Why do some students become philosophy majors: questions sought.

I “minored” in Philosophy while attending university (in the States). I first took “beginners” classes which were designed to elicit interest in the subject in undergraduates – so watered down lectures on Descartes, etc., along with lots of debate on abortion and other issues that elicit emotive responses. So that was the initial draw. However, it seems like for a lot of people Philosophy is something “interesting” but not especially practical. I used to think so as well, viewing my minoring in Philosophy as more of a pleasurable pursuit since I liked to debate and thought of myself as quite the debater.

However, once I started taking higher-level courses I initially had a very hard time – I didn’t quite understand what the courses I was taking had to do with Philosophy, and didn’t like that a lot of the readings were becoming quasi-mathematical.

But I eventually started to “get it” and I think I’ve benefitted from what little Philosophy training I’ve had – I’m known among my friends and family as “very logical” and “very rational.” I’m a much clearer thinker, definitely, and have a greater ability to puzzle through complex issues. I also don’t care as much about “debate” now.

My mother raised me on two basic truths (not joking here):
1. var(sum)= sum(var) if independent
2. keep surveys short to minimize non-response.

I have a story about the use and mis-use of surveys in higher education. I was once a teaching assistant for one professor of political science whose goal was to boost enrollment in his class. Enrollment was low, and being a quant-ish sort of fellow, he took a survey. The results showed that the main factor influencing the students’ decision was whether or not the class met on Friday. Friday classes were a deal breaker, apparently, for a large number of them. [It is possible that there were other, more substantive, suggestions, but this is the only one my professor was able and willing to implement.]

As a result, the professor abolished Friday discussion sections for all his classes. (Giving the punters what they paid for?) Instead of two hours of lecture and one of discussion, the class would now consist of two 2.5 hour lectures. Since very few people can lecture comfortably for 2.5 hours, many films and video clips were shown.

Now I am the first to admit that there are many problems with the ‘two lectures and a discussion section’ model of course design. But it seems to me that attracting more lazy students is the wrong reason to abolish it. The new arrangement hardly produced more pedagogical value, as far as I can tell. Significant portions of class time were spent watching videos of things like the Whitehouse Correspondents Dinner.

Anyway, I’m sure Harry is not nearly as cynical as my dear old professor, and cares, at least on the margins, for what might be good for the students’ learning outcomes, as opposed to their social calendars.

I wonder if students always understand what is happening themselves when they pick a major. The two professor who were most influential for me when I took up philosophy were an Asian man and an Anglo woman. It did not occur to me that ethnicity or race or gender were key at that time. All that mattered to me was whether *I* was good enough to do philosophy. Philosophy felt like a special club only some people get to to join. These two were good teachers but I suspect that they also gave me some sense of permission to join the club even though I was utterly terrified of both of them at the time (especially the woman). It felt like the sexism and racism were the price of admission also and I think their presence in the department (the male was the only non-white professor in the department) meant in some way I could do it–because they had done it. But NONE of this was in my conscious mind. I only knew these were people I wanted to please, impress and emulate–they were like little lodestars in the darkness. (I was independently interested in philosophical questions–of course I was–but philosophers always seem to forget how many other fascinating fields there are in the world, and that these spheres of knowledge have value. And women and people and of color can always opt for these in the face of philosophy’s inhospitable atmosphere.)

First, dip into Earl Babbie’s Practice of Social Research, especially if you can borrow a colleague’s copy, as it is expensive. When y0u say you’re seeking systematic information, I take it to mean you want reliable feedback representative of the population you sample. Different kinds of questions are more amenable to that result than others. For example, an open-ended question like, “Why did you finally decide to major in philosophy?” (which asks directly for the information you seek), or even, “What are the three most important factors that determined your decision to major in philosophy?,” can invite unpredictable responses. You’ll have to figure out how to code those responses if you want to compare them statistically. Y0u might control the responses by establishing them in advance–a multiple choice, Likert scale, or true/false approach, for example–but then you run the risk of failing to consider genuinely influential factors or of improperly influencing your respondents’ answers by restricting the scope of responses available to them.

So, what you might have to do is run a trial or two using open-ended for no reason other than to get a sense of the kinds of responses you can expect, and then construct a more rigorous survey using a reliable sample and carefully crafted questions based upon the array of responses you encountered during the trials.

Obviously we’re particularly interested in why women and members of certain racial minorities become majors at lower rates than men and members of other racial groups.

Back in the 90s, when I was working on my second bachelors (while this one said “humanities” on the label, my first was electrical engineering), I ended up joining the student chapter of the Society of Women Engineers. They had a similar issue: why do so few women enter engineering in college and why do so many drop out?

1. For women entering engineering, 90% had a family member or close family friend who was an engineer. For men entering engineering, that number was 60%.

2. Women drop out of engineering at twice the rate that men drop out.

3. Joint studies with the National Society of Black Engineers showed similar numbers for black students.

What #1 and #3 implied was two-fold: that high school guidance counselors were steering boys/whites into engineering (and not doing the same for women/blacks) or possibly that women/blacks had no role models showing that women could be engineers.

The student chapter of SWE (that I was a member of) chose to try to address the lack of role models with outreach to girl groups. So one semi-joke I make about that time was that I visited more girl scout camps than boy scout camps despite being a boy scout as a young’un.

No one had any sort of good answer for #2. This was especially poignant as my lab partner (I had to take a number of pre-reqs to get into an MS program for computer engineering) who recruited me dropped out, and when the president dropped out, I got promoted to president.

For this bachelors in humanities, except for the philosophy requirement, I met all my core requirements with women’s studies courses. For philosophy, I had a choice between “dead white guys” and “dead white guys”.

Take from this what you will. My hypothesis is that the lack of women & minorities has a lot to do with the combination of “lack of role models” and the general obnoxiousness/exclusiveness that all-male groups engage in.

…and am now wondering… obvs

Apropos of Brett’s comment about salaries:

The present value of the extra earnings that graduates in humanities majors can expect over their lifetime is $302,400 for drama majors, $444,700 for English majors, $537,800 for history majors, and $658,900 for philosophy majors.

More here: http://dailynous.com/2014/11/22/financial-return-on-humanities-degrees/

mbw,

Your mother sounds amazing. And it seems like there’s a story there. Spill it!

Seconding the advice of david (if the IRB / admin will let you, make the box to check an opt out saying they deny your access to demographic data rather than an opt in granting the permission) and Dean C. Rowan. If there’s enough time /manpower, consider leaving an open-ended “what else seems pertinent that we didn’t ask?” question and then contact some (eg respondents who write a lot in that space, different demographic groups, etc) for a more in-depth interview providing a more qualitative understanding of the data. Those interviews can provide a phenomenological perspective that survey questions can’t possibly provide, and especially in a study going after demographic disparities that kind of analysis can be really fruitful.

Philosophy is considered the subject where aptitude is most important compared to effort for sucess and women avoid such careers. (no link to the source and in German unfortunately, but it does sound like they do report somewhat valid research) http://www.wiwo.de/erfolg/trends/psychologie-der-vorurteile-wo-fleiss-gefragt-ist-steigt-der-frauenanteil/11241308.html

I’m curious about the ratio of majors to non-majors in the mid and upper level, small, discussion-based philosophy classes- that is, where the real fun is. Is there a way to make these classes more available to non-majors? Could Philosophy flourish as a place for intellectually hungry students from across the university, or is the major-tally all-important?

Jo Walton’s new novel, The Just City gives some interesting answers to the question of why one might study philosophy, or at least Plato. (It doesn’t actually address the question of majoring in it, though.)

If ZM is any indication, perhaps it’s because it isn’t a discriminatory young girl’s club.

This recent paper on women in science also has some data points on philosophy that are relevant
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6219/262.full

Briefly, the authors surveyed academics in 30 disciplines on how much they thought success was due to innate talent (rather than hard work). They found fields with a strong belief in innate talent had a lower % of female PhDs. Philosophy had the strongest beliefs in innate talent, and one of the lowest % of female PhDs.

So it might be worth assessing those beliefs, and also looking at the methods these authors used.

Brett Bellmore’s comments suggest that it might be useful to ask respondents about what kind of responses they’ve gotten to the idea of them majoring or taking courses in philosophy. Were the responses positive or negative? Did anyone encourage them; or tell them they “probably weren’t meant for philosophy” or the like?

As an engineer I was going to be snarky and say something like, “maybe the women are smart enough not to”, but Brett kind of ruined it. Anyhow, financial motivation doesn’t really do a good job of explaining the pattern for engineering or even, most likely, philosophy if you were able to identify what people are opting for instead.

