Self-Unconsciousness (Talk at CSU Fullerton)

This is the text of a talk I'll be giving tomorrow at Cal State Fullerton, for a conference called "Consciousness and the Self"

i.

[SL 1] Philosophers tend to be pretty impressed by human self-knowledge. [SL 1.1] Descartes (1641/1984) thought our knowledge of our own stream of experience was the secure and indubitable foundation upon which to build our knowledge of the rest of the world. Hume – who was capable of being skeptical about almost anything – said that the only existences we can be certain of are our own sensory and imagistic experiences (1739/1978, p. 212). One of the central aims of Sydney Shoemaker’s work on self-knowledge has been to show that certain sorts of error are impossible (1963, 1988, 1994a-c). David Chalmers has likewise attempted to show that, for a suitably constrained class of beliefs about one’s own consciousness, error is impossible (2003, sec. 4.1). Even philosophers most of the community thinks of as pessimistic about self-knowledge of consciousness seem to me, really, to be fairly optimistic. Paul Churchland, famous for his disdain of ordinary people’s knowledge about the mind, compares the accuracy of introspection to the accuracy of sense perception – pretty good, presumably, about medium-sized, nearby matters (1985, 1988). Dan Dennett, often cited as a pessimist about introspective report, actually says that we can come close to infallibility when charitably interpreted (2002).

[SL 1.2] Another domain in which philosophers have tended to be impressed with our self-knowledge is our attitudes, such as our beliefs and desires. This is the kind of thought that has impressed many philosophers as requiring some explaining: Although I can be wrong about it’s being sunny outside, I can’t in the same way be wrong about the fact that I think it’s sunny outside. Some philosophers have argued that this accuracy is due to the operation of a fairly simple and straightforward self-detection mechanism that takes our attitudes as inputs and produces beliefs about those attitudes as outputs, a mechanism so simple that it rarely errs. Others have argued that our attitudes, at least some of them, can contain each other in a self-fulfilling way, so that my belief that I think that it’s sunny in some sense literally contains as a part the belief that it’s sunny. (Sydney Shoemaker (1995/1996) and Fred Dretske (2004) have said things along roughly these lines, though their views are more subtle.)

From Descartes to the present, the philosophical literature on self-knowledge of consciousness and attitudes has focused, with a few exceptions, on statements of or attempted explanations of the fact that we know ourselves remarkably well. Even those portrayed as skeptical have mostly been exercised to concoct bizarre or pathological scenarios designed to show that although our self-knowledge may be excellent it’s not wholly infallible. The debate, that is, has been between the infallibilists and the not-quite-infallibilists. I, however, am inclined to think we don’t know our stream of consciousness or our own attitudes very well at all.

ii.

[SL 2, 2.1] Let’s consider currently ongoing conscious experience. Suppose you’re looking directly at a sizeable red object in good light and normal conditions. You judge that you’re having the visual experience of red. How could you possibly be wrong about that? Or suppose someone has just dropped a 60 pound barbell on your toe. You judge that you’re feeling pain. How could you possibly be wrong about that either?

Well, in such cases I’m inclined to think it is highly unlikely that one would go wrong. But the question is this: How representative are such cases? Does the apparent difficulty of going wrong about color and pain experiences in canonical conditions reflect the general security of our judgments about our ongoing stream of conscious experience, or are those cases exceptional, best cases? Optimists about our self-knowledge of our conscious experience tend to focus, with stunning regularly in fact, on exactly the cases of seeing red and feeling pain, generalizing from there, thus implicitly treating those cases as typical.

Let’s start somewhere else for a change. [SL 2.2] Close your eyes and form a visual image. (Go ahead and do it now if you want.) Imagine, for example, the front of your house as viewed from the street. Assuming that you can in fact form such imagery, consider this: How well do you know, right now, that imagery experience? You know, I assume, that you have an image, and you know some aspects of its content – that it’s your house, say, from a particular point of view. But that’s not really to say very much yet about your imagery experience. Consider these further questions:

How much of the scene can you vividly visualize at once? Can you keep the image of the chimney vividly in mind at the same time you vividly imagine your front door? Or does the image of the chimney fade as you start to think about the door? How much detail does your image have? How stable is it? Supposing you can’t visually imagine the entire front of your house in rich detail all at once, what happens to the aspects of the image that are relatively less detailed? If the chimney is still experienced as part of your imagery when your image-making energies are focused on the front door, how exactly is it experienced? Does it have determinate shape, determinate color? In general, do the objects in your image have color before you think to assign color to them, or do some of the colors remain indeterminate, at least for a while? If there is indeterminacy of color, how is that indeterminacy experienced? As gray? Does your visual image have depth in the same way your sensory visual experience does, or is your imagery somehow flatter, more sketch-like or picture-like? Is it located in subjective space? Does is seem in some way as though the image is in your head, or in front of your forehead, or before your eyes? Or does it seem wrong to say that the image is experienced as though located anywhere at all? How much is your visual imagery like the experience of seeing a picture, or having phosphenes, or afterimages, or dreams, or daydreams?

Now these are fairly substantial questions about your imagery experience. These aren’t piddling details, but questions about major-to-middle-sized features of the visual imagery that is presumably currently ongoing in you right now. If I asked you questions at that level of detail about an ordinary external object near to hand, you’d have no trouble at all – about a book, say. How stable is it? Does it flash in and out of existence? Does its cover have a durable color? What happens to its shape when you open it up, spin it around, look at the underside? These questions present no difficulty. And yet most of the people I’ve talked to find that questions at this level of detail about their conscious experience of imagery are considerably more difficult. In fact, I think people often simply get it wrong when they think about their imagery experience. One kind of evidence for this is the failure of psychologists, in more than 100 years of research, to find any real relationship between people’s self-reports about their imagery and their performance on cognitive tasks that would presumably be facilitated by imagery. For example, some people say they have imagery as vivid and detailed as ordinary vision, or even more so. Others claim to have no imagery at all. And yet there is no consistently detectable performance difference between self-described high- and low-imagery people on psychological tests like mental rotation tasks, mental unfolding tasks (these are tasks where you’re asked to guess what something would look like when unfolded), or tests of visual memory, or tests of visual creativity (Schwitzgebel 2002, Schwitzgebel in preparation).

Now of course people might still be quite accurate in their judgments about their visual imagery, even if the differences in their judgments don’t correspond to any sort of performance differences in behavioral tests. Maybe phenomenological differences are irrelevant to behavioral performance, or at least performance on the sorts of tasks that psychologists have so far concocted. But if you share my intuitive sense that it feels somehow difficult to introspect your imagery – if you share my insecurity about your self-knowledge of your own ongoing conscious experience of sustaining a visual image – then maybe you’ll grant me this: There’s no special, remarkable perfection in our knowledge of such things, no elite epistemic status. We probably know normal, outward objects better, in fact.

[SL 2.3] How about emotional experience? Reflect on your own ongoing emotional experience at this moment. Do you even have any? (If not, try to generate some.) Now let me ask: Is it completely obvious to you what the character of that experience is? Does introspection reveal it to you as clearly as visual observation reveals the presence of me standing up in the front of this room? Can you discern the gross and fine features of your emotions as easily and confidently as you can discern the gross and fine features of the clothing of the person sitting in front of you? Can you trace its spatiality (or nonspatiality), its viscerality or cognitiveness, its involvement with conscious imagery, thought, proprioception, or whatever, as sharply and infallibly as you can discern the shape, texture, color, and relative position of your chair? I can’t, of course, force a particular answer to these questions. I can only invite you to share my intuitive sense of uncertainty. And it doesn’t seem to me that the problem here is merely linguistic, merely a matter of finding the right words to describe an experience known in precise detail.

[SL 2.4] How about visual experience? Consider not your visual experience when you’re looking directly at a canonical color but rather your visual experience of the region 10 degrees or 30 degrees away from the center point. How clear is it? How finely delineated is your experience of the shape and color of things that you’re not looking directly at? People give very different answers to this question – some say they experience distinct shape and color only in a very narrow, rapidly moving foveal area, about 1-2 degrees of arc [indicate manually]; others claim to experience shape and color with high precision in 30 or 50 or 100 degrees of visual arc; still others find shape imprecise outside a narrow central area, but find color quite distinct even 30 or 50 degrees out. And what’s more, people’s opinions about this aren’t stable over time. In the course of a conversation, they’ll shift from thinking one thing to thinking another. They change their minds. The phenomenal character of their visual experience is not immediately obvious to them.

We don’t really know so much, then, I think, about our stream of consciousness experience, about the phenomenology always transpiring within us. We know certain things. Our knowledge tends to be good in three types of case, I suspect. [SL 2.5] First, we know the aspects of our phenomenology that we intentionally create or sustain. This is especially pertinent to imagery. If I aim to create a visual image of my house, or if I aim to sustain and consider such a visual image that came to me at first unbidden, then I generally know that I am visually imagining my house. This is a self-attribution that I work to make true. I can also work to make true particular features of that image: I can decide to imagine the house as red. Generally, I succeed and consequently know that my image is of a red house. But many features of the image I don’t have such control over, or at least don’t exercise such control over, such as its overall level of detail, the stability of its coloration, its flatness or depth, its similarity to visual experience – and about these things, my introspective judgments are much more tenuous and doubtful.

Our knowledge about our own experience is also good when we can lean upon our knowledge of the outside world to prop it up. I know the following non-experiential fact: I’m looking directly at a red thing, in good light. I also know enough about vision to know that this sort of stimulus tends to produce reddish experiences. Such background knowledge ordinarily contributes to and helps support my judgments about my current conscious experience. Another case: I know that my wife just said something insulting. This helps support my sense that the rising arousal I’m feeling is anger. But if you ask me about aspects of my sensory or emotional (or other) experience that are not in this way easily buttressed by my knowledge of the outside world, I tend to stumble or feel uncertainty: Consider not what objects or properties are experienced by me as out there but rather how I am experiencing those objects and properties – with how much clarity? with what features of visual perspective? with how much stability in my visual field? Consider not what emotional attribution makes sense given how I’ve been treated and how I’m now acting, but rather how that particular emotion is felt – where is it felt? how bodily is it? what is its rough phenomenal structure? On such questions I struggle and err.

The third type of experiential feature about which we have good self-knowledge, I’d speculate, are features about which it’s important to our survival or functioning that we get it right. It’s important that we be right about the approximate location of our pains, so we can avoid or repair tissue damage. It’s important that we be right about the presence or absence of hunger or thirst. It’s important that we know what objects and properties we’re perceiving and in what sensory modality. But again, probing even the gross morphology of the phenomenal character, if it takes us away from what it’s practically useful to know, leads us to dubious territory: We have no particular accuracy in our judgments about the precise character of the pain we feel (stabbing, shooting, dull) or its precise location (as you’ll know if you’ve ever tried to pinpoint a toothache for a dentist). The phenomenal character of our hunger and thirst – really anything about them besides their very presence or absence – we’re not especially prone to make accurate judgments about, I suspect.

Maybe also under this head should go the sense we have of the general gist of our thoughts, including those in the very recent past. Presumably recovering the general gist of a few seconds of recent thought is useful for regulating and maintaining coherent streams of thought. But again, as with hunger, thirst, and emotion, we’re not so good about even the grossest morphology – for example whether the thought was in inner speech or not, or whether it had an experiential subjective location. Such judgments, I suspect, tend to run hostage to our theories and preconceptions.

So I’d suggest there’s only a limited range of cases in which we have good self-knowledge about our stream of experience: cases in which we can make our self-attributions true; cases in which we can lean on our better knowledge of the outside world; and cases in which there are strong, directly practical reasons for us to know about some aspect of our phenomenal character. As for the rest, we just tend to make crap up and fly by the seat of our pants.

ii.

[SL 3, 3.1] How about our self-knowledge of our attitudes? For some of our attitudes I’m inclined toward a version of what sometimes gets called a “transparency” view (maybe Alex Byrne will talk a bit about transparency). The rough idea here is that if someone asks me something like “do you believe it will rain tomorrow?” I think about whether it will rain. That is, despite the fact that the question is about what I believe, in answering it I don’t think about what I believe, I think about external affairs – and then I express my judgment about those external affairs using, if it suits me, either self-attributive language (“Of course I don’t think it will rain!”) or objective language (“Of course it won’t rain”), with the difference between these two sorts of expression grounded more in conversational pragmatics than in the presence or absence of an introspective act. This expressive procedure delivers accurate self-attributions if there’s the right kind of hook-up between my judgment (“it won’t rain”) and my self-attributive expression of that judgment (“I don’t think it will rain”).

This sort of procedure works fine, I think, for fairly trivial attitudes or attitudes that connect fairly narrowly to our actions – attitudes like my preference for vanilla ice cream over chocolate when I’m asked on a particular occasion or my general belief that it doesn’t rain much in California in April. The vanilla preference and the rain belief don’t tangle much with my broad values or self-conception, and their connections to my behavior are pretty limited – an evening’s ice cream consumption, my springtime habits in picnic planning and umbrella carrying.

[SL 3.2] But those aren’t the attitudes I care about most – or at least they’re not the ones most critical to my self-knowledge in the morally-loaded sense of “self-knowledge”, in the sense of the Delphic oracle’s recommendation to “know thyself”. The oracle was presumably not concerned about whether people knew their attitudes toward the April weather. To the extent the injunction to know oneself pertains to self-knowledge of attitudes, it must be attitudes like your central values and your general background assumptions about the world and about other people. And about such matters, I believe (I think I believe!) our self-knowledge is rather poor.

[SL 3.3] Let’s start with sexism. Many men in academia sincerely profess that men and women are equally intelligent. Ralph, a philosophy professor let’s suppose, is one such man. He is prepared to argue coherently, authentically, and vehemently for equality of intelligence and has argued the point repeatedly in the past. And yet Ralph is systematically sexist in his spontaneous reactions, judgments, and unguarded behavior. When he gazes out on class the first day of each term, he can’t help but think that some students look brighter than others – and to him, the women rarely look bright. When a woman makes an insightful comment or submits an excellent essay, he feels more surprise than he would were man to do so, even though his female students make insightful comments and submit excellent essays at the same rate as the men. When Ralph is on the hiring committee for a new office manager, it won’t seem to him that the women are the most intellectually capable, even if they are; or if he does become convinced of the intelligence of a female applicant, it will have taken more evidence than if the applicant had been male. And so on. Ralph may know this about himself, or he may not. I don’t see any reason to think he has any special authority in such matters, compared to other people who have observed substantial portions of his relevant behavior. In fact, he may be disadvantaged by a desire not to see himself as sexist and by the more general desire to see himself as someone whose actions reflect his espoused principles.
Now you might want to say that in a case like Ralph’s – and let’s assume that Ralph is not aware of the pervasive sexism in his behavior – there’s no lack of authority about what one believes. Ralph believes that men and women are equally intelligent, you might suggest, he just doesn’t tend to act on that belief. Now this seems to me an overly linguistic and intellectualist view of belief. Our beliefs are what guide us not just in what we say, but in what we do – they animate our limbs, not just our mouths – and they’re also manifested in our spontaneous emotional reactions and our implicit assumptions. Now I don’t think it’s quite right to call Ralph simply an out-and-out sexist who straightforwardly believes that women are intellectually inferior. What Ralph says and how he reasons in his most abstract and most thoughtful moments is an important part of what he does, even it it’s only a part. Ralph’s attitude toward the intellectual equality of the sexes is what I’d call an in-between state. His dispositions, his patterns of response, his habits of thought, are mixed up and inconsistent. It’s neither quite right to say that he believes in the intellectual equality of the sexes nor quite right to say that he fails to believe that. But he has no specially privileged self-knowledge of that fact.

Many people profess to believe in God and Heaven. Here again, I think we have a case where sincere linguistic avowal often comes apart from behavioral manifestation and spontaneous response. To believe in God, in the mainstream monotheistic sense, is in part to believe that there’s an omniscient agent who is always observing you, with the power to reward you with eternal bliss or condemn you to eternal torment. Many people who sincerely verbally espouse the existence of such a God fail to act and react in their daily lives as though such a God exists: They’ll do before God what they wouldn’t do before any neighbor, even the most forgiving one; and only human eyes and human condemnation will give them the pinch of fear and remorse. Such people are, I think, like Ralph the sexist. But rarely do they realize that they are. If you take yourself to believe in such a God, and if your behavior is less than saintly, you should be terrified about the state of your faith.

I say I value family over work. When I stop and think about it, it seems to me vastly more important to be a good father than to give talks like this one. Yet I’m off to work early, I come home late. I take family vacations and my mind is occupied with some journal article. I’m more elated by my rising prestige than by my son’s successes in school. My wife rightly scolds me: Do I really believe that family is more important? Or: I sincerely say that those lower than me in social status deserve my respect; but do I believe this, if I don’t live that way?
If my attitudes – my beliefs and my values, especially – are not so much what I sincerely avow when the question is put to me explicitly but rather what is reflected in my overall patterns of action and reaction, in my implicit assumptions, my spontaneous inclinations, then although I may have pretty good knowledge of the simple and trivial, or the relatively narrow and concrete – what I think of April’s weather – the attitudes that are most morally central to my life, the ones crucial to my self-image, I tend to know only poorly.

iii.

[SL 4] How about other features of my mentality? My personality traits, my moral character, the quality of my philosophical work, my overall intelligence?
[SL 4.1] My own view is that traits of this sort are structurally very similar to attitudes. Personality trait attributions, skill attributions, and attitude attributions can all be seen as shorthand ways of talking about patterns of action and reaction. And our degree of self-knowledge is roughly similar: Our self-knowledge is pretty good about narrow and concrete matters, especially when an attribution is normatively neutral in the sense that it doesn’t tend to cast one in either a good or a bad light, and it’s also pretty good when there are straightforward external measures. I know I’m good at Scrabble. That’s pretty narrow, concrete, and measurable. I know that I’m more interested in business news than celebrity gossip. Just look at what parts of the newspaper I read.

