Keele's philosophy department not to be closed

Thanks to campaigning by students, faculty, alumni and others, it appears that Keele's administration has decided to not pursue the possible plans to close its philosophy department and centre for professional ethics. The university will still be attempting to reduce costs in the departments concerned and their respective schools, but closure is apparently off the table and there will be a fresh intake of students this September.

A good day for UK philosophy. Congratulations to all at Keele.

Possible closure of philosophy department at Keele University

Worrying, and not just because it's my alma mater. Keele isn't the first UK university in the past few years to attempt to close its philosophy department - Liverpool tried unsuccessfully, Middlesex successfully - but it's still very disappointing to see another institution attempt to shut down research into one of the oldest academic subjects.

Facebook group for saving philosophy at Keele
Facebook group for saving the Centre for Professional Ethics
Peter Kail comments on Brian Leiter's blog
New APPS has a brief post about the potential closure
Iain Brassington comments at the BMJ Group's blog
Andrew Willetts discusses the background of the proposal on his blog Political Details

There was also a petition calling for an emergency general meeting of Keele's student union, which has apparently been successful.

The Quantum Mind?

I can't say that I hold much sympathy for theories of either consciousness and/or cognition that invoke quantum mechanics, and I'm well aware that it's hardly a majority view, but after reading that Searle has apparently recently endorsed the view I became curious as to how many proponents there actually are.

Penrose and Hammeroff are, of course, the most famous quantum mind theorists; Penrose's two books The Emperor's New Mind (1989) and The Shadows of the Mind (1994) being the main explications of his idea that human thought features some non-algorithmic elements. There are plenty of critical replies to both ENM and SotM; Grush & Churchland (1996), Tegmark (2000) and Chalmers (1995) being some of the more well known names who have published responses.

Speaking of Chalmers, he himself has expressed some sympathy for the possibility that quantum mechanics might be linked to consciousness (Chalmers, 1996; 2002). I can't say that I received the impression whilst reading him that he thinks the possibility is likely, however; he merely thinks that it's an option that shouldn't be ruled out, similar to his views on panpsychism.

Henry Stapp is one name I occasionally hear in relation to quantum theories of mind, but I literally know almost nothing about his work.

Searle's (2007) argument, which caused me to start thinking about this topic, is as follows;

Premise 1. All indeterminism in nature is quantum indeterminism.
Premise 2. Consciousness is a feature of nature that manifests indeterminism.
Conclusion: Consciousness manifests quantum indeterminism.

I'm not sold on the truth of either premise (I'm honestly not knowledgeable enough about physics to either agree or disagree with the first, and the second seems untrue), but it's nonetheless an interesting claim. I've yet to properly read through the book which contains this argument, so perhaps Searle will manage to convince me of its veracity.

Apart from the views listed above, I can't really think of (or find) any other major proponents of quantum mind theories. If anyone stumbling across this blog can give me reading recommendations, I'd appreciate it!



References:

Chalmers, D.J., (1995), "Minds, machines and mathematics", Psyche, 2(9), 11-20
Chalmers, D.J., (1996), The Conscious Mind, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Chalmers, D.J., (2002), Consciousness and its place in nature, in (S. Stich & F. Warfield, eds) The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell
Grush, R. & Churchland, P.S. (1995), "Gap's in Penrose's Toilings", Journal of Consciousness Studies, 21, pp. 10–29
Penrose, R., (1989), The Emperor's New Mind, Oxford, Oxford University Press
Penrose, R., (1994), Shadows of the Mind, New York, Oxford University Press
Searle, J., (2007), Freedom and Neurobiology, Columbia University Press
Tegmark, M., (2000), "The importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes", Physical Review E, vol 61, pp. 4194–4206

Female PhDs in Psychology

There's a curious graph making the rounds, made by Kieran Healy, regarding the percentage of US PhDs awarded to women in 2009. Most of the discussion I've seen regarding said graph is related to the remarkably low levels of female philosophy PhDs (~30%), which is interesting enough, but the findings for psychology seem equally surprising to me; apparently over 70% of psychology PhDs were awarded to women. Why the skew?