Then there is grad school. On the one hand, it would be better for grad school attendance to be more balanced. On the other, I suspect attending grad school is a bad decision for most attendees and maybe even a larger percentage of marginal attendees. Does it really help to encourage women/minorities on the margins to attend? They already face lower career earnings prospects.

My personal experience with abandoning the idea of taking more philosophy courses: I had taken a couple of courses in philosophy and one survey course taught by a philosophy professor (with whom I didn’t always agree but was encouraging–a woman, btw), and I did well in most of them and okay in the other. Then I took a class in which I was, apparently, entirely lost, and simply (very apparently) lost the professor’s respect. It took me a year before I worked up the nerve to take another philosophy course, and by then it was the last semester of my senior year.

My thoughts: Women, and more middle or lower-middle class and poorer students, may be more likely to conclude a subject is not for them, after having had a single bad experience (even with my daughter just in kindergarten, I’ve unfortunately seen how a bad teacher or coach could teach that lesson). Students in large urban public schools (in my experience) are very explicitly taught that they will have to navigate college themselves without help and are discouraged from approaching teachers. The teacher with whom I had a bad experience was one of the few instructors I had from my own ethnic/religious group, and I sometimes wonder if this could have a paradoxical effect on some students’ continuing, especially if there’s some tokenism going on.

Tangurena’s statistic of about women whose parents were engineers would include me, as my dad had an MSEE before going into teaching. But computer science, though I had stars in my eyes about cool new software and startups and such, was to some extent a fallback to something people had told me I should go into, and that I already knew I was good at, and was for the most part graded impersonally, rather than something I longed to study, at the time.

My department is working on a project for the department to try to get more systematic information about why undergrads become philosophy majors (and why students who might, don’t).

I suggest you think very carefully about what you’re looking for. Systematic surveys take considerable effort, and they can sometimes reveal important results — but it’s like a microscope, if it’s focused on the wrong thing it doesn’t tell you a lot about the things it isn’t focused on.

Is your intention to get more students who have already enrolled in college to take philosophy courses? Do you want to create more philosophy grad students? More philosophy graduates who get prestigious or remunerative jobs outside academics? Do you want to create facts that you can use to argue with people in faculty meetings or budget committee meetings?

You guys are philosophers. Choosing your goals carefully is probably one of your strong suits.

When you’re clear what you want then look at how to get it. Standardized surveys are a good way to test things that are easy to test. They can show you things you didn’t expect, sometimes. And if you tailor the questions carefully you can get exactly the results you wanted and then present the result as scientific. But they’re a big effort and they mostly tell you about what you are most careful to ask about. Like, if you ask about how much they care about prospective incomes versus finding the truth versus doing good in the world you can get information about how those compare, but if in fact they are thinking in terms of video game plots that survey might not give you any hint about it.

So in my imagination your question might be something like “How can my own philosophy department provide valuable experiences and skills etc to students, and how can we show the students ahead of time about the value?” Then it might be good to get several philosophers to spend time talking to students. Say it’s four philosophers who interview 30 students each, with recorded sessions. Try to pick the students entirely at random, and try to avoid no-shows. You might offer them $10 each, not too much money or it will bias the results. (That’s $1200 already, and 120 hours of faculty time plus slippage. Better if you can get longer interviews, several hours each would be good, serving tea and cookies and if they sign up for 1 hour and stay for 3 without getting antsy then it’s a clear success.) Subtly ask them what’s important to them and listen. This might be another philosophy department strength, or maybe not.

Think about what you experienced. Look for things they need that the college is not good at supplying. Some students never get the sense that anybody believe they have something worth listening to. When is it OK to have a good time? When do you have the right to take initiative? How do you deal with making choices in the presence of lots of uncertainty? I’m thinking about the things that come to me, but you’d pay attention to whatever real things come up. Every unmet need is something that your department might possibly fill.

So discuss your insights with each other and come up with candidates to test more rigorously — preferably some that could lead to improvements. Again depending on your needs, you might choose to organize your questionnaire like a marketing survey. You might for example want to know what claims would lead to students taking a particular kind of philosophy class.

Your actual survey should probably focus on questions whose answers would actually help you further your purposes.

The son of two friends of mine took an introductory course in Philosophy as a Freshman and decided he was going to major in Philosophy. I gathered that in Philosophy class you argue about interesting things like Inductive Logic and Counter-Inductive Logic and get graded on clever things you say. In physics (Mechanics 101), for a test problem I had a mass hanging by a massless string through a infinitesimal hole in a flat, frictionless table-top, connected by the string to another mass which was rotating around the hole on the table, in a vacuum but with gravity pulling the hanging mass down, with values for gravity, the masses, and the initial lengths and velocities given, and had to calculate the time it would take the hanging mass to fall a given distance. (That was one of about ten questions on a mid-term exam.)

I can only reliably explain why I was *not* a Philosophy major: because the physics problem had one right answer and learning things that made it easy to construct a mathematical model and find the answer in a few minutes time seemed much more interesting and useful to me than learning Philosophy (later on I would learn to apply friction and other complexities also). Also, even if Philosophy had seemed as interesting, the only job I could think of which it would qualify me for would be teaching Philosophy, which is too self-referential for my tastes.

In physics I was also mainly learning the ideas of dead, white males, of course. I’ll be a dead, white male myself in the not too-distant future but have taken some pains not to inflict my ideas much on future generations. (Okay, actually it was mostly involuntary.) However, Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder is one of my heroines – things are getting better.

I would submit the additional following thoughts:

1. Philosophy is by no means a unified or even coherent field. Instead, it is, and almost always has been, riven with fundamental controversy. I would claim that this is in it’s very nature.

2. Different schools of philosophy (or rival tribes of philosophers) attract very different students in very different environments. What a university perceives philosophy to be doing within the various courses of study varies immensely by university. Similarly, students at different universities will perceive philosophy differently based upon the sorts of students each university attracts and through the different lens that each institution has.

For example, at an elite Catholic university in the US, philosophy is (often) perceived of as doing three major things: 1. inculcating those future lay wealthy Catholics (who might be interested in theoretical or intellectual subjects and thus stray from the Church) on the broad basics of Thomist metaphysics such that the wealthy Catholics stay in the Church and stay donating in later life; 2. a primary vehicle for training an elite layer of priests and religious along with the theology department; and 3. a good method for showing off the religious order’s intellectual prowess and high intellectual status (elite Catholic universities in the US are usually run by a religious order). Thus, within that university, the university itself wants to attract the following students into the philosophy department: 1. laypeople of a certain inquiring character and certain social class; and 2. young men who want to be future priests.

But that’s not what a philosophy department does in a lower-ranked Catholic institution. Or what a philosophy department does in an Ivy League institution. Or what a philosophy department does at a top small liberal arts college. Which, again, is very different from what a philosophy department does in a lower-tier public institution. Which is different from the role a philosophy department plays in an engineering and science school. And so on.

“I think you’ve got to consider that, for most college students, college is vocational study. Necessarily vocational study, they can’t possibly afford such a large investment that won’t pay off in increased income.”

Turns out Philosophy majors make more money than most other humanities majors:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2014/11/20/surprise-humanities-degrees-provide-great-return-on-investment/

#40 Scott P

Turns out Philosophy majors make more money than most other humanities majors:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2014/11/20/surprise-humanities-degrees-provide-great-return-on-investment/

It looks like there’s room for bias there, as follows: If you are going to college and expect a job in your family business, then you can major in anything you want and not worry about getting a job. So if it were to turn out that people who can expect good jobs regardless of major were a large share of the ones who became philosophy majors then on average philosophy majors could expect to do well. But that statistic would not be any help to a philosophy major who did not already have a sinecure waiting for him.

I don’t know whether that matters in the study that you quoted dorfman quoting, but he gave nothing to indicate that it isn’t important.

OP: more systematic information

I strongly deprecate this lazy, unthinking retreat into mere empiricism. It would be infinitely more appropriate for philosophers to seek an a priori answer to this (or any) question. Find some relevant metaphysical principle, deduce all its consequences, and declare one or another of them applicable in this case. This method was good enough for millennia, during philosophy’s long golden age, and things have only gone downhill since the Queen of the Sciences began to take notice of grubby material facts.

I know that as I was considering graduate work the main problems I had with philosophy as a discipline had to do with the way it was being taught, specifically, the way that it had developed in the US.

Philosophy seemed no longer about the pursuit of the good life; it either got bogged down in epistemological pseudo-problems, or the logic-chopping parsing of sentences.