Now of course there’s a whole industry in psychology based on the self-report of personality traits. It generally works by asking people medium-sized questions about traits or attitudes – do you like to go to parties? do you go out of your way to meet new people? – and then finds patterns in the answers. If you generally say yes to questions like that, you’re an extravert. There is some stability in people’s answers to such questions over time, and some relationship between how people rate themselves in such matters and how their friends rate them. Correlations to outward behavior, though, tend to be at best moderate, and self-evaluations and peer-evaluations tend to break apart when the trait in question is evaluatively loaded (John and Robins 1993; Gosling et al. 1998). It’s okay to like parties, and it’s okay not to like parties; self-evaluations and peer evaluations on that fairly narrow and neutral measure tend to line up; so also actual party-going behavior, maybe. Not so much, though, for evaluative attributions like being flexible or lazy. In fact Oliver John and Richard Robins found a tendency for self-attributions and peer-attributions to correlate negatively for some traits: People whose peers judged them to be (relatively) ignorant, undependable, unfair, or lazy were actually less likely to describe themselves as (relatively) ignorant, undependable, unfair, or lazy than were people whose peers did not attribute them those vices.

[SL 4.2] Perhaps the most general evaluatively loaded trait attribution is simply whether one is a morally good person. How well do we know this about ourselves? I’d guess that there’s approximately a zero correlation between people’s actual moral character and their opinions about their moral character. Plenty of angels (but not all) think rather poorly of themselves, and plenty of jerks (but not all) think they’re just dandy. If you think pretty well of yourself, it’s probably just about as likely that you’re actually a relatively good and admirable person as that you’re overall moral character is below average. It would be nice to have some empirical data on this. Unfortunately, there’s not much so far. People are too wily.

However, I suspect that our habit – the habit of most of us, at least, and certainly me – is to assume that we’re pretty decent people, above average overall in moral character, and then defensively reinterpret and rationalize any counterevidence. I’ve been trying to get out of this habit myself, and it’s highly unpleasant. [SL 4.3] I’ve been trying to take an icy look at my moral behavior, applying simple objective standards, and I can’t say that I’ve shown up as well as I hoped. At work, I tend to carry less than the average load of committee duties, suggesting that I’m a shirker; too frequently I forget about meetings with students or even qualifying exams, suggesting I’m self-absorbed; I seem to make more requests and ask for more exceptions than average from editors and conference organizers, suggesting that I’m difficult and demanding. Now I tend to think of myself as a good department citizen, attentive to my students, and relatively easy-going. But so also, I suspect, do most professors, even those who lack such traits. Attending to simple objective measures like hours in committee meetings, number of forgotten appointments, and number of special requests, might help serve as a check against self-deception. Of course, if I cherry-pick objective measures, I can find some that make me look good; but a self-flattering preference for some measures over others is exactly the sort of defensive rationalization that I seek to avoid.

I can carry this icy look over into my personal life, of course, but I don’t feel like sharing that with you all. Unfortunately, it looks no better. I will tell you one whimsical objective measure I’ve concocted – whimsical, but I do take it somewhat seriously. I call it the jerk-sucker ratio. Suppose there’s a line of cars slowed down to make a left turn or to exit the freeway. They’re not stopped. Their lane is just slower than your lane, because it’s crowded with cars planning to turn. The question is, how far along do you go before you change over into that lane? Cutting in at the last moment, of course, is the jerk option – it puts you in front of everyone else without having waited your turn and furthermore it increases the risk of accident and slows down the cars behind you in your lane who aren’t turning or exiting. Getting over early and tolerating the jerks is the sucker option. Suppose there are 48 cars waiting and two who cut in at the last moment. If you’re one of those two who cuts in, you’re in the 96th percentile for jerks. If there are 85 cars waiting and 15 who cut in, and you cut in, you’re in the 85th percentile for jerks. Of course, I might think to myself that I’ve got better reasons to hurry than all the others waiting or that I’m a skilled enough driver to cut in at the last second without negative consequences. And maybe for some people that’s true; but in my own case I worry that that would just be defensive rationalization. Of course, I don’t take this little test as a valid measure of jerkhood across the board: There may be little if any relationship between your driving behavior and how you treat your students or your spouse. But this is the kind of thing, extended to more serious issues, that constitutes the objectively grounded, icy self-examination I have in mind.

[SL 4.4] I was going to say a little something about intelligence too, and skill in philosophy, but I find I have no time. But maybe the case need hardly be made. Do you think there’s anyone in this room who doesn’t substantially overestimate his or her philosophical abilities?

iv.

Self-knowledge? Of general features of our stream of conscious experience, of our general and morally most important attitudes, of our real values and our moral character, of our intelligence, of what really makes us happy and unhappy – about such matters I doubt we have much real knowledge at all. We live in cocoons of ignorance, especially where our self-conception is at stake. The philosophical focus on how impressive our self-knowledge is gets what's most important backwards.

[OPTIONAL, IF TIME, SL 4.5] Maybe it’s good that way. Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown (1988), reviewing a broad range of literature, suggest that positive illusions about oneself are the ordinary concomitant of mental health; so also, I suspect, is blasé confidence in answering questions about the stream of experience. It’s mainly depressed people, Taylor and Brown say, who have a realistic self-image and an adequate appreciation of their limitations. That’s a controversial conclusion, of course, but I start to feel the pull of it.

Why I Think the Newer Model Will Become Increasingly Prominent

(by guest blogger Manuel Vargas)

(this is a note to this post on The Splintered Mind)

One, there is always something impressive about big publication records, especially if a reasonable number of those publications end up in good, or even occasionally great journals. I’ll go to my grave recalling when I discovered that by the late 1990s, Pat Suppes had over 400 publications. I’m sorry, but that is just awesome.

Two, the more pubs model tends to bring with it some reputational advantages generated out of citation impact. If you are publishing more, (and crucially) if you are part of a network of scholars publishing more, and your work is any good by the standards of that community, you are going to be getting more citations partly because there is more citing going on. And that inevitably has some visibility spillover outside one’s field.

Three, there will be some pressure to favor this model from larger forces at work in academe: i.e., it is more reliable path to tenure and beyond to focus on novelty+volume than focusing on single, highly-polished masterpieces. Minimally, it is proof of productivity, a currency everywhere recognizable, even by (or especially by!) deans with no background in philosophy.

Four: the system fuels itself. If you are more aware of productive people around you, my bet is that it will heighten your sense of needing to be more productive. Over time, you get an arms race of publication, where more and more people are publishing more to avoid looking comparatively bad.

And, for the record, would people please stop publishing so much about free will and moral responsibility? You all are starting to make me look bad.

Comments on Gualtiero Piccinini “First-Person Data, Publicity, and Self-Measurement”

Why should we care whether first-person data – which are mostly subjective reports that people make about what’s going on in their minds – are private? [pause] Well the core idea here, I think, is this: Calling first-person data “private” stresses the fact that people have an access to what’s going on in their own minds that’s more direct and also more accurate than the access anyone else can have to what’s going on in their minds – so much more direct and more accurate that it’s really, epistemically, different in kind. If I’m entertaining a visual image, say, of the Eiffel Tower, I seem to have some sort of access to or awareness of that imagery that no one else can have. If you want to know what imagery I have right now, you have no recourse – no realistic recourse, anyway – other than to ask me. In that sense, my imagery is private.

I know Gualtiero defines “privatism” somewhat differently than this, and quite a bit more strongly. He defines it so strongly, in fact, that I’m not sure there are any leading contemporary philosophers who are privatists in his sense. Goldman, as Gualtiero mentions, seems (especially recently) to have embraced a more moderate position. And Chalmers is at most an inconsistent or very partial advocate of the position. I doubt Chalmers’s considered view is as strongly privatist as Gualtiero suggests. After all, the idea that there is no way to validate, to confirm or disconfirm, to shed light on the accuracy or inaccuracy of, first-person data, such as introspective reports about mental states – no way other than, perhaps, looking for bald contradictions – that’s a very strong and pretty implausible claim unless it’s very narrowly restricted in some way. Few contemporary philosophers are going to want to be committed, I think, to a broad and strong privacy claim. As Gualtiero points out, it’s pretty common, for example, for people to call into question our sincere reports about our emotional states, and we often accept such corrections.

So I think we should treat the key issue about privatism not as whether that unreasonably strong claim about the impossibility of external checks is true or false but rather whether a certain more modest claim is true or false – whether the kind of knowledge we have about our own mental states (or some important subclass of those mental states such as the conscious ones) is so much better and more direct than the access anyone else could have that a special epistemic label – “private” – is justified as a way of characterizing this asymmetry of access.

Here’s a thought experiment to consider: Suppose that in a hundred years neuroscience is so advanced that neuroscientists can reliably tell – by looking at relevant topologically-arranged regions of my visual cortex perhaps – what kind of visual imagery I’m having, for example, whether I’m visually imagining a square or a circle or a hamburger or the Eiffel Tower; and maybe they could narrow things down to a fairly fine level of detail; and maybe they could add some semantic or associational content by looking at connected activity in other brain regions. Suppose also, as I think, that people are not infallible judges of their imagery experience. In 2109, I sit inside the latest high-tech brain scanner (if by some miracle I live that long). Although my method for arriving at judgments about my imagery may be very different than the scientists’ method, we may be epistemically about on a par: not infallible, really very good (perhaps virtually infallible) about gross morphology, less reliably accurate about matters of detail. Would I still, in such a case, want to say that I have “private” access to my mental life? My mental states are still private in one sense: Only I have them. But I’d suggest that they’re not private in the sense that’s relevant here – the sense relevant to scientific epistemology.

The question of privatism should, I think, come down to a question – an empirical question – about the nature and reliability of our access to our own minds and the extent to which that can be reproduced or matched by outside observers. On this question, with one caveat, I’m very much on Gualtiero’s side – mostly because I think our access to our minds is much worse than people tend to think it is, and much more entangled with the ordinary, fallible cognitive processes by which we reach judgments about the outside world. Our self-knowledge is so meager, it won’t take long for scientists to catch up, even given a fairly modest vision of what science can accomplish.

The caveat is this: About my conscious experience – even perhaps about such fundamental questions as whether I am a conscious being at all -- it may be the case that outsiders who are sufficiently removed from me (intelligent robots say, or aliens from another planet) can only assume or theorize whereas I and my friends can know. So universal, cross-species publicity about what creatures are conscious creatures, and what it’s like to be them, may be unattainable.

Reply to Murphy on Mind and Supermind

A couple of years ago, Eric and I had an exchange about my book Mind and Supermind (see here and here). Part of this revolved around passages from Dominic Murphy's review of the book on Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. I felt that the review misrepresented the scope and aims of the book, and Eric suggested I write up a response for the underblog. I made some notes, but shelved them, thinking it would seem querulous to reply to a reviewer. However, since then I’ve occasionally been asked how I would respond to Murphy’s objections, and I felt it might be useful to dig out the comments and make them public. So, since Eric kindly kept his offer open, here they are. Aside from adding a few references to my more recent work, I've not changed them.
-----

I am grateful to Dominic Murphy for his review of my book, which I found thoughtful and provocative. However, I felt that in several places he misinterpreted the book’s aims and the nature and strength of the claims made being, and this reply is intended to set the record straight. This is not meant to imply to any criticism of Dr Murphy. If the book is open to misinterpretation, then that is squarely my fault. But I believe the issues are important enough for it to be worth clarifying exactly what I was proposing.

(1) Murphy claims that the book makes a very strong to commitment to the view that folk psychology quantifies over real entities and is almost wholly accurate about their nature.

Reply: The book does argue that folk psychology is committed to a form of intentional realism, but the form in question is a non-standard one, which does not involve claims about internal architecture. I argue that the folk concept of belief tracks personal-level states, not subpersonal ones -- behavioural dispositions in the case of what I call the 'basic mind', and behavioural commitments (specifically, premising policies) in the case of the ‘supermind’. Nor does the book argue that folk psychology is accurate. Its aim is to articulate a view of the mind that systematizes our folk-psychological intuitions about it -- a theoretical regularization of folk psychology. For the purposes of the project, I proceed on the assumption that most folk-psychological practices are sound, but (aside from a few speculative comments in the final chapter) I don’t argue that the resulting theory is in fact true. I make this clear in Chapter 1.

(2) Murphy objects that it is implausible to claim that folk psychology divides neatly into two unified sub-theories, each of which accurately characterizes one aspect of our mental nature. He suggests that the conflicts I identify cross-cut each other, and that mental states can share properties I treat as exclusive.

Reply: First, since the two-strand framework is intended as a theoretical regularization of folk psychology, it’s not essential that it should capture all our intuitions and ways of speaking (pp.8-11, 49-50). What matters it is that it should embody a reflective equilibrium, which strikes the optimal balance between intuition and theoretical economy. Second, I don’t argue that the various features of belief must go together in the way I suggest. Rather, I sketch two types of attitude (behavioural dispositions and premising policies) in which they do go together in that way, and then suggest that everyday belief-talk is best understand as referring to one or other of these two types of attitude. Third, in the book I am concerned only with folk psychology, and I make no attempt to characterize states and processes at subpersonal level -- those, that is, that support the dispositions that constitute the basic mind. These are, I argue, beyond the purview of folk psychology. Thus, nothing I say rules out the possibility that there may be subpersonal states which combine features of strand 1 and strand 2 (see pp.43-4).

(3) Murphy objects that it is just false to claim that conscious belief is binary and that we have no immediate awareness of our degrees of conscious belief.

Reply: I agree that we can have varying degrees of confidence in our conscious beliefs (the claim is in fact central to my definition of superbelief), but I deny that this affects their status as binary. Conscious belief is binary in virtue of the fact that it involves commitment to a premising policy, and this sort of commitment does not admit of degree. Typically, then, our degrees of confidence in our flat-out beliefs will not affect how we reason with those beliefs -- though they will help to determine how ready we are to abandon them in the face of conflicting evidence. I agree, too, that we have some awareness of these degrees of confidence. I deny, however, that we have direct, introspective awareness of them. We infer the strength of a belief from our reactions to relevant scenarios -- for example, to the thought of giving it up, or of making various bets on its truth.

(4) Murphy objects that attributions of unconscious beliefs seem as susceptible to a binary interpretation as attributions of conscious ones, and, more generally, that folk psychology seems to treat conscious and unconscious beliefs in the same way.

Reply: I agree that folk psychology doesn’t treat conscious and unconscious beliefs as radically different; indeed I think that for most purposes it conflates the two strands (p.10). Again, the proposed distinction is offered as a theoretical regularization of folk psychology, not an analysis of it. I claim that there are deep tensions within folk psychology, which are best understood as arising from the use of the same theoretical vocabulary for two different but superficially similar phenomena.

(5) Murphy objects to the claim that what I call ‘austere functionalists’, such as Dennett and Davidson, must hold that beliefs can only ever be sustaining causes and never dynamic (triggering) ones.

Reply: By ‘austere functionalism’ I mean the view that treats beliefs and desires as multi-track behavioural dispositions, and thus as standing states. Dynamic causation is a relation between events (e.g. between ‘occurrent’ beliefs and actions), so an austere functionalist must deny that beliefs and desires are dynamic cases. Of course, when a disposition manifests itself there will be various relevant events in the offing -- triggering events and lower-level mediating events. But on an austere functionalist view none of these can correctly be described as an occurrent belief or desire.

(6) Murphy notes that the proposed two-level framework results in a very complicated theory of reasoning on which actions may have two different explanations, and he objects that the gains don't compensate for this complication.

Reply: The account is indeed complicated, but it does have substantial compensating gains. It explains and resolves numerous tensions in folk psychology. It meets the Bayesian challenge (the challenge of explaining how flat-out beliefs can guide the behaviour of a rational agent). It explains how thought processes can constitutively involve natural language. It vindicates the intuition that we have a measure of control over our mental states and reasoning processes. It explains how we can be justified in our tacit commitments to propositional and conceptual modularity, even though we are ignorant of the functional architecture of the brain. And, as I argue in the final chapter, it offers robust explanations of akrasia, self-deception, and first-person authority. Of course, the proffered explanations may not be sound, but if they are, then they amply compensate for the complications.

(7) Murphy objects that because superbeliefs are held with high confidence I face the same problem with conjunctive closure as advocates of the confidence view. So why not stick with that view, and treat the graded conception of belief as primary -- thereby avoiding all the complicated extra machinery?

Reply: This misses the point. The problem for the confidence view is that it cannot explain why belief should be subject to conjunctive closure in the first place, and virtually requires us to deny that it is. The proposed two-level view doesn’t face this problem. If forming the flat-out belief that p involves (among other things) committing oneself to taking p as a premise in deductive reasoning, including conjunction introduction, then our commonsense commitment to conjunctive closure is vindicated. Now it’s true that on my view flat-out belief also involves high confidence, and thus that it is also subject to probabilistic norms that are incompatible with conjunctive closure. But this is not a problem, since it appears to be true. We do feel that belief is subject to conflicting norms -- which is how the paradox of the preface gets its grip. One moral of this -- which I draw explicitly in a more recent paper -- is that the folk concept of flat-out belief is unlikely to have an important role in formal epistemology.

(8) Murphy asks why we should take the view that the supermind is realized in the basic mind. Wouldn’t it be simpler to treat the basic mind and the supermind as having largely independent physical bases? He also complains that no details are given about the notion of realization.

Reply: In saying that the supermind is realized in the basic mind, I mean that it consists in the possession of a set of basic beliefs and desires -- beliefs and desires that motivate and guide an appropriate range of premising policies. This view is a corollary of the claim that superbeliefs are premising policies, since policy possession is constituted by the possession of certain beliefs and desires. (Thus, even if the supermind were realized in a separate neural subsystem, that subsystem would still have to support a hierarchy of intentional states -- those at the lower level constituting the premising policies in which those at the higher level consist.) The case for the premising view itself (a variant of the behavioural view) is made in Chapter 3, and the realization thesis is developed in detail in Chapter 4. Further support for the realization thesis comes from its role in the various applications of the theory. In particular, it is crucial to the proposed solution to the Bayesian challenge -- a challenge that can be recast in a more general form as that of explaining how two reasoning systems can constitute a unified agent. Views which posit separate reasoning systems have serious problems here. The realization thesis also has attractions from an evolutionary point of view (see the -- admittedly brief -- remarks at pp.152-3 and 228-9). More recently, I have argued that the realization thesis can also resolve problems facing dual system-theories in cognitive psychology (see my 'Systems and levels', linked in (11) below.)

