy is, in the end, about “our procedures and practices regarding O”, or (b) the philosophy of O is indeed about O, but at the same time, “our procedures and practices regarding O” are good indicators of the nature of O, or of the truth of claims one might make about O. In case (a), philosophy is really a branch of sociology — it is really about some of the social and linguistic practices of us human beings.

I don’t really know what to make of claim (b). It seems to me likely to be true in some cases (for some O), false in others (but I’ll grant that how things seem to me is pretty poor evidence for how they really are). Anyhow, an argument ought to be made, for any given O. And if the argument relies on some claim such as that O is itself to be defined in terms of our procedures and practices regarding O, then we are back at case (a). Moreover, it does seem that for some O, claim (b) is pretty implausible. Perhaps, in the case of knowledge, claim (b) has some plausibility about it, for knowledge is, arguably, very much a human phenomenon, or even a human construction (but perhaps not). On the other hand, Stroud’s reliance on (b) in the case of knowledge seems to have led him astray, in the way I described above. And for some other O, claim (b) seems extremely implausible to me. Consider, for example, certain parts of metaphysics, such as the philosophy of material objects (which embarks on such tasks as identifying the essential properties of material objects as such). What reason could we give for thinking that our procedures and practices regarding claims about material objects provide good evidence about the nature of material objects? Aren’t we instead (and as science seems frequently to reveal) often quite confused about the nature of material objects?

Well, I have now broached another huge topic, really a subtopic of the present one, namely, the nature of evidence in metaphysics. I should stop, though, because whenever I discuss this topic, I tend to get thinly veiled threats from some philosophers, and I have children to look after. What is philosophy about? I haven’t answered that question, but perhaps some of the considerations above are at least relevant, perhaps even important, for doing so.

The debates over creation science (and more specifically, intelligent design) and evolution continue to heat up, although reasoned discussion (indeed, successful communication) is still difficult to find. It is difficult to say anything about the issue without being abruptly labeled an insensitive supercilious atheist or an anti-intellectual blind ignoramus. I’ll try. Because I have little sympathy for the extremists on either side, however – and because non-extremists are apparently either rare or in hiding – I suspect that I will be labeled both. (Non-extremists do exist. Michael Ruse is, I think, arguably moving towards – perhaps already occupies – a helpful viewpoint that many would do well to study.)

One of the many battle-fronts that has opened up in this war concerns whether (neo-) Darwinian evolution is ‘just a theory’. Apparently, both parties to the debate feel that a great deal turns on this issue.

“Evolution is a theory, not a fact.”

    – sticker placed in biology textbooks in Cobb Country School District, Atlanta, Georgia; the same line can be found many other places

“Evolution is fact, not a theory.”

    – Carl Sagan, in the book that accompanied his television program Cosmos; the same line can be found many other places

To a philosopher of science, it is a strange debate indeed, for the epithet ‘theory’ seems to imply, to both parties, that there is some other sort of scientific thing that the view espoused by (neo-)Darwinians could be, and that being that sort of scientific thing (a ‘fact’) would lend it greater credence than it has in the eyes of the contemporary opponents of evolution.

Before I address this point further, I need to dismiss one kind of well-intentioned attempt to defuse the issue by drawing a distinction between the ‘fact of evolution’ and the ‘theory of natural selection’ (or more generally, theories about the mechanism of evolution). The former refers to the purported fact that members of certain species are the biological descendents of members of other (typically now extinct) species. The latter refers to ‘theories’ about the path or mechanisms by which new characteristics emerge and old ones disappear in a given species, or how one species ‘evolves’ into another. This distinction might help some people find an acceptable (to them) ‘middle ground’ between the two sides, but it will not resolve the issue for the vast majority of combatants: many (on both sides) will dispute even these more limited claims (e.g., the ‘fact of common descent’ or the ‘theory of natural selection’).

