Early this month, Harvard students staged a walk-out in a class taught by professor Greg Mankiw. You can read their explanation here.
It takes a lot of scrolling down through the comments to get to what I had to say about that, so I'll save you the work, dear blog reader.
They’re students at Harvard, yet they can’t express themselves better than this? I’m dismayed. Here’s a simple stylistic point: “basic” and “fundamental,” in the sense in which those terms are both used in the final sentence of the third graph, are synonyms. To use both with a disjunctive, “more fundamental or basic,” is just bizaare or eerie. [See what I did there?]
Far more important, there IS of course a reason why Adam Smith’s work should be taken as more “fundamental or basic” than Keynes’. It is in point of historical fact more basic. Keynes, whether you agree with him or not, was building on a century and a half of prior work. Keynes and Smith are not competitors any more than Einstein and Newton are competitors. In each pairing, the work of the former would simply have been inconceivable without the prior contributions of the latter.
If you think you have mastered Newton, then you can go on to the study Einstein, and perhaps some day to have an intelligent opinion about Higgs’ boson. Otherwise, you’re likely to end up confusing a boson with a North American bison.
Indeed, this is what Mankiw himself has said about the situation. I confess I hadn't checked out his response before writing the above, but I've seen it now, and he has sensibly risen above the rancor directed his way. He has posted on his blog a video of a recent half-hour talk on 'heterodox' economics, and he has suggested in a single well-wrought paragraph that his main disagreement with the "Occupy Harvard" group is pedagogical.
Showing posts with label Harvard University. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harvard University. Show all posts
15 December 2011
16 October 2010
Writing Against The Scholars
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the common man, that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in support of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people."
Joshua Greene, an assistant professor of psychology at at Harvard University with an interest in moral philosophy, has evidently found that a stimulating quote. It inspired the title and much of the reasoning of his essay The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul. (Hmmmm. A Harvard man officially tasked with teaching psychology who writes about moral philosophy? Why would he interest a Jamesian like myself?)
Greene discusses trolley cars in that essay, and regular readers of Pragmatism Refreshed will not be surprised to learn that this bit drew my attention. [I'll assume my reader already familiar with the standard trolley-car hypothetical. Follow that last link if you want a refresher.]
Greene ups the ante: "What if the trolley is headed for a detonator that will set off a nuclear bomb that will kill half a million people?" he imagines asking a stubborn deontologist. "Suddenly the welfare of society as a whole starts to sound important again."
His point is that the initial refusal of many of his students to (imaginatively) sacrifice somebody to an oncoming trolley for the good of two or more somebodies is an emotional reaction, one bred into us by evolution, where immediate interpersonal relations are the only ones that really counted for our selfish genes. The emotional reaction gives way and "cognition" kicks in once numbers get really large.
So should we conclude that we owe it to ourselves as a species to get over our inbred emotional responses and do the right thing as our cognition indicates? That deontology is a phase in our existence we ought finally to outgrow? Green does not draw that conclusion. After all, taken without qualification that line of reasoning tells me also that I should "feel uneasy" about loving my children more than any other children. No parent [almost no parent?] feels uneasy about that, and Greene states the reason well. "It seems that one who is unwilling to act on human tendencies with amoral evolutionary causes is ultimately unwilling to be human." There must be a line between "correcting the near-sightedness of human moral nature and obliterating it completely...." Giving up on parental love would obliterate human nature. On which side of the line would one put the deontological refusal to stop the runaway trolley, even if it dooms two victims rather than one? Is that the humanness we must preserve or the near-sightedness thereof we should correct?
Greene leaves that question open. But the fact that he suggests deontology still has some life in it, even after treating it as an emotional response at odds with cognition, suggests that the secret in his soul may be the same as the secret in Kant's.
Joshua Greene, an assistant professor of psychology at at Harvard University with an interest in moral philosophy, has evidently found that a stimulating quote. It inspired the title and much of the reasoning of his essay The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul. (Hmmmm. A Harvard man officially tasked with teaching psychology who writes about moral philosophy? Why would he interest a Jamesian like myself?)