(9) According to Murphy, I deal with the folk commitment to propositional and conceptual modularity by denying that modularity at the supermental level is an architectural hypothesis and treating it simply as a commitment to independently assessable contents. Given this, he argues, the proposal could have been stated as a simple Dennettian claim about the shallowness of intentional psychology, without all the machinery of mind/supermind.

Reply: I do not deny that the modularity theses are architectural hypotheses. I treat them as claims about functional organization -- about the causal roles of various mental states and components. I do deny, however, that they are claims about neural architecture. The mental states and components in question are personal-level states and skills, and the functional architecture they implement is a virtual one. This is argued for at length in Chapters 6 and 7.

(10) Murphy claims that if the supermind is realized in the basic mind, then it ultimately has whatever neural architecture the basic mind has.

Reply: If the thought is that ascriptions of supermental states entail claims about subpersonal architecture, then the objection trades on a type/token confusion. Each token superbelief will inherit the subpersonal realization base of the token basic beliefs and desires that constitute it. Every higher-level state needs some realization base. What I deny is that superbeliefs require a certain type of subpersonal realization base, and I argue at length that they don’t, since a richly structured supermind can be realized in an austere basic mind, understood as a set of multi-track behavioural dispositions.

(11) Murphy objects that there is no science in the book, and little attempt to show that the proposed two-level framework sheds light on scientific inquiries.

Reply: Again, this reflects the aim of the book, which is to systematize our everyday view of belief, not to defend that view. Now, I do in fact think that the resulting regularized theory is broadly sound (and say so in the book), but establishing its soundness is a very different project -- and one that certainly does require contact with the empirical literature. Apart from a short section on scientific psychology in Chapter 7, there is nothing on this in the book. (For some later work that seeks to apply the two-level framework to issues in scientific and clinical psychology, see here and here.) Moreover, even if the theory is sound, it will not shed light on the subpersonal organization of the human mind. The states and processes it deals in are personal-level ones: dispositions, commitments, and activities of the whole agent. Some may say that the really interesting questions about the mind are precisely ones about subpersonal psychology. I tend to agree, but it is important to disentangle those questions from those posed by folk psychology, and that is a central aim of the book.

Block's Reply to My Post on Consciousness and Attention

Ned Block felt I distorted his view in my post Consciousness Without Attention? I post here (with Ned's permission) the full text of our last two conversational turns.

From me to Ned Block, November 19:

Hi Ned --

In light of your objection, I've posted an update on my blog indicating that you think I've oversimplified your argument. It would be helpful, though, to have clarification on two points:

(1.) Is it consistent with your view that consciousness is limited to what's in (perhaps diffuse) attention?

and

(2.) If you do think that consciousness does outrun attention in the inattentional blindness (and other) cases, do you think that does NOT apply in the Sperling case?

Your answers to (1) and (2), in my mind, would determine whether I have really substantially misunderstood your view.

Best,

Eric

Ned's Reply later that day:

Dear Eric, I don't have definite views on those questions. My argument was concerned with cognitive access, not attention. The phrase I used in the paper when I was being careful, especially in my reply to Jesse which was about that topic, was "the evidence points towards". I argued that the evidence "points toward the conclusion that neither [attention nor consciousness] is necessary for the other". Evidence can point toward a conclusion without conclusively showing that that conclusion is right. In a number of different paradigms, when attention is removed to the extent that people know how to remove it, you still get conscious perception. That seems to me to point toward the conclusion. Also, I like my "mesh" argument to the effect that we can explain overflow by assuming that recurrent loops in the back of the head are conscious all by themselves. I think there is good reason to think that what attention is is a process by which some representations are amplified and other suppressed via top-down control, but we also know that that the same levels of recurrent activation can at least in principle be reached without top-down influence and hence without attention. So I think there is substantial reason for believing in conscious experience without attention. Still, is it CONSISTENT with my view that consciousness requires attention if only diffuse attention? Yes, since I don't think that the evidence settles the matter.

I do think that consciousness PROBABLY outruns attention in the "inattentional blindness" cases, but I don't think I even mentioned attention in my discussion of Sperling. You summarize my argument, saying:
Similarly, when one is presented with a Sperling-like display -- a very brief presentation of three rows of alphanumeric characters -- one has a sense of visually experiencing the whole display despite the fact that one can only attend to (and report) some incomplete portion of it. Therefore, conscious experience outruns attention.

As I said, I don't think that I mentioned attention at all in connection with the Sperling experiment, and if I did, it was not the main point. But more importantly, I am not trying to give an argument of the FORM that you suggest. You suppose my argument is of the form: there is consciousness in such and such a situation but no attention. But to the extent that I am even talking about attention at all, my point is more holistic as indicated above.

Even if I am right about these things, I don't take them to show that there is not any such thing as inattentional blindness. Some specific representation might not get to the level of recurrent activation required for consciousness without attention, so depriving it of attention could count as inattentional blindness. I think the standard "change blindness" and "inattentional blindness" cases might occasionally be genuine inattentional blindness in the sense just mentioned, but probably mostly are not cases of blindness at all but rather inattentional inaccessibility as suggested by the Landman and Sligte experiments. The upshot is that although I think the evidence points towards the claim that attention is not necessary for consciousness, there can still be cases in which lack of attention makes the difference.

The issue of whether attention is necessary for consciousness may seem intractable if you insist on "direct" evidence, but the right perspective for consciousness research is, as I argued in the paper, holistic.

Going back to your original post:
You object to me and to Koch and Tsuchiya, saying:
"I believe this argument fails. In both cases, it's plausible to suppose that there may be diffuse attention to the entire display, the entire (say) computer screen, albeit with focal attention on only one part of it. Such examples may establish that consciousness outruns focal attention narrowly defined, but they do not establish that consciousness outruns some broader span of diffuse attention."
I doubt that very many readers of your argument would expect that In the very issue of the journal you refer to, I say (correctly) "As Koch & Tsuchiya (2007) point out, it is difficult to make absolutely sure that there is no attention devoted to a certain stimulus." That is, I acknowledge the very point you make in the the very article you say makes the mistake.

I would be happy to have this posted if you want to.

cheers
Ned

Brief Introduction to Dynamic Systems Theory

From Neither Brain nor Ghost
By Teed Rockwell
Published 2005 MIT Press

A Brief Introduction to DST

A dynamic system is created when conflicting forces of various kinds interact, then resolve into some kind of partly stable, partly unstable, equilibrium. The relationships between these forces and substances create a range of possible states that the system can be in. This set of possibilities is called the state space of the system. The dimensions of the state space are the variables of the system. Every newspaper contains graphs which plot the relationship between two variables, such as inflation and unemployment, or wages and price increases, or crop yield and rainfall etc. A graph of this sort is a representation of a set of points in a two-dimensional space. Newspapers and journals will also sometimes contain graphs which add a third variable, and thus represents a three-dimensional space, using the tricks of perspective drawing. The state space of the sort of dynamic system studied by cognitive scientists will have many more dimensions than this, each of which measures variations in a different biologically and/or cognitively relevant variable: Air pressure, temperature, concentration of a certain chemical, even (surprise!) a position in physical space. But the mathematics is the same regardless of how many variables the space contains, or the physical or biological process that each dimension is tracking.

However, although these variables define the range of possibilities for the system, only a few of these possibilities actually occur. To study a dynamic system is to look for mathematically describable patterns in the way the values of the variables change and fluctuate within the borders of its state space. The patterns that a system tends to settle into are called attractors, basins of attraction, or invariant sets. In Port and Van Gelder 1995, an invariant set is defined as "a subset of the state space that contains the whole orbit of each of its points. Often one restricts attention to a given invariant set, such as an attractor, and considers that to be a dynamical system in its own right." (p.574) In other words, an invariant set is not just any set of points within the state space of the system. When several interrelated variables fluctuate in a predictable and law-like way, the point that describes the relationship between those variables travels through state space in a path which is called an orbit. The set of points which contains that orbit is called an invariant set because the variations in that part of the system repeat themselves within a permanent set of boundaries.

Port and Van Gelder define "attractor" as " the regions of the state space of a dynamical system toward which trajectories tend as time passes. As long as the parameters are unchanged, if the system passes close enough to the attractor, then it will never leave that region." (p.573). The simplest example of an attractor is an attractor point, such as the lowest point in the middle of a pendulum swing. The flow of this simple dynamic system is continually drawn to this central attractor point, and after a time period determined by a variety of factors (the force of the push, the length of the string, the friction of the air etc.) eventually settles there. A slightly more complex system would settle into not just an attractor point but an attractor basin. i.e. a set of points that describes a region of that space. The reason that these attractors are called basins of attraction is because the system "settles" into one of these patterns as its parameters shift, not unlike the way a rolling ball will settle into a basin on a shifting irregular surface. A soap bubble is the result of a single fairly stable attractor basin, caused by the interaction of the surface tension of the soap molecules with the pressure of the air on its inside and outside. Because a spherical shape has the smallest surface area for a given volume, uniform pressure on all sides makes the bubble spherical. But when the air pressure around the soap bubble changes, e.g. when the wind blows, the shape of the bubble also changes. The bubble then becomes a simple easily visible dynamic system of a sort, marking out a region in space that changes as the tensions that define its boundaries change. To see how these same principles can eventually reach a level of complexity that makes them a plausible embodiment of thought and consciousness, imagine the following developments.

1) The soap bubble could get caught up in an air current that flows regularly so that, even though the soap bubble is not staying the same shape, it changes shape in a repeating pattern. As I mentioned earlier, this pattern is often called an orbit, because the trajectory that describes this repeating change forms something like a loop traveling through the state space of the system. Systems that settle into orbits are usually more complicated than those which settle only into attractor basins which are temporally static, particularly when those orbits follow patterns that are more complicated than mere loops.

2) Instead of having the soap bubble fluctuate in three dimensional space, imagine that it is fluctuating in a multi-dimensional computational state space. As I mentioned earlier, state space is not limited to the three dimensions of physical space, for it can have a separate dimension for every changeable parameter in the system. The most popular example in cognitive science of a system that operates within a multi-dimensional state space is a connectionist neural network. Connectionist nets consist of arrays of neurons, and each neuron in a given array has a different input or output voltage. Each of those voltages is seen as a point along a dimension of a Cartesian coordinate system, so that an array of ten neurons, for example, would describe a ten-dimensional space. But in other kinds of dynamic systems analyses, any variable parameter can be a dimension in a Cartesian computational space. Our friend the soap bubble can be interpreted as a visual representation of the air pressure coming from every possible angle within the three dimensions in physical space, if all other background conditions remain stable. And when the various interacting forces and variables in a dynamic system are designated as dimensions in a multi-dimensional space, it becomes possible to predict and describe the relationships between different attractor basins in that system. This is the most relevant disanalogy between a soap bubble and the more complicated dynamic systems studied by cognitive scientists. Because:

3) A soap bubble has really only one stable attractor basin. Although the attractor space that produces a soap bubble is fairly flexible, the bubble pops and dissolves if too much pressure is put on it from any one side. But in certain systems, there are fluctuations of the variables which can cause the system to settle into a completely different attractor space. These systems thus consist of several different basins of attraction, which are connected to each other by means of what are called bifurcations. This makes it possible for the system to change from one attractor basin to another by varying one parameter or group of parameters, and thus initiate a different complex pattern of behavior in response to that change.

This propensity to bifurcate between different attractor basins is what differentiates relatively stable systems (like soap bubbles) from unstable systems (like living organisms or ecosystems). In this sense, all living systems are unstable, because they don’t settle into an equilibrium state that isolates them from their surroundings. Organisms are constantly taking in food, breathing in air, and excreting waste products back into the environment they are interacting with. We usually think of unstable processes as formless and incomprehensible, but this is often not the case. Certain unstable systems have a tendency to settle into patterns which still fluctuate, but fluctuate within parameters that are comprehensible enough to produce an illusion of concreteness. When the various forces that constitute the processes shift in interactive tension with each other, a basin of attraction destabilizes in a way that makes the system bifurcate i.e. shift to another basin of attraction. This kind of system is sometimes called multi-stable, because its changes between various basins of attraction are predictable and (to some degree) comprehensible. A complete pictorial graph of a dynamic system of this sort would resemble figure 4. It would show interlocking computational spaces whose transitions were governed by the relationships between the constituting forces of the system.

This process of bifurcation bears a significant resemblance to the switching between possible branches of decision trees which is the fundamental cognitive process performed by computer languages. And this kind of decision-making is an essential part of many extra-cranial aspects of skillful sensory motor activity, a fact which plays havoc with Descartes' distinction between the so-called automatic functions of the body and the rational decision making of the mind.

The Psychology of Philosophy

The Psychology of Philosophy
(for the Experimental Psychology pre-conference of the
Society for Philosophy and Psychology)

Eric Schwitzgebel
for June 25, 2008


i.
Experimental philosophy, as an intellectual movement, has so far been focused mostly on one sort of experiment: polling intuitions, or at least what philosophers would ordinarily call “intuitions”. That is, experimental philosophy has centered on asking people for their judgments about issues of philosophical dispute, or more commonly their judgments about particular cases that warring philosophers would judge differently.

For example: Joshua Knobe, Bertram Malle, Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon and others have asked people for their judgments about whether certain actions are intentional; Eddy Nahmias, Shaun Nichols, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and others have asked people their views about determinism and moral responsibility; Marc Hauser, Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, John Mikhail, and others have asked people for their judgments about the morality of killing one person to save others; Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe, and others have probed people’s judgments about causation.

It’s high time philosophy as a discipline got serious about such issues. Since at least the rise of “ordinarily language philosophy” in the middle of the 20th century, philosophers have explicitly and self-consciously relied on appeals to what ordinary people find intuitive. The bottled-up sense many philosophers have long had that we haven’t been held empirically to account for such claims, constituted a pent-up demand for experimental philosophy – a demand that partly explains the movement’s sudden prominence and attention once it was finally articulated as a research program and experimental results began coming in.

But clearly philosophers make experimentally testable claims that aren’t just expressions of what they, or “we”, or people in general find intuitive. We should think about whether experimental philosophy has room for experiments of other sorts, or whether to bring them under the tent threatens the coherence and vision of the movement.

ii.
It would help in thinking about this if I knew better what a philosophical claim was. Philosophers, of course, make all sorts of claims. Some of them are clearly merely background assumptions, the testing of which wouldn’t count as philosophy – that we dream at night, that starving people in far-away countries would benefit from our charity, that chimpanzees can be trained to use hand signals. But what about the claim that there is a fundamental randomness to physical reality that cannot be resolved by means of hidden variables? Or the claim that human cognition is at root the manipulation of representational tokens? Or the claim that science is, or is not, more successful when it proceeds by means of biased investigators pushing their hypotheses than it would be if everyone were impartial? Are these philosophical claims, strictly speaking? And if so, is any researcher who designs an experiment aimed at shining light on a claim of this sort thereby doing experimental philosophy?

Now in fact my own view is that there is no clear line between the philosophical and the non-philosophical – that, as Alison Gopnik put it in a paper I co-wrote with her, “philosophy is just very theoretical anything” (Gopnik and Schwitzgebel 1998). Well, that’s a little too simple and compressed – but if something like it is right, then philosophy of biology is just very theoretical biology, philosophy of mind is just very theoretical psychology, philosophy of science is just the broadest inquiry into the scientific enterprise, and so forth, and the philosophical and the empirical or experimental will fade into each other. Researchers on that hazy border between philosophy and the empirical will be doing empirical or empirically-informed philosophy. If to qualify as an “experimental philosopher” one must actually conduct the experiments oneself, then most experimental philosophers will turn out to be employed by science departments. On the other hand if one needn’t actually perform the experiments then there are many more experimental philosophers than appear on most lists and bibliographies of experimental philosophy.

Either way, this characterization of experimental philosophy as research on the hazy border between the philosophical and the empirical makes experimental philosophy much older than it is ordinarily taken to be, and to span a much broader class of work than it is ordinarily taken to span. One could restrict it by including only people employed in philosophy departments who run experiments, so the field basically consists of experiments done by philosophy professors. But this is a strange and too simplistically sociological category. So maybe experimental philosophy is better conceived of in the relatively narrow way I suggested earlier, as restricted to the testing of intuitions about philosophical cases? That would make most of the people speaking in this pre-conference experimental philosophers, but not me.

iii.
Here’s another broad class of claims philosophers often make (though not as often as they make claims about their intuitions) that admits of experimental exploration: claims about their conscious experience or phenomenology. Sometimes phenomenological claims are made as independent philosophical theses. For example, there’s currently a hot dispute between philosophers who think that there’s a distinctive phenomenology of thought, different in kind from the phenomenology of emotions and imagery, and those who think there is no such phenomenology. In the philosophy of perception, there’s a long-standing dispute between those who think that our concepts and categories thoroughly permeate and infect even the most basic perceptual experiences and those who hold that people with very different understandings of a scene may still have exactly the same perceptual experience of it. In other cases, phenomenological claims are made in the course of arguing for other non-phenomenological theses – for example, libertarians about free will sometimes make claims about the phenomenology of freedom in support of their views; and the distinctive experience of selfhood, or lack of such an experience, is sometimes appealed to in arguments about personal identity. Sometimes, phenomenological claims seem to play both roles – as, for example, claims about whether we visually or auditorially experience what we’re not attending to, which are both debated in their own right and in the context of their implications for a general theory of consciousness.

