Protect research in the UK: sign this petition!

If you think the allocation of research funding should be decided on the basis of research excellence and not on the short-term and narrowly construed 'impact' it's likely to make (as decided in part by non-specialists), then please sign this petition!

CAI and SCQ

I've posted a new and expanded version of my paper arguing that composition as identity doesn't settle the special composition question. It's here; thoughts welcome.

The Northern Institute of Philosophy

The Northern Institute of Philosophy - a research centre at the University of Aberdeen directed by Crispin Wright dedicated to the core areas of analytic philospohy - now determinately exists! It is indeterminately identical to the centre I was a member of during my PhD, so is metaphysically interesting in its own right!

Their website is here, and they have a blog here. An exciting future no doubt awaits!

The REF and 'impact'

We don't often delve into the political side of things on MV, but this is an extremely important issue for philosophy in the UK. As many will know, there used to be the RAE: the research assessment exercise. This consisted of a panel of subject specialists reading and making a judgment on the (self-nominated) four best papers of every academic in the country put forward by their department (in practice, basically all the research active staff). The resulting department ratings controlled how much money they would get. Like any system, it of course had its problems, but it was beneficial in many ways. Departments could no longer afford to simply hire the person with the Oxbridge degree and ignore the non-Oxbridge person with a stack of papers in good places - it made hiring more meritocratic.

The RAE is no more. It is being replaced by the REF. It does not look like a change for the better. One bad change is that the panels are to be more coarse grained: it will no longer be simply philosophers judging philosophers, etc. But the most disturbing issue is that 25% of the grade a paper gets is now going to be on the 'impact' it makes. At least, they *say* it will be determined by the impact it makes: in practice, of course, it can't be, since no-one has a crystal ball - so the least they could do is be honest and tell us straight that 25% of the grade will be determined by its short term impact. At least wear the short-term-ism on your sleeve if that's what we're aiming for now!

"How do you determine the impact of a specific paper anyway?" one might ask. Yeah, good question. These guys need to read their Quine! The simple counterfactual account is obviously problematic (even putting aside epistemic problems). All signs point to a focus on narrow, direct, short term impact being what's going to be relevant. A disaster!

Alan Weir wrote on open response to the REF that's available here. It's well worth reading: I want to quote a section.

"The taxpayer can see how funding researchers to investigate solutions to
some immediate problem, a virus say, can be justified. But how can the
funding of pure research be justified? Well, since the research is carried
out for its own sake, those involved will think that centuries-long
traditions of transmitting a body of work of enormous intellectual,
cultural and artistic merit from one generation to the next is of great
value in its own right. But to the sceptical taxpayer we have a very
potent additional point to make. What if Albert Einstein, Max Planck,
Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, in trying to determine how the
mysterious sub-nuclear world of quantum physics worked, had been
constrained and directed by whether their research satisfied short-term
impact criteria? What, to move closer to my own area, if Gottlob Frege,
Bertrand Russell, and Kurt Gödel and others who devoted their lives to
investigating the nature of mathematical truth, logical consequence and
the light formal artificial languages can shed on them (and with no
thought to the possibility of automated reasoning machines of the type the
philosopher Leibniz had sketched) had been required to demonstrate the
impact their researches would have outside academe? Then no quantum
physics and modern micro-electronics, no artificial languages, recursion
theory and computer science; we would have likely remained at the level of
Victorian science and technology and all the practical, medical and
intellectual advances which microelectronics and computing have given us
would not have emerged. Even taxpayers with no desire at all to be
Socrates dissatisfied can see the enormous impact (though not on the
ludicrously short scale of ten to 15 years) these
investigations, driven by pure intellectual curiosity, have made by
comparing today’s technology with late Victorian.

It is essential to grasp that the unintended consequences which emerge
from pure disinterested research have arisen because they were precisely
that: the research was not being directed at all to go towards immediate
practical goals."

Hear hear! The 'impact' research makes is both a long term issue, and a holistic one: one simply cannot separate out the impact made by the research activity of mankind and parcel it out paper by paper. To try to do so is simply nonsense, especially on the ridiculously short time scale it would need to be for it to be relevant for funding purposes.

Let's hope sense wins out and the research community in philosophy and elsewhere is not forced to bow to the whims of petty short term thinking, looking only to immediate and foreseeable commercial gain.

Update: There's a good post on this at Logic Matters.

Update 2: Of course, it's not just philosophers who should be worried. The Guardian quoted some reasonably concerned physicists too - even the subjects where you'd expect it would be easier to demonstrate 'impact' still, sensibly, don't want to have their research agenda to be driven by that.