Greene discusses trolley cars in that essay, and regular readers of Pragmatism Refreshed will not be surprised to learn that this bit drew my attention. [I'll assume my reader already familiar with the standard trolley-car hypothetical. Follow that last link if you want a refresher.]
Greene ups the ante: "What if the trolley is headed for a detonator that will set off a nuclear bomb that will kill half a million people?" he imagines asking a stubborn deontologist. "Suddenly the welfare of society as a whole starts to sound important again."
His point is that the initial refusal of many of his students to (imaginatively) sacrifice somebody to an oncoming trolley for the good of two or more somebodies is an emotional reaction, one bred into us by evolution, where immediate interpersonal relations are the only ones that really counted for our selfish genes. The emotional reaction gives way and "cognition" kicks in once numbers get really large.
So should we conclude that we owe it to ourselves as a species to get over our inbred emotional responses and do the right thing as our cognition indicates? That deontology is a phase in our existence we ought finally to outgrow? Green does not draw that conclusion. After all, taken without qualification that line of reasoning tells me also that I should "feel uneasy" about loving my children more than any other children. No parent [almost no parent?] feels uneasy about that, and Greene states the reason well. "It seems that one who is unwilling to act on human tendencies with amoral evolutionary causes is ultimately unwilling to be human." There must be a line between "correcting the near-sightedness of human moral nature and obliterating it completely...." Giving up on parental love would obliterate human nature. On which side of the line would one put the deontological refusal to stop the runaway trolley, even if it dooms two victims rather than one? Is that the humanness we must preserve or the near-sightedness thereof we should correct?
Greene leaves that question open. But the fact that he suggests deontology still has some life in it, even after treating it as an emotional response at odds with cognition, suggests that the secret in his soul may be the same as the secret in Kant's.
09 September 2010
Marc Hauser
Marc Hauser seems to be in some trouble, although it is rather difficult to get a fix on how much.
Hauser is a big name in the field of evolutionary psychology. He's the co-director of the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program at Harvard University, Director of its Cognitive Evolution Lab, and adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Education and the Program in Neurosciences.
In 2002 his paper, “Rule learning by cotton-top tamarins,” was published by the journal Cognition. Of course he has written much else, but I mention that paper because it is at the heart of the still developing scandal. Here's some info about the cotton-top tamarin. It's a small monkey, the sort of animal one would want to study if one were trying to prove, say, that humans are distinctive vis-a-vis moral/cognitive development even compared to other primates. Or that humans aren't that distinctive.
Hauser's experiments appear to have involved hidden loudspeakers within the living environment of these monkeys. The monkeys would, not surprisingly, sometimes turn about to look toward the loudspeakers when they started talking. But how frequently they turned around was used as a measure of whether they thought the loudspeakers were saying something interesting. After all, if the same-pld-stuff kept coming from the loudspeakers, then over time it would just become ambiant noise, and the monkeys would learn to ignore it.
By videotaping the environment, and carefully watching the tape for monkey turn-arounds, and correlating all that to what was coming out of those speakers at diferent times, one can presumably draw some conclusions about the recognition of speech by monkeys, and even (if the data set is large enough) about whether monkeys notice things like grammatical errors.
This is all founded on experiments that Elizabeth Spelke has run with human infants, as David Dobbs has explained in SLATE.
Here's what the Chronicle of Higher Education said on August 13. The findings published in Cognition in 2002 can not be relied upon. The conclusions are not supported by the data. So ... what happened? Did someone else look at the videotape and see monkeying around inconsistent with what the paper reported?
I suspect there are some big issues that are at stake here, and I wish Harvard were more forthcoming about its investigation.
Hauser is a big name in the field of evolutionary psychology. He's the co-director of the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program at Harvard University, Director of its Cognitive Evolution Lab, and adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Education and the Program in Neurosciences.
In 2002 his paper, “Rule learning by cotton-top tamarins,” was published by the journal Cognition. Of course he has written much else, but I mention that paper because it is at the heart of the still developing scandal. Here's some info about the cotton-top tamarin. It's a small monkey, the sort of animal one would want to study if one were trying to prove, say, that humans are distinctive vis-a-vis moral/cognitive development even compared to other primates. Or that humans aren't that distinctive.