I could wax lyrical about psychology possibly being a stereotypically female field and thus naturally attracting more women to it, but that would be mere conjecture. Let's look at the data, which Kieran helpfully provided. My first question is; what exactly is that "psychology" datapoint on the "Selected Disciplines" graph showing? Is it all psychology fields aggregated together, or merely generic psychology PhDs? I remain unsure; in the detailed data, "psychology/general" shows ~68% women, whereas "psychology/aggregated" shows ~66% - neither of which match the ~72% displayed on the "Selected Disciplines" graph.

Regardless of where that >70% figure cames from, the aggregated total for all psychology sub-fields is still very much female-dominated. Breaking that aggregate down into its components, however, yields some fairly interesting results; cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics is the most evenly distributed field, with 48% of PhDs being issued to women. Experimental (62%), physiological (63%) social (64%) and family (65%) psychology all show a slight female bias.

The really female-dominant fields, however, are counselling (76%), clinical (77%), school (77%) and educational (78%) psychology. The most female-heavy subfield is, without a doubt, developmental and child psychology, with apparently 85% of all PhDs issued being awarded to women. It's probably unsurprising that the female-heavy areas of psychology are the ones most associated with stereotypically "feminine" subjects; other educational subjects display an equally high percentage of PhDs issued to women.

So what this data shows us, then, is that generic psychology is not as female-slanted as it appears at first glance; rather, much of the subject seems to be surprisingly well-balanced in terms of gender population, with some certain subfields overwhelmingly populated by women. Not to say that this is a bad or undesirable state of affairs; I just thought that the initial placing of psychology was curious, and wondered what the explanation for it might be.

“When discussing psychological research, what surprises every economist or physicist is that psychology has no theory.”

Psychology, as subjects go, tends to have a fairly bad reputation regarding its scientific credentials. For the most part I think that reputation is unfounded (perhaps unsurprisingly), but one persistent criticism stands out – the argument that psychology lacks any sort of unified theory, a necessity for a field to qualify as scientific under a Kuhnian viewpoint.

An article written by Gerd Gigerenzer was recently published in the journal Theory and Psychology discussing this state of affairs, and what he thinks can be done to solve it. In short, Gigerenzer’s view is that psychologists are currently failing to integrate their findings into overarching theories, and – perhaps more importantly – must learn how to construct such overarching theories in the first place.

To go into slightly more depth about the content of his paper, Gigerenzer bemoans how psychologists are generally “content working within the confines of their own small territories”; contemporary psychology is, he suggests, “a patchwork of small territories, resem­bling, to use a political metaphor, Italy or Germany before unification around 1870”. The insinuation is made that psychologists are skirting around this issue; Gigerenzer notes that he has written about the lack of over-arching theory in psychology before, and that those papers are amongst his least cited.

He makes the proposal that theory construction should be taught to students of psychology; not exactly an unreasonable suggestion. Many current theories in psychology, Gigerenzer argues, differ from those in other subjects on a number of dimensions – “The nature of parameters in a theory … formal versus verbal theories, optimization versus heuristic processes, as-if models versus process models… domain-specific versus domain-general theories...” – and that student psychologists need to be taught that the construction of good psychological theories should mirror the construction of good theories in other fields. The possibility of physics envy aside (and, perhaps, economics envy?), it’s hard to find fault with this proposal.

A large chunk of Gigerenzer’s paper is then dedicated to explicating two specific elements of teaching theory construction; the first being the study of the history of previously developed theories. One of the main methods of theory generation in psychology, Gigerenzer suggests, springs from the adaption of psychologists to a new tool; what he calls the tools-to-theories heuristic. Examples he gives of such theories include signal detection theory arising from the Neyman-Pearson hypotheses testing method, and Bayesian theories of cognition arising from Bayes’ theorem. The second element that he then discusses is the art of spotting things which claim to be theories, yet are not. Gigerenzer’s most prominent example of such “surrogate theories” is the classic “Why does opium make us sleepy? Because of its dormative properties”; the theory doesn’t actually explain anything about opium’s effect, it merely redescribes the effect using different terminology.