Such phenomenological claims have two things in common with claims about what’s intuitive that make them ripe for inclusion under the umbrella of “experimental philosophy”: First, it is mainly philosophers who make such claims; and second, there is no substantial tradition outside of philosophy dedicated to the empirical evaluation of the claims. These facts may be mere historical accident: Back in the days of introspective psychology, psychologists loved to dispute issues of this sort. But fortunately or unfortunately, psychology still has not sufficiently rebounded from the behaviorist revolution that such general phenomenological claims are broadly discussed by mainstream psychologists. Instead, disputes about phenomenology, like (until recently) disputes about matters of moral intuition, are generally conducted by philosophers in their armchairs consulting their own experience and impressions. And, of course, each philosopher seems to have a different impression. We philosophers need to get more systematic, experimental, and empirical about these topics.

For philosophers with an experimental bent, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit here. In some cases, simple polls or questionnaires may cast light on the issues – asking undergraduates if they think they have constant tactile experience of their feet in their shoes or not, or asking subjects whether two figures, one thought of as a sigma and one thought of as an M on its side would generate the same visual experience. In other cases, one might want to sample experience by giving people beepers to wear during everyday activity, and/or one might want to conduct structured interviews.

Philosophy is often grounded in introspective claims about consciousness. These introspective claims can be, but rarely are, examined experimentally.

iv.
Here’s another type of empirically explorable claim that philosophers often make, explicitly or implicitly – claims about why they believe the philosophical theses they believe. Typically, philosophers present themselves as believing things for good reasons, because the arguments compel it. This is of course almost entirely bogus, and here’s how I know that: On day one of your first class in normative ethics, you were either sympathetic or unsympathetic to consequentialism. Those sympathies almost certainly didn’t change by the end of the class. Since at the beginning of the class, you had no appreciation of the subtle arguments pro and con, those subtle arguments can’t really be what’s driving your view. Almost always, I find, we are immediately attracted to or repulsed by philosophical views – long before we really appreciate the arguments, long before we have a sense of what philosophers of different leanings consider to be fatal objections to our views – and those attractions and repulsions don’t change much over time. So why do you love (or hate) Kantian ethics? Why do you accept (or reject) compatibilism about free will? Why do you think metaphysical idealism has to be false? If it’s not a deep understanding of the arguments, what is it? I doubt you have much idea.

There is room for experimental philosophy here – experiments or other empirical studies aimed at discerning what factors correlate with what philosophical views. Thomas Nadelhoffer and others are running an on-line survey right now that will attempt to correlate views about free will with features of one’s psychological profile. Shaun Nichols has looked at historical data to support his hypothesis that philosophers are mainly drawn to compatibilism because of an antecedent commitment to determinism. I have looked at the relationship between culture-specific metaphors and the prevalence of certain views about conscious experience. To highlight some of my own work: Are people (including philosophers) more likely to say that dreams rarely contain colored elements if the film media around them are predominantly black and white? Are people more likely to say that a circular object (such as a coin) viewed obliquely looks elliptical if the dominant media for describing vision are media like paintings and photographs that involve flat, projective distortions? When people say that they literally see red when angry or that they experience an idea as literally located in the back of their heads or that they experience thought in general as transpiring inside their heads as opposed to in their chests – how much do such claims vary cross-culturally? Do they vary reliably with differences in actual phenomenology that are being accurately reported, or are our introspective judgments driven at least as much by the theories and ways of speaking dominant in our culture at the time?

We can attempt to determine empirically the psychological roots of different philosophical views. Of course even a suspiciously motivated view may be right – to assume it can’t be right is the genetic fallacy – but an understanding of the psychological roots of our philosophical commitments will surely shine an important light on those commitments.

v.
Finally, in my bid to broaden our conception of the kinds of experiments that can be done under the heading of “experimental philosophy” let me mention experiments about the practical consequences of particular philosophical views. Now maybe (maybe!) views in the physical sciences stand or fall independently of their practical consequences, but I don’t think this can be the case in philosophy. Given the choice between two conceptual schemes or two moral visions, one’s quite in the right to consider the practical consequences of accepting one scheme or one moral vision – perhaps, indeed, there is no other way to decide, if the views are self-coherent and coherent with the empirical facts.

This is the backside of study of the causes of our philosophical views; it’s a study of their effects. So, for example, we could study whether courses in consequentialist ethics are more or less likely to generate actual moral behavior than courses in deontological ethics or virtue ethics. We can study – as I am doing right now – whether philosophical reflection has any positive effect on moral behavior whatsoever, and if so under what conditions. We can look at the moral behavior of ethics professors, the scientific research of Popperians, the real-world coping of radical skeptics. Things might look good and so shine a positive light on these philosophical enterprises; or they might look not so good.

vi.
You might think of what I’m proposing as not the philosophy of psychology but rather the psychology of philosophy – a subfield of potentially great interest and consequence for anyone interested in the origin and grounding of philosophical theses, but one that has not been pursued seriously since the time of Nietzsche, James, and Dewey.

Does Experience Outrun Attention? (And a Possible Second Demise of Consciousness Studies)

Does Experience Outrun Attention?
(And a Possible Second Demise of Consciousness Studies)

Eric Schwitzgebel
Department of Philosophy
University of California at Riverside

presentation for

Toward a Science of Consciousness (Tucson)

April 11, 2008

Does Experience Outrun Attention?
(And a Possible Second Demise of Consciousness Studies)

1. Rich and thin.

Do you have constant tactile experience of your feet in your shoes? Constant auditory experience of [the shuffling of people near you in the audience; the hum of the florescent lights]? Constant visual experience of the tip of your nose? Or when these things aren’t in attention do they drop out of consciousness entirely, so that they’re not experienced, not even in a secondary, peripheral way? Think of consciousness as like a soup. Is it a rich soup, full of experience in many modalities simultaneously, or is it a thin soup, limited at any one time to only one or a few things in attention?

You drive to work on a route you’ve taken a thousand times. All the while, you’re thinking of other things – impending deadlines, those unfair referee reports on your rejected article – and suddenly you’re there, with little memory of the road – it’s almost like you wake up (“ah, I’m at work already!”), though obviously you stayed on the road, stopped at red lights, avoided other cars. Did you visually experience the road on that trip? How often? Constantly? Intermittently? Hardly at all?

Intuitions diverge. Among those who find the richness of experience intuitively or introspectively obvious are William James (1890/1981) and John Searle (1992). Among those who find the thinness of experience intuitive are Julian Jaynes (1976) and David Armstrong (1981). Ordinary folks and philosophy graduate students show the same divergence of opinion. In one experiment, I found eleven participants inclined toward a rich view of experience and ten inclined toward a thin view (Schwitzgebel 2007).

2. Terminological Dispute?

Now some folks are so convinced of the intuitive or introspective obviousness of their own view – whether rich or thin – that they have trouble conceiving that others might disagree with them. These people will tend to suppose that any apparent disagreement is merely terminological, not substantive.

So let me make it as clear as I can: I’m talking about phenomenal consciousness, subjective experience, what it’s like – the central subject I take it that all of us at this conference are concerned with. I’m not talking about knowledge of consciousness or any acute sort of self-awareness, except insofar as those are entailed by the mere fact of phenomenal consciousness itself. Nor am I talking about mere non-conscious reactivity, to the extent that reactivity can be separated from phenomenology. The question is, phenomenal consciousness itself, the holy grail of consciousness studies – how pervasive is it? To how much of our mentality does it attach? Disputes about this question can be, but need not be, purely terminological. There’s a substantive issue here, one very near the heart of consciousness studies. James and Searle and Jaynes and if not Armstrong at least some of those following him make it quite plain what they disagree about.

The answer is not, I think, as obvious as it is sometimes taken to be.

3. The Refrigerator Light Illusion.

One potential source of error, often mentioned by advocates of the thin view, is what Nigel Thomas (1999), Ned Block (****), and others have called the “refrigerator light” illusion. If I think right now about whether I have tactile experience of my feet in my shoes, I find that I do. If I think about whether I hear [the buzz of the lights, the rustling of nearby audience members], it seems I experience those things too. But of course the fact that I have these tactile and auditory experiences when I am considering the question of whether I have them implies nothing about whether I experience them when I am immersed in the ordinary business of life and not giving the matter any thought. To infer the richness of experience from such introspective data is to make the same mistake as the child who thinks that the refrigerator light is always on. The act of checking creates the very phenomenon under test – at least according to the thin view.

So the question is not, do you have tactile experience of your feet in your shoes right now, but did you have it five minutes ago, or two hours ago, when you weren’t thinking of it? The answer to that question, I take it, is not entirely obvious.

4. No Good Empirical Data.

Intuition and ordinary introspection create divergent and uncertain results. So maybe we can explore the question using some more rigorous empirical method? I’m pessimistic.

One kind of evidence that is sometimes regarded as supportive of the thin view – for example by Dan Dennett (1991) and by Arien Mack and Irv Rock (1998) – is evidence that without attention we often fail to parse, respond to, notice, or remember what one might suppose to be salient stimuli, such as a stream of speech coming in one ear (Cherry 1953; Moray 1959) or a person in a gorilla suit walking through a ballgame (Simons and Chabris 1999). However, it’s one thing to show that we don’t do much processing of, or have much memory of, unattended stimuli, and it’s quite another to show that we have no conscious experience of those stimuli. We may experience the general speechiness of the unattended speech even if we don’t do much semantic processing of it; we may experience the person in the gorilla suit inchoately, or as some sort of black blob, even if we don’t realize it’s a person in a gorilla suit (Simons 2000). And of course we do do some processing of unattended stimuli – otherwise nothing unattended could ever call our attention. The question is: Whatever processing we do absent attention, is that enough to underwrite consciousness? Experiments that aim to clarify exactly how much or little processing we do without attention, worthwhile as they are, simply do not address that question.

In the contemporary cognitive psychological literature on implicit perception, indirect tests sometimes reveal subjects to be responsive to stimuli they deny having perceived. Some researchers have thought that such results have implications for the richness or thinness of consciousness. Advocates of a rich interpretation take implicit perception to show that “awareness” (a term sometimes used synonymously with, and sometimes conflated with, “consciousness”) substantially outruns what we attend to and report (Holender 1986; Hannula et al. 2005). In contrast, advocates of a thin interpretation have taken implicit perception to show that we perceive (implicitly) stimuli we have no consciousness of. Most researchers agree that under some conditions, subjects will respond to stimuli they deny perceiving; but this fact shows nothing about the richness or thinness of experience. On the contrary, it is only in light of prior assumptions about the richness or thinness of experience that data of this sort can be seen as related to issues about consciousness.

Ned Block (****), Michael Tye (Tuesday) and others have remarked that it’s introspectively compelling that when we’re presented with a brief visual display we phenomenally experience at least the general gist of even the parts that aren’t focally attended. I’m sympathetic with this, but I don’t think it shows the falsity of the thin view. It’s plausible to suppose that we in some way diffusely attend to the whole display. Maybe attention spreads along a gradient, for example. Thus, Block’s and Tye’s observation is quite consistent with the alignment of consciousness and attention. What not introspectively compelling – at least not to everyone – what Block and Tye and the others don’t discuss, is whether we consciously experience the picture on the wall in the background, or our feet in our shoes, when we’re attending to a psychologist’s visual display.

So what evidence do we have on this key question about consciousness? Only divergent intuitions and question-begging interpretations of empirical results. That is, essentially no evidence. Such is the absolute infancy of consciousness studies.

5. Beeper Results.

Purely objective measures – of reaction time, memory, change detection, performance on forced-choice or stem-completion tasks – won’t get us any further in studying the richness or thinness of experience. The basic data are in: People show some, but only limited, reactivity to unattended stimuli. To progress further, what we need is better subjective reporting.

The use of beepers appeals to me. So much so, in fact, that I’ve just written a book on it with Russ Hurlburt. [Hold up book.] Here it is: Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic. I’m afraid I’m the skeptic.

Here’s what’s good about beepers: You can prepare the subject in advance with a question about her experience, then send her off with a beeper. If the beeper is set to sound at long intervals, she will soon forget she is wearing it and become immersed in her everyday life. Then, when the beep sounds, within a second she can reflect on what her experience was at the last undisturbed moment before the beep. Thus, beepers combine the virtue of surprise with the virtue of preparedness. You can see the advantage here in avoiding the refrigerator light illusion. If all goes well, if the method works, you get a report on what the inside of the fridge was like just before the door was opened. So, for example, you could send a subject off with a beeper, instructing her to, when the beep sounds, reflect on whether she was having any visual experience in the last undisturbed moment before the beep, or visual experience in the far right visual field, or tactile experience, or tactile experience in the left foot.

In fact, I did just that in a 2007 article in Journal of Consciousness Studies. I gave subjects beepers and asked them to report simply on whether they were having experience in these various modalities as they went about their normal day. Here’s what I found: Of the subjects instructed to report on their visual experience, a majority (8 of 13) reported visual experience (of some sort or other) in every single sample. A substantial minority, though, 5 of the 13 subjects, reported sometimes having no visual experience at all. In the other conditions, the rates of reported experience were significantly lower, generally in the 50%- 90% range, depending on the subject and the condition. Surprisingly to me, there was little relationship between a subject’s stated inclination toward the rich or the thin view in a preliminary interview and the rate at which she reported experience while wearing the beeper.

The strangest results, perhaps, came from the tactile left foot condition. Of the four subjects in this condition, two reported little experience: One reported tactile experience in her left foot in 4 of 22 samples (18%), and one reported experience in 3 of 19 samples (16%). An advocate of the thin view might be happy with these reports: Although it seems unlikely that we normally spend 16 or 18% of our day thinking about our left feet, wearing a beeper and being instructed to report on tactile experience in one’s foot may change that (though I did exclude samples in which the subject reported thinking about the experiment). On the other hand, two subjects reported tactile experience in their foot at very high rates – even though they also say that they forgot about the beeper, weren’t thinking about the experiment, and weren’t particularly thinking about their feet at the time the beeps went off. One subject reported experience in 12 of 15 samples (80%), and another in 11 of 12 samples (92%). The subjects themselves were surprised by these results – both of them reported a prior inclination toward a thin view of experience and expected to find no or almost no tactile experience in their feet during the sampling. The one reporting tactile experience in almost every sample said that he came to believe that he had a constant, subtle experience at every moment of the general position and disposition of his body including as a minor part the condition of his left foot. The one sample in which he denied experience was one in which he had fallen asleep. In contrast, another subject – one asked to report in general on his tactile experience, not just on his left foot – said that it was often the case that he was so absorbed in things that it was as though he had no body at all. Here was have James and Jaynes, right?

I’ve also recently added a condition in which I asked subjects to keep their eyes closed through a sampling period of two hours a day for three days. Their task was to report on whether they had visual experience, and if so what it was. Here again the results are widely divergent. Among five subjects, one reported visual experience in all of his samples, while another never reported any visual experience at all.

6. Difficulties of Interpretation.

Now of course it could just be that some people are rich and others are thin. Maybe William James really does experience, as he says, every morsel of his body constantly pulsing with life while Julian Jaynes has only fleeting moments of sensory consciousness. That would certainly explain their differences of opinion!

Yet if this were so, one might expect major differences in physiology, behavior, and cognition between the rich and the thin. Some of us should have vastly more sensory experience than others – like the difference, almost, between being blind and not. As far as I can tell there are no such physiological, behavioral, or cognitive differences. Two people walk into a room. Behaviorally and physiologically, they are almost identical – yet one is bursting with experience in all regions of all modalities and the other has almost no sensory experience at all? Stranger still that people wouldn’t know this about themselves, that they’d feel uncertainty, be amenable to changes of view, report their experience as one way in a preliminary interview, then shift their opinion after a session or two with a beeper. And my subjects did often report changing their minds on the substantive issue – further evidence, by the way, that the dispute here is not merely terminological.

So are some people simply mistaken about their experience? That’s a strange idea, too. After all, there’s a huge difference between the world of experience posited by the rich view and that of the thin view. Shouldn’t a moment’s reflection reveal the truth as obviously as sensory perception reveals the fact that there are many, rather than few, seats in this room?

The fact that it doesn’t is, I think, bad news for consciousness studies. Concurrent introspection is defeated by the refrigerator light error. Immediate retrospection, for example using a beeper, may help us avoid that error, but it may not. I may, for example, be victim of an illusion of timing: Maybe the beep, or whatever other signal we use to prompt our retrospective assessment, triggers the experience in question, which some subjects due to an illusion of timing falsely attribute to the moment before the beep. Or maybe we’re subject to what Titchener called the “stimulus error”: I’m walking down the street wearing the beeper. The beep sounds, and I immediately close my eyes, considering whether I had visual experience in the last undisturbed moment before the beep. I seem to recall green grass and a house to my left, a paved street on my right – but am I now recalling objects that were in my visual field or visual experiences that I was actually having at that moment? How do I separate those questions? The same problem arises when you notice the striking of a clock several chimes in: You can count back chimes in your memory – you know there were three before you started paying attention – but did you actually have phenomenal consciousness of those chimes before you attended to them? If the thin view is correct, subjects might easily mistake memories of outward objects or events for memories of experiences of those events. This mistake could be driving the relatively rich reports of some of the subjects in my beeper study.

An advocate of the rich view might, conversely, criticize the immediate retrospections of those who deny experience in unattended modalities while wearing a beeper. After all, as many experiments have shown, we quickly, almost instantly, forget many of the things we aren’t attending to. For example, “change blindness” studies show that with a very brief flicker, people will repeatedly fail to notice major changes in pictures, if those changes are to things outside their focus of attention. George Sperling showed that we can retain a briefly displayed image for a split second, so that if we are cued to remember part of it, we can report that part, while the rest is forgotten. Maybe conscious experience is richly detailed but instantly forgotten, so that any retrospective judgment, no matter how swift, will be impoverished. Indeed, it’s quite plausible to suppose that if experience were rich it would be instantly forgotten: What would be the point of retaining all that detail?