Hauser's experiments appear to have involved hidden loudspeakers within the living environment of these monkeys. The monkeys would, not surprisingly, sometimes turn about to look toward the loudspeakers when they started talking. But how frequently they turned around was used as a measure of whether they thought the loudspeakers were saying something interesting. After all, if the same-pld-stuff kept coming from the loudspeakers, then over time it would just become ambiant noise, and the monkeys would learn to ignore it.
By videotaping the environment, and carefully watching the tape for monkey turn-arounds, and correlating all that to what was coming out of those speakers at diferent times, one can presumably draw some conclusions about the recognition of speech by monkeys, and even (if the data set is large enough) about whether monkeys notice things like grammatical errors.
This is all founded on experiments that Elizabeth Spelke has run with human infants, as David Dobbs has explained in SLATE.
Here's what the Chronicle of Higher Education said on August 13. The findings published in Cognition in 2002 can not be relied upon. The conclusions are not supported by the data. So ... what happened? Did someone else look at the videotape and see monkeying around inconsistent with what the paper reported?
I suspect there are some big issues that are at stake here, and I wish Harvard were more forthcoming about its investigation.
29 November 2009
"Bread, Please" as Conditioned Response
I'd like to pursue the ideas to which I alluded here a week ago.
B.F. Skinner's book, Verbal Behavior (1957), grew out of a series of lectures he gave at Harvard in 1947-48. It naturally draws my attention that these were the William James Lectures, sponsored jointly by Harvard's Departments of Psychology and Philosophy. This is a series of lectures that began in 1930 and continued until the 1980s, and that hosted some of the most illustrious thinkers of that period within the interchange of those two disciplines. Just for example, not to elevate those above the others: Arthur Lovejoy gave the WJ lectures in 1932-33; Karl Popper in 1949-50; Gabriel Marcel in 1961-62.
The fact that Skinner gave his lectures on "verbal behavior" ten years before the publication of the book of that name would seem to suggest a considerable modification between the one format and the other.
Anyway, the book may be found here.
He defines "verbal behavior" in the first instance as "behavior shaped and maintained by mediated consequences," i.e. that has its desired effect through the actions of a listener. The desired effect of "bread please" is to persuade someone else at the table to move an object around, where physical constraints or social convention prevent the speaker from obtaining the bread for himself. Skinner later refines that definition a bit, but that remains a key to his approach.
"Bread please" seems a behavior generated by operant conditioning in a rather straightforward way. For a youngter, saying "bread" will suffice to get the bread. Indeed, one's parents (the conditioners) will likely be delighted that their child can form the word, so they will happily reinforce that speech by handing over a piece of bread. Later, though, "bread" earns only frowns unless modified by "please," so the growing child is brought within the scope of social convention.
More elaborate usages of language are only very complicated instances of the operation of much the same mechanism whence comes the phrase "bread please." That, at any rate, is Skinner's view. One of its advantages in his eyes is that it gets rid of the idea that words have meaning in the sense in which "meaning" might be something inside the brain and hidden from science. Words only "mean," for Skinner, because they get listeners to do things, and the doing is "as observable as any part of physics."
That is enough for today. I will say more soon about why Chomsky objected to the study of language in these terms, how later Skinnerians reacted to Chomsky, and how the dispute feeds into the question of the differentia of the human species.
B.F. Skinner's book, Verbal Behavior (1957), grew out of a series of lectures he gave at Harvard in 1947-48. It naturally draws my attention that these were the William James Lectures, sponsored jointly by Harvard's Departments of Psychology and Philosophy. This is a series of lectures that began in 1930 and continued until the 1980s, and that hosted some of the most illustrious thinkers of that period within the interchange of those two disciplines. Just for example, not to elevate those above the others: Arthur Lovejoy gave the WJ lectures in 1932-33; Karl Popper in 1949-50; Gabriel Marcel in 1961-62.
The fact that Skinner gave his lectures on "verbal behavior" ten years before the publication of the book of that name would seem to suggest a considerable modification between the one format and the other.
