Flickers of Freedom

Nahmias Interview with 3:AM

Our own Eddy Nahmias has an illuminating  interview with 3:AM's Richard Marshall--who has been doing a number of really nice interviews as of late with a wide variety of philosophers.  So, when you're done reading the interview with Eddy, you should check out some of Marshall's other interviews for 3:AM as well!

Intellectual Humility: A Call for Proposals

Thanks to Ian Church for sending along the following Call for Proposals:

IH: Overview

This program will provide up to $4.0 million in research support for empirical work on the virtue Intellectual Humility. “How little we know, how eager to learn” is the slogan of the intellectually humble. Unfortunately, the vice of intellectual pride is commonly displayed by both the ignorant (who know little and don’t care that they don’t) and the knowledgeable (who know enough to presume to know it all). In areas where public discourse is shot through with intellectual pride at so many different levels, the topic of intellectual humility is of crucial practical importance.Although humility has received significant attention, its distinctively intellectual side needs much further exploration. Intellectual humility concerns how we come to hold and retain our beliefs. It is constituted by a state of openness to new ideas, receptivity to new sources of evidence and the implications of that evidence, and willingness to revise even deeply held beliefs in the face of compelling reasons.

This project thus seeks to:

1. Support research on some under-explored areas in the psychology and evolution of intellectual humility/arrogance;
2. Foster critical engagement between those who work in the cognitive and evolutionary sides of this topic;
3. Digest the results of work in the field in order to advance its philosophical and theological significance;
4. Assess the relevance of the results to determine the impediments to intellectual humility, and to identify concrete strategies for overcoming these native tendencies.

Investigators (individual or teams) from the psychological sciences and other relevant empirical sciences are invited to request from $50,000 up to $270,000 for a research project of up to two years in length. We anticipate making 16 awards. Award semi-finalists will be invited to participate in a “virtual” workshop in November 2012. Award winners will be invited to two conferences, one mid-project conference in May 2014 in Princeton, NJ, and one capstone conference in May 2015 in Los Angeles, CA. Inquiries should be directed to Rebecca Sok, at intellectualhumility@fuller.edu.

The complete call for proposals can be found here.  Note, the deadline for the 1,000 word LOI is July 1s5, 2012.!

David Hodgson

I just learned that David Hodgson is hospitalized with terminal cancer.  He's wondering whether any reviews of his recent book are in the pipeline.  That's *Rationality + Consciousness = Free Will*, published late last year by OUP.  If you have a draft of a review, please consider sending it to David.  If you need his e-mail address, just ask me.  I also have the e-address of his daughter, Sue Procter.

Many thanks.

Al Mele

John Kruk on Desert

Last week on the ESPN radio show Mike and Mike in the Morning, John Kruk was on to talk about beanball codes in baseball.  Mike Greenberg asks him whether he’s ever gone up to the plate knowing that the opposing pitcher is going to hit him in retaliation for something.  Kruk tells this story. 

The batter before Kruk (I couldn’t get the name) hits a milestone home run and gets so excited that he does a cartwheel crossing home plate.  This is a huge sign of disrespect for the pitcher according to baseball norms.   Kruk was appalled, says has no idea what the batter was thinking.  So now Kruk walks up to the plate knowing he’s going to get hit.  He asks the catcher where he’s going to get it and the catcher tells Kruk “I wouldn’t dig in too much if I were you.”  First pitch is up and in (at Kruk’s head) and Kruk has to dive to the ground trying to avoid it.  Then Kruk tells Mike and Mike: “And look, I wasn’t gonna charge the mound.  Because I deserved it!” (Exact words).  And after a pause:  “if anything, I’d charge the dugout [to fight his teammate]!.” 

 Two interesting things from this story.  First, it’s a clear case of collective responsibility.  Kruk himself claims that he deserved the beanball hit even though he wasn’t the one that violated the norm.  The pitcher holds him responsible and he accepts responsibility even though he didn’t endorse the act and had no control over it whatsoever.  Second, you can see how collective responsibility norms encourage self-policing within groups.  If you’re going to be held accountable the actions of your teammates, then you have plenty of incentive to make sure your teammates stay in line.  But if they do violate a norm in the heat of the moment, you have to accept that you deserve what you get in response.   Is there anything irrational about this?  Not that I can see.

 

Free Will and Science in Padua

Andrea Lavazza has alerted me to what should be a great special session on free will and neuroscience coming up in Padua. It's a really nice town, if you feel like popping over... If you can't the event will be live streamed. Details below the  fold.

Attributability and Daddy Issues

I am a fan of attributability as a conception of responsibility.  The trick, as we all know, is to get clear on just what that means.  Even if you don't think attributability is a conception of responsibility, it is surely necessary for responsibility, so getting clear on what it consists in is in everyone's interest.  One popular theory of attributability is a kind of evaluative judgment view: an action or attitude is properly attributable to me just in case it is ultimately dependent on my evaluative judgments.  I'm wondering, though, about the following possible counterexample to this view.

Free Will and Experimental Philosophy: An Intervention

Several people have asked me to send them a copy of the dialogue I presented (with the generous help of Josh Weisberg) at the XPS group session in Seattle. So I figured I would post it here.

Comments welcome, either on the blog or in an email.  Please note that the remarks of Friend 2 do not necessarily represent those of the author.  

 Download Free Will and Experimental Philosophy, an intervention.  

Clark on Waller's Semi-Compatibilism (in Reverse)

Bruce Waller recently published an interesting new book entitled Against Moral Responsibility (MIT Press).  I am only half way through the book right now myself, but I think thus far Waller has done a nice job of motivating skepticism about desert-entailing moral responsibility.  Fortunately, Tom Clark has written up a great review over at Naturalism.org.  So, check it out here.

Experiment Month is Back!

 

Just a quick note to let you know that Mark Phelan is coordinating the second annual Experiment Month initiative and that the deadline for submissions is June 15th.

The basic idea of the initiative is simple. If you are interested in running an experiment to address a philosophical question, you submit the plan for your experiment to Experiment Month. Then, if your submission is accepted, the staff will help you out with the more technical side of running the study. More specifically:

• If you think it might be helpful, staff members will connect you with an 'experiment buddy' who will help you out with experimental design. 
• Once the design is complete, the staff will run your experiment online and send you the data.
• Finally, staff members will help you with the statistics needed to analyze your data and see whether your hypothesis was confirmed.

To get a better sense of how this project has gone in the past, check out this summary of what ended up happening for the philosophers who submitted last year.

Free Will and Consciousness: Experimental Studies

An excellent paper with this title is now published online at Consciousness and Cognition.  It is by Joshua Shepard, a graduate student at FSU. The paper is here, but if your institution does not allow you access, you can email Joshua for a copy at jls09k at fsu dot edu

Joshua's experiments suggest (at least) these two interesting results about people's understanding of free will:

1. Free will is strongly connected to consciousness, such that people are likely to attribute free will and responsibility to agents and actions when the agents' conscious processes play a role in action, even in cases where determinism is stipulated; and people are unlikely to attribute FW and MR when unconscious processes are emphasized.  And these results seem to wash out differences between descriptions in terms of brain mechanisms vs. psychological processes (and hence probably offer a better explanation for my prior results in terms of that contrast, which is consistent with what I actually think is going on).

2. People are much more likely to attribute FW and MR to agents when they agree with the information described in the scenarios, an important finding that calls out for more research (it's one I've noticed but not analyzed in my experiments).  When they disagree with determinstic descriptions, they are more likely to offer incompatibilist responses.

I hope people will check it out and begin some conversations here.