Now to the main point: the word ‘theory’ is apparently being used in what, to a philosopher of science, seems a rather odd way. Often, in everyday parlance, the term ‘theory’ refers to little more than “guesses strung together,” as William Jennings Bryan liked to say (about evolution). But in science, the term ‘theory’ means something more. It is notoriously difficult to say, with the sort of precision to which philosophers aspire, what it is to be a scientific theory, but I know of no philosopher of science who has thought carefully (or even casually) about the issue who believes that scientific theories are nothing more than hunches, or guesses, or mere opinion. Even radical social constructivism (not my cup of tea) will agree that something more needs to be true about a set of claims before it is properly labeled a ‘theory’. How specifically do theories go beyond mere hunches or guesses? This question is very difficult to answer, but in fact (fortunately) we do not need to answer it here. We need only to acknowledge two points, the first of which I have discussed in this paragraph: having an opinion regarding X is different from having a theory about X.

The second point goes the other way: theories can (and typically are) wrong in some way or other. Scientific theories come and go. Some of them have more credibility than others. Some of them face more problems and challenges and open questions than others. But none of them is immune to these things. Historians and philosophers of science have long given up on the idea that there are scientific theories that are somehow beyond doubt or question. The history of science makes the existence of indubitable scientific truths extraordinarily difficult to entertain.

Indeed, the lack of indubitable scientific truths extends even to very simple, apparently ‘merely factual’ claims, thus calling into serious question the distinction – insofar as it is supposed to have any evidential or epistemic import – between ‘theories’ and ‘facts’. Let’s consider an example. Does the earth orbit the sun, or vice versa? If there is a ‘factual’ answer to any question, surely this is one of them. But the ‘factual’ answer to this question has been intimately tied up with the fortunes of theory. The Ptolemaic theory of the planetary orbits was a very well-confirmed theory in the late middle ages and early modern period, and it implied that the sun orbits the earth. Along came Copernicus, with further confirmation from Galileo and ultimately Newton, and we arrived at a different ‘fact’: the earth orbits the sun. Along came Einstein, whose theory of general relativity calls into serious question the ‘absoluteness’ of accelerated motion, and therefore calls into serious question the very meaningfulness of the question itself. (The very definition of rotational motion within Einstein’s theory is notoriously problematic. I will not pursue the point further here.) It is somehow no longer even the right question to be asking, in the context of Einstein’s theory. Changes in science have a way of making certain ‘factual’ questions seem quaint.

I did not choose my example arbitrarily. Richard Lewontin, emphasizing the ‘factuality’ of certain aspects of evolution, wrote: “No person who pretends to any understanding of the natural world can deny these facts any more than she or he can deny that the earth is round, rotates on its axis, and revolves around the sun” (“Evolution/Creation Debate: A Time for Truth” Bioscience 31, 559). Ignoring Lewontin’s failure to appreciate the effect of Einstein’s theory on the question of what rotates around what (and he is a biologist, not a physicist, so we can cut him some slack here), there is a sense in which I agree with him: there is powerful theoretical and observational evidence for a wide variety of evolutionary claims (including many that Lewontin mentions). Insofar as we are asking scientific questions about the nature of this physical (specifically, biological) world, we can do no better than to appeal to that evidence; those claims are supported by scientific evidence as well as just about any scientific claim is support by scientific evidence.

Nonetheless – and nevermind for the moment the debate between evolutionists and their opponents – any claim that evolution is ‘fact’ must be tempered by the recognition that scientific ‘facts’ are intimately tied up with theory, and that scientific theories can and do change, often in surprising and even shocking ways. And when they do, the ‘facts’ that they imply can also change, often in surprising and even shocking ways. Quite often, the terms in which the old questions were posed and the old ‘facts’ were stated simply no longer make sense. The best we can usually do is to understand the ‘old facts’ retrospectively as some approximation to, or modification of, or merely phenomenal consequence of, the new ones.

On the other hand, any claim that evolution is ‘just a theory’ is equally misleading, and I’ll finish by briefly considering that point. If the claim is that evolution, like the products of science generally, is a ‘theory’, then one can hardly disagree, but this point ought not by itself drive one to find some alternative theory. Quantum mechanics is ‘just a theory’. Plate tectonics is ‘just a theory’. Both are empirically very well supported, and more important, there is no alternative view that is even remotely as well supported. This is not to say that they do not have their problems – there are, famously, some very difficult issues facing quantum theory, not the least of which is the failure, thus far, to account for the force of gravity in quantum-theoretic terms. But scientific theories always have open questions, and even conceptual and empirical problems. These questions and problems are never, by themselves, enough to consider the theory to be wholesale false.