Gigerenzer’s proposal is certainly an interesting one, although I’m not sure optimism is warranted when wondering whether psychologists as a group will listen. Perhaps the most pertinent question that it raises to my mind, though, is; why does psychology seem so averse to theory unification? At what point did that become a quality of the field? Gigerenzer certainly isn’t the first to notice it; Hans Eysenck, in his last submitted paper (published after his death) argued that the unification of disparate psychological subfields was necessary in order to produce theories with greater explanatory power. Howard Gardner has noted that psychology seems to be fracturing, with some aspects of the field apparently merging with cognitive science and neuroscience (those aspects probably being the ones I fall into), and some blending into cultural studies.

The theoretical unification of psychology still seems like a work in progress, which is… disappointing, I suppose. Despite the possibility of further fragmentation (the myriad of post-cognitivist views springing to mind), though, I can’t help but be optimistic about the future of the field.

References:

Esyenck, H.J. (1997), Personality and Experimental Psychology: The Unification of Psychology and the Possibility of a Paradigm, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(6), 1224-1237

Gardner, H. (1992), Scientific Psychology: Should we Bury it or Praise it?, New Ideas in Psychology, 10(2), 179-190

Gigerenzer, G. (2010), Personal Reflections on Theory and Psychology, Theory & Psychology, 20(6), 733-743

Emotion recognition

I'm still on a fairly extended holiday, and just wanted to post something brief about an interesting article in the NY Times which discusses the technology of a company called Affectiva. The most notable product that Affectiva offers - from my limited perspective - is their Affdex expression recognition technology, which is designed to detect the affective state of an individual.

I'm of the opinion that machines which interact with humans regularly are eventually going to require some manner of a theory of mind, and Affdex seems like an impressive piece of progress towards that possible goal.

DID in the DSM-5

As almost everyone vaguely interested in psychiatry knows, the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is about to enter its fifth edition. The changes in many areas have come under some scrutiny (most recently the decision to slash some personality disorders), so I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the proposed revisions to dissociative identity disorder.

The current criteria for diagnosis of DID in the DSM-IV are;

A. The presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states (each with its own relatively enduring pattern of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and self).

B. At least two of these identities or personality states recurrently take control of the person's behavior.

C. Inability to recall important personal information that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness.

D. The disturbance is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., blackouts or chaotic behavior during Alcohol Intoxication) or a general medical condition (e.g., complex partial seizures). Note: In children, the symptoms are not attributable to imaginary playmates or other fantasy play.

The slightly lengthier revised criteria are;

A. Disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states or an experience of possession, as evidenced by discontinuities in sense of self, cognition, behavior, affect, perceptions, and/or memories. This disruption may be observed by others or reported by the patient.

B. Inability to recall important personal information, for everyday events or traumatic events, that is inconsistent with ordinary forgetfulness.

C. Causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. *

D. The disturbance is not a normal part of a broadly accepted cultural or religious practice and is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., blackouts or chaotic behavior during Alcohol intoxication) or a general medical condition (e.g., complex partial seizures). NOTE: In children, the symptoms are not attributable to imaginary playmates or other fantasy play.

Specify if:**

a) With non-epileptic seizures or other conversion symptoms

b) With somatic symptoms that vary across identities (excluding those in specifier a)

* The workgroup will further consider whether Criterion C is necessary

** These specifiers are under consideration.

There are a few things to comment on here, I think. Apparently dissociative trance disorder, a diagnosis present in the DSM-IV, has been merged with DID for the DSM-V; this merger explains some of the additional diagnostic criteria - primarily the feeling of possession in the revised criteria A. That merge may be broadening the definition of DID to a potentially unhelpful degree, particularly when DID is already a relatively heterogenous disorder.

The cultural/religious caveat in the revised D seems odd to me, primarily because if C remains as it is listed above then D is almost superfluous; if the experience of DID is a normal part of a cultural practice, then it will almost surely not cause clinically significant distress - but if it does cause that distress, why should it matter whether it's part of an accepted tradition?

The revised C is also interesting because, in its current state, it appears to give credence to the concept of "healthy multiplicity"; roughly the idea that, well, if you have all the symptoms of DID, but don't actually suffer from it, then you're okay - and that this can even be quite a beneficial situation to find oneself in.

If C is eventually deemed unnecessary, then that would be a fairly significant alteration of the proposed criteria - it's difficult to judge quite what to make of the proposed revision until the question of C's inclusion has been decided. Interesting developments, though.