7. The Insolubility of the Problem.

These difficulties are not, I think, merely difficulties with a particular methodology. They are difficulties in principle. Concurrent introspection is subject to the refrigerator light problem, while immediate retrospection is subject to timing problems, stimulus error, and potentially very serious failures of memory. These problems cannot be resolved with mere refinements of method. Subjective report may simply be fatally flawed as a means of addressing the rich vs. thin dispute.

But neither will purely objective methods get us anywhere. Objective methods either merely operationalize “consciousness” – equating it by definitional fiat with some behavioral or cognitive pattern – or they beg the question by assuming a particular relationship between phenomenal consciousness and some behavioral or cognitive pattern. Does mere behavioral responsiveness to some stimulus demonstrate that that stimulus was phenomenally conscious? Not in any way that should satisfy an advocate of a thin view. Does failure to report a stimulus outside of attention show that the stimulus was not phenomenally conscious? Not in any way that should satisfy an advocate of a rich view. The fact is, we simply do not know enough yet, about the relationship between cognition and consciousness to take any objective measure of consciousness as valid without begging the rich vs. thin question.

Could we, perhaps, approach the issue by finding out what indisputably nonconscious mental episodes have in common and what indisputably conscious episodes have in common – for example neurally – then see whether our cognition of unattended stimuli is more like the former or more like the latter? While in general this is a promising sort of approach, the gulf between the indisputably nonconscious and the indisputably conscious is too wide to be bridged in this way. Early visual processing and early lexical processing are indisputably nonconscious; focal visual attention on a bright red object and deliberate episodes of inner speech are indisputably conscious. There are many neural and cognitive features the latter will share that the former lack, and some of those features will be shared with visual processing in unattended parts of the visual field. But which of those features are essential for consciousness? We don’t know.

8. The Potential Collapse of Consciousness Studies.

And worse, we will probably never know until we resolve the rich vs. thin dispute. Consider the search for neural correlates of consciousness. The search for these correlates makes no sense unless we have in advance at least a rough sense of the sorts of mental states that are conscious. And we don’t have even a rough sense of what mental states are conscious until we settle the rich vs. thin question. Suppose we find a neural state that occurs when and only when a sensory process involves attention. Is that a neural correlate of consciousness? Not if the rich view is correct; it might just be a correlate of attention. Suppose we find a neural state that occurs whenever there is sensory responsiveness of any but the most minimal sort. Is that a neural correlate of consciousness? Not if the thin view is correct; it might just be a correlate of sensory sensitivity.

Until we determine how rich or thin the stream of consciousness is, we are hamstrung in our search for a general theory of consciousness, and indeed in any generalizations about consciousness that don’t confine themselves to matters on which the rich and thin views agree. And it looks like without such a general theory, the rich vs. thin debate may be irresolvable. Thus, we have a Catch-22. No resolution of the rich vs. thin question without first a general theory of consciousness; no general theory of consciousness without first a resolution of the rich vs. thin question.

There is a grave danger for consciousness studies here. In the early 20th century, the empirical study of consciousness suffered academic defeat at the hands of behaviorism for a variety of reasons, among them most famously its inability to resolve the question of whether conscious thought was possible without imagery. In the 21st century our reborn discipline could founder on similar shoals. We can measure behavior and we can measure brain states, but we can’t directly measure consciousness – at least not without subjective report. Yet subjective reports are inherently limited, with serious methodological shortcomings. In the case of the question of the richness vs. thinness of experience, the shortcomings of subjective report may be insurmountable; the question may be forever irresolvable. And consequently, a general theory of consciousness may remain beyond human reach.
In the long run, naysayers about science are almost inevitably proven wrong by the ingenuity of scientists. There may well be a way past these difficulties that I don’t see. Yet, as participants in this conference are fond of saying, consciousness is special. It may not prove, in the end, to be amenable to rigorous and general scientific exploration.

The richness or thinness of experience – here are two radically different views of the stream of consciousness. In one, our phenomenal lives burst and swarm with panoramic detail; in the other, we fly swiftly from one small experience to another while the rest is void. No question is more central to our understanding the stream of experience than which of these views is correct. Yet if I am right, the question may prove irresolvable and be our downfall.

Joshua Rust: Are Ethicists Ethical? Empirical Support for Aristotle's Moral Particularism

ARE ETHICISTS ETHICAL? EMPIRICAL SUPPORT FOR ARISTOTLE’S MORAL PARTICULARISM

Joshua Rust
Stetson University
jrust@stetson.edu

For ancient scholars the behavior of a philosopher who endorsed an ethical theory was considered evidence for or against that theory. While the conduct of a particular ethicist is no longer admissible as relevant to the standing of a theory, in this essay I contend that Aristotle’s moral particularism best explains a collection of empirical data concerning the behavior of ethicists as a whole. In the past year I have helped Professor Eric Schwitzgebel amass empirical data concerning the degree to which professors of ethics are, themselves, ethical. In this presentation I intend to both present some of those findings and offer some suggestions as to whether those findings are philosophically significant. After reviewing generalist and particularist explanations of the data, I will draw the tentative conclusion that a version of Aristotelian particularism best accommodates the data.

Are ethicists ethical? The studies

The empirical data come in two varieties. First, we surveyed people’s attitudes regarding the moral competence of ethics professors. [Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust, "The Moral Behavior of Ethicists: Peer Opinion," unpublished (2007).] Second, Schwitzgebel sought evidence that spoke directly for or against the behavior of ethicists. [Eric Schwitzgebel, "Do Ethicists Steal More Books?," unpublished (2007).]

At the 2007 Pacific APA conference we set up a table and invited philosophers to fill out a brief survey. The sign on the table said, “Fill out a 5-minute philosophical-scientific questionnaire, get four Ghirardelli chocolate squares!”. Over the course of the conference 277 people completed the survey.

The survey aimed to excavate philosophers’ attitudes concerning the behavior of ethics professors. While two versions of the survey were distributed, I will focus on the first version as the significance of the results of the second version are less easy to discern. In the first survey the respondent was asked to judge whether she/he thought that, on the whole, ethicists behaved better, worse, or about the same as, first, other philosophers who did not specialize in ethics and, second, non-academics of a similar social background. On both of these questions, the respondent was asked to locate ethicists on a 7-point scale, where 1 was labeled “substantially morally better” than non-ethicists, 4 was labeled “about the same”, and 7 was labeled “substantially morally worse.”

Following the two questions about ethicists, the respondent was then asked how professors specializing in Metaphysics and Epistemology compare to other professors in the field, and how they compare to non-academics of a similar social background.

The remaining questions were either demographic (field of study, level of academic achievement, etc.), or else attempted to establish whether the respondent had prior knowledge of the contents of the survey.

The results of the survey are as follows. Of the 138 people who took the first version of the questionnaire, ethicists tended to rate ethicists behave slightly better than non-ethicists (3.4 vs. 4) [although it is worth pointing out that just over 50% of ethicist respondents did not rate ethicists any higher than non-ethicist philosophers], whereas non-ethicist philosophers think that ethicists behave no better than other philosophers (4). Both groups saw philosophers as less ethically delinquent than non-philosophers (3.8 or 3.6 vs. 4).

Mean responses to survey 1 by specialization.
1 = “substantially morally better”, 4 = “about the same”, 7 = “substantially morally worse”
Ethicist respondents:
1) ethicists vs. other philosophers: 3.4 (p = .01)
2) ethicists vs. non-academics: 3.1 (p = .00)
3) M&E vs. other philosophers: 4.3 (p = .01)
4) M&E vs. non-academics: 3.8 (p = .20)

Non-ethicist respondents:
1) ethicists vs. other philosophers: 4.0 (p = 1.00)
2) ethicists vs. non-academics: 3.7 (p = .47)
3) M&E vs. other philosophers: 4.0 (p = .73)
4) M&E vs. non-academics: 3.6 (p = .00)

The aforementioned survey reveals our attitudes towards the behavior of ethicists. Those attitudes bear a telling, but tenuous relation to the actual moral standing of ethicists. To more directly address the question, Schwitzgebel reviewed the rates at which approximately 200 ethics and non-ethics philosophical books were listed as missing in 32 leading academic libraries. He found that, as a percentage of books off-shelf (either checked out or missing), ethics books were significantly more likely to be missing (8.7%) as compared to non-ethics books (6.9%). Ethics books were about 25% more likely to be missing than philosophy books specializing in other fields.

Libraries: 13 leading U.S. academic libraries (Harvard, Berkeley, etc.) and 19 leading British libraries (Oxford, Cambridge, etc.)
Books: Approx. 200 matched ethics and non-ethics books, 1960 or later, reviewed in Phil Review, 1990-2001, or appearing in at least 5 SEP bibliographies.
Raw numbers:
Ethics Books:
1) Holdings: 14,517
2) Out or missing: 3,721
3) Overdue or missing: 498
4) Missing (incl. 1 year overdue): 323
Non-Ethics Books:
1) Holdings: 9,608
2) Out or missing: 1,775
3) Overdue or missing: 186
4) Missing (incl. 1 year overdue): 123
Percentages and ratios:
Overdue or missing, as a percentage of those off-shelf: Ethics: 13.4%, Non-ethics: 10.5%
Missing, as a percentage of those off-shelf: Ethics: 8.7%, Non-ethics: 6.9%
Odds Ratio: Ethics % missing : Non-ethics % missing: 1.25 (p = .02)

Re: older books. Excluding pre-1985 books:
Mean age of book: ethics: 1993.0, non-ethics: 1992.7
Missing as percentage of off shelf: ethics: 7.7%, non-ethics: 5.7%
Odds ratio: 1.35 (p = .01)
Re: more popular books. Excluding books occuring 5+ times in SEP:
Off-shelf as a percent of holdings: ethics: 15.5%, non-ethics: 16.1%
Missing as a percentage of off shelf: ethics: 8.5%, non-ethics: 5.7%
Odds ratio: 1.48 (p = .03)

The books-study points to a greater tendency among students and teachers of ethics to irresponsibly handle library books. The survey of attitudes may be taken to bespeak of a kind of skepticism many philosophers seem to hold concerning ethical theory’s ability to make a difference in our lives. In a more generous mode, we might fully expect ethicists to benefit from the course of study they have pursued. Shouldn’t we expect the study of ethics to make some difference in the life of the inquirer? Indeed, ethicists think this as they tended to rate ethicists better than non-ethicists. But non-ethicists do not expect ethicists to behave better than non-ethicist philosophers. Moreover, the book-study, where ethicists appear to be more ethically delinquent than non-ethicists, points to the possibility that epistemologists and metaphysicians are not skeptical enough.

There is an explanatory gap between the expectation that the study of ethics should benefit the researcher, and the results the study, where ethicists appear to not have benefited at all. Why is this so?

An easy way to close the explanatory gap is to cite problems with the studies. For example, while the results of survey 1 remain statistically significant, the limited sample size in the attitudes survey burdened the study with a relatively high margin of error. The findings of the book study need to take into account the fact that ethics books have been in circulation longer, and are more frequently borrowed than books in metaphysics and epistemology. However, for the purposes of this presentation I want to treat the studies as relatively reliable. While they are not immune to methodological criticism, they have withstood more superficial attacks. For example, Schwitzgebel has shown that even when controlling for variables such as popularity and age, ethics books remain significantly more likely to be missing from leading US and British academic libraries.

The books-study appears to vindicate the opinions of those in the attitudes survey that felt that such study made no difference to their behavior, or even those who felt that ethicists tend to exhibit a degree of moral deviance not found in their counterparts in metaphysics or epistemology. But what are some of the philosophical implications of the above studies?

The generalist explanation of the data

The question concerning the relationship between the study of ethics and the ethicist’s behavior is helpfully recast in more general terms, where theoretical and practical reasoning is seen as standing in various relations to practical wisdom. Theoretical reasoning is directed at an exposition of fact, where the ethicist is particularly concerned with articulating what counts as the good. Practical reasoning is more overtly normative, aimed at distinguishing which among a set of possible actions is the good or right action to perform. Practical wisdom, on the other hand, is a description of competent behavior.

The philosopher may be excused for assuming a fairly tight connection between theoretical reasoning and practical reasoning, when good action is (ideally) the result of proper deliberation and proper deliberation is only possible if one knows what counts as the good. According to the generalist, general principles ought to guide or direct particular behaviors and these principles are made available to us through an application of theoretical reasoning. Generalism is contrasted with particularism. The difference between the two camps concerns the genesis of practical wisdom: where the generalist sees principles as the ideal source of our moral competence, the particularist will rather cite an acute awareness of contextual factors given by way of socialization, training, etc.

Both Kant and Mill endorse the view that we discover what our particular duties are by way of an application of general, self-evidential knowledge. For example, for the consequentialist, theoretical reasoning discovers that we ought to maximize happiness. The Kantian uses theoretical reason to discover that the Categorical Imperative is the general principle by which correctness is determined. Practical reason then applies one or the other of these principles to determine a specific course of action. This is the generalist view of the relation between theoretical or practical reasoning and practical wisdom, at least insofar as ethics is involved (it is, however, telling that we would not assume that someone with a theoretical understanding of plumbing makes for a good plumber).

I assume that most professors of ethics endorse the generalist claim, which assumes a strong link between theoretical and practical reasoning on one hand and practical wisdom on the other. Indeed it was precisely that assumption which constitutes the contrast-class against which the study findings were deemed surprising or puzzling. Given that knowledge of the good is a condition for reliably good behavior, why is it that (a) we do not assume that ethicists are better than non-ethicists and (b) they don’t in fact appear to be better than non-ethicists?

However, the generalist appears to be able to account for the fact that practitioners of ethics seem to be less morally upright than other philosophers. Some generalists might insist that the general study of ethics is purely intellectual pursuit that has little or nothing to do with their day-to-day behavior. The problem with this suggestion is two-fold. If this was the case, we would only expect ethicist’s behavior to be on a par with that of non-ethicists, not worse, as the data suggest. Moreover, if reasoning is an essential component to practical reasoning then even if the ethicist is no more or less interested in behaving well than the average philosopher, we could at least expect them to behave better in virtue of having more skill in reasoning practically.

To account for the data, then, the champion of generalism must argue, not just that ethicists are largely indifferent to the connection between ethics and their day-to-day lives, but must be antecedently delinquent; ethicists steal more books because, in spite of their training, they are less morally sensitive than those in M&E. Ethicists may know that they need to return the books—which most moral theories tell us is the right thing to do—but fail to heed the call of reason. But why would ethicists be more akratic than non-ethicists? There’s no principled reason to think that, on average, ethicists would exhibit more weakness of will than non-ethicists. Is there a significant difference between ethics philosophers and non-ethics philosophers which would gift the latter with more fortitude?

In casual conversations with both Schwitzgebel and myself a number of philosophers have put forth reasons for thinking that ethicists are prone to be morally lax as compared to non-ethicists, thus saving the generalist position. The explanation usually runs as follows: we are attracted to what we struggle with. For example, psychological counselors become so because they already contend with precisely the sort of complications this kind of study promises to ameliorate. Similarly, prospective ethicists might be attracted to the field precisely because they struggle with what may come more effortlessly for the rest of us. Moreover, this akratic tendency must be so pronounced that it cancels out any gains made by increased deliberative skills that come with studying ethical issues.

I worry about the generalist’s appeal to a kind of prephilosophical delinquency or weakness of will in explanation of the data. Apart from the potential callousness of the suggestion, it seems equally likely that ethicists are attracted to the field, not because of personal ineptitude, but because of a non-deviant interest and competence in ethical matters. We would not, for example, seriously entertain the suggestion that metaphysicians are drawn the field because of a kind of ontological ineptitude not had by their counterparts in ethics.

The naïve particularist explanation of the data

Opposing the generalist are those who endorse moral particularism, which finds its roots in Aristotle. In its strongest form, as advocated by John Dewey, Jonathan Dancy, John McDowell, or S.G. Clarke and E. Simpson [Jonathan Dancy, "Ethical Particularism and Morally Relevant Properties," Mind 92, no. 368 (1983); ———, Moral Reasons (Oxford [England] ; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993); John McDowell, "Virtue and Reason," in Virtue Ethics, ed. Roger Crisp and Michael A. Slote (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Stanley G. Clarke and Evan Simpson, Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism, Suny Series in Ethical Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989)], the particularist denies any place for general principles as a ground for moral action: actions are prompted by the contingent features of the specific context in question. Dancy, for example, endorses a “thorough particularism, according to which our ethical decisions are made case by case, without the comforting support or awkward demands of moral principles”. [Dancy, "Ethical Particularism and Morally Relevant Properties," 530.] Dewey is perhaps less discreet is his rejection of generalism: “Ready-made rules available at a moment’s notice for settling any kind of moral difficulty . . . have been the chief object of the ambition of moralists. In the much less complicated and less changing matters of bodily health such pretensions are known as quackery”. [John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, in Jo Ann Boydston, ed, 14 John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924 1, 164 (Southern Illinois 1983).]

Aristotle’s phronimos excels at practical wisdom. When Aristotle says that, “practical wisdom is concerned with the ultimate particular, which is the object not of knowledge but of perception,” [Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Bollingen Series (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1142a25] at least part of what he is getting at is that phronesis is not typically a matter of theoretical or even practical reflection. The phronimos prereflectively responds appropriately to concrete, particular circumstances. The phronimos acts appropriately, but such action is not normally traced back to an internal process of deliberation. The actions of a phronimos do have a proper causal pedigree, but it is one that ends not with a set of deliberative or cognitive processes, but in the practices and activities of a community. What the phronimos gets from the community is a set of pre-deliberative perceptual skills: she or he learns to see particular situations and instances as among those requiring action, just as a child learns to hear a kind of sound as a telephone call or see someone’s running across a particular line as a touchdown.

Naïve particularism has the resources to explain why a life dedicated to the study of ethical theory might not endow ethicists with practical wisdom. Aristotle provides an account of practical wisdom, as constituted by appropriate behavior, which is causally uncoupled from practical reasoning. Once this link is broken, the postulated connection between theoretical reasoning and practical reasoning is, even if it is true, irrelevant. Because practical reasoning is not a condition for practical wisdom on Aristotle’s account, theoretical reflection on the good can neither be a condition for practical wisdom.