And if the claim (‘evolution is just a theory’) is that evolution is nothing more than a string of guesses, then it is clearly false. The theory of evolution provides a model for the explanation of a significant amount of scientific observation. Is the explanation infallible? Clearly not – no scientific explanation ever is. Are there conceptual and empirical problems with the theory (problems that are celebrated in highly misleading ways by opponents of the theory)? Absolutely; and again, scientific theories always face such problems. But if you believe that the existence of some conceptual or empirical problems with a theory implies that the theory is wholesale false, or that the theory must be given up, or, even that some specific denial of the theory is true, I urge you to study the history of science carefully, for it suggests a very different conclusion. It suggests that the existence (and ultimate resolution, or dissolution) of such problems is the path to scientific progress, and that any prediction about the direction that theories will go in order to overcome the problems is extraordinarily likely to be wrong.

There is a great deal more to say, of course, about this debate, but my main point, here, is that the rhetoric involved (specifically the rhetoric of ‘facts’ and ‘theories’) is highly unproductive and misleading, and belies an almost tragic ignorance of the history of science on both sides.

[Recently I was asked to speak to the inductees of the Philosophy Honors Society (Phi Sigma Tau) at the University of South Carolina. What follows is a rough approximation of what I said, rewritten for a wider audience.]

In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe, a spaceship full of telephone sanitizers and other purportedly useless members of society are sent to colonize a planet. Predictably, those who sent them then die of a disease that spreads via unsanitary telephones.

But what about all of the other societies in the universe, who never had telephone sanitizers in the first place, and apparently don’t need them? Are they worse off without the sanitizers? Are they somehow less than what they should aspire to be, for their lack of telephone sanitizers?

I think that the answer is clearly ‘no’. I do not, of course, mean to suggest that the telephone sanitizers did not contribute to their society — they took care of a job that was apparently necessary for survival. And perhaps (as individuals, not as telephone sanitizers) they did other things, even more wonderful (but probably not, as you will know if you have read the book).

The same could, I think, be said of automobile mechanics in our society. They do play an important role in our society — they fix cars. But suppose that cars never needed fixing. We would clearly, then, have no mechanics; and would be we a poorer society as a result? I am inclined to say ‘no’. The kind of good that mechanics supply is one that arises only contingently; it arises because, as a matter of contingent fact, we have cars that need fixing. Send Bob the mechanic backwards in time 1000 years and he would suddenly, qua mechanic, become a useless member of society.

Consider, instead, artists, and consider a society in which there are no artists, but plenty of art. Very fine (and very awful) art just appears from the sky, washes up on the beach, turns up in the laundry, or behind couch cushions, fully formed and ready to be enjoyed (or derided). In other words, this society has the same art that we have, but no artists. I think that this society lacks something important. I believe that we are culturally richer not merely for having art, but for having people who are engaged in making art. I believe this because I believe that part of our goal as a society ought to be to create conditions where our members can, and do, engage in the variety of activities that constitute human flourishing, and those activities include the production of art, but not the sanitizing of telephones.

I want to suggest that philosophers are more like artists than like telephone sanitizers. And, as a philosopher myself, I will make this suggestion on somewhat principled grounds, as a consequence of my answer to a bigger question: what good are philosophers?

Asking this question, I am not asking ‘what is a philosopher good for?’, as in, ‘what can you do with a philosopher?’ Even less am I asking the question ‘what can philosophers do that others generally cannot?” My question, instead, is: what good to society are philosophers? Is society any better off for having philosophers, and why?

There are in fact many answers to this question. Here are two obvious ones.

