11/2023 Link Post: All Things Meta
I decided to make a link post for this month. The blog has been a bit slow lately. I’ve been working on a few posts that became much longer, including one that addresses my claim that certain forms of moral realism are unintelligible. However, the main reason is that I am shifting the focus of my blog away from an almost exclusively focus on metaethics and metaphilosophy.
I am in a bit of a planning phase that will see changes in my channel as well as this blog. Metaethics and metaphilosophy will remain the main focus, but I’ll be incorporating other topics as well, including metascience (see below). After a year of covering these topics extensively, I’ve needed a bit of a break, so I think this will be a good change for both me and for readers.
This is my first time doing so, so we’ll see how it goes. Essentially, I’m going to gather up links to topics that interest me and hopefully interest you and share them. This link post is part of a broader effort to begin expanding the range of topics I cover on this blog (something I’ll be saying more about soon), so you’ll see quite a few topics that fall well outside the ambit of metaethics.
Metaphilosophy
(1) A new paper by Maćkiewicz, Kuś, & Hensel (2023) explores whether training in philosophy causes measurable improvements in intuitions over time. Results purportedly cast doubt on the notion that undergraduate education in philosophy confers any special, general form of philosophical expertise or any special expertise in specific subdisciplines with respect to deploying one’s intuitions. Instead, the authors suggest that:
[...] available evidence, including the results of cross-sectional research, is best explained in terms of differences in adopted beliefs about specific cases, rather than acquired cognitive skills.
This comports with the central argument of my dissertation. In my dissertation, I argue that most people don’t have any determinate stances or commitments with respect to moral realism and antirealism, and I suggest that this may generalize to philosophical issues more broadly.
That is, I suggest that people without training in philosophy may tend not to have any particular (even if implicit or nascent) philosophical positions, and that efforts to measure folk philosophical beliefs or intuitions are misguided, since such studies are either attempting to measure something that isn’t there, or result in spontaneous theorizing (people generating answers on the fly in response to stimuli) or require training in philosophy that causes the formation of a position in the first place (what I call philosophical induction).
In addition, I have argued in several instances on my blog and channel that consensus within philosophy may be driven by selection effects. In particular, people who aren’t disposed towards reporting “intuitions,” or who hold unconventional intuitions, may be discouraged from participating in academic philosophy. However, the authors tested this by assessing whether there were higher rates for students who didn’t “conform to the textbook consensus” dropping out of philosophy programs, but they report no significant differences that would suggest such a pattern. This runs contrary to my expectations, though I still suspect such an effect may be real.
Note that the findings only cover a longitudinal analysis of undergraduates, so they do not provide direct evidence about any changes that may come from graduate training in philosophy or postgraduate experiences.
This paper was discussed over at Daily Nous, where commenters raised some objections to the study and its conclusions.
(2) This is an intriguing article where the author describes their experiences with aphantasia (the inability to form mental imagery, or a diminished ability to do so) and speculates on how this might influence people’s philosophical views. I am enthusiastically in favor of speculation of this kind. The broad presumption among philosophers that this or that claim “is intuitive” or “is obvious” seems to me to be predicated on mistaken assumptions about the homogeneity of our phenomenology.
Metascience
(3) Simine Vazire has been chosen as the next Editor-in-Chief for the journal Psychological Science. Dr. Vazire has been at the forefront of promoting reforms in psychological research. To say this is a welcome development is an understatement. This is awesome! For more on Simine Vazire’s selection, see this short transcribed interview.
(4) A recent report (paywalled) refers to this paper (note the paper is a preprint. Down with universal pre-publication peer review!). Researchers in ecology and evolutionary biology from 174 different teams analyzed the same dataset and reached different conclusions. This variation was often substantial. For one dataset, they report that:
“[...] there was near continuous variation in effect size from large negative effects to effects near zero, and even effects crossing the traditional threshold of statistical significance in the opposite direction.”
Researchers exhibited significant variation in their analytic decisions, though as the authors also note:
“[...] analyses with results that were far from the mean were no more or less likely to have dissimilar variable sets, use random effects in their models, or receive poor peer reviews than those analyses that found results that were close to the mean.”.
These results echo similar findings in psychology, like this one. This paper identifies several other similar efforts, attempts to diagnose some cases behind this high variation in analyses, and offers some suggestions on how to avoid them.
(5) Gino has offered a rebuttal to the authors of Data Colada over alleged data fraud here. This article offers a critical appraisal of that rebuttal. There are enough links in both places that if you aren’t aware of what’s going on, you can certainly get caught up.
(6) Some of the focus of this blog (and my channel) will be shifting to other metascientific concerns, primarily those associated with peer review and the academic publishing industry. See this article (there is audio as well) for a critique of peer review which I really enjoyed. I recently interviewed Adam Mastrioanni, and that interview will come out Monday (11/13) on my channel. You can also pop over to the community section there for a poll and thread on the peer review process.
Metaethics
(7) Lutz & Case, a moral antirealist and a moral realist, respectively, have put out a new book featuring a debate between them, called “Is morality real?” which you can find here. I haven’t had the chance to read it yet, but I figure I’d let readers know about it and plug a topic near and dear to me. If you’ve read the book and have thoughts, or even want to write a review, please get in touch and let me know! I’d even be happy to post a review (if it’s well-written) here.
(8) My trilemma (trivial, false, unintelligible) has been taken up for topics outside the domain of non-naturalist moral realism. See here. I endorse its extension to other philosophical topics, though in this case the orthogonality thesis still interfaces to some extent with issues in metaethics. I suspect the trilemma could be applied to other cases, as well. Speaking of the orthogonality thesis, this is a topic (along with existential risk more generally) that I hope to address to some extent here or on my channel.
Starting to read Is Morality Real? and enjoying it. The Foreward shows how the different metaethical theories impact how we hold our normative ethics, which gives it a real-world and grounded feel.