Had I not lucked out and got to know a professor through the father of a friend, I would never have known about John Dewey, or that there existed philosophers who took the real problems of real human beings as their starting point. Before this, I honestly thought philosophy was this kind of immaculate citadel wherein monkish sorts whiled away (re: wasted) their time solving puzzles and crunching numbers.

It just didn’t seemed like the kind of place toward which idealistic young people would gravitate.

In my case, a long time ago, I gave up on philosophy when we got to the part about stopping a trolley by throwing a fat man off a bridge.

“In my case, a long time ago, I gave up on philosophy when we got to the part about stopping a trolley by throwing a fat man off a bridge.”

Me, I gave up on philosophy when we stopped a trolley by throwing a fat man off a bridge, and the judge didn’t buy our explanation at *all*.

Me, I only started philosophy after we had to blow up the fat man to get out of the cave.

(Sorry, will try for more substantive comment next time.)

I was suspicious of the forces involved and did a little napkin math. Even a man at the 99th percentile of body mass index would generate insufficient resistance to halt a trolley and spare others on the same track. Once you get to animals big enough to actually halt a trolley, bystanders would no longer have the strength to push them on to the track, even if you did have a rhinoceros around. Even if you had a rhinoceros hanging in a quick-release harness over the track for emergencies, the collision of trolley and rhinoceros is likely to generate casualties among the trolley passengers even as it spares those on the tracks; you would need much more detailed modeling than is possible in a few seconds’ decision time to decide the right course even on utilitarian grounds of maximizing quality-adjusted life years.

For example, the readings included Peter Singer’s work on human relations and responsibilities to animals. This is very maths logic-y so he concludes severely disabled people should be treated worse than animals, which most people think is a poor conclusion to reach.

I think this is strawmanning Singer. He doesn’t privilege human experience over the experience of other animals “just because.” On grounds of capacity to experience pain, or intelligence (justifications often offered for killing/harming animals in ways that most people wouldn’t tolerate applying to humans), he concludes that very young humans and severely disabled humans earn no more distinction than, say, adult pigs. If you’re trying to justify killing pigs on grounds of differences from able adult humans Singer may make you angry because it sounds like he wants to kill infants and disabled humans too. But Singer does not eat meat, and wants people to treat animals with more consideration. He wants moral consistency across humans and animals so as to protect animals, not to send infants and disabled people to the killing floor. But if someone can’t conceive of expanding the circle of moral concern to animals, it will sound like the only consistent choice is shrink the circle to cast out infants and the disabled, and that may well make people angry.

“But Singer does not eat meat, and wants people to treat animals with more consideration.”

But I can conclude animals should not be eaten without using maths logic that then leads me to think we have fewer obligations to severely disabled people than animals. This is the beauty of reaching moral conclusions without using maths logic.

Also it is very unfortunate but where I live even though it would be better if no one had brought in non-indigenous animals like foxes and rabbits to live in the wild – the reality is that they did and we don’t have any big predators to keep their numbers down – so from a managing local ecologies perspective it is usually thought better to kill some of these animals … I don’t know if and if so how Singer’s work engages with these sorts of difficult environmental dilemmas?

I did a philosophy BA, and later an Hons. year at a different university.

I wasn’t planning to major in it, but had one paper in my first semester and realised that it was going to be a fun and easy subject for me. As a few posters above have alluded to, the effort/reward ratio is pretty high if you’re wired a certain way, at least in the first year or two before things get difficult, and I am a lazy person, good at bullshitting, so I found it very easy.

It was interesting going to a second university for a postgrad year (about five years later) and seeing the gender difference (much more balanced at the second one). I put that down to the interests of the lecturers more than anything. The first department was heavily analytic: lots of papers on ev-psych, implausible theodicies formulated by atheists for kicks, the metaphysics of time travel and fictional characters, that kind of thing. The discussions were dominated by people like me: confident contrarians (mostly young men, though you do find occasional female equivalents. They tend to have a libertarian streak and be anti-religious and think themselves terribly dangerous for it). When I finished my BA, I did other things for several years and didn’t really read any philosophy.

The second university was much more Continentally-inclined, which was new to me; and that was much more intellectually challenging, and frankly better, because it was harder work for people like me and made me slow down and think and listen a bit more. (I also met my girlfriend there, in a paper on Husserl.) After a year of that, I looked back on my three years of analytic philosophy with a real sense of an opportunity missed. There never seemed to be anything at stake in those three years of lectures, and they encouraged me to feel and think of philosophy as a game. A year in a different department gave me much worse grades, but much more passion for philosophy as an enterprise closer to poetry than crosswords. And I still read philosophy for pleasure.

Also it is very unfortunate but where I live even though it would be better if no one had brought in non-indigenous animals like foxes and rabbits to live in the wild – the reality is that they did and we don’t have any big predators to keep their numbers down – so from a managing local ecologies perspective it is usually thought better to kill some of these animals … I don’t know if and if so how Singer’s work engages with these sorts of difficult environmental dilemmas?

AFAIK he doesn’t deal with these environmental dilemmas, nor with the problem of whether or not obligate carnivores should be allowed to prey on herbivores in any habitat. People who have read more Singer than me may be able to cite passages where he does consider these problems. Singer’s philosophy seems to be the most satisfying solution I’ve yet encountered to moral problems that minimizes “because God” or equally unjustified special-case rules. Starting from one axiomatic premise of technical hedonism, you can get an awfully comprehensive and pretty satisfying body of behavioral rules. That doesn’t mean it is wholly satisfying, though, largely because of the tension between my commitment to minimize suffering and the instinct against altering nature to the extent necessary to ensure that animals no longer suffer as prey for other animals.

“Singer’s philosophy seems to be the most satisfying solution I’ve yet encountered to moral problems that minimises “because God” or equally unjustified special-case rules”

A couple of things I’ve read in recent years have made me think Peter Singer has been struggling a bit with his utilitarianism.

One from The Guardian in 2011 on climate change notes some issues he is grappling with: 1. from the new edition of Practical Ethics “I have found myself unable to maintain with any confidence that the position I took in the previous edition – based solely on preference utilitarianism – offers a satisfactory answer to these quandaries” 2. The requirement to take unborn future generations into account 3. Whether moral givens exist “He described his current position as being in a state of flux. But he is leaning towards accepting moral objectivity because he now rejects Hume’s view that practical reasoning is always subject to desire. Instead he inclines towards the view of Henry Sidgwick, the Victorian theist whom he has called the greatest utilitarian, which is that there are moral assertions that we recognise intuitively as true”

Another from the university paper on Mill’s Utilitarianism book, where he says “I’m interested in utilitarianism as an ethic and whether it is defensible” and “The great objection to Utilitarianism , as Mill conceives it, is that it may lead people to act unjustly, or as though justice doesn’t really count”

Brett Bellmore

the philosophy of philosophical logic is deep and interesting. But the logic part is just math. Presumably this is why so many philosophical logic types started out as math majors.

#58 ZM

Also it is very unfortunate but where I live even though it would be better if no one had brought in non-indigenous animals like foxes and rabbits to live in the wild – the reality is that they did and we don’t have any big predators to keep their numbers down – so from a managing local ecologies perspective it is usually thought better to kill some of these animals … I don’t know if and if so how Singer’s work engages with these sorts of difficult environmental dilemmas?

The central problem is that left to themselves most living populations will have more offspring than can survive in any environment. We could prevent that for, say, cats by carefully watching over them and sterilizing 60% of females before puberty. The remaining females could have one litter before being sterilized. We would probably want to keep them caged so they could not hurt any other animals during their lifetime, but would feed them nutritious kibble.

I don’t really know, but I suspect if you could explain this concept to pretty much any tiger, and ask her what she thought of it, she might likely tear your face off.

Once in San Francisco I discussed this with a woman at a no-kill animal shelter. Because cats have so many kittens, it was necessary for the city to kill a whole lot of cats, barrels and barrels of dead cats every day. She felt it was unethical to ever let a cat go outdoors. I considered making her the same offer. “How bout I take you home and keep you there. No need for you to ever face the dangers of going outside. I would have you sterilized so you won’t contribute to the population problem, and you could have a happy life with lots of companionship and just the right amount of nutritious kibble, and when you got old and cranky I would have you painlessly put to sleep. A good life.” But it was San Francisco and I was afraid she would take me seriously, and we would both get creeped out.

Once you accept that there are more people and animals born than can survive to reproductive age, it leads to ethical concerns that people would rather not deal with. I have the idea that a lot of people and also a lot of animals would rather meet their destiny whatever it is, than live a placid life avoiding it.