1. Sometimes philosophy more or less directly informs our answers to questions whose practical import for society is clear. (Consider the paper “Why Does Facilities Management Need Philosophy?” The author, who is serious if misguided, applies lessons apparently learned from, among others, Ayn Rand, Michel Foucault, and Paul Feyerabend — a strange philosophical trio indeed — to issues in workplace management.) Similarly, philosophy can critique or comment on social policy. A group working at the University of South Carolina has done important work, both in the academy and in the public at large, commenting on social policy surrounding nano-technology. Michael Ruse and others have provided expert testimony in court cases, especially involving the status of creation science. In these cases, philosophers, as philosophers, are directly involved in the discussion of social policy.

2. Sometimes, on the other hand, philosophy defines broad ontological, or epistemological, or otherwise philosophical perspectives that somehow, in ways that I think are poorly understood, leak out into society and begin to inform the way people view themselves, the world, and their place in the world. The mechanical philosophy that partly caused, and partly emerged from, the Scientific Revolution is an example. In the 20th century, epistemological ideas from some historians and philosophers of science, especially Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper, have apparently been incorporated into many people’s picture of the world. The general views of some political philosophers, perhaps most notably John Rawls, have had some not insignificant influence on social policy. And there are many other examples.

Both of these answers to my basic question are correct, and both of them indicate some sort of social role — and consequently the possibility of social value — for philosophy. I would like to consider, however, a different answer.

I’ll come at it obliquely, by asking a different question: What good is a monk? Now, by a monk, I mean somebody who has deliberately segregated himself from society and has minimal contact with it; somebody who spends more or less as much time as possible in prayer; and somebody whose work – normally, manual labor of some sort – is done primarily for the sake of enabling the life of prayer, not for some other reason.

So what good is a monk? Traditionally, three sorts of answer have been given to this question. One is that monks — even if minimally — do contribute to society by producing goods: brewing hearty beer, or raising tasty chickens, for example. But this answer is clearly a bad one, for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is in fact an answer to a different question, namely, ‘what good is a brewer, or chicken farmer?’, which monks (as I defined them) are only accidentally, not qua monks.

A second traditional answer is that monks pray for society. The monks’ voluminous praying therefore has a more or less direct benefit to society. Assuming that one believes in the efficacy of prayer, this answer might appear to have something to recommend it, although it relies on some extra assumptions about prayer (for example, that prayers are more likely to be answered if they are prayed by many people for a long time than by one person briefly). But regardless of your views about the efficacy of prayer, this answer is also wrong, because it relies on a fundamentally mistaken understanding of what prayer is for the traditional Christian.

Correcting that misunderstanding leads to a third answer. For the traditional Christian, prayer is not just an entreaty to God; it is an activity that is a human good in its own right. Moreover, in some traditional Christian circles it is a particularly important good, not unlike what Aristotle says about contemplation (theoria) in book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics. Indeed, it is such an important good, that society ought, at least in part, be geared towards the production of this good. For traditional Christians, society ought to be organized in such a way that substantial — even monk-like — engagement in prayer is realized by at least some members of society. For Aristotle, the state (polis) ought to be organized in such a way that at least some members can engage in theoria. The absence of monks from a traditional Christian society is a failure of the society, and the absence of contemplators from an Aristotelian polis is a failure of that polis, even if they do very little to contribute materially to the polis.

It is worth pointing out that this idea, or something like it, shows up in many places. It shows up, for example, in Hindu social thought. The first three stages of Hindu life are those of the student, householder, and forest-dweller. The fourth stage is that of the ‘homeless wanderer’, or hermit, who is on the verge of moksha (freedom from the cycle of birth and death). The hermit’s contact with society is minimal, and yet, without the hermit, what is the point of having a society? The goal of the traditional Hindu society is to produce hermits, and the good of hermits is that their very existence is the goal of society.

I suspect that many people today would say that as long as a monk is doing no harm to society, he can do whatever he likes. If he wants to spend all day praying, that’s his own business. I don’t buy this answer. I think that the monks need to justify themselves. So do the philosophers. (I am not, of course, suggesting that philosophers are monk-like in all respects.) Now, nobody will propose that contemporary society is aimed at the production of philosophers the same way that traditional Hindu society is aimed at the production of hermits. And yet, the relationship of the philosopher to society ought to be conceived, in part, in similar terms. That is, philosophical reflection is a good in itself. It is a good thing for humans to do, just as the production of art is a good thing for humans to do. And just as a society with art, but no artists, would be a shame, so also a society with no philosophers would be a shame, not only because philosophers can, and should, contribute materially to the betterment of society in the ways that I mentioned before, but also because philosophical activity is the sort of good that society ought to be enabling.