Anyway, the book may be found here.
He defines "verbal behavior" in the first instance as "behavior shaped and maintained by mediated consequences," i.e. that has its desired effect through the actions of a listener. The desired effect of "bread please" is to persuade someone else at the table to move an object around, where physical constraints or social convention prevent the speaker from obtaining the bread for himself. Skinner later refines that definition a bit, but that remains a key to his approach.
"Bread please" seems a behavior generated by operant conditioning in a rather straightforward way. For a youngter, saying "bread" will suffice to get the bread. Indeed, one's parents (the conditioners) will likely be delighted that their child can form the word, so they will happily reinforce that speech by handing over a piece of bread. Later, though, "bread" earns only frowns unless modified by "please," so the growing child is brought within the scope of social convention.
More elaborate usages of language are only very complicated instances of the operation of much the same mechanism whence comes the phrase "bread please." That, at any rate, is Skinner's view. One of its advantages in his eyes is that it gets rid of the idea that words have meaning in the sense in which "meaning" might be something inside the brain and hidden from science. Words only "mean," for Skinner, because they get listeners to do things, and the doing is "as observable as any part of physics."
That is enough for today. I will say more soon about why Chomsky objected to the study of language in these terms, how later Skinnerians reacted to Chomsky, and how the dispute feeds into the question of the differentia of the human species.
27 November 2008
Marist College's Red Foxes
I'm an alumnus of Marist College, and I have to say I've just discovered something very peculiar -- evendisturbing -- on the website for Marist's intercollegiate sports.
Marist teams are known as the "Red Foxes." So a natural simple cheer would be "Go, Red Foxes!" right?
Unfortunately, somebody should have told the webmaster that you have to be careful when you run words together. "Go Red Foxes" run together as a single internet-friendly phrase can look indistinguishable from "Gored Foxes"!
And who'd want to cheer for a bunch of gored foxes?
If you follow the link you'll discover that not only is the URL "Goredfoxes.cstv.com but the phrase appears at the bottom of the page followed by the helpful suggestion that one might "permanently bypass this page." Yes, indeed one might.
Anyway, the Red Foxes (men -- basketball) played Delaware Tuesday and seem to have made a fine showing though losing in overtime, 88 to 83.
The Red Foxes (women -- basketball) went to Cambridge, Massachusetts Tuesday and defeated their Harvard counterparts 76 to 63. Go, Red Foxes! Three distinct words!
Marist teams are known as the "Red Foxes." So a natural simple cheer would be "Go, Red Foxes!" right?
Unfortunately, somebody should have told the webmaster that you have to be careful when you run words together. "Go Red Foxes" run together as a single internet-friendly phrase can look indistinguishable from "Gored Foxes"!
And who'd want to cheer for a bunch of gored foxes?
If you follow the link you'll discover that not only is the URL "Goredfoxes.cstv.com but the phrase appears at the bottom of the page followed by the helpful suggestion that one might "permanently bypass this page." Yes, indeed one might.
Anyway, the Red Foxes (men -- basketball) played Delaware Tuesday and seem to have made a fine showing though losing in overtime, 88 to 83.
The Red Foxes (women -- basketball) went to Cambridge, Massachusetts Tuesday and defeated their Harvard counterparts 76 to 63. Go, Red Foxes! Three distinct words!
18 May 2008
Gershom Scholem
I see a brief review in the latest issue of Harper's of a new edition of the diaries of Gershom Scholem, an expert on the history of Judaism, who grew up in Germany, among a thoroughly assimilated German-Jewish family, in the years before the first world war.
The reviewer make the point that Scholem's scholarly interest in Judaism was itself something of a youthful rebellion, one which (combined with his anti-war opinions) got him evicted from his family home in Berlin in February 1917.
The new edition is a publication of the Harvard University Press, of the journals Scholem kept betwen 1913 and 1919, under the title "Lamentations of Youth." There isn't much there about the eviction, though. Only a cryptic entry in which he says he has "experienced something."
Two books generally regarded as masterpieces define Scholem's achievement, MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM (1941) and SABBATAI SEVI: The MYSTICAL MESSIAH (1957).