J Thomas,

I think the idea is there used to be more large predators or herbivores (megafauna I think they are called) in most places, and these didn’t have high fertility or else they would fight so their numbers were not too high. Except people killed a lots of these big animals, which means people have to do what the big animals used to do in the ecosystems. George Monbiot thinks maybe it would be best to bring African megafauna into England to replace the ones that humans made extinct. I am not sure – because in Australia introducing animals seems to mostly go wrong like with our rabbit and camel and Brumbies etc etc problems.

“True or false: While you respect the idea of a laboratory, you would prefer to conduct your experiments in your head, properly.”

Not a fan of experimental philosophy?

#69 NK

“Once you accept that there are more people and animals born than can survive to reproductive age…”

But why should one accept that, given that it is not clear that it’s accurate? It may be true for animals, but generally the trend for developed, industrialized societies has been for birthrates to fall to at or below replacement.

Yes, that’s been the trend for industrialized societies over the last 50 years or so, since the post-WWII baby boom was over. In terms of human history it’s a blip. For a very long time cities in general were population sinks, worldwide. People outside of cities had more children than they could provide farms for, and the surplus people were forced into cities where they died faster than replacement. There were other patterns — surplus viking men went raiding and occasionally got enough wealth to buy a farm, but more often died.

Maybe the experience of the last 50 years, where people on salary who couldn’t afford children could get easy contraception — demonstrate a permanent change. Too soon to tell.

#70 ZM

I think the idea is there used to be more large predators or herbivores (megafauna I think they are called) in most places, and these didn’t have high fertility or else they would fight so their numbers were not too high. Except people killed a lots of these big animals, which means people have to do what the big animals used to do in the ecosystems.

Large predators typically have more offspring than the environment can support, and the surplus that doesn’t die off while they are being raised will usually die the first year after they are on their own. Typically the predators don’t manage to limit prey numbers very well, but predators and prey both fall into limit cycles. It’s complicated. The subject in general is poorly understood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_dynamics_of_fisheries#Trophic_cascades

Even with predators many prey occasionally escape regulation and raise hell for a generation or two. I don’t know whether that would happen in environments entirely unmodified by humans because we don’t seem to find any of those to study. My guess is that probably it would.

George Monbiot thinks maybe it would be best to bring African megafauna into England to replace the ones that humans made extinct. I am not sure – because in Australia introducing animals seems to mostly go wrong like with our rabbit and camel and Brumbies etc etc problems.

We have a good chance to exterminate megafauna if we decide we don’t like it there after all. A better chance than anything else. But people sometimes object — cf wild boars in Hawaii, where they tear things up but a single-issue voting block likes them.
http://oahunaturetours.info/wildpigs.html

But then there are the microfauna that arrive with the megafauna, including viruses etc. If they get established in local populations they may never go away.

I think we should preserve what we can of native species for our own long-term benefit, because we don’t know which of them we will need. We are living through an extinction event, at least I hope we’ll live through it. But I’m taking a practical stand (except that so many people care so much about what’s practical for them in the short run). It doesn’t really speak to morality and ethics.

#74 J Thomas:

I would say the evidence for a predictable and consistent behavioral response under these conditions is stronger than you suggest here, but either way, at the very least, the question is debatable enough that I feel no obligation to “…accept that there are more people … born than can survive to reproductive age…”

#76 NK

I would say the evidence for a predictable and consistent behavioral response under these conditions is stronger than you suggest here, but either way, at the very least, the question is debatable enough that I feel no obligation to “…accept that there are more people … born than can survive to reproductive age…”

OK, I don’t insist that you accept it. I will assert that through most of human history there have been years in most long lifetmes when the local population declined because things didn’t work out, and that as we learned to organize better we got rarer but larger declines. The issue has often been not just lack of food — we can blame the starvation in europe in the 1940’s on politics and war, and we can blame the starvation in china and tibet in the 1950’s on the communists, and the starvation in cambodia in the 1970’s on the khmer rouge. If we had the political will we could distribute food better worldwide — there is enough food worldwide to feed everybody, if we only had the will to do that — and so you could blame any starvation on our will to stay disorganized.

And yet, despite industrialized urban populations being so insipid and drained that they lack the will to replace themselves, there has been some starvation in your own lifetime even as the world population rises faster than world food production.

You are not obliged to agree with me, but I hope you can agree that my view is not completely implausible.

#78 J Thomas:

Okay, gonna get this out of the way up front. When you said:

“…despite industrialized urban populations being so insipid and drained that they lack the will to replace themselves…”

I assume what you actually meant was, “despite developed industrialized [urban has little to do with it] populations being made up of women that are educated and socially and technologically empowered enough that they are able to stop at one or two kids rather than devoting their lives to the physically exhausting exercise of pumping out babies…”

Aside from all that, my point is that past data only predicts future data if we have reason to believe the circumstances haven’t changed. I mean, by your “it’s been that way for thousands of years of the past and only changed recently” logic, I would also be required to believe that there is very little real chance that the earth is warming. It’s true that we have many years of data on pre-industrial societies with high birth rates. What’s unclear to me is why I should assume that lots of historical data on pre-industrial societies’ behavior necessarily tells me anything about developed, industrialized societies’ behavior, especially when the data on actual developed, industrialized societies quite consistently shows a different picture.

I’m impressed, but not convinced by the salary diffs quoted above. I suspect there is a strong
selection effect at work, that mostly people choose philosophy if they are bot good at and enjoy logic for the sake of logic. These people might well do better (for financialized value of “better”) in another major. I certainly have the strong impression that philosophy would be a difficult subject, and that students who diverge from the logic wouldn’t feel respected. Math shares many of the same perceptions.

The older I get (I’m fascinated by applied math -but I think my observation applies to many other fields too), the more I recognize there are far more problems to solve then people/time to tackle even a few of them. So you might as well choose some that non philosphers(mathematcians/whatever) can appreciate even if they can’t/won’t follow the details.

Layman @79 Yes that was pretty good, although the questions after the first should all have a few reallys in them

I am not a demographer, but I’ve done enough historical demography to generalize a little, absent (apparently) someone with greater expertise. If s/he shows up, consider this comment withdrawn.

Over the course of millennia, populations have generally arrived at what we can call a kind of “equilibrium,” for loose values of that term. People have rarely, if ever, had “as many children as they could,” but have wound up calibrating their childbearing to existing social-economic conditions. They did this in some cases consciously by use of contraceptives (however inadequate) and abortifacients; for these purposes – although probably not for philosophical/ethical ones – we might also include the practice of infanticide, since in many societies newborns were not considered persons until they had passed a certain threshold. In many other cases the mechanisms we can uncover may not have been consciously related to fertility control at all – delayed marriage (for ritual or economic reasons, e.g., you were not entitled to marry until you occupied one of the finite number of farms in the district), prescribed extensive periods of celibacy (related to religion and/or taboos and/or travel), etc. But they all tended to bring societies to a place where the number of births roughly equalled the number of deaths over the medium-to-long run.

All of these were extremely imperfect tools, and so there were times when the only thing holding population growth back was natural catastrophe, a la Malthus; it is this that gives rise to the (mistaken) view that populations will always grow maximally until death intervenes. And given high infant mortality (one might posit a rough average on the order of 2-300, which is to say 2-3 newborns out of 10 will not reach their first birthday), high fertility was widespread, though rarely unrestricted. It is interesting to note that fertility tends to rise in the immediate aftermath of a mortality crisis; the postwar “baby boom” is not unique to the USA after 1945, but has been documented many times in many places throughout history.

Then about 2-300 years ago, a variety of factors started to depress the death rate, which meant that the mechanisms keeping the population at a low level began to break down and higher rates of sustained growth started to be seen here and there across the historical landscape. Almost invariably – though we don’t quite know how and why (in spite of thousands of studies devoted to the topic) – not long after (a generation or so) the birth rate, which sometimes rose briefly in the short run, started to trend downward as well, so that the rate of natural increase, though high, didn’t escalate out of all proportion. This decline may be due to improved access to contraception, to greater delays in marriage, or any of a number of proximate and more distant causes, topics for many many demographic conferences and volumes. The education of women is often one of the most powerful connectors, as noted above. Another goes under the heading of “the intergenerational transfer of wealth,” which – grossly oversimplified – suggests that in certain kinds of societies (peasant agricultural) children rapidly started paying for themselves by working around the farm, etc., so that they were a net asset, but when urbanism and education (again) came to be factors children cost more to feed and maintain while they were developing the skills that would make them self-sufficient, so a higher investment in fewer children was the rational strategy. (And somehow, again, families wound up having fewer children.)