If you live in a society with philosophers, you should be glad, because something about your society is going well. If you are a philosopher, then you should, of course, not forget your responsibilities as members of a society, and you should not forget that your expertise as a philosopher gives you an opportunity to contribute to your society in a particular way. But you should also not forget that the very fact that you philosophize is already a good.

The other day I drove past the headquarters of the South Carolina State Lottery and noticed that its official name is the “South Carolina Education Lottery”. In fact, they use this name in their advertising. Tonight the estimated jackpot is $20 Million (but, as they are required to say in the fine print “$9.4 Million Cash Value”). Sound good? Well, let’s have a little education.

The lottery is required to put at least 45% of the money paid by ‘players’ into the prize pool. Although it takes some looking around, one can find the odds of winning the various games on the lottery’s web site, and those odds confirm that the expected value per dollar spent is around -55 cents. (In other words, in the long run, for every dollar spent by a ‘player’, that ‘player’ will get around 45 cents back in ‘winnings’.) About 15 percent of the money spent by ‘players’ goes towards running the lottery. (Anybody else suddenly feeling tempted to go into the lottery business?) The remaining 40% of the money spent by ‘players’ goes towards education in the state of South Carolina.

Apparently, that education does not include a lesson on why you shouldn’t play the lottery. Let’s consider the two apparently best reasons one might have for playing the lottery.

First, you might play because you wish to support education (a noble sentiment). This reason is clearly stupid, because your gift is first reduced by 60%. You (and the state) would be far better off if you just gave what you can to the state, bypassing the lottery.

Second, you might play for the chance of winning a lot of money. Let’s compare how well you would do at the lottery compared with going to a casino. In 2003, the average household in the U.S. spent $372 on state lottery tickets. Shocking, I know, but the facts are there for all to see. On average, over 10 years spending this much money on the South Carolina lottery, a household will have lost $2046 (of that, $1488 will go to education). (All of the numbers that I will give here are rough, not taking inflation, etc., into account, but they are sufficiently close to the truth to illustrate the point.)

Suppose instead you went to a casino and played baccarat with your money. (Many games have worse house odds than baccarat; a few are better.) If you play correctly, and spend the same amount that you would have on the lottery, you should expect to lose about $39.50.

“But”, I hear you say. I don’t mind losing my money to the schools of South Carolina. I don’t particularly want to give my money to casinos. Plus, I would have to buy a plane ticket to get to a casino.”

Let’s be clear that this argument is awful. When you play the lottery for $372 per year for ten years, here is where your money goes (on average):

Suppose instead you spent $400 on a weekend trip to Atlantic City. (I just found a deal on the internet – flight plus hotel – for $400, and I only looked for 3 minutes.) Then your breakdown (on average), spending the same $3720, would be (playing Baccarat – again there are better (and worse) games):

Take out $1674 for yourself, and you still have $1610.80 to give to the State for education. (Of course, your local Indian casino is likely to be closer than Atlantic City. Moreover, if you really must gamble, you can do it essentially for free on the internet, saving that $400 entirely.) And I haven’t even mentioned all of the free snacks and cocktails…

But maybe you play the lottery because of the chance to win ‘the big one’. So let’s finish off this argument by looking at the big one, the Powerball lottery. Let’s compare the chance of winning $200,000 by spending $3000 on lottery tickets, versus the chance of winning $200,000 by playing American roulette (which is far from your best bet if you are hoping to win money in a casino). Playing the lottery, your chance of winning $200,000 is a little better than 1 in 1200. In American roulette, if you simply bet all of your money on a 2-1 proposition (such as ‘1st 12’) every time until you reach your goal (or, as is more likely, bust), you have an approximately 1.2 in 1200 (i.e., 1 in 1000) chance of getting to around 200,000. In other words, your odds of winning a ‘big prize’ are about 20% better (and that was by playing a silly game in a silly way).