I'll leave that as a teaser for now. I'll be back Thursday and continue this train of thought.
The reviewer make the point that Scholem's scholarly interest in Judaism was itself something of a youthful rebellion, one which (combined with his anti-war opinions) got him evicted from his family home in Berlin in February 1917.
The new edition is a publication of the Harvard University Press, of the journals Scholem kept betwen 1913 and 1919, under the title "Lamentations of Youth." There isn't much there about the eviction, though. Only a cryptic entry in which he says he has "experienced something."
Two books generally regarded as masterpieces define Scholem's achievement, MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM (1941) and SABBATAI SEVI: The MYSTICAL MESSIAH (1957).
I'll leave that as a teaser for now. I'll be back Thursday and continue this train of thought.
17 July 2007
Back to the Golden Age
Last Tuesday, July 10, my blog entry consisted of a lengthy quotation from a letter that William James wrote to his friend/colleague Palmer during the golden age of Harvard philosophy, commenting on two of their colleagues in particular, Royce and Santayana.
I'd like to expound upon that letter a bit today.
Royce, it tells us, has just been assigned to teach epistemology. James (although his name is now closely associated with epistemological controversies) didn't like the term,
and jests here about its portentuosness. The French phrase he uses, BTW,literally translates "by the times that run" ... or more idiomatically, "since these are the conditions that prevail"! Everybody else is using "Epistemology," so we might as well use it, and have somebody as talented as Royce teaching it.
Royce was at this point at work on the second volume of his two-volume work, THE WORLD AND THE INDIVIDUAL. That's the "new volume" that James says he looks forward to eagerly. Royce was trying to reconcile Hegelian metaphysics with individualistic ethics and
politics, hence James' description of it as "voluntaristic-pluralistic monism."
But when we start reading James description of his reaction to Santayana's new book, the mingling of praise and critique positively en-giddies us! What James first says he prizes about Santayana is his imperturbability. But James doesn't describe himself as
imperturbable ... he squeals and grunts! Imperturbability is best admired in others, rather than imitated, it appears.
All of James' admirers know how James used the word "thickening" as a term of praise, and here Santayana is credited with thickening Harvard.
But after he describes the "thick" atmosphere, the various fighting faiths, why does he refer to himself as "out of it"? I don't think this a hypochondriacal lament. I believe, rather, that at this time James was hard at work on the Gifford lectures, which would
eventually becomes "The Varieties of Religious Experience." He perhaps regretted that he was becoming too immersed in a project that might seem, from the point of view of the debates on epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics he has in mind in most of this
letter, something of a digression.
I'd like to expound upon that letter a bit today.
Royce, it tells us, has just been assigned to teach epistemology. James (although his name is now closely associated with epistemological controversies) didn't like the term,
and jests here about its portentuosness. The French phrase he uses, BTW,literally translates "by the times that run" ... or more idiomatically, "since these are the conditions that prevail"! Everybody else is using "Epistemology," so we might as well use it, and have somebody as talented as Royce teaching it.
Royce was at this point at work on the second volume of his two-volume work, THE WORLD AND THE INDIVIDUAL. That's the "new volume" that James says he looks forward to eagerly. Royce was trying to reconcile Hegelian metaphysics with individualistic ethics and
politics, hence James' description of it as "voluntaristic-pluralistic monism."
But when we start reading James description of his reaction to Santayana's new book, the mingling of praise and critique positively en-giddies us! What James first says he prizes about Santayana is his imperturbability. But James doesn't describe himself as
imperturbable ... he squeals and grunts! Imperturbability is best admired in others, rather than imitated, it appears.
All of James' admirers know how James used the word "thickening" as a term of praise, and here Santayana is credited with thickening Harvard.
But after he describes the "thick" atmosphere, the various fighting faiths, why does he refer to himself as "out of it"? I don't think this a hypochondriacal lament. I believe, rather, that at this time James was hard at work on the Gifford lectures, which would
eventually becomes "The Varieties of Religious Experience." He perhaps regretted that he was becoming too immersed in a project that might seem, from the point of view of the debates on epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics he has in mind in most of this
letter, something of a digression.