This whole phenomenon is referred to as the “demographic transition,” and is remarkably stable across space over the last few centuries. It ends when the decline in the death rate flattens out at a low level, and the birth rate in due course approaches it, so that we have a kind of “equilibrium” again, except that it’s now low fertility/mortality instead of the high fertility/mortality experienced a couple of centuries earlier. Where we go from here is out of my remit – I became a historian to escape the present, not to predict the future – but if the historical case proves anything, it is that human fertility is NOT automatically unrestricted, but is remarkably tuned to social and economic circumstances by a variety of mechanisms, conscious or otherwise.

What this signifies in terms of ethics is a problem left to the reader.

dr ngo @88:
Thank you, that was really interesting!

#82 NK

… my point is that past data only predicts future data if we have reason to believe the circumstances haven’t changed.

I agree. There’s every reason to think that things are different now. The question is whether this is an extremely unusual blip, or whether things have really changed, and I see no way to prove that one way or another.

#88 Dr. Ngo

Over the course of millennia, populations have generally arrived at what we can call a kind of “equilibrium,” for loose values of that term.

Agreed. Many species do that, while many others create as many eggs as they can. So for example, many birds establish territories to nest in, they defend the size of territories that they estimate will be required to raise their young. The surplus population hangs around in areas that are too marginal to raise families, and waits for their chance. Maybe next year. Meanwhile the winning females must balance the metabolic cost of laying eggs versus the number of chicks they can reasonably raise, and if they lose a whole clutch early enough in the season they may build a new nest and lay again.

On the other hand, a songbird that lays 8 eggs can’t expect more than 2 of them on average to successfully reproduce. And a hawk that lays 3 eggs in a year can usually expect 2 of them to leave the nest. The third is sort of insurance, if it’s a good year the third can survive too.

Humans have tended to be a bit conservative (have extra children in case more than expected die young) and also optimistic (have extra children in case new opportunities show up for them to exploit). It could be argued that human populations have everywhere usually tended to increase beyond carrying capacity and then fall below, and as we have found new ecological niches to support us that carrying capacity has risen.

What this signifies in terms of ethics is a problem left to the reader.

Agreed.

Brett Bellmore,

““Just” math? Math is the closest thing to absolute, undeniable truth humans have ever stumbled across. It is the language of the universe, our guide in reasoning. “Just” math, indeed. Reasoning without “math” is hardly deserving of the name.”

“you couldn’t have one fine day without the day – could you” ;)

I feel like this argument about maths/words was covered more fully and funnily in The Phantom Tollbooth.

Perhaps what you’d expect. People deeply concerned about questions like “What am I? What is? What ought I to do? For what can I hope?” sign up.

These would be people who want education, who think spending their college years preparing for a job is a philistine waste of a golden opportunity.

But by all means keep the college bureaucrats happy with a survey.

After all, nearly all of them wasted their college years on vok-ed.

“It’s not like not pushing the fat guy onto the tracks and having to see a bunch of people die instead is going to make you happy, even if you won’t feel wrong about it in the same way.”

‘Happy’ is overrated. I prefer tranquility. With some mild sufferings once in a while, to continue appreciating it.

Re. Andrew F., Alan White, and the transporter (which is all pretty amusing): It seems to me the normal way of thinking about it is to be interested in the story and the futuristic technology first, and second in the philosophical implications. But the philosophy student is, on occasion, asked to think of the transporter and the story themselves as only secondary to the important question of personal identity–to imagine that someone thought up the puzzle, what if a person’s body could be destroyed and reconstructed, and then said why don’t we invent the idea of a transporter to illustrate it? I believe Andrew is suggesting that people who think the implications of a real transporter are more interesting, won’t become philosophy majors. In other words, the similarity between the thought experiment and science fiction is a deceptive illusion.

“Some day ALL us white males will be dead, and then you’ll be sorry.”

Well, as you might guess, one of my favorite philosophers is Ayn Rand. (Not that I’m a Randroid; She got some things seriously wrong, and is an excellent example of somebody who brought what they fled with them.) Last time I checked, she was white and dead, but hardly male.

I do think that obsessing over the gender of whoever came up with an idea, to the point that you’d go out of your way to meet your humanities requirements with just ‘women’s studies’ courses, is probably not a good sign in an aspiring philosopher.

You got that right, Bianca. To be a good philosopher, you should be more concerned with ideas, than who came up with them.

Sort of like GWB’s dictum that the only philosopher worth reading is Jesus.

I am going to sue this opportunity to shill once again for one of my favourite webcomics

http://existentialcomics.com/

Existential Comics is a series of webcomics that tries to explain philosophical concepts in an engaging and humorous way. You can learn more about it here:

http://existentialcomics.com/patreon

Please do check it out if it sounds like something you would enjoy.

“Well I for one am SHOCKED….”

Rand had one or two decent insights, which is all it takes to be an important philosopher. Her problem is that she tried to turn one or two decent insights into an entire system.

To be fair, this is a common mistake by people who have one or two decent insights.

The idea of a “Humanities Logic” is pretty hilarious.

Since you seem blissfully uninformed, what you learn when you take a logic class in a phil. dept. is propositional and first-order logic, possibly up to 2-place predicates, but more likely not. And if you try to raise a stink about modus ponens, you’ll fail just as surely as you would if you went all ‘quus’ in a math class. This was Tabasco’s point, more or less, and it’s exactly right.

To return to the OP subject:

It seems to me that there are three groups of questions that would be helpful to have answers to, and that clearly distinguishing them is likely to be useful.

In my observation, there are sets of areas of study that tend to draw from the same pool of students within an institution. (For example, people choose between history and political science, between applied math and econometrics and finance, etc.) What those sets are varies by institution to some degree.

So the first group of questions should be designed to figure out “in what set of majors is philosophy here?” (Are we competing for majors with math, or with theology?) This is a matter of school culture, and is extremely unlikely to change quickly.

The second group of questions should be designed to figure out “what does the pool of students for that set of majors look like?” This may be influenced some by the department, but not much.

The third group of questions has to do with how choices are made inside that pool. (For example, at my undergrad institution math and economics were in the same pool, but math was majority-female and economics super-majority male.) This level is the one on which the department can have a significant effect.

Star Trek transporters and the question of identity: China Miéville deals with this brilliantly and specifically in Kraken. Very closely related problems are found in Algis Budrys’s Rogue Moon, in Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, in John Barnes’s Thousand Cultures series, and in Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution tetralogy. But Miéville make it clear that what the transporter does is kill you.

The NAND gate actually appears in the second edition of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, under the name Sheffer stroke.

And in the Tractatus, which I think is earlier? I could be wrong. (I think I remember hearing/reading that Russell got it from Wittgenstein, but I’m relying on a vague memory that may well be false.)

Anyway, sorry, I’ll stop with the thread derail now.

You might want to scope your questions along the “major funnel”, i.e. the total process whereby a student goes from not knowing anything about philosophy to having graduated with a degree in it (or decided to go on to grad school if that concerns you).

Also, you should try to find a way to survey students who never took any philosophy classes (assuming it’s not mandatory). Misconception about philosophy can both drive people both into, and out of, the discipline, and while those whose who enroll because they think it’s something that it isn’t will eventually learn via classes, the real concern is those who might have enrolled if they realized what it was really about.

1. What were your impressions of philosophy when you entered the university?
2. What led you to enroll in your first philosophy class (or to never enroll in one)?
3. (If applicable) After your first philosophy class, what led you to enroll/not enroll in further classes?
4. What led you to consider/not consider philosophy as a major?
5. (If applicable) After considering philosophy as a major, what led you to choose/not choose it?
6. (If applicable) After choosing philosophy as a major, what led you to complete/not complete the program?

Completing a degree in philosophy isn’t one decision, but a series of decisions made over the course of a college enrollment.

@MPAVictoria, 108: That was great! Thank you so much for the link. Who draws these? It reminds me of the work of Donald Palmer, whose textbook we used in my own freshman intro class years ago …

Theophylact @ 116:

It was clear in the original-cast series/movies that Bones instinctively believed that the transporter was a killing/duplicating machine. ST The Motion Picture partly demonstrated that point of view with a botched transport where the materialized mishmash of what were people fortunately “didn’t live long”. But jets, cars, ships etc. are potential killing machines as well; they just don’t challenge any particular criteria of what identity is when they do their jobs. The transporter does. (There’s even that early episode “The Enemy Within” that suggests that certain transporter malfunctions have Parfitian implications by producing two versions of Kirk, neither of which evinces the full personality of the original Kirk; yet, invariably the viewer is drawn to more closely identify the weak-kneed but “good” Kirk against the conniving lecherous “evil” Kirk .)