And what about the ‘really really big one’? Well, the payout changes from week to week. This week the real cash value of the payout is around $10 million, and your odds of winning that money are 1 in 146,107,962. You have a better chance of getting 27 heads in a row on a fair coin. It’s trite to say, but your odds of being struck by lighting are far better. (A common estimate is 1 in 600,000, or around 240 times more likely than wining the lottery.)

I can hear the response. “I play the lottery for the excitement of gambling. And I’d rather get a little excitement every week for 10 years than a lot of excitement for one weekend.” Well, there’s no arguing with taste – maybe some people do get excited about scratching numbers off of a card in a convenience store and then going home and watching some overdressed ‘TV host’ draw numbers from a bin (not to mention paying 55 cents on the dollar for the privilege). I’ll only suggest that there are better (more stimulating, longer-lasting, more productive) ways to get excited. And there are certainly better things to do with $372 per year.

‘Intellectual honesty’ covers a lot of territory. It obviously forbids plagiarism, in all of its varieties. But it covers other ground as well. For example, an experimental scientist who announces a result while knowingly withholding data that contradicts the result has acted intellectually dishonestly. A philosopher who argues for a conclusion while knowingly ignoring good arguments against that conclusion has acted intellectually dishonestly. There is a political version of this vice, in which politicians knowingly ignore reasonable arguments against their position. (One might dispute whether this sort of activity is vicious in politics, as it is in academia. I believe that it is. But in any case, there is little doubt that it is rampant.) But I’m not writing primarily about politics here. Instead, I’d like to consider what ‘intellectual honesty’ might mean in the context of the courts. I am prompted to consider the issue by the recent nomination of Judge Alito for the Supreme Court.

To see why that nomination made me think about this issue, consider the following analogy. Suppose that there is a team of nine scientists working on some particular scientific question — suppose, for example, that they are trying to measure the mass of some fundamental particle. They have access to precisely the same sets of data (from a variety of experiments). Their job, as scientists, is to interpret that data, each time. Now suppose that, frequently, when a new set of data comes in (for example, a new experiment is run that is relevant to their shared question), one particular scientist, ’scientist X‘, interprets the data differently from the others, who all more or less agree.

There are several types of explanation for this sort of disagreement (between scientist X and the others), but there is little doubt that an explanation is needed. One possibility (a) is that scientist X is incompetent. Another (b) is that scientist X is a genius, and the others are unable to appreciate the brilliance of the rogue interpretations, or perhaps are incompetent themselves. Yet another (c) is that scientist X is willfully interpreting the data differently. Perhaps, for example, scientist X has a brief for some particular physical theory, one that requires the mass of this particle to be different from what the others believe it to be. These three hypotheses (a,b, and c) are probably the most reasonable candidates for the correct explanation of scientist X’s behavior.

Assuming that all of the scientists on the team have good training, solid experience, a good track record on relevantly similar questions, and appear to be reasoning intelligently and honestly about the data, explanation (b) seems quite unlikely. Of course, it always remains a possibility — maybe we too are unable to appreciate scientist X’s genius! — but it is a judgment that, under the described conditions, ought, in general, to be reserved for the cases where the other explanations can be ruled out, or where scientist X’s judgment has been independently vindicated. (There are events of that sort in the history of science, but they are very rare. The picture of the lone genius bucking against the establishment is romantic, but it is almost never accurate.)

We are left, then, with (a) or (c). Of course, neither is very flattering to scientist X, and both are good reasons to reject scientist X’s judgments. If scientist X is merely incompetent, then we should advise a change of career. If the correct explanation of the repeated dissent is intellectual dishonesty, then scientist X should be censured for engaging in activity that is both morally wrong and highly damaging to scientific progress. (Those not in a position to make a judgment themselves might see the dispute between scientist X and the others as indicative of genuine scientific uncertainty, when it is instead a case of one scientist’s intellectual dishonesty. Alas, this sort of thing happens all the time.)