The basic idea is that generalism holds that certain reasoning skills are a necessary source of moral aptitude. If—as the study suggests—those who are most competent at these reasoning skills appear, on the whole, no less morally deviant than the rest of us perhaps that points to a flaw with generalism. Aristotle’s account of the phronimos helps us explain why moral philosophers, who theoretically reflect on the good, do not, in fact, behave better than the rest of us: conceptual reflection does not a phronimos make.

There are at least two problems with the naïve particularist’s explanation of the data.

First, if the study actually provides empirical support for an Aristotelian outlook, we would expect that it shows moral philosophers to be no better, but also no worse, than other philosophers. While theoretical reflection is not necessary for appropriate action, nothing the particularist says entails that theoretical or practical reasoning can undermine moral competence. However, the books-study suggests that people who study ethics exhibit morally worse behavior than other philosophers. Can Aristotle’s theory accommodate this datum?

Second, the particularist-generalist dichotomy seems a bit naïve. With the exception of Dancy, McDowell, and Clarke and Simpson, very few philosophers would accede to the suggestion that practical wisdom involves no reference to general principles. Even Aristotle, as we will see, is not a particularist in this strong sense.

An Aristotelian explanation of the data

What role do general principles play in Aristotle’s otherwise particularist account of practical wisdom? Deliberative powers, both theoretical and practical, should be brought to bear in the case of breakdown, where e.g. the phronimos is faced with conflicting goods. Indeed, standard ethical thought experiments such as the trolley case are intended to replicate exactly these sort of situation. Because she or he is faced with an importantly novel situation, a more detached stance is necessary; the phronimos must be capable of theoretical reflection. [Ibid., 1141b10.] But Aristotle wants us to see that a deliberative stance is normally only appropriate in the case of breakdown, when the phronimos does not immediately perceive the right course of action.

So why, if the data is correct, would someone who has dedicated their life to ethical reflection be less morally competent than someone who has dedicated their life to other pursuits? Perhaps an entrenched commitment to generalism, which sees deliberation as a prerequisite for practical wisdom, actually undermines moral competence insofar as it prompts ethical reflection in non-breakdown cases. Something like a “caterpillar effect” could set in, as when experienced drivers start thinking about how they are using the clutch, thus stifling action. The generalist suggestion that we ought to deliberate in cases where deliberation is not normally necessary sets the stage for inadvertent moral omission or oversight, as practical reasoning consumes valuable cognitive resources. The Aristotelian might contend that intellectual gridlock accounts for how ethicists could be less morally competent, without cynical psychological appeals to innate moral delinquency.

The testable consequences of this explanation are as follows. We would not always expect ethicists to be, on average, more morally delinquent than non-ethicists. When it comes down to breakdown cases (trolleys, etc.) ethicists ought to be able to adjudicate the various possibilities for action with more subtly and care than would a non-ethicist. But if generalism extrapolates from the preferred treatment of breakdown cases to the non-breakdown case, and this hyper-deliberative stance undermines our moral competence, then we should expect the ethicist (generalist) to choke in these ordinary, non-breakdown cases. The returning of library books is precisely one of these latter cases.

Returning to the attitudes study

Finally, does the data concerning our attitudes toward the behavior of ethicists shed any further light on the plausibility of Aristotle’s account?

This data points to a kind of stark and puzzling ambivalence we feel regarding the role of theoretical reflection in our activities. On one hand, all but the ethicists seem to be skeptical about the capacity for ethical reflection to make a difference in our day-to-day lives. This skepticism is melancholy, and may betray a kind of unintended sympathy with psychologists Jonathan Haidt’s conclusion that emotion is the dog and reasoning is the tail. [Jonathan Haidt, "The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.," Psychological Review 108, no. 4 (2001).] And yet many of these same philosophers will stridently uphold the tenets of the standard, generalist view, which sees an intimate link between deliberation and action. Generalism is, as mentioned, the contrast class against which the data seemed surprising in the first place. If there is such a link between theoretical reasoning and practical wisdom, and we know this, wouldn’t more philosophers speak more favorably about the practical wisdom of ethicists? But the survey data seems to suggest that on some level, we already endorse a kind Aristotelianism: the fact that we don’t assume that ethicists would be better may imply that we already know there is something wrong with generalism.


Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Edited by Jonathan Barnes, Bollingen Series. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Clarke, Stanley G., and Evan Simpson. Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism, Suny Series in Ethical Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.
Dancy, Jonathan. "Ethical Particularism and Morally Relevant Properties." Mind 92, no. 368 (1983): 530-47.
———. Moral Reasons. Oxford [England] ; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993.
Dewey, John. Human Nature and Conduct, in Jo Ann Boydston, ed, 14 John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924 1, 164 (Southern Illinois 1983).
Haidt, Jonathan. "The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment." Psychological Review 108, no. 4 (2001): 814-34.
McDowell, John. "Virtue and Reason." In Virtue Ethics, edited by Roger Crisp and Michael A. Slote, 162. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Schwitzgebel, Eric. "Do Ethicists Steal More Books?" unpublished (2007).
Schwitzgebel, Eric, and Joshua Rust. "The Moral Behavior of Ethicists: Peer Opinion." unpublished (2007).

Applying to Ph.D. Programs in Philosophy: Full Text

Below is the full text of Applying to Ph.D. Programs in Philosophy, a seven part post on The Splintered Mind, September - October 2007. Some of the original posts have useful comments and discussion, so you may want to check those out by going to the individual original posts:

Part I: Should You Apply, and Where?

Part II: Grades and Classes

Part III: Letters of Recommendation

Part IV: Writing Samples

Part V: Statement of Purpose

Part VI: GRE Scores and Other Things

Part VII: After You Hear Back

Part I: Should You Apply, and Where?

Last January I posted some thoughts on applying to graduate school in philosophy. Many people seem to have found that post helpful, and now that people are thinking about applications for next academic year (yes, it's time to get cracking!) I'm finding myself beseiged with questions, so I thought I'd expand and update my reflections in a series of posts. The current post will address the issue of deciding whether to apply at all, and where.

Warning: This might be depressing!

It's Extremely Competitive

At U.C. Riverside (ranked 31 in the Philosophical Gourmet Report), we received about 200 applications last year, of which we admitted 24 (more than usual for us) for an entering class of 11. Students we admitted typically had GPAs of 3.8 or more, and most of them had virtually straight A's (that is, almost no A-minuses) in their upper-division philosophy classes by senior year, if they were applying as undergraduates. Of our entering class of 11 students, four had perfect 4.0 GPAs in their last enrolled institution (whether undergrad or MA).

To get into the top-ranked philosophy departments is considerably more difficult than to get into UCR. To my knowledge no UCR undergraduate has ever been admitted to a top-15 philosophy Ph.D. program (certainly not in the 10 years I've been here), though we've had some students with straight A's, very strong letters, and excellent writing samples. When I was a student at Berkeley, it seemed that almost all my classmates were from top universities (Harvard, Princeton) or renowned liberal arts colleges (Amherst, Swarthmore). The few who weren't from such name-brand institutions seemed to have done time at such colleges (a classmate from Northeastern, for example, had spent a year at Oxford and had letters from professors there). I don't want to suggest that it's impossible for a student from a middle-tier school to get into a top Ph.D. program, but the odds appear to be long even if you're valedictorian.

When I applied to graduate school in 1991, I had literally straight-A's from Stanford (except for an A- and a B+ my very first term and one A- later) with a liberal sprinking of A+'s (one semester I took four courses and received four A+'s), very strong GREs (800/790/750, back when it had three sections), what seems to me now in retrospect to be a good writing sample, and letters from leading philosophers (Fred Dretske, John Dupre, and P.J. Ivanhoe) one of whom later invited me to contribute to an anthology based on one of my undergraduate essays (and so presumably wrote a strong letter). I was not admitted to Harvard.

For comparison, here are the admissions data from the Harvard Law School admissions site:

Admissions Criteria
Applicants accepted: 12.2%
Number of 2006 applicants: 6,810
Number of 2006 matriculants: 558
LSAT range (25 to 75 percentile): 169 to 175
GPA range (25 to 75 percentile): 3.95 to 3.72

and Harvard Medical:

Admissions Criteria
Applicants accepted: 4.9%
Average MCAT: 11.7
Average GPA (4.0 scale): 3.79

It seems a safe bet that it's considerably harder to get into Harvard Philosophy than Harvard Law or Medical.

The best 1-2 majors at U.C. Riverside every year have GPAs around 3.9. Those who apply to graduate schools typically land in schools ranked in the 25-40 range.

Prospects After Admission

Although I haven't seen data on this, my impression is that most philosophy Ph.D. programs have completion rates of 50% or less; that most of the people who do finish take longer than advertised, often 7-9 years (though Stanford and Princeton have reputations for being quick); and that most of the people who drop out do so during the dissertation phase, after already having completed several years of study. I also suspect that women complete at substantially lower rates than men. (Why that should be is an interesting question!)

Those students who do complete their degrees don't always find tenure-track teaching jobs -- and those who do find tenure-track jobs often have to apply for several years, be willing to move anywhere in the country, and settle for schools they've never heard of. (If you're in a large metropolitan area and willing to teach at the community college level, and if you're patient about piecing together temporary "freeway flier" jobs for a few years, you may be able to stay local after graduation.) Students completing their degrees at top ten universities have a better chance of finding a job at a school they've heard of before, but are often not taken seriously as applicants at lower prestige schools.

Here's what happened to my entering class of eight at U.C. Berkeley (ranked about #3 or 4 nationally at the time were were admitted): One dropped out after the first year, two dropped out after 7-9 years, two completed their degrees after 7-9 years but never found permanent teaching positions, one ended up at a respectable but not renowned liberal arts college (Marquette) after about 12 years of study, one went to SUNY Albany after 6 years of study (then later moved to U.T. Austin), and one (I myself) went to U.C. Riverside after 6 years of study, though for methodological reasons it may be distortive to include myself in these data.

Coming out of U.C. Riverside, my impression is that about half of our successful students end up teaching community college (some never complete their degree and don't show up on the official "placement" lists). Those who land at four-year schools (often after a couple years of looking) are generally (but not universally!) at lower prestige colleges. Here's our placement record. Bear in mind that many two-year schools do not have "community college" in their name.

I advise students not to consider graduate school in philosophy unless (1.) they'd be happy teaching philosophy at a low prestige college and are willing to move almost anywhere in the country, and (2.) even if they never finished the degree they would have found the process of studying philosophy at the graduate level intrinsically worthwhile.

My sense is that the last criterion is key to completing the degree. Students who are extrinsically motivated in their education are unlikely to complete a dissertation in philosophy. There are no real deadlines, no structure imposed by your advisor. You simply have to sit down and think and read and write about the same topic, without much outside help or direction, for a few years. At the same time, you're in a very anxiety-producing situation: Your whole career depends on how good your dissertation is, and the power your dissertation chair has over you -- in the form of approving or not approving your dissertation chapters and in writing a good or a weak letter for you at the end of the process -- is enormous. This is not a situation in which people who are not powerfully intrinsically motivated to do philosophy are likely to succeed.

On the bright side: It's delightful to be able to spend your time surrounded by others as nerdy about philosophy as you are -- peer-to-peer interactions are one of the most rewarding aspects of graduate school -- and you have great liberty to explore almost any topic you want in seminars, independent studies, reading groups, and later your dissertation. Also, unlike law school or medical school, almost all ranked philosophy Ph.D. programs will give you some combination of fellowship and teaching support so that if you live frugally you needn't borrow money or hold down jobs outside of philosophy in order to get through school.

Choosing Where to Apply

If all this hasn't soured you on the prospects of graduate school in philosophy, then you're just the sort of maniac who might succeed! The Philosophical Gourmet Report is the natural starting place for thinking about where to apply, along with with advice from your professors. Once you have a sense of about where you might expect to land in prestige level based on the features of your application, you might select about four schools at that level, two more prestigious schools as longshots, and two fallback schools. Look at faculty profiles (on each department's web page) and at the Gourmet's specialty rankings to see what schools have strengths in the areas or points of view that appeal to you. If you find that geography is a major factor for you, you might consider whether you'll be ready to be geographically flexible in your job search later; if not, bear in mind that community college teaching is the most likely outcome.

Should You Apply to an M.A. Program First?

If you're determined to get into a Ph.D. program in philosophy and you don't have the application for it straight out of undergraduate, an M.A. can be a springboard to a Ph.D. program. Generally speaking, however, if you can get into at least a mid-ranked Ph.D. program straight out of undergraduate, it's advisable to do so. The very top-ranked programs seem mostly to prefer stellar undergraduate applicants over applicants with stellar grades in M.A. programs and only nearly stellar undergraduate records. (There are exceptions, though, so if you wouldn't be happy with any but a top ten department and are only admitted to mid-ranked departements, you might consider a good M.A. program; but the odds are low and you might actually end up worse off in the end! Here, for example, is Houston's placement record, and here is Milwaukee's. Bear in mind that students who do not complete the program, which may be a substantial percentage, are not included on such lists.)

About half of U.C. Riverside's Ph.D. students enter with M.A.'s. Most of those students also did fairly well as undergraduates (3.5-3.8-ish undergraduate GPA). I'd guess that the proportion of students entering with an M.A. is higher at U.C.R. than at most peer instititions, but I'm not sure.

Although technically most community colleges only require their professors to have an M.A., most people who find permanent community college teaching positions nowadays either have a Ph.D. in hand or nearly finished.

Update on Ph.D. Placement (Sept. 20)

A reader advised me to look at SUNY Stony Brook's placement record. Although they are not ranked in the Gourmet report, this year they placed students in several good tenure track positions including Emory and Colorado-Boulder, and they have also placed well in the past. I suspect their track record is unusual in this respect, and may have to do with the sense some people have that the Gourmet Report is unfair to a network of schools including Stony Brook, Penn State, and Vanderbilt. Those schools may, then, have better placement records than their unranked status suggests. This could be the case regardless of whether the Gourmet ranking is fair (about which I mean to take no stand): The point is that some people will see those schools as very good and view their Ph.D.'s favorably.

But also, even from schools about which there is general consensus that they're at the middle of the pack, people do occasionally land jobs at ranked Ph.D.-granting departments or at prestigious liberal arts schools. In 1997, U.C. Riverside placed a student at Wisconsin-Madison, and a student of ours from the early 90's, after moving a few times, was recently hired at Washington-Seattle. Also, last year UCR hired a Ph.D. from Georgetown to a tenure-track position. For a fuller perspective on placement, look at departments' websites.

My point is not that such things are impossible -- or that it's impossible to get into Princeton's Ph.D. program from Cal State San Bernardino -- but that such events are relatively rare.

Update: Applying to Your Own Department (Sept. 21)

Undergraduates at schools with Ph.D. programs will be tempted to apply to their own programs. Presumably, they're having a positive experience and enjoying the good opinion of their professors, if they're considering graduate school in philosophy. They will receive good advice against this from their letter writers.

Every department has a character. Certain philosophers and issues will be taken as core, others not much discussed. How seriously is Davidson taken? Wittgenstein? Heidegger? Modal realism? Contemporary English philosophy of perception? Different approaches will be valued -- keeping up with the journals or emphasizing the classics, valuing the empirical or the a priori, applied ethics or metaethics, etc. Of course, faculty will have diverse opinions on these issues, but that doesn't prevent the shock and surprise -- or simply the breath of fresh air -- that students feel going to a department where things are viewed very differently on the whole!

Students who spend their whole careers in a single department thus risk a stunted and provincial view of philosophy. It's also difficult for them to gain an accurate sense of how their advisors are perceived by the field as a whole. They will learn less from taking classes from the same professors again than they would from a new crop of professors. They may also find it's very different being a star undergraduate than an average graduate student; the tone of their relations with their mentors will change.

When I have served on admissions committees I have argued that we should have a higher bar for our own students than for others. Still, it can be difficult to reject a student when your colleague down the hall insists that she deserves admission!

Update (Sept. 25): Some helpful discussion of community college placement here.

Update (Sept. 28): Should You Despair?

Okay, you're at Cal State Whatever or Southern Iowa Christian, and you would love to be an Ivy League professor of philosophy someday. Is there simply no hope? I would hate to counsel despair. At every step, there are a small number of people who do the unlikely: Get into a top-ranked Ph.D. program from a non-elite school, get an elite starting job from a middle-ranked Ph.D. program, move from a non-elite university to an elite one later in their career.

Great students from non-elite schools do sometimes make an impression on a "top ten" admissions committee. Maybe our best UCR students have been a bit unlucky. There's certainly some degree of chance in the process. Is your glowing letter from someone that someone on the admissions committee happens to really respect? (It's a small world!) Does your writing sample really resonate with someone?

It can also help to be pro-active. For example, can you drive across town, or apply to an exchange program, or take some time off, to take or audit courses at an elite university (as my friend from Northeastern did)? Can you attend talks, colloquia, conferences around town and out of town, and possibly make some connections or at least give your letter writers fodder for backing up their claims never to have seen so energetic and dedicated a student?

But most importantly: Polish, polish, polish that writing sample! (And do so under the guidance of at least one professor.) If a committee member reads a polished, professional sample she feel she has learned something from, in prose that compares favorably with the typical journal article (not through being flowery or technical but through being elegant and precise), that's an applicant she'll want to admit, more so than the Harvard student with the 3.95 GPA who has a so-so sample. But very few undergraduates can write such samples. Which is why, of course, they're so precious.

All that said, bear in mind that for anyone an Ivy-League career is a longshot. (Well, maybe Kripke was destined.) I would not advise pursuing a career in philosophy if you wouldn't be happy teaching at a non-elite school.