See what you’ve done Andrew F?

Shirley0401

have you considered that the background of your philosophy student colleagues might have more to do with the college you attended than what kind of people major in philosophy?

Brett Bellmore @ 17 (and later):

The thing is, my own experience of being an undergrad, grad, and adjunct instructor of philosophy has been that caring about the gender of the thinker isn’t a sad thing, if you have to constantly notice how the body of the thinker matters to the thoughts they share with others.

Consider the basic problem: where are those ideas you’re talking about?

I’m not sure we can easily extract an idea from a person, as though an idea is something separable from the material processes through which individuals generate meanings alongside other individuals. If they aren’t separable, then what we have to do is examine more often, if accuracy is important, and more closely, if precision is important, how ideas are thought by the particular ones doing this thing we call an idea.

Because, I’m fairly convinced, ideas are the sorts of things we do, not the sorts of things we lug around in suitcases and call our stuff, our possessions. Ideas are performed, is my meaning; they are something more like baseball or scouting or marriage.

You can see a different take on this basic question when Kahneman and Tversky talk about how people interpret ‘Alice is walking to the bank.’ For me right now, Alice is black, since I’m using Alice Walker (“is walking” hits this association strongly) in my class; the bank is along the river, since I live right next to a river. But neither of my interpretations invalidate or prove wrong the others, do they? Do alternate or more frequent interpretations by urban people who grew up with stories of Wonderland make mine invalid or provably wrong? Should they?

Once we acknowledge this diversity in interpretations, then again, if we want to approach the notion of ideas a bit more, maybe, ‘scientifically’, then noticing how immediate and lived experiences of thinkers changes their conceiving becomes very important. We can’t just dispense with this diversity in favor of something a little less “sad” by imagining human ideas are possible to behold without our own particular, actual, and emotional eyes, hands, noses, toes. Nor are we going to become better thinkers ourselves by ignoring how our own feelings within the body distort, inform, shape, and swerve our ideas, as though such ignorance isn’t one more fantasy a philosophy is supposed to undermine.

Do different races, genders, classes, cultures, time periods have different understandings of the same notions? I think so, maybe not always to a great extent and sometimes surprisingly little, but what’s fascinating is noticing how the subtle differences in the concepts as different groups of folks use them evoke major changes in the connected thoughts down the line, particularly when people explaining how they understand whatever concepts inevitably reach to metaphorics and the uncrossed limits between nonconceptual understanding and our conceptual building blocks.

That is, listen to people explain themselves. The metaphors and metonyms, the styles and habits, the patterns and the assumption of cultural fixities: we all use these things to try and link together our different takes on what the same symbols mean, but because we don’t share a lot of our lived experiences with one another, our meanings go awry. And since if we’re not in the habit of practicing the skill of listening to one another–or mostly today, reading one another–we don’t get better at detecting and discriminating how our differences come to express themselves in our ideas, then we find other people not only more alien and strange and unusual in contemptuous ways, but we lose out on all the opportunities for invigorating our own processes for forming ideas.

Maybe I’m wrong about this, but all the best lessons that helped me change my mind and improve my thinking have come about by intentionally seeking out thinkers or cultures who were radically alien or hostile or indifferent to my own. It didn’t seem fair or just, to me, to discount other ideas on account of how my life has gone, as though the fact we use a group of symbols in common means I have unparalleled access to someone’s ideas without ever having to study or analyze how those others are using those symbols to mean something. As though I can just use my own feelings as universal guides. But to feel out the patterns of other thoughts meant touching a lot of text, reading a lot of words, hearing a lot of talk, smelling a lot of spice, wearing down my joints by trying to climb around their world. Given how often people unwittingly insert their bodies and what they feel like into their words and how they use them, how else are we supposed to understand one another? I mean, you refer us to your sadness and your hilarity, as though these emotional states indicate something to us about what you expect should be similar or ideal reactions for others, as though caring what you feel matters. Does it? Should it?

Philosophy is a cultural process. Ideas are not materials. They’re virtual, and they depend on the material configurations supporting them. This seems obvious to me, but I know I’m just primed and framed to think this way. I know others aren’t, and I accept that they aren’t, and so I accept they don’t share my claims here. Should I not? Should I, instead, seek to find the right way of removing all the various traces of the flesh in the concepts I think are the right ones to have, so that anyone is able to see the correctness or the error of those concepts?

Maybe. It seems to work for some people to do philosophy that way. It also seems to work for others to do it other ways. This interests me, since we can all go very far in our understanding regardless of our methods (if even it’s methods that make the difference), just as we all do go very much nowhere in the end but dead all the same.

Putting all that aside, though, I do think this. I don’t really think of philosophy apart from teaching it, so I have a particular bias in what I think philosophy is about. Teaching philosophy to undergrads by actually listening to them and their concerns helps give me new ways of reading old texts, new texts to explore as they talk about what they’re learning in other classes. A lot of their concerns do come down to how they intuitively feel all these “identity” issues impact what they know and how they know it. They see that being white or woman or wealthy or wedded makes a difference in what people understand and how they think about something such as ‘Freedom’. By listening to these differences, I help them listen to other ones, and they help me to listen to even further ones.

At least, I like to think that listening to students instead of just assuming they’re all stupid or lazy and needing my correction is part of my job, my vocation, and my tao as a person. I know a lot of my students are in single-parent families or are young cohabiting parents, work two part-time jobs or one full and one part, are taking subjects with either lots of busy work or demanding huge amounts of their cognitive resources, don’t eat well and sleep well, and do not have any daily habit for reading or writing. I guess it’s different to teach at more landed and traditional universities or colleges, where material privilege mitigates a lot of this, but community college is where I teach, and it’s the sort of challenge I enjoy. But here’s the thing. My students are going to be struggling through the material, and I’m asking them to consider the possibility that all their reasons for pursuing their lives under those conditions are actually false for them and should be properly subjected to skeptical and critical investigation, thus potentially undermining what little hope they have any of it’s going to work out. Telling them lies about unexamined lives and what’s worth life isn’t going to change the fact of their work and family and relationship situations, just make them pressured even more. This is something I found important for myself as a philosophy instructor to remember about our subject, that unlike the other subjects which people associate with greater rewards or more comfortable living or direct applications to technical mastery of the world and people, studying philosophy has the very real potential of severely and permanently disturbing the already fragile realities our students depend upon to survive. Is there any wonder why there are so many depressed philosophers and philosophy students? It’s a very dangerous subject, and not practicing fiduciary responsibility here is irresponsible, so I claim.

But to get sensitivity to people does mean having to practice those skills at listening and empathizing. I guess I’m saying it just doesn’t seem right to me that if someone wants to be a good philosopher, they should be indifferent to who they’re talking to, what the audiences’ experiences are, how the audience listens and imagines and pictures and models. Again, that’s likely due to the experiences I’ve had of successful philosophy classes, good discussions outside the classroom and inside it, and seeing so many students start to really take ownership of their own education by coming to understand themselves a lot, lot more.

I apologize for the long comment here. Insomnia and headaches compel me.

#128 Charles R

I’m not sure we can easily extract an idea from a person, as though an idea is something separable from the material processes through which individuals generate meanings alongside other individuals. If they aren’t separable, then what we have to do is examine more often, if accuracy is important, and more closely, if precision is important, how ideas are thought by the particular ones doing this thing we call an idea.

It might turn out that ideas aren’t separable from bodies, and that differences in bodies result in differences in ideas, and that differences in brains are insuperable, that we simply cannot translate ideas from one person to another. Maybe it simply cannot be done.

I tried discussing this idea with my cat. I think she agrees but I’m not sure.

Maybe when we think we’re communicating we are merely setting up the stage for others to create brand new thoughts that are in some way similar. We can guess how effectively we do that by how they respond.

You can see a different take on this basic question when Kahneman and Tversky talk about how people interpret ‘Alice is walking to the bank.’ For me right now, Alice is black, since I’m using Alice Walker (“is walking” hits this association strongly) in my class; the bank is along the river, since I live right next to a river. But neither of my interpretations invalidate or prove wrong the others, do they?

No, of course not. But if they point at Alice and you see, then you know something. Alice may or may not look black to you. If she arrives at a river bank or a building with an ATM and she stops, that tells you something else. Or they might tell you more that would help. “Alice looked at the sky. She had forgotten her parasol and she burned so easily. It made her look attractive, too. She needed to get to the bank and get some money.”