Notice that this story I am telling would have a very different conclusion if we were talking about, say, food critics. “À chacun son goût”, as the French say. There is no accounting for taste. If one food critic adores a new restaurant and eight others despise it, we might draw the conclusion that we are, ourselves, more likely to despise it than to adore it, but we would not (at least, I would not) conclude that the rogue critic is wrong (as opposed to idiosyncratic). The point is that in taste there is no unique correct answer. There is a unique correct answer about the mass of a particle. (Some philosophers of science would disagree with me about that; for them, I would need to draw this distinction in a more subtle way.)

Let’s turn, finally, to the courts. As President Bush and so many others love to emphasize, the job of a judge is to interpret and, given the interpretation, apply the law. (We should add that the judge’s job is also to interpret judicial precedent — indeed, much of what appellate courts do is to interpret prior rulings of their own, or of other courts, especially the Supreme Court.) In other words, the job of the judge is more akin to that of the scientist than that of the food critic. There is, in principle, a correct interpretation of laws and judicial precedents. Of course, as it goes in science, so also in the law: there are hard cases — cases where the correct interpretation is difficult to fathom, perhaps because of apparent (or worse, real) inconsistencies in the ‘evidence’ (the laws and judicial precedent), perhaps because of a lack of relevant evidence, or perhaps because of the inherent difficulty of understanding the evidence.

However, even in light of this difficulty (which is no less present in science), it remains reasonable to try to find an explanation for why a single judge would frequently disagree with the others, often as a minority of 1. Judge Alito has just such a record (as reported by many court-watchers, both left-wing and right-wing). He frequently disagrees with his fellow judges, when, in fact, they are all ‘interpreting’ the very same law and judicial precedent. Why? Is he incompetent? Is he a judicial genius toiling against legal dimwits? Or is he intellectually dishonest?

Many of his supporters, and some of his detractors, praise his legal skill in glowing terms: I can recall, in recent days, hearing the terms ‘brilliant’, ‘astute’, ‘knowledgeable’, ‘expert’, and ’skilled’. It seems safe to rule out incompetence. How might we make a determination about the other possibilities (genius or dishonesty)? I’m not in a position to judge, although I might try to take a stab at some relevant considerations in a later post.

However, I do wish to argue for this point: intellectual dishonesty is a possibility for judges. My main claim, here, is not about Judge Alito, but about the nature of the job for which he is nominated (and indeed the nature of the job he already holds). It is more like the job of the scientist than like the job of the food critic. It is possible to be wrong. It is possible to be misinformed, or to ignore the information that one does have. It is possible to misinterpret the law or judicial precedent, and it is possible to do so willfully, either by ignoring relevant aspects of the law or judicial precedent, or by ignoring good arguments against one’s own interpretation. Doing so is a form of intellectual dishonesty, and this sort of judicial intellectual dishonesty is severely damaging to the courts, and to our society.

Lewis Libby has been indicted. What aspect of the indictment did you find most surprising? I personally was hardly surprised by the presence of corruption, dishonesty, and arrogant disregard for others in the White House. But I did learn something new from the indictments — the origins of the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It turns out, as reported by several news agencies, that Libby was the inventor of that phrase. I remember hearing the abbreviation ‘WMD’ for the first time, because it also happens to be my initials. (My full name is ‘William Michael Dickson’.) Indeed, I used to use ‘wmd’ as part of my ’standard internet password’. (You have one of those, right? — your insecure password that you use at web sites that require you to ‘register’ before you can view their content.)

Well, in fact I am a ‘junior’, and I certainly don’t mean to cast aspersions on my real father, but, as many sons do, I will insist on rebelling against my ‘other’ Dad, Libby’s version of ‘WMD’. And what better way to rebel than to re-appropriate my name? So from now on, in my own mind (and I’m guessing that I’m probably alone here), ‘wmd’ means ‘words of mass dissemination’.

Welcome to my blog.

Do you want some context for this blog (as in, ‘WMD, who are you’)? Visit my web page at mdickson.com and you’ll find more information about me than you ever really wanted to know.