Fine on essence

I've put online a draft of a paper I'm writing for Phil Compass on the grounds of necessity. Comments on anything in it are welcome, but I'm going to post here some of the stuff I say about Kit Fine's reduction of modality to essence, since I'd especially welcome thoughts on that. So here's Fine:

"Necessity has its source in those objects which are the subject of the
underlying essentialist claim. . . We should view metaphysical necessity
as a special case of essence. . . . The metaphysically necessary truths
[are] . . .the propositions which are true in virtue of the nature of all
objects whatever."

Here are three thoughts (none intended as anything like insurmountable objections, just things to think about):

1) Prima facie, the view seems to require us to accept the existence of things like properties and relations, and thus appears to be incompatible with nominalism. For what entity can we plausibly say has a nature such as to guarantee the
truth of ‘If there are some things, there is a set of those things’ if not the
relation being a member of? No collection of actual individuals guarantees the
truth of that, because the claim says something about what happens no matter
what individuals are around.

2) If it’s necessary that there couldn’t be certain (kinds of) individuals
(universals, say, or God) then we must admit that some of the things that exist
have natures that exclude the existence of other things. You might find this
harder to accept than the claim that some things have natures that guarantee
the existence of other things. (Cf. the familiar objection to admitting
truthmakers for negative existentials: intuitively, they are true because some
things don’t exist, not because some thing does. Similarly, impossible
existents are impossible, intuitively, because there’s something about them
that’s impossible, not because, e.g., there’s something else whose essence is
such as to make them impossible.)

3) It’s easy to see how the essence of an entity e can account for the necessity of
a conditional the antecedent of which says that e exists. So my essence
grounds the truth of, hence accounts for the necessity of, ‘If Ross exists, he is
a human’. From this, it’s easy to see how unconditional necessities can be
grounded if the thing whose essence accounts for its truth has existence as part
of its essence. So were I an essential existent, my essence would account for
the necessity of the antecedent of the above conditional as well, and hence
account for the necessity of the consequent. But we might want to allow for
cases where an unconditional necessity is ‘multiply realized’ in the following
way. Suppose 2+2=4 is actually true in virtue of the essence of the numbers 2
and 4. So we account for the necessity of ‘If the numbers exist, 2+2=4’. But
it’s not just conditionally necessary that 2+2=4, ‘2+2=4’ is itself necessary.
But on this view, that’s not because the numbers exist necessarily: on this
view, while our actual world is Platonist, and mathematical truths are true
because of the numbers, structuralism is possibly true and ‘2+2=4’ is true in
virtue of the essence of certain structures, and maybe in some worlds there are
brute mathematical laws, and ‘2+2=4’ is true in virtue of these laws. So there
are multiple possible grounds for the arithmetical truth, and the truth is
necessary because it’s necessary that there is some ground or other. But what
actual things have essences such as to ground this last necessary truth? The
worry is that Fine can only account for conditional necessities or
unconditional necessities which are unconditionally necessary because there is
some essential existent that accounts for their truth in any possible circumstance.

Jobs at Leeds

Leeds will be hiring two new positions in the upcoming hiring round, at either lecturer or senior lecturer level (for US readers: roughly equivalent to a tenured assistant prof and an associate prof, respectively). Details below.

University of Leeds
Faculty of Arts
Department of Philosophy

2 Lectureships/Senior Lectureships in Philosophy
(Available from 1 September 2010)

The Department of Philosophy is one of the largest Philosophy departments in the UK, with over 30 academic staff, a large intake of undergraduate and postgraduate students and a vigorous research culture. It received a maximum 24 in the last Teaching Quality evaluation and in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise 65% of our research was rated "world class" or "internationally excellent" (matching the percentage of leading UK philosophy departments such as Oxford and Cambridge). The Department has distinctive strengths in aesthetics, history and philosophy of science, metaphysics, and moral philosophy.

The ‘Area of Specialisation’ for this position is open, within Philosophy. Potential candidates are strongly advised to consult the department’s website for details of its research and teaching programmes.

The position will incorporate undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, some thesis supervision, and usual non-teaching duties. With a strong record of research publication, the successful candidate should be qualified to masters level or equivalent. A PhD prior to application and teaching experience are strongly preferred for a Lectureship and are essential for a position at Senior Lecturer level.

