THE PHENOMENal Public - Volume 1, Issue 1 of the new journal, political philosophy

Writing this paper was more fun than should be allowed in such endeavors.

Abstract: With what modes of mentality can we build a visceral, subjective sense of being in some specific mass-political society? Theorists and political cultivators standardly call upon the imagination – the kind prompted by symbols and rituals, for example. Could perception ever play such a role? I argue that it can, but that perceptions of mass-political publics come with costs of cruelty and illusion that neither democratic theorists nor participants should be willing to pay. The clearest examples of such perceptions are found in fascist political culture. My discussion aims to illuminate what it is about publics, perception, and democracy that makes this so.

TWO NEW PAPERS

One is on inquiry in mind-wandering. The other is on inquiry in journalism, forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Epistemology.

Profile - from Fall 2023

This profile appears in the Jan-Feb 2024 issue of Harvard magazine. It’s by a brilliant journalist I was lucky to get to talk to - Lydialyle Gibson. She covers some of my work and personal history. It shows a throughline connecting my older work in philospohy of perception to more recent work on vigilantism. It doesn’t focus on my inquiry project , or mind-wandering, or the philosophy of journalism, and it doesn’t cover any debates in the philosophy of perception. But not everything can be covered in one profile. As a bonus, you can see some of Becky Moon’s philosophical paintings!

Sea of Perception - Art + Philosophy show

The amazing artist Becky Moon based in St Louis and Seoul has produced a series of paintings and sculptures prompted by the philosophy of perception. In October 2023 co-curated an art show in Emerson Hall, home to Harvard’s philosophy department. Our artists talk is here, and you can see many Moon’s wonderful pieces here.

BBC Radio 4 - on The morality of News Coverage

Discussion with 4 journalists from across the political spectrum, and 4 “witnesses” on the principles that should guide news coverage. The Moral Maze program, June 28, 2023. Listen here. (I’m the 4th witness, on air around minute 40).

Philosophy of Journalism workshop + Jack Smart Lecture + David K Lewis/Barry TaYlor Memorial

May 2023: In quick succession: an Interdisciplinary workshop on philosophy of journalism, and the Jack Smart Lecture at the Australian National University, and the Lewis/Taylor memorial lecture at the University of Melbourne. My talks at the first two of these events: on different aspects of the relatinships inquiry and journalism. In Melbourne I’ll be talking about the psychological structure of inquiry, focusing on cases where inquiry proceeds without many of the markers of executive control.

American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.

I was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April.

GUggenheim fellow 2023-24

I’ll be on leave in 2023-24 working on my vigilantism project, thanks to the John S Guggenheim foundation.

LEbowitz Prize

Prof. Kristie Dotson and I won the 2023 Lebowitz Prize awarded by Phi Beta Kappa and the American Philosophical Association for our work on norms of attention.

THE PHENOMENAL PUBLIC

…a talk I wrote during the pandemic on whether it is only possible to grasp the public via imagination, as many political thinkers have assumed (think of Anderson’s “imagined communities”), or whether it is possible to perceive the public, by perceptually experiencing it - even if the perception involves illusions. It now exists as a paper, email me if you’d like to read it.

The PHILOSOPHY OF VIGILANTISM

My paper Vigilantism and Political Vision has been published by a new and awesome journal: Washington University Review of Philosophy, special issue on war and violence. I discuss what “taking the law into one’s own hands” can amount to, the relationships between vigilantes and mobs, vigilantism and self-defense, and vigilantism and social protest. I came to this topic from a piece I wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books on mob violence, and was drawn in initially by the fascinating range of historical examples and contemporary resonances in global proto-fascist politics. But I also found vigilantism a useful test case for seeing how (and even whether!) an analysis of correct uses of a concept can also explain misuses, abuses and contestations. Not any old conceptual analysis can do these things. Spoiler: this one can! There’s an extended dsicussion of how attributions of vigilantism can mask self-defense, and how attributions of self-defense can mask vigilantism.

PS: Don’t miss the fabulous cover of the special issue, illustrated by wondrous artist and philosopher Becky Moon - she paints to depict philosophical ideas!

Books that change your life

They asked me which books changed my life, but I wanted to talk about what can make a book life-changing. Starring Plato, Thomas Mann’s unfinished novel Felix Krull, the moist miracle of the human eye, and the philosophy of perception. In the Harvard Gazette, August 2022.

Conference on my work in Barcelona, June 1-3

Inter-university workshop on philosophy and cognitive science. Programme here.

Conference: “A right to truth? INformation, Communication and Democracy in the 21st CEntury”

I’ll be speaking at this conference on May 4th at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Presidential Address at Southern Society for Philosophy and psycholgy

My presidential address at SSPP in April 2022, “The stepping stones of inquiry”, introduces a framework for analyzing the structure of inquiry that can help us understand how it may unfold in the spontaneous flow of thought, and how shifts of attention can be epistemically better or worse.

Two new POdcasts: 5 Questions & Ideas-Cast

I chatted with philosopher Kieran Setiya on his 5 Questions podcast about the differences between writing fiction and non-ficiton, the continuties and differences between philosophy and journalism, and whether there are norms of attenetion. We fit a lot in to half an hour! At the end there’s a bonus poem - Susan Carey’s masterpiece of developmental psychology The Origin of Concepts rendered in poetry in the form of Goodnight Moon.