And then more. “Why did the johns decide that the riverbank was the place to pick up girls? There were mosquitoes in the summer, and it was dank, extra chilly in winter.”

“Alice was troubled by those poor girls. She hated to walk by them on the way to the bank.”

There’s a highly-valued art to communicating clearly without giving people wrong impressions. There’s an art to Burns-and-Allen type misleading too, which is mostly not valued nearly as much.

Do alternate or more frequent interpretations by urban people who grew up with stories of Wonderland make mine invalid or provably wrong?

No, not at all. But when they’re the target audience and you aren’t, then the communication becomes more hit-and-miss with you.

Should they?

No. But if they have more discretionary income they are more likely to be the target audience.

Once we acknowledge this diversity in interpretations, then again, if we want to approach the notion of ideas a bit more, maybe, ‘scientifically’, then noticing how immediate and lived experiences of thinkers changes their conceiving becomes very important.

Yes, but once we recognize that, what can we do about it? We aren’t privy to their experience. They can try to communicate something about it to us, and we can try to pick up what we can from their communication. We can imagine what it might have been like for them, out of our own experience and imagination. There is no possible verification, except that we can try to communicate things to them that they can interpret as our understanding or not, and they can communicate back about their belief in how well we understood.

Do different races, genders, classes, cultures, time periods have different understandings of the same notions?

If not, then there is a tremendous amount of snark and condescension circulating. Imagine what kind of world it would be if everybody but you understood what everybody including you meant, and they still acted this way!

… we find other people not only more alien and strange and unusual in contemptuous ways, but we lose out on all the opportunities for invigorating our own processes for forming ideas.

Yes, but ….

… studying philosophy has the very real potential of severely and permanently disturbing the already fragile realities our students depend upon to survive.

When people have a fragile sense of reality, when they’re struggling to keep a sense of who they are and what it means, they can’t possibly incorporate lots of alien ideas at the same time and still keep their fragile identities intact.

There’s something to be said for discarding all that. Let your fragile identity be smashed, build up a new one from whatever you can grab onto that is reliable. You may wind up with a sense of the world that can withstand a whole lot. And it might have to withstand a whole lot, because the society around you will probably not have roles available for it to fit into.

Charles R @ 128

You make a lot of good points, but I wonder whether it’s really your business to guess what your students need in their lives during the couple of months they’re taking your class. (And the idea that those students who don’t get enough sleep are somehow exceptionally disqualified from academic work is, well, from an empirical perspective, odd.)

protoplasm, I actually had written that the survey questions I ask in my classes tend to be along the lines of “How often do you read physical books?” and “What is your experience with poetry?”, but since these are unscientific and not systematic questions, they’re likely not helpful for many of the reasons already given for other open questions. That said, I think it’s also helpful, as has been pointed out a few times already, to inquire about how the students afford the education. Loans? Working their way through? Pell grant? Perhaps these things matter.

bianca steele, I also wonder if I’m qualified to discern what students’ needs are, but I didn’t mean to say that I took it as my purpose in the role of instructor to satisfy those needs. I do think it’s important for me to teach in such a way that they learn, and I think learning is holistic. I’m likely not saying something the right way, and I apologize for misleading you by what I write or don’t write. What is it you think I’m saying?

As for students not sleeping well (and all the other things I mentioned), I’m not saying they are “exceptionally disqualified” for that reason. I’m saying look at the totality of circumstances of students who are working jobs, have families depending on their care, and who come to class already stressed out about. I don’t think these things disqualify a student from being a successful student. I do think these things make it much, much harder to focus, find the time to complete assignments, reflect meaningfully, read the material closely, write and proofread papers, and provide feedback to other students in the class responsibly. My exposure to the research on the role of sleep, neurologically speaking, in the education process suggests to me that this is one of those areas where modern life isn’t conducive to what we’re demanding of our students (and ourselves). Here’s one link to a paper on this; a search of articles linked to ‘sleep memory learning’ turned up a lot of hits in the last decade and a half. There appear to be some connections here.

I don’t think it’s empirically odd to say that stressors in our lives make it more difficult to do well academically, and that lack of sleep is one of those. To reiterate, I’m not saying lack of sleep—and even the totality of the circumstances—disqualifies someone from going to college or the university. I’m saying I have seen students work hard to overcome those things to get the most out of their time; seen students have to withdraw altogether to care for children, siblings, cousins, themselves; seen students gradually go from very good to much worse on account of being overworked. Female students, especially, have to be absent from class to caretake for family members. Has your empirical experiences of this been different? Like I said, maybe it’s different teaching at a community college?

Hmm. Maybe that’s a question to ask on the survey, too: are you a primary caretaker in your family?

J Thomas, you wrote

There is no possible verification, except that we can try to communicate things to them that they can interpret as our understanding or not, and they can communicate back about their belief in how well we understood.

and my response is: this is why I emphasize listening, and not so much getting better at talking, for myself. Obviously I am horrible at communicating, so I spend more time listening.

Charles R:

This reference might be a bit dated, but have you ever read Eugene Gendlin?

Cranky Observer said:

“I would think a set of questions about future plans for attending law school would provide useful crosstab data. Anecdotally it seemed to me that a large percentage of philosophy BAs planned on law at some point. That may have changed with the changes in the legal market over the last 5 years.”

Excellent point. Somewhat like economics is the standard major for those wishing to get an MBA degree, philosophy is a plausible major for those planning to attend law school. At the moment, however, law school is out of fashion due to the oversupply of law school graduates a decade ago.

If you want to attract more of “certain racial minorities,” you probably ought to have good evidence that philosophy isn’t necessarily a path to lifelong impoverishment. If you can’t come up with persuasive evidence for that, maybe you shouldn’t try to lure poorer young people into studying philosophy.

Perhaps highly logical young people from poor backgrounds would be better off becoming CPAs or whatever, and then their children could afford to be philosophers.

bianca steele, to clear up one thing, I’m not refusing to ask them to consider something like that. I think, rather, covering the history of philosophy and various philosophical methods will naturally lead people down that path. I’m saying I don’t want to ignore that the very subject matter we’ll be covering doesn’t occur in isolation from the rest of a student’s life, or won’t have any effect at all on them the better they get it. It seems to me the people who most get into philosophy and get something out of it end up very different, rather better or worse, more confined to their opinions or more open—but changed. So, I have to ask them to consider this possibility of nihilism, if I’m going to teach them this subject. I don’t want to sell them a slogan such as “The unexamined life is not worth living,” because examining one’s life might lead some to conclude their life or no life is worth living at all (Ligotti’s take on where things are going, for example, seems to me reasonable).

There’s also the other side of the danger, which is giving them the tools philosophy uses to dismantle bad illusions, and watching them use them on each other in terrifying ways. I agree with the Socratic vision of young puppies tearing each other apart in Book 7 of Republic, and I witness this in a lot of places where people brush with philosophy. It’s something I have to work hard to undo in myself, having grown up alongside the BBSs becoming AOL becoming usenet becoming, well, all of this unrecognizable Internet of ads today. Habits to break, right?

So, not a refusal. It’s more like, I have to evaluate as the teaching goes and listen to the discussions we have in the classroom. Redirect away from the tearing apart, move towards the respectful and curious dissent. Caution. Care. Charity. Curiosity. Cleverness. Some of them won’t care, but I find caring takes on a lot of different shapes, and it’s a big learning experience for me every semester how wrong my fears can be.

You have the right of it: I do think my concerns about my students also apply to y’all’s students. And as even more people are funneled into college and university without any sense for why, it’ll get worse before it gets better. I also think your concerns about why I included sleep habits apply to each item on the list I came up with. I don’t think these problems are exclusive to my students or this region. I just know my students are not as privileged as the students I have taught in other places, where there was more land, tradition, alumni, and history feeding into the prestige and glamour of being students there. The shocks of the economy hit my students really hard, just as it’s also brought even more students leaving those other places to come to our place.

Maybe I’m worrying too much? Wouldn’t be the first time. I appreciate your engagement and your apologies, though!

john c. halasz, I haven’t heard of Gendlin, but thank you for the reference! A quick cursory look suggests similar themes to thoughts I’ve been having after reading David Lachterman, Hans Blumenberg, Lakoff and Johnson, and now Mario Praz’s Illustrated History of Furnishing.