For general information see http://www.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk/

Lecturer - University Grade 7 (£32.458 – 35,469 p.a.) or University 8 (£36,532 – 43,622 p.a.) Senior Lecturer - University Grade 9 (£44,930 – 52,086 p.a.)

Informal enquiries to philosophy-hod@leeds.ac.uk or tel: +44 (0)113 343 3260

To download an application form and job details please visit www.leeds.ac.uk and click on ‘jobs’. Alternatively these may be obtained by email from recruitment@adm.leeds.ac.uk or tel: +44 (0)113 343 5771.

Job ref 318050 Closing date Wednesday 11th November 2009

Presentations and Interviews will take place on Monday and Tuesday 18th and 19th January 2010

Applicants should submit the completed application form, full CV, and a writing sample (of no longer than 25 pages) by the closing date of 11th November.

Presentism, Truthmakers and Theoretical Virtues

I’m just back from the BSPC where I gave my Truthmaking for Presentists. I got loads of good questions of and comments, but wanted to comment on one of them. In the paper I argue that truthmaker theory can be contingently true and hence that it’s no immediate objection to my view if there are possible presentist scenarios in which my account doesn’t work, so long as we can reasonably believe that they are not actual. (The scenario in question discussed in the paper is a presentist world with an infinite past.)

One of my commentators, Caspar Hare, was pushing me on whether I thought it was similarly okay for the truthmaker principle to simply be true now. He was expecting me to say yes – but I say no, it must be true always; and he was rightly pushing me to say why one should demand that the principle be true at all times but not at all worlds when one holds a view that treats times and worlds analogously in holding that only one of each (the present time, the actual world) is real.

For me the reasons to be a truthmaker theorist concern theoretical virtues. Truthmaker theory is the theory that all the brute truths are truths about what there is, and this is theoretically more virtuous than theories that take as brute truths not only about what there is but also truths about what there was, could be, should be, etc, as well as truths about how things are, what laws hold, etc, etc. If truthmaker theory is true, God’s language only needs names and an existence predicate: that’s ideologically simpler, and hence more virtuous (other things being equal), than theories which require God to be able to make predications, express tensed facts, etc.

I think that in the absence of further information, if the only reason to believe a theory is that it is theoretically virtuous, then we should take that theory to be at best contingently true. There’s no inconsistency in a theoretical virtue selecting a necessarily true theory, but we’d need some reason to think that it does in any particular case. In general the world needn’t have cooperated with what is theoretically virtuous: being guided by simplicity, parsimony etc might have taken us badly wrong – we just hope it doesn’t actually do so. That’s why I only hold truthmaker theory to be a contingent truth. (It’s also why I hold the contingency of composition, and the contingency of whether there is a fundamental level.)

But it seems to me that satisfaction of the theoretical virtues makes a demand on how the world is across times, not just at the present time, even if the present is all that is real. Suppose we’re faced with two theories, T1 and T2. T1 says that there are always 10,000 things. T2 says that there are now only 100 things but that at all other times there are billions. It seems to me that the presentist doesn’t get even a pro tanto reason to accept T2 on the basis that it says that there are fewer things in reality. (I’m assuming quantitative parsimony is a virtue – replace talk of number of things with number of kinds of things if you don’t.) Sure, the present is all that there is, and T2 says that there are presently 100 things whereas T1 says that there are presently a hundred times as many things. But the presentist should still be moved, I think, by the fact that according to T2 reality just was, and is soon to be again, massively more unparsimonious than T1 says it is. The fact that those times aren’t real shouldn’t make us worry any less about that. (By contrast, if T3 and T4 agree on what actually exists but T4 says there are more possibilia than T3 does, this only gives us even a pro-tanto reason to prefer T3 if we are realist about possibilia.)

I think that what’s driving this thought is an idea that Kit Fine pushes in his fantastic paper ‘Tense and Reality’: that everyone should think of non-present times as part of the same ‘all encompassing reality’ whereas only the realist about possibilia should think that about worlds. Now Fine takes that as a reason to deny that the present time is privileged, and so to be a non-standard realist if you’re going to be a realist about tense; but I think that one can still accept that thought and accept a privileged present. One just needs to accept that what’s going on at other times is relevant to how we judge theories in a way that what’s going on at other worlds is not (at least, not in the same way).

So parsimony doesn’t tell the presentist to accept T2 over T1, and if the truthmaker principle is only true now it doesn’t tell the presentist to be a truthmaker theorist. The virtues of truthmaker theory are only obtained if it is always true; by contrast, whether it is necessarily true are neither here nor there, as far as securing those virtues is concerned.