Update: Oct. 29, 2008:

David Brink at UCSD has posted some general reflections for prospective graduate students here. I agree with most of his remarks, except:

(1.) If you're aiming for a job in a research-oriented department, you should probably aim for a graduate department more elite than just the top 25 (though a small percentage of people from mid-ranked departments (roughly 20-40) do find research-oriented jobs).

(2.) To say that "Anything below a 3.5 [GPA] at UCSD is going to be problematic at top programs" seems to me to substantially understate the importance of GPA, unless UCSD students are doing vastly better than UCR students in gaining admission to top programs and unless UCR is more selective about GPA than top programs in philosophy.

(3.) In my experience, GRE doesn't pay much of a role in making the "first cut" among applications, though I do suspect this varies substantially from department to department, depending on institutional factors and the views of particular committee members about the importance of such measures.

See here for readers' comments on Part I.

Part II: Grades and Classes

It's awfully hard to be admitted to top Ph.D. programs in philosophy, as I mentioned in Part I. Today: What do admissions committees look for in transcripts? In other posts I'll talk about other aspects of the application.

GPA, Overall and in Philosophy

You must have excellent grades to have a reasonable prospect of being admitted to a top-50 philosophy Ph.D. program, unless there's something very unusual about your application. At U.C. Riverside, ranked 31st in the Gourmet Report, admitted students typically have GPAs of 3.8 or more, with students coming directly from undergraduate having basically straight A's in philosophy their senior year. (Think about it: Ph.D.'s in philosophy become college professors. Doesn't it make sense that the people teaching your college classes should be people who were at the top of their own classes as undergraduates? Would you want the guy chewing gum in the back?) Even a 4.0 from a top university is no guarantee of admission to a top Ph.D. program.

Current graduate students (whether in M.A. programs or other Ph.D. programs) are evaluated a little differently, since good graduate programs may be very demanding. Depending on the admission committee's sense of how demanding the program is, a substantial number of A-minuses in philosophy, or even some B+'s, may be acceptable for admission to a mid-ranked department, if the letters and writing sample are excellent.

I went back and looked at the GPAs of the UCR entering class this year. We admitted 24 students and 11 accepted. Presumably the 13 who declined admission were at least as good, on average, since they chose to go to other similarly ranked or better ranked programs.

Here is the distribution of GPAs from the students' most recent institutions (with undergraduate GPA in parentheses if the student did graduate work):

[These data have been removed due to concerns about confidentiality. In summary, there were several perfect 4.0's and the median was 3.89.]

Transcripts are evaluated holistically. Not all 3.8 GPAs are equal. What matters most are grades in upper-division philosophy courses. A "C" in chemistry your first year won't sink your application! Even a significantly lower GPA may be okay, if the low grades are early in your study and outside philosophy. Conversely, a 3.9 that includes a lot of A-minuses in undergraduate philosophy courses doesn't look so good. Also, of course, a transcript from Princeton will be evaluated differently than a transcript from a large state school with low admissions standards -- which raises the question of...

Institution of Origin

At UCR, probably a bit more than half of our students come straight from undergrad, with no prior graduate training. (They get their M.A. here, along the way to the Ph.D.) As I mentioned in Part I, I suspect UCR admits more students from M.A. programs than most similarly ranked departments -- though 8 of 11 entering this year with prior graduate work is high even for us.

I also mentioned in Part I the difficulty of being admitted to a top ten Ph.D. program from a non-prestigious school. At UCR, in contrast, colleges represented among our students run the spectrum. This year's entering class includes students from Fordham, Boston College (M.A.), Kansas State, Georgia State (M.A.), Missouri-Columbia (transfer from Ph.D. program), and Azusa Pacific, among others.

It can be difficult for admissions commitees to evaluate transcripts from small liberal arts schools, foreign schools, and M.A. programs, since grading standards vary widely. It helps if students from such schools have at least one of their letter writers address this point with concrete comparisons. For example, a letter writer might say: "Jill's GPA of 3.91 is the best GPA for a graduating senior in Philosophy in the last five years, among 80 graduates." Now the admissions committee knows better what that 3.91 means! If the writing sample is excellent, that also confirms the meaningfulness of the GPA.

Students who have attended multiple universities must submit transcripts from all their universities. We occasionally admit students who did poorly early in their education then seem to have "shaped up" with consistently excellent performance later on, though we had no such admissions in this year's class.

Types of Courses

You needn't be a philosophy major to apply to graduate school in philosophy, though you do need to have a track record of excellent upper-division or graduate work in philosophy. Occasionally neuroscientists or physicists or whatever decide they want to become philosophers instead. Admissions committees aren't hostile to the idea -- it shows the good sense of recognizing the superiority of our field, after all! -- especially if the student excelled in her original discipline. But without some sort of track record it can be hard to know if the student's skills would transfer well to philosophy, or even if the applicant really knows what she's getting into.

If you have an opportunity to take graduate courses in philosophy, especially if you're at a school with a Ph.D. program, by all means do so. If you can earn an A or two in graduate-level courses in philosophy, that can really solidify the case that you're ready for graduate school -- especially if one of your letter writers compares you favorably with her current graduate students! Unfortunately, applications generally have to be sent in in early winter, so make sure you do that graduate work by fall term of the year you apply.

Honors Thesis

For some reason, we don't get many applicants who have written honors theses, nor do many philosophy students at UCR write them (I can only recall one in ten years!). However, if your school offers this option, I'd recommend strongly considering it, especially if you're able to complete the thesis by the time of application. It establishes that you can do long-term, independent, self-directed work, and also it gives you a taste of such work so you can think about whether it's really for you; it's likely to be your best piece of work and a natural candidate for a writing sample; it deepens your relationship with a potential letter writer; and on top of all that, it's an intrinsically worthwhile experience!

Timing Graduation

Oddly, students completing their studies in a spring term, as is traditional, are at a bit of a disadvantage in applying compared to students who finish in the fall. If you take 4 years to graduate and apply at the beginning of your fourth year, 1/2 or 2/3 of your senior year won't show in your transcripts, you'll have fewer essays to draw on as potential writing samples, and you'll have had less exposure to potential letter writers then if you take 4 1/2 years to graduate and apply at the beginning of your fifth year.

I myself took an extra quarter at Stanford and applied in the fall quarter of my 5th year -- and I know my application was much better than it would have been had I applied in the fall quarter of my 4th year. I then had fun for nine months, doing other things (hanging out in Humboldt County in far northern California), holding a temporary job I didn't much care about, and I had plenty of time to travel to the schools that admitted me -- a very positive experience I'll discuss in a future post.

Another possibility is to graduate your 4th year, then apply the year after. However, this potentially doesn't look as good to admissions committees. Why didn't you go straight to graduate school, the committee might wonder. What are you doing now? Such questions don't doom your application by any means (especially if you're just fresh out of your B.A.), but it's preferable if they don't arise. So if you're not ready to apply in fall of your fourth year, it's better to postpone graduation until fall of your fifth year, if you can bear the wait! (Besides, that's all the more philosophy, right?)

Update, October 3:

This last section seems to have caused panic and consternation among some readers. Let me stress that it's a minor issue at most, if you're applying less than a year after graduating! Don't feel you have to stay enrolled through fall if you were planning to graduate in spring. And a strong application after graduation, with good letters, good writing sample, etc., is much better than a weak application submitted early one's senior year, if one isn't really fully ready.

See the comments section for advice to students who are several years past their B.A.

See here for readers' comments on Part II.

Part III: Letters of Recommendation

Good grades alone won't secure admission to a Ph.D. program in philosophy. Writing samples and letters of recommendation are also very important. I believe writing samples should carry more weight than letters (and admissions committees often say they do), but I suspect that in fact letters carry more weight. An applicant needs at least three.

Whom to Ask

If a professor gave you an A (not an A-minus) in an upper-division philosophy course, consider her a candidate to write a letter. You needn't have any special relationship with her, or have visited during office hours, or have taken multiple classes from her -- though all those things can help. Don't be shy about asking, we're used to it!

No matter how friendly they seem, you should be wary of asking for letters from professors who have given you A-minuses or below, since if they have integrity in writing their letters, it will come out that your performance in their class was not quite top-level. If a professor has given you both an A and an A-minus, there might still have to be some restraint in the letter -- though less so if the A is the more recent grade.

Letters from philosophers are distinctly preferable to letters from non-philosophers. Letters from eminent scholars are distinctly preferable to letters from assistant professors. Of course, these factors need to be weighed against the expected quality of the letter.

You may submit more than the stated minumum of letters, but be advised that three strong letters looks considerably better in an application than three strong letters and one mediocre one.

Although it's a delicate matter, you can ask a professor whether she thinks she'll be able to write a strong letter for you.

Should You Waive Your Right to See The Letter?

Most applicants waive the right, and some professors will feel offended or put on the spot if an applicant does not waive the right. However, I must confess that in my own case, I think I might be slightly less likely to say something negative, and I might think more carefully about how the letter will come across, if I think the applicant might view it. On the other hand, for the few very best of my letters, I might also slightly restrain my transports of enthusiasm. (I suspect professors don't really have good self-knowledge about such matters.)

Enabling Your Professors to Write the Best Possible Letters

Think of all those wonderful things you've done that don't show up on your transcript! You audited some philosophy classes at Harvard for fun (and on the sly) for a few weeks one summer. (I did this once, going to every upper-division class on offer for two weeks before Stanford's quarter started in late September; it was a kick!) Or you gave free tutoring to needy high school students. You won the Philosophy Department award for best undergraduate essay. All on your own, you read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason last summer and two commentaries on it. You play piano in nightclubs. You have a blog that gets 1000 hits a week. (But be careful what's on your blog, since the admissions committee might look at it!) You got a perfect 1600 on the SAT.

Your letter writers want to know these things. Such facts come across much better in letters than in your statement of purpose (where listing such things might seem immodest or irrelevant). In letters they can be integrated with other facts to draw a picture of you as an interesting, promising student. So give your letter writers a brag sheet and don't be modest! Sit there while they read it so they have a chance to ask questions. Explain to them that it's just a brag sheet and that you leave it to their judgment how much of that stuff, if any of it, will be useful to them in writing their letter.

Give your professors photocopies of all the essays you've written for them, including if possible their comments on those essays. I don't always remember what my students have written about, especially if it has been a year, even if the essays are excellent. With a copy of the essays in hand, I can briefly describe them -- their topics, what seemed especially good about them -- in a way that adds convincing detail to the letter and gives the impression that I really do know and remember the student's work.

Give your letter writers copies of your statement of purpose. If a letter writer says "Karen has a deep passion for epistemology and hopes to continue to study that in graduate school" and your statement of purpose mentions nothing about epistemology, it looks a bit odd. You want the portraits drawn by your letter writers and your own self-portrait to match. Also, statements of purpose are extremely hard to write well (more on that later!) and it's good to have feedback on them from your letter writers.

Give your letter writers your transcript. They may not know you have excellent grades across the board. Once they know this, they can write a stronger letter and one that more concretely addresses your performance relative to other students at your school. Also, they might be able to comment helpfully to the admissions committee on aberrations in your transcript. ("Prof. Hubelhauser hasn't given a student an A since 1973" or "Although Jill's grades slipped a bit in Fall Quarter 2006, her mother was dying of cancer that term, and her previous and subsequent grades more accurately reflect her abilities". Of course, they can't write the latter unless you tell them.)

Give your letter writers the cover sheets and envelopes for all the schools you are applying to, along with an overall cover sheet designed by you. Envelopes should be addressed but needn't be stamped since they'll be going out in the unversity's mail. The overall cover sheet should list the deadlines for all applications. It should also specifically highlight schools that request online letters and for which, consequently, there is no school-specific cover sheet.

Give your letter writers all this material at least a month before the first application deadline.

Gentle Reminders

Professors are flaky and forgetful. They are hardly ever punished for such behavior, so their laxity is unsurprising. Also, it's part of the charm of being absent-minded and absorbed in deeper things like the fundamental structure of reality!

Consequently, it is advisable to email your letter writers a gentle reminder a week before your first deadline. If you don't receive an email in reply saying that the letters are sent, send another reminder a week after the deadline.

Don't panic if the letters are late. Admissions committees are used to it, and they don't blame the applicant. However, if the letter still isn't in the file by the time the committee gets around to reading your application it will probably never be read. (You may still be admitted if the two letters that did arrive were good ones.)

It's also advisable to call the schools a week or so after the deadline to confirm that your application is all in order. Departmental secretaries sometimes goof things up, too.

Advice to Letter Writers

Reading hundreds of letters of recommendation, things become something of a blur. Most letters say "outstanding student" or "I'm delighted to recommend X" or "I'm confident X will succeed in graduate school in philosophy". It would be strange not to say something of this sort, but still -- my eyes start to glaze over. I suspect that trying to detect nuanced differences in such phrases is pointless, since I doubt such nuances closely track applicant quality. More helpful: (1.) Comparative evaluations like: "best philosophy major in this year's graduating class"; or "though only an undergraduate, one of three students, among 9, to earn an 'A' in my graduate seminar"; or "her GPA of 3.87 is second-highest among philosophy majors". (2.) Descriptions of concrete accomplishments: "Won the department's prize in 2006 for best undergraduate essay in philosophy"; or "President of the Philosophy Club". It's also nice to hear a little about the applicant's work and what's distinctive of her as a student and person.

Regarding those little checkboxes on the cover sheet ("top 5%, top 10%" etc.): My impression is that letter writers vary in their conscientiousness about such numbers and have different comparison groups in mind, so I tend to discount them unless backed up by specific comparison assessments in the letter. However, my experience is that other people on the admissions committee often take the checkboxes more seriously.

Most letter writers write the same letter for every school and simply attach it to the cover sheet rather than addressing the specific paragraph-answer questions that some schools include on their cover sheets. However, if you think an applicant is a particularly good fit for one school, a specifically tailored letter that explains why can be helpful.

See here for readers' comments on Part III.

Part IV: Writing Samples

Do Committees Read the Samples?

Applicants sometimes doubt that admissions committees (constituted of professors in the department you're applying to) actually do read the writing samples, especially at the most prestigious schools. It's hard to imagine, say, John Searle carefully working through that essay on Aristotle you wrote for Philosophy 183! However, my experience is that the essays are read. For example, when I visited U.C. Berkeley in 1991 after having been admitted, I discussed my writing sample in detail with one member of the admissions committee, who very convincingly assured me that the committee read all plausible applicants' writing samples. She said that they were the single most important part of the application.

At UCR, every writing sample is read by at least two members of the admissions committee. How conscientiously they are read is another question. If an applicant doesn't look plausible on the surface based on GPA and letters, I'll skim through the sample pretty quickly, just to make sure that we aren't missing a diamond in the rough. For most applicants, I'll at least skim the whole sample, and I'll select a few pages in the middle to read carefully.

Few undergraduates can write really beautiful, professional-looking philosophy that sustains its quality page after page. But if you can -- or more accurately if some member of the admissions committee judges that you have done so in your sample -- that can make all the difference to your application. I remember in one case falling in love with a sample and persuading the committee to admit a student whose letters were tepid at best and whose grades were more A-minus than A. That student in fact came to UCR and did well. I'll almost always plug for the admission of the students who wrote, in my view, the very best samples, even if other aspects of their files are less than ideal. Of course, most such students have excellent grades and letters as well!

Conversely, admissions committees look pretty skeptically at applicants with weak samples. You definitely want to spend some time making your sample excellent.

What I, at Least, Look For

First, the sample must be clearly written and show a certain amount of philosophical maturity. I can't say much about how to achieve these things other than to be a good writer and philosophically mature. I think they're hard to fake. Trying too hard to sound sophisticated usually backfires.

Second, what I look for in the middle is that the essay gets into the nitty-gritty somehow. In an analytic essay, that might be very detailed analysis of the pros and cons of an argument, or of its non-obvious implications, or of its structure. In a historical essay, that might be a very close reading of a passage or a close look at textual evidence that decides between two competing interpretations. Many otherwise nicely written essays stay largely at the surface, simply summarizing an author's work or presenting fairly obvious criticisms at a relatively superficial level.

Most analytic philosophers favor a lean, clear prose style with minimal jargon. (Some jargon is often necessary, though: There's a reason specialists have specialists' words!) When I've spent a lot of time reading badly written philosophy and fear my own prose is starting to look that way, too, I read a bit of David Lewis or Fred Dretske.

Choosing Your Sample

Consider longish essays (at least ten pages) on which you received an A. Among those, you might have some favorites, or some might seem to have especially impressed the professor. You also want your essay, if possible, to be in one of the areas of philosophy highlighted as an area of interest in your statement of purpose. If necessary, you can adjust your statement of purpose, but that can only go so far. If your best essay is in Chinese philosophy or medieval philosophy or Continental philosophy or technical philosophy of physics or Bayesian decision theory, or some other subfield that's outside the mainstream, and you aren't planning to apply to schools that teach in that area, it's a bit of a quandary. You want to show your best work, but you don't want the school to reject you because your interests don't fit their teaching profile, and also the school might not have someone available who can really assess the quality of your essay.

Approach the professor(s) who graded the essay(s) you are considering and ask for her frank opinion about whether the essay might be suitable for revision into a writing sample. Not all A essays are. You might even consider taking a term of independent study with that professor, with the aim of deepening your knowledge on the topic and generating at the end a truly excellent longer essay that goes well beyond what you originally covered in class.

Revising the Sample

Samples should be about 12-20 pages long (double spaced, in a 12-point font). Longer samples can be submitted, but I'd recommend including an abstract on the first page along with advice about what sections (totaling 20 pages or fewer) the admissions committee should focus on in evaluating the sample.

If possible, you should revise the sample under the guidance of the professor who originally graded it (who will presumably also be one of your letter writers). Your aim is to transform it from an A paper to an A+ paper. Deepen the analysis. Connect it more broadly to the literature, maybe. Consider -- or better, anticipate and defuse -- more objections. With your professor's help, eliminate those phrases, simplifications, distortions, and caricatures that suggest either an unsubtle mind or ignorance of relevant literature -- things which professors usually let pass in undergraduate essays but which can make a difference in how you come across to an admissions committee.