10 July 2007
A Golden Age
On April 2, 1900, William James wrote to a Harvard colleague, the Hegelian philosopher George Palmer. I love this letter as an artefact of that time, a golden age in American philosophy, as seen from the inside.
"Glorious old Palmer --
"I had come to the point of feeling that my next letter must be to you, when up comes your delightful 'favor' of the 18th, with all its news, its convincing clipping, and its enclosures from Bakewell and Sheldon."
[I omit here some gossit about the jockeying for academic positions.]
"I'm glad you're back in ethics and glad that Royce has 'Epistemology' -- portentous name, and small result, in my opinion, but a substantive discipline which ought, par la temps qui court, to be treated with due familiarity. I look forward with eagerness to his new volume. What a colossal feat he has performed in these two years -- all thrown in by the way, as it were ...."
[I do further skipping here to get to my favorite part.]
"The great event in my life recently has been the reading of Santayana's book. Although I absolutely reject the platonism of it, I have literally squealed with delight at the imperturbable perfection with which the position is laid down on page after page; and grunted with delight at such a thickening up of our Harvard atmosphere. If our students now could really begin to understand what Royce means with his voluntaristic-pluralustic monism, what Munsterberg means with his dualistic scientificism and platonism, what Santayana means by his pessimistic platonism (I wonder if he and Mg have had any close mutually encouraging intercourse in this line?) what I mean by my crass pluralism, what you meanby your ethereal idealism, that these are so many religions, ways of fronting life, and worth fighting fo, we should have a genuine philosophic atmosphere at Harvard. The best condition of it would be an open conflict and rivalry of the diverse systems. (Alas! that I should be out of it, just as my chance begins!) The world might ring with the struggle, if we devoted ourselves exclusively to belaboring each other.
"I now understand Santayana, the man. I never understood him before. But what a perfection of rottenness in a philosophy! I don't think I ever knew the anti-realistic view to be propounded with so impudently superior an air. It is refreshing to see a representative of moribund Latinity rise up and administer such reproof to us barbarians in the hour of our triumph. I imagine Santayana's style to be entirely spontaneous."
"Glorious old Palmer --
"I had come to the point of feeling that my next letter must be to you, when up comes your delightful 'favor' of the 18th, with all its news, its convincing clipping, and its enclosures from Bakewell and Sheldon."
[I omit here some gossit about the jockeying for academic positions.]
"I'm glad you're back in ethics and glad that Royce has 'Epistemology' -- portentous name, and small result, in my opinion, but a substantive discipline which ought, par la temps qui court, to be treated with due familiarity. I look forward with eagerness to his new volume. What a colossal feat he has performed in these two years -- all thrown in by the way, as it were ...."
[I do further skipping here to get to my favorite part.]
"The great event in my life recently has been the reading of Santayana's book. Although I absolutely reject the platonism of it, I have literally squealed with delight at the imperturbable perfection with which the position is laid down on page after page; and grunted with delight at such a thickening up of our Harvard atmosphere. If our students now could really begin to understand what Royce means with his voluntaristic-pluralustic monism, what Munsterberg means with his dualistic scientificism and platonism, what Santayana means by his pessimistic platonism (I wonder if he and Mg have had any close mutually encouraging intercourse in this line?) what I mean by my crass pluralism, what you meanby your ethereal idealism, that these are so many religions, ways of fronting life, and worth fighting fo, we should have a genuine philosophic atmosphere at Harvard. The best condition of it would be an open conflict and rivalry of the diverse systems. (Alas! that I should be out of it, just as my chance begins!) The world might ring with the struggle, if we devoted ourselves exclusively to belaboring each other.
"I now understand Santayana, the man. I never understood him before. But what a perfection of rottenness in a philosophy! I don't think I ever knew the anti-realistic view to be propounded with so impudently superior an air. It is refreshing to see a representative of moribund Latinity rise up and administer such reproof to us barbarians in the hour of our triumph. I imagine Santayana's style to be entirely spontaneous."
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