Blogs and the Hiring Process

The online version of the Chronicle of Higher Education contains a pair of article written by Ivan Tribble entitled "Bloggers Need Not Apply" and "They Shoot Messengers Don't They?" on the impact blogging can have on the hiring process (a subscription is required for the CHE online, though I would think the articles could also be found in the print version). The core of Tribble's articles is "a sharp warning to bloggers on the academic job market, based on how I saw blogs detract from some candidates in a recent search at my college." 

While these two articles are aimed mainly at private blogs rather than discipline oriented blogs such as the Garden, I'm wondering what fellow Gardeners' thoughts are on how blogs of whatever stripe might have on the hiring process (after all, tis the season!).  I would think that discipline oriented blogs can have a positive impact in that they can provide networks, contacts and exposure for one's work.  But maybe these can lead to negatives as well; e.g., 'we don't want to hire him--he's a libertarian after all!'.  While I intend the example to be cheeky, perhaps such things do happen; I don't know, as I've never been on a hiring committee.  Any thoughts that you're willing to share on a public blog?

Moral Sense Test

PEA soup already linked to this, so you may have seen it, but just in case you haven't -- you should go take Harvard's Moral Sense Test.  Here's the description of the project:

The Moral Sense Test is a Web-based study into the nature of moral intuitions. How do humans, throughout the world, decide what is right and wrong? To answer this question, we have designed a series of moral dilemmas designed to probe the psychological mechanisms underlying our ethical judgments. By putting these questions on the Web, we hope to gain insight into the similarities and differences between the moral intuitions of people of different ages, from different cultures, with different educational backgrounds and religious beliefs, involved in different occupations and exposed to very different circumstances. Participation in the study is easy, quick and completely confidential. As a subject, you will only be given a small sample of the scenarios we are currently testing. The test of our moral sense therefore comes from combining the responses of many hundreds of subjects taking different tests, each with different scenarios.

Pressing the problem of luck

I don’t know if we have any defenders of event-causal libertarianism out there, specifically of something like Kane’s version. Perhaps some of you may be motivated to reply to a version of the problem of luck. The original problem goes like this.

For Kane, we need not have alternative possibilities every time we freely and responsibly act. Instead, it must be true that at the time of the action either (a) we have APs, or (b) our action is determined by our characters, and our characters are the product of “self-forming actions” (SFAa), where a “self-forming action” is an action which sets our will one way or another, and regarding which we did possess APs.

Where the (Free) Action Is

Over at the Leiter Reports, Brian Leiter tells us that he has commissioned a series of posts that will outline "where the action is" in various sub-fields of philosophy.  (Leiter himself did the one on Nietzsche studies a while back.)  The most recent installment, available here, is our own John Martin Fischer on where the action is in free will and moral responsibility.  It's a good read -- short and sweet, but long enough to adequately describe the action.  Recommended reading for all (but only because I have no official way of making it required reading!).  I'm sure you'll find it interesting, and Leiter has opened comments. 

Mottos for the Free Will Problem

I recently picked up a copy of Ted Sider and Earl Conee's new intro to metaphysics book, Riddles of Existence (OUP 2005).  Though I haven't read through the whole thing yet, it looks to be a great intro to metaphysics.  But more to the point, they have a chapter on freedom and determinism (written by Sider).  It's clearly a pro-compatibilism take on the problem, as indicated by the following mottos he devises for hard determinism and libertarianism:

Hard Determinism: "I reject everything good about humanity!"

Libertarianism: "I know from my armchair that physics is incomplete!"

And I might add:

Compatibilism: "Being manipulated's not so bad after all!"

Aside from mottos, though, reading Sider's chapter got me to thinking about how best to teach the free will problem to undergrads.  Sider's chapter, for example, completely ignores sophisticated event-causal libertarian views like Kane's.  Well, I don't expect him to talk about Kane, of course, but what I mean is that he doesn't exactly give libertarianism a fair hearing, since his criticism of it is more a criticism of agent-causation.  Granted, he's obviously more inclined toward compatibilism, but how useful is it, pedagogically, to leave out a discussion of event-causal libertarianism altogether?

More generally, how do people like to teach the free will problem to their students?  Do you present James' Dilemma of Determinism to map out the terrain?  What articles are most useful for teaching the material?  And, perhaps a bit superficially, how useful are the terms 'hard determinism' and 'soft determinism' anymore?

I'd be interested to hear any thoughts or suggestions about teaching free will.