Lynne: I knew ‘of’ Rousseau for a long time. Then I say down actually to read “Émile”. Extraordinarily ur-Nazi text, really:
http://amechanicalart.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/rousseau-emile-ou-de-leducation-1762.html

#140 Charles R

john c. halasz, I haven’t heard of Gendlin, but thank you for the reference!

Oh, yes! I highly recommend Gendlin too.

Once when I was deeply depressed, recently divorced, poor, mostly hopeless, with neither trust in professional psychotherapists nor money to pay them and with no access to an academic library, I resolved to do what I could to learn how to get out of it. I was in walking distance of a public library, and I started checking out psychological self-help books and trying to use their advice. Gendlin’s book was the only one that was at all helpful. More than that, Gendlin’s book was intensely helpful. Within a few weeks of starting his exercises alone (he recommended working with partners but I had no one to practice with just then) I was ready to look for new possibilities.

I can’t say it would be as useful for other depressed people. By choosing to look for it I had already started in generally the right direction. But his exercises are worth doing.

MSM @139: I find it hard to follow a man whose philosophical theories … required the abandonment of his children.

They didn’t, actually. You can fully subscribe to Rousseau’s theories without feeling obliged to abandon your children.

Main Street Muse,

I had not heard that about Rousseau before :/ it reminds me of something I read by Germaine Greer on Socrates and his wife and children:

“The wives who are remembered are those who are vilified, like Socrates Xanthippe and Aristotle’s Phyllis….
If Xanthippe had never existed, bachelor dons would have had to invent her. Among the scant references to her is the story told in the Phaedo of how, when she came with Socrates’ three sons to visit him when Socrates had been sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens and ordered to commit suicide by drinking hemlock, she so annoyed the great man with her lamentations that he sent her home again, so that his last hours could be spent in rational discussion with his disciples. No historian has ever shown the slightest interest in what became of Xanthippe and her three small children after Socrates’ suicide. Such mundane matters are beneath the consideration of great men and their biographers. To protest that Socrates’ chosen martyrdom brought catastrophe on the four innocent people who depended on him would merely be womanish.”
– Germaine Greer, Shakespeare’s Wife

Xanthippe got a book contract and his three sons became a sitcom (with Fred McMurray, I think).

147,149: Let me guess, let me guess!

The juicer.

Ellipsis is just so mean, geo.

Also I’m not sure I’d count Phyllis among the women who are remembered, since I have to thank ZM for bringing her name to my attention.

LFC@149: It was the Breville BJE200XL Compact Juice Fountain 700-Watt Juice Extractor.

@geo: see my explanation @156

@158: Journals, magazines, and blogs seem to be the preferred venues for reviews; even with paywalls etc., it’s often not too hard to find reviews of something one’s interested in, at least in my experience. That said, more (and more helpful) reviews of scholarly/serious bks on Amazon wd be nice just from the standpoint of convenience, even if one doesn’t actually buy books through Amazon (as I usually don’t).

I got 7 reviews from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Experiencing-Creation-Meaning-Philosophical-Psychological/product-reviews/0810114275/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_btm?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

I’d meant to reference the philosophical and general pedagogical issues Charles R. was raising, which seemed in line with Gendlin. But the psychotherapy aspect is fine by me, though I never looked into it much, so long as one doesn’t confuse the two.

Aside from the U. of C. pragmatist tradition, he seemed to me to be obviously influenced by Merleau-Ponty, but then it’s been 20-odd years since I read ECM.

This maybe doesn’t really contribute much to the OP questions but it’s funny I think. My oldest daughter did an Arts-Law degree, majoring in history and philosophy, and chose to do honours in philosophy.

I asked her why and she said she just enjoyed philosophy. I asked why philosophy rather than history, and she said (I quote): “I don’t know. Why does anybody study anything?”

So that’s what you get if you ask philosophy majors questions!

More seriously on why she eventually chose to work as a lawyer rather than doing a PhD in philosophy, she said that she liked learning and discussing philosophy, but not writing, and feared she would leave things till the last moment and not write articles. I think this possibly also have something to do with gender and confidence issues, although I don’t think she would see it that way necessarily.

(She was very good, as you’ve probably gathered, so I guess it’s philosophy’s loss, but I don’t know what can be done about this exactly. I’ve read a lot of stuff about female ‘lack of confidence,’ plus bias against women in assessment and publishing, and I think female ‘lack of confidence’ isn’t actually just a weakness of women, but a realistic perception that the odds are against us, so it’s going to be unreasonably hard to succeed, so I guess that’s the underlying issue).

bianca, I used to think the asynchronous nature of commenting on blog entries allowed for people to have the time they need to reflect and come back to topics, doing either diligence to write with whatever emotional state they preferred and felt best complemented their views, or research what they needed to be informed, or to just take the time to compose something thoughtful. But then people started attaching deadlines to their entries, the blogs kept moving forward and burying the past, and no one revisits the past entries under newer entries without going “off-topic.” Pressure does curious things, I guess I’m saying.

On 1, I take it that enacting any critical analysis of one’s own beliefs, frameworks, theories challenges the motivations for holding on to them. People get their minds blown all the time, but in some cases those fragments are harder to piece back together. Add into this there are people who engage in philosophy specifically for the rush of power in demolishing things (How many of the early moderns frame their ‘new’ and ‘novel’ approaches and methods to thinking as the wiping away or the demolishing of the past’s foundations, back down to the ground? How many still do?), a phenomena of aggression Socrates, to just name one, discusses as one of the by-products of a poorly developed philosophical education. Take contemporary concerns with “what it’s like” to be a minority—not just one’s minority status from a political perspective, but any social positioning, including one’s views and habits for forming thoughts—and how these concerns orient approaches towards reducing bullying and aggression specifically within philosophy.

For me, the aggression from others mixed with one’s own deep self-directed criticism produce a spirit of hopelessness in some of us who try doing philosophy. Some of us, it seems, flourish under those conditions. If on the one hand someone really does try to take seriously the notion that everything one believes about themselves is open to being illusion, wishful or magical thinking, such that clear analysis or dialectic is one path towards surer or better reasons or understanding how they believe or how they live, and on the other hand, the discursive practices of analysis or dialectic require dealing constantly with bullying from outside—and for some, this becomes internalized or already has been internalized—then finding hope in the outcome of this process, a process from the outset isn’t even clearly one we can complete, is very difficult.

To say it more simply, philosophy empowers those who wish to use its power for destruction and disempowers those who wish to use its weakness for rebuilding. Finding the right balance is not easy, especially when we add in all the other strains of living. Finding the way to help people learn enough of the subject so that they are more able to understand their own authenticity is not easy. But is there some different goal we should have in teaching this subject?

On the other other hand, we could just teach philosophy in a very boring way, where it’s just a matter of matching bold-type words with glossary appropriate definitions, and not facilitate any of the students’ interests in developing their own skill at critical evaluation. I don’t accept that solution, but, sure, it’s one, right? Some people do.

Does this make sense? Maybe I’m overstating my case because I like to err towards caution when it comes to the practice, but I’ll admit I indulge in the hyperbole of the miserable. I am trying to throw in there enough reasonable weasel words to show that I’m aware there isn’t anything certain about who will end up, on their own, contemplating the total meaninglessness of our efforts working ourselves to death and who won’t, while also remaining true to my own sense that it’s not my place to shield them from themselves. Or drive them to it. I think, given how your responding, that you share my own belief in self-direction: the students are responsible for themselves. But I do take teaching to be a fiduciary activity, not one I do just to get paid without concern for what happens with the tools. My impression is that you also have this sense, too. Am I wrong on that point?

If you’re concerned I’m patronizing my students, either by building them up or laying them down, I’m always worried about that, too. So, I accept the criticism, if that’s what concerns you.

#165 Charles R

To say it more simply, philosophy empowers those who wish to use its power for destruction and disempowers those who wish to use its weakness for rebuilding.

What I see from this is that first, whatever you think is objectively correct, might be wrong. So for example, physicists with Maxwell’s equations etc put together a fundamental understanding of the world that answered all the fundamental questions they thought were worth asking. But today that view is regarded as a reasonable approximation for some large statistical ensembles, and the things that now are regarded as probable fundamental objective truths are mostly incomprehensible. And there’s no reason to expect that this view will survive well.

Philosophically there’s no reason to think we know anything about anything much. Even logic is revealed as a reasonable way to organize our language, but nothing with much meaning in itself.

So we must choose in the face of uncertainty. Or choose to be certain arbitrarily, by a leap of faith.

Should people who haven’t faced that get bullied? That’s a social question, and a teacher has the right to use whatever authority he has to give it an answer of no.