See here for readers' comments on Part IV.

Part V: Statement of Purpose

I've never read a first draft of a statement of purpose (also called a personal statement) that was any good. These things are hard to write, so give yourself plenty of time and seek the feedback of at least two of your letter writers. Plan to rewrite from scratch at least once.

It's hard to know even what a "statement of purpose" is. Your purpose is to go to graduate school, get a Ph.D., and become a professor. Duh! Are you supposed to try to convince the committee that you want to become a professor more than the next guy? That philosophy is written in your genes? That you have some profound vision for the transformation of philosophy or philosophy education?

Some Things Not to Do

Don't let someone in business tell you how to write a statement of purpose. The kind of sales pitch that results will rub professional philosophers the wrong way. Indeed, bad statements of purpose can go wrong in many ways. For example:

Corny: "Ever since I was eight, I've pondered the deep questions of life."

Brown-nosed: "In my opinion, U.C. Riverside is the best philosophy department in the country." (Shh! Don't let out the secret!)

Unrealistic or arrogant: "I plan eventually to teach philosophy at a top ten philosophy department." (Do you already know that you'll be a more eminent philosopher than the people on your admissions committee?)

Self-important: "I will attempt to revive American pragmatism."

Ignorant: "U.C. Riverside suits my interests especially well because of its strengths in the philosophy of artificial intelligence." (No one here works on AI.)

Self-promoting: "I have always been at the top of my classes and active in class discussions."

Obvious (the least of these sins): "I hope to become a philosophy professor and teach philosophy."

A more subtle way in which statements of purpose can go wrong is in endorsing a particular substantive philosophical position. You are probably not far enough in your philosophical education to justifiably feel confident that you know enough about some particular philosophical issue that your mind is immune to change on it. Thus, saying things like "I would like to defend Davidson's view that genuine belief is limited to language-speaking creatures" comes off as a little bit close-minded and if not exactly arrogant at least not as charmingly humble as you might like. Similarly, "I showed in my honors thesis that Davidson's view...". If only, in philosophy, honors theses ever really showed anything! Much better: "My central interests are philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. I am particularly interested in the intersection of the two, for example in Davidson's argument that only language-speaking creatures can have beliefs in the full and proper sense of 'belief'."

Don't tout your accomplishments. Let your letter writers do that. It comes off so much better! (Make sure, in advance, that your letter writers know what your accomplishments are. See my discussion of letters in Part III.)

Don't tell the story of how you came to be interested in philosophy. It's not really relevant.

What To Write

So how do you fill up that awful, blank-looking page? With a cool, professional description of your areas of interest. If you have, say, three main areas of interest, devote one short paragraph to each of them -- a few sentences describing what questions or subareas within that larger area you find particularly intriguing or have already thought and written about. For example:

I took a two-term independent study course with Prof. Hoffman on Descartes' theory of the passions and its connection to freedom of the will. I anticipate that the history of modern philosophy will continue to be a central interest of mine, especially early modern philosophers' conceptions of the mind. For example, how is Hume's theory of the passions similar to and different from Descartes'? What is the relationship between mentality and personhood for Locke, Hume, and other philosophers of the era? To what extent was Malebranche's occasionalism about causation a development of views already implicit in Descartes?

A statement of this sort tells the committee two things. First, it tells them that you are knowledgeable about the areas of philosophy you plan to study -- not every undergraduate knows about Hume's theory of the passions and Malebranche's occasionalism! -- and it does so without risk of sounding arrogant or close-minded by making pronouncements about what philosophical views are right or wrong. And second, it gives the committee a sense of whether you would be a good fit for the department. If no one in the department teaches the history of modern philosophy (unlikely, actually, but if my example were different the issue could more plausibly arise) or if the people who do teach early modern really focus only on moral and political philosophy (possible), you won't seem like a good match. On the other hand, if the department has specialist(s) in your area(s) of interest, being a "good fit" can boost the likelihood of acceptance.

Explaining Weaknesses in Your File

Although hopefully this won't be necessary, a statement of purpose can also be an opportunity to explain weaknesses or oddities in your file -- though letter writers can also do this, often more credibly. For example, if one quarter you did badly because your health was poor, you can mention that fact. If you changed undergraduate institutions (not necessarily a weakness if the second school is the more prestigious), you can briefly explain why. If you don't have a letter from your thesis advisor because he died, you can point that out.

Tailoring to Specific Schools

It's not necessary, but you can tailor your applications to individual schools. I'm not sure I'd recommend changing your stated areas of interest to suit the schools, though I see how that might be strategic. (If you change them too much, however, there might be some discord between your statement of purpose and the letters of recommendation in your file.) If there is some particular reason you find a school attractive, there's no harm in mentioning that in a final paragraph. For example, you might mention 2-3 professors whose work especially interests you. (But if you mischaracterize them or they don't match your areas of stated interest, this can backfire, so be careful.)

Some people mention personal reasons for wanting to be in a particular geographical area (near family, etc.). Although this can be good because it can make it seem more likely that you would accept an offer of admission, I'd avoid it since graduating Ph.D.'s generally need to be flexible about location and it might be perceived as indicating that a career in philosophy is not your first priority.

On the bright side: Most statements of purpose are flawed in one or more of the ways described above. Committees are used to it and generally don't hold it much against the applicant. Though you can shoot yourself in the foot by coming across as particularly arrogant or poetical or uninformed, this is the one part of the application where standards are low. Philosophers are not, as a rule, especially talented at self-presentation! (I include myself.) The main thing committees want to see is a match between (most of) your areas of interest and what they can teach.

For further advice, see this discussion on Leiter Reports -- particularly for a discussion between the difference between U.S. and U.K. statements of purpose.

See here for readers' comments on Part V.

Part VI: GRE Scores and Other Things

GRE Scores

GRE scores are less important to your application than grades, letters, writing sample, and statement of purpose. A few schools don't even require them. In my experience, some members of admissions committees take them seriously and others discount them entirely. My own opinion is that they add little useful information. However, since some committee members take them seriously, it's worth studying for the GRE and retaking it if you didn't do well. Also, since the higher-level administrators who oversee the process and often make the decisions about fellowship funding can really only evaluate your GPA and GRE scores, people who do well on these quantitative measures are likely to get better funding offers -- more years of fellowship without teaching, for example (being paid simply to be a student!). Also, it looks good for the department if the students they admit have better average grades and GREs than the students in psychology, economics, etc. We don't want to send too many 1100 GRE offers up to the dean's office for approval!

The GRE scores for this year's entering class at UCR ranged from 1230 to a perfect 1600, with most in the 1300s and 1400s. At UCR I'd say below 1250 is a strike against an applicant, above 1400 is a bonus. There is no GRE Subject Test in Philosophy.

Awards

Of course you made dean's list! If you list too many awards, the really good ones may escape notice. Among the most impressive awards: Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, departmental or college "outstanding student" or "outstanding essay" awards (if the department only selects one per year and the college only a few), awards from nationally- or internationally-recognized institutions such as the NSF or DAAD. Generally, though, even fairly impressive awards don't count for much. It's your grades, letters, and sample that really matter.

Race and Gender

Some schools give you the option of specifying your race and gender. Letter writers must also choose pronouns and can choose to mention race if they think it is relevant. (Some would never do so. Others think they help the applicant by doing so, if the applicant is a minority. If you prefer to keep the information confidential, tell your letter writers in advance.) Committees will often guess gender and ethnicity based on names.

Philosophy is largely a male discipline right now (and of course historically) and it's overwhelmingly non-Hispanic Caucasian. (Tenured men outnumber tenured women in philosophy by a ratio of about 4-to-1, maybe more. The ratio of non-Hispanic Caucasians to minorities is probably even more skewed.) I believe there are persistent systemic biases. However, I also believe that most admissions committees would like to counter these biases and see a broader diversity in the field. Admissions committees may nonetheless show bias implicitly in how they read a file from "Maria Gonzales" compared to a file from "Mark Johnson", unconsciously expecting less from the first file than the second. However, at least the admissions committees I've worked on have used conscious strategies in attempt to counteract, maybe more than counteract, these biases. For underprivileged minorities, especially, an application might be seriously considered that would be quickly dismissed if the applicant were a white male.

While we white males might feel disadvantaged by this, we should bear in mind that we profit from persistent bias in our favor in other contexts. For example, it's generally much easier to fit a professor's stereotype for a "promising philosophy student" if you have a certain kind of look and diction, the tone of voice and cultural attitude, that is characteristic of upper middle class white men. Decades of psychological studies suggest that stereotype-driven expectations can have substantial effects not only on how one is perceived (and thus presumably on letters) but also on one's performance on objective tests (through being encouraged, supported, believed in, made comfortable, etc., by one's teachers).

Personal Contact and Connections

Such things don't help much, I suspect, unless they bring substative new information. If a professor at some point had a good substantive, philosophical conversation with an applicant and mentions that to the committee, that might help a bit. But seeking out professors for such purposes could backfire if it seems like brown-nosing, or if the applicant seems immature, arrogant, or not particularly philosophically astute.

Some professors may be very much swayed by personal connections, I suppose. I myself, however, often have a slightly negative feeling that I'm being "played"; and even if I know the person hasn't sought me out for the purpose of improving her admissions chances, in aiming to be fair and objective in my evaluations I will tend to discount that person's application somewhat -- maybe even more than it deserves.

Cover Letters

Your cover letters may be thrown away or lost. Don't include any important information in them.

See here for readers' comments on Part VI.

Part VII: After You Hear Back

When You'll Hear and When You'll Have to Decide

There's a general agreement among philosophy Ph.D. programs that applicants have until April 15 to decide whether to accept an offer of admission. This deadline drives the process.

Schools with a hard cap on their admissions offers might be permitted by the administration to admit only eight students, for example, or to offer funding (in the form of T.A.-ships and fellowships) to only eight students. These schools will try to admit those eight students quickly (in February, maybe) and will often pressure those students to make a decision as soon as they can so that if they decline, another student further down the list can be admitted or offered funding.

Other departments will target a certain entering class size and admit approximately twice that many students (or more or less, depending on the "yield" rates in recent years) with the expectation that about half of the admitted students will decline. (For example, UCR was aiming for 10-12 last year. We admitted 24 and got 11.) In principle, these departments could admit all those students early in the process, but in fact things often fall behind. If the number of students accepting offers seems to be falling short of expectations, a few may be admitted at the last minute.

If you're at the top of a department's list, expect (typically, depending on the committee's speed) to hear mid-Februrary to mid-March. Applicants lower down on the list may not hear until April, even April 15th itself! You may not hear good news about funding, in particular, until very near the April 15th deadline, if the department has a hard cap on funding. Be ready on April 15th to make an immediate decision about an offer should one come -- and don't be too far from the phone! It's not unreasonable to ask for an additional day or two to decide, should you hear on April 15th, but the department may or may not comply with such a request.

It's generally in the interest of the applicants, then, to wait on their decisions until April 15. However, it is in the interest of departments to extract decisions from applicants as early as possible. Unfortunate!

Occasionally, if an entering class is looking smaller than expected, a department may admit someone after April 15th. That student may already have committed to another school. Generally speaking, it's good to keep to your commitments, but if the one program is much more appealing than the other, I'd recommend reneging with a heartfelt apology!

Funding Offers

Most top-50 ranked Ph.D. programs do not expect students to pay their way through graduate school. They'll offer funding (at poverty levels) in the form of T.A.-ships and fellowships. When comparing funding offers between schools, don't just look at the raw dollar amounts. Some schools inflate their dollar amounts by adding the cost of tuition to their stated funding totals -- money which of course comes right back to them. Make sure, also, that your funding offer includes student medical insurance.

Most departments will guarantee students five years of support (though UCR typically offers only four years to students entering with an M.A.) in some combination of fellowship and T.A.-ship. If you're on fellowship you're paid just for being a student! (Sweet!) A typical offer at a typical department will be for one year of fellowship (your first year, when you aren't really advanced enough a student to be a T.A., anyway, in the eyes of most deparments) and four years of T.A.-ship. Students especially targeted by the department may receive additional fellowship years. (Outstanding GPA and GRE scores help a lot here, since the high-level administrators who often give out those fellowship packages can evaluate those numbers better than they can evaluate writing samples and letters of recommendation.) Although most Ph.D. programs expect most of their students to pay their way through most of their years by T.A.-ing, a few schools -- especially the smaller private schools -- don't expect much T.A.-ing from their students and offer comparatively more fellowship support.

You might also consider how much is expected of a T.A.: Teaching one section of 25 students is much easier than teaching three sections of 25 which in turn is easier (usually) than teaching an entire course on your own. Also consider what happens when your guaranteed years of funding run out, since most students at most schools run out of guaranteed funding before they complete their degrees.

Don't expect too much wiggle room in negotiations about funding. But if a comparable department is offering you a better package than the school that would otherwise be your first choice, it can't hurt to politely mention that fact to the chair of the admissions committee.

Financial offers generally don't include summer funding, though often students can apply for a limited number of summer-school teaching positions. So how are you going to get through the summer?

Unless summer funding is dependable, I recommend considering writing test questions for ETS or a similar organization. Question writing often pays pretty well (by graduate student standards) and since it's piece work, you can do as little or as much of it as you like, on your own time. Such organizations often appreciate the precise turn of mind typical of philosophy students, who as a group do very well on standardized tests. (The organization I worked for, ACT, specifically recruited philosophy Ph.D. students, and the guide to writing questions used philosophical jargon and made reference to Quine!) Unfortunately, it can take several months to get training and certification to write questions, so if you consider this option, plan well in advance. Or -- again, if you're the sort who does well on standardized tests -- you can approach the issue from the other side and teach SAT or GRE prep courses. (Of course teaching philosophy is even better, if you can swing it!)

Letting People Know Where You've Been Admitted

Let your letter writers know where you've been admitted -- or even if you haven't been admitted anywhere -- and ultimately where you decide to go. It's only polite, since they put in work on your behalf. It helps them have a better sense, too, of what to expect for future students. And besides, they might have some helpful advice.

Admissions committee chairs also like to know where you've been admitted and where you decide to go (if not to their school) and why. You needn't share this information if you don't want to, but it helps them in thinking about future admissions. For example, if lots of admittees are going to comparably ranked schools because those schools have better funding offers, admissions committees can make a case for more funding to the college administrators. If admittees are declining mostly for much better-ranked schools, then committees know that their low yield rates are due to having a strong batch of applicants. Etc.

Visiting Departments

I highly recommend visiting the departments to which you've been admitted -- but only after you've been admitted. Admitted students, whom departments now want and are competing to attract, are treated much differently than students who have merely applied or who are on the "waiting list" (if there is one), who will be seen as petitioners. Unfortunately, then, it won't be possible to properly visit departments that admit you at the last minute.

Some departments have money to help students fly out to visit, others don't. It doesn't hurt to ask politely. In any case, let the admissions committee chair know you intend to visit. Even if funding isn't available, she can help arrange your stay -- for example by mentioning what times would be good or bad and maybe finding a graduate student willing to put you up for a night or two.

There are two main reasons to visit departments: First and obviously, it can help you decide where to go. But second, and less obviously, it is a valuable educational experience in its own right.

The second point first: As I mentioned in Part I, students who spend their whole time in one department often have a provincial view of philosophy. Even visiting another department for a few days can crack that provincialism and give an invigorating and liberating, broader perspective on the field. Also, you will never again be treated as well by eminent professors as you will when you are a prospective (admitted!) graduate student. The country's best-known philosophers will take you out to lunch or coffee for an hour and genuinely listen to your views on philosophical topics. They'll be solicitous of you. They'll value your opinion. I remember one extremely eminent professor spending a full day with me. We toured his campus and another nearby campus; we listened to music late into the night; he shared gossip about the state of the profession. (Spending a full day is highly unusual, though! Don't expect it. Aim for coffee. Interestingly, this particular professor had no idea who I was when I saw him again a few years later.) Graduate students -- who at top schools sometimes soon become influential professors themselves -- will engage you in long discussions about the state of philosophy, and you'll (sometimes) feel a real camraderie. My own graduate school tour, for which I set aside three full weeks (for six campuses) was one the highlights of my philosophical education.

To maximize all this, try to stay at each campus for a few weekdays. Weekends don't really count. If you have to cut classes, cut classes. This is much more important than whether you get an A or a B in Phil 176. Also, I'd recommend emailing in advance the professors you'd like to meet and asking them if they're willing to go out for coffee with you.

When you visit a school, the department will generally set you up with first- and second-year students to meet. No harm in that, but bear in mind that first- and second-year students are often still in the glow of having been admitted and they haven't yet started the most difficult part of their education, their dissertation. Insist on meeting students in their 5th year and beyond, especially students working with advisors you imagine you might be working with. In my experience, such students will generally be brutally honest. Unlike new graduate students and unlike professors they don't really care whether you come to their school or not, so they have little motive to draw a rosy picture. And often they're just itching to have someone to grouse to.

Meet the professors, but don't expect their solicitious treatment to continue after you've enrolled. The advanced students' opinions about the professors are probably a better gauge of how you'll actually be treated. Nonetheless, if you talk substance with professors on philosophical topics you care about, you can get a sense of whether you're likely to see eye-to-eye philosophically.

The Summer Before

Students often seem to be shy about showing their faces around the department to which they've been admitted until either classes start or there's some formal introductory event. No need for this. Move in early. Meet some professors and ask them for some reading suggestions pertinent to your shared interests or classes you'll be taking with them in the fall. Get a running start. Professors are often quite interested in meeting the new students -- until the inevitable disappointment of discovering that on average they're only average! But if you get a running start, maybe that's a sign that you'll be an unusually good student...?

See here for readers' comments on Part VII.

Comments welcome on the original posts:

Part I: Should You Apply, and Where?

Part II: Grades and Classes

Part III: Letters of Recommendation

Part IV: Writing Samples

Part V: Statement of Purpose

Part VI: GRE Scores and Other Things

Part VII: After You Hear Back