Annual Job Market Post

Somehow we seem long overdue for the annual angsty job market discussion on this blog. I don't have any special desire to do so and I tried to talk a few other people into doing it. There were no takers, but since I'm willing to blog for the team, here goes:

It seems to me that one might reasonably believe that the following well-discussed observations from last year remain true:

1. The job market is bad.

2. Free Will/Phil Action types run into special problems on the job market because they are neither fish (ethics) nor fowl (metaphysics or mind) <insert joke about 'foul' applying to your least favorite associated fields>, and no one ever advertises jobs for phil action or philosophers working on free will.

3. This affects people in the job market at all levels of their career.

4. Complaining about these things is fun or at least an engaging waste use of time.

I'm inclined to think that (1) is probably less true than it has been in a while. While I don't have any real data on this, it seems to me that there are a good number of jobs out there relative to job marketeers (albeit few to none that list phil action). The relatively little blogging about the topic this year also speaks against (4). Maybe it is less fun to complain about these things or maybe there isn't as much cause to complain. (Although I imagine there will be a spike of discussion after the Eastern, whether or not it is in the blogosphere.) So maybe things have changed a bit. I doubt they have changed alot.

One thing that I don't think anyone on this blog has mentioned in connection with the usual woes about the job market is the way in which membership in different subfields tends to bring with it the opportunity or cost of having colleagues with overlapping research interests at your institution. People who work in ethics have it pretty good, I think. Most mid-to-large departments have multiple ethicists around. Good luck have multiple colleagues in a mid-to-large departments, though, if you work in aesthetics. I suspect that things are comparatively good for "core" analytic types in major research institutions but less good in the majority of jobs out there (i.e., in more teaching-oriented places).

Philosophy of action is a bit strange in this respect.

Imaginative resistance and the X-Philes.

Once more into the experimental breach. This post applies equally to Eddy (et al) and to Thomas and Adam’s paper, over at the X-phile website.

I’m thinking imaginative resistance (IR). IR is the phenomenon of readers failing to go along with the stipulations of authors. This happens most easily in moral cases, but it is not limited to such cases. JK Rowling can say that Harry Potter can fly on a broomstick, and – in the world of the books – it’s true that Harry Potter can fly on a broomstick. But if she said that Voldermort tortured an newborn kitten to death, and stipulated that he acted morally in so doing, it wouldn’t be true, even in the book, that Voldermort acted morally in doing so. Roughly, we get IR when an author stipulates that a concept applies to the description of a case when the facts upon which that concept supervenes are not in place (so IR comes in two basic forms: the claim that X is the case, when the supervenience base for X is missing, and the claim that X is not the case, when the – undefeated – supervenience base for X is present). For an understanding of IR along these lines, see Brian Weatherson, "Morality, Fiction, and Possibility" over at Philosopher’s Imprint)

Now, as Thomas and Adam note in their paper, in Eddy’s original studies some people failed to reason conditionally. They had to be asked to suspend disbelief (a majority stated that the scenario in which a supercomputer predicts with certainty that an agent will perform an immoral action 20 years later was impossible). Now, suppose that the folk, or at least a large proportion of the folk, are incompatibilists. That may commit them to the claim that libertarian free will is, or is part of, the supervenience base for the application of freedom. In effect, I am suggesting, the scenarios asked the participants to reason as if a concept applied, when the supervenience base of that concept failed to apply. They therefore would have experienced IR to the claim that the agents had free will (as evidenced by their initial failure to reason conditionally, and their claim that the scenario is impossible).

What happens if people are asked to reason conditionally about IR situations? I have no real idea: there is, to my knowledge, no data, and it is difficult to guess a priori. One possibility is that the folk will bracket the facts that form the supervenience base as if another set of facts were stipulated; another possibility is that they will bracket the supervenient property and reason as if another such property were stipulated (the one that is in fact held to be supervenient on the physical facts stipulated). My guess is that which way they will go will depend upon how difficult the scenario is to imagine, in its physical properties. In ‘Voldermort’, for instance, if they were asked whether Voldermort deserves praise for acting well, the folk would deny it, because it is all too easy to imagine torturing a kitten to death.

But in the deterministic scenarios which the studies present, the subjects may bracket the stipulated (subvenient) base. They may, in effect, substitute another set of physical facts for the ones stipulated: the kind of facts they believe actually apply. Given that people experience IR not merely to the holding of the concept stipulated in the light of the physical facts, but to the physical facts themselves, the case is not like 'Voldermort'. Instead, we should expect the supervenience base itself to go. But if that’s the case then it may well be that the studies tell us nothing about whether people believe that agents can be free or responsible in deterministic worlds.