This episode belongs a series of you-tube chats with philosophers for general audiences. I talked with host Justin McSweeny about the epistemology of perception, self-defense law, perceiving the public, mobs, the spontaneous flow of thought, and the mind as a newspaper.

discussion of the film ‘memento’ (with Dan SChacter)

We discuss Christopher Nolan’s classic 2000 neo-noir film ‘Memento’, from perspectives of philosphy and cognitive science.Sponsored by Harvard’s Mind/Brain/Behavior program. Moderated by Prof of Neurology, Kirk Daffner. February 2022.

death and its impact on consciousness, in life and in governance

My discussion of this topic in the Harvard Gazette, for 2021. Day of the Dead. Published 2 November 2021. In February 2023, I discussed this topic with the physician, author, and bioethicist Dr. Lydia Dugdale of Columbia Medical School, hosted by the Veritas forum. We had a lively and enjoyable discussion - you can listen or watch it here.

Brains Blog Roundtable on Philosophy of Perception

The first Brains Blog Roundtable led by Daniel Burnston, with Ned Block and Susanna Schellenberg on the philosophy of perception (posted here starting November 8th, 2021).

Podcast Episode

• …with Friction Philosophy. On method in philosophy, epistemology, and many other topics raised by The Rationality of Perception.

The philosophy of mob violence

A longer piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books, published 9/27/2021. Part of Brad Evans’s Histories of Violence series of interviews with writers who share their perspectives on violence. Here I discuss the nature of mobs, the rhetorical force of accusations of being ‘a mob’ or part of a mob, the relation of these things to perceiving the public, and the perplexities of vigilantism. Starring Elias Canetti, Hannah Arendt, Adolph H. from Germany, the Jan 6th insurrectionists, the “I don’t call 911” signs that some gun owners in the U.S.A. post in their yards, Frederick Douglass, Ida B Wells, and historical research by Caroline Light and Elizabeth Hinton.

The phenomenal public

Lively andy length substantive discussions of this material at London School of Economics and Sheffield in October 2021 on zoom talks that were recorded by the philosophy departments. Draft coming soon…

Reflections on Septmber 11, 2001, twenty years later

My piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books, published 9/11/2021. Part of a collection of short reflections by philosophers, historians and cultural critics. E-book with the entire collection available here.

Philosophy by Postcard

A wonderful project led by the fabulously creative philosophers Claire MacCumhaill and Rachel Wiseman of In Parenthesis. in honor of Iris Murdoch. 100 people asked 100 philosophers 100 questions addressed to Murdoch. An 8-year old asked me “How do we think? PS. I am eight”. My (short 1-sentence) reply is here.

New course: Philosophy of journalism

I’m teaching a course this Fall (2021) on the philosphy of journalism, called Truth, Lies and the Press. It’s the first course ever on this topic to be taught in the Philosophy department at Harvard. Syllabus here.

The course is organized around four visions of democracy and the role of journalism in it. We start by considering in chronological order the thinkers who developed these visions: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, and Hannah Arendt. Then we have a chance to discuss specific problems and topics: objectivity; framing; leaks; the Apology movement by historically white newspapers; and what should count as news. In the last segment we turn to challenges posed by social media. It’s a mix of philosophy, social theory, and US history.

The “pre-assignement” is to listen to Ezra Klein interview Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates on the 1619 project and resulting backlash, as it raises a lot of central questions we’ll discuss in depth along the way: the potentially competing pressures of fact and narrative; the epistemic status of framing; the many guises, promises, and pitfalls surrounding ideas of objectivity; the roles of journalism in shaping narratives around political violence; the rise of professionalized journalism; the varieties of organized lying, and the challenges for journalism of responding to them.

The course is a mix of philosophy, social theory, and US history.

Recent Talks

New paper: The Phenomenal Public, presented at the Global Consciousness forum, organized by Uriah Kriegel.

In mass society, what modes of mentality can be used to get one’s mind around “the public” - the body politic, ‘the People’? Many thinkers have argued that you can’t perceive the public with perceptual experience - instead you have to imagine it (D. Allen, B. Anderson, J. Dewey, W. Lippmann, M. Nussbaum, etc). I discuss various ways to perceptually experience a public in mass society, and discuss the ways that facilitate and anti-facilitate democracy.

Other presentations of this material, as it grows and morphs: Turin on June 16, Reno in early September. Sao Paolo in late September, Sheffield, Barcelona and London School of Economics in October.

Recording of “How can perceptual experiences explain uncertainty?” - on probability and perception, presented at Moshe Bar’s lab.

Two new papers on salience

“Salience Principles for Democracy”. Forthcoming in Sophie Archer, Ed. Salience. Routledge, 2021.

Abstract: I discuss the roles of journalism in aspirational democracies, and argue that they generate set of pressures on attention that apply to people by virtue of the type of society they live in. These pressures, I argue, generate a problem of democratic attention: for journalism to play its roles in democracy, the attentional demands must be met, but there are numerous obstacles to meeting them. I propose a principle of salience to guide the selection and framing of news stories that I argue may help address the puzzle: the public-as-protagonist principle.

“Salience: the stepping stones of inquiry” has become a larger project. Contact me if you want to read it.

Abstract: In an intuitively recognizable sense, some things can be more salient to the mind than others. I develop the notion of an outlook (one kind of clustering of mental states), and analyze the ways that outlooks can influence what becomes salient in the flow of thought. On my analysis, the flow of thought is a flow of embryonic inquiries, and the epistemic contours can be found by considering the many ways that inquiries can be better or worse. Salience structures can be extensions of inquiry, and that is the key to their epistemic evaluability.

Review of Sheridan Hough’s Marvelous book “Kierkegaard’s Dancing Tax Collector”

Hough’s book shares a feature with most novels: It is narrated by someone distinct from its author. It presents an account of Kierkegaardian faith, on which the paragon of faith is the dancing tax collector - someone described by Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling. Faith is inherently joyful, on this account. Which raises a question about whether it is possible to move faithfully through catastrophe. I argue that the literary form of Hough’s book is not an optional extra or a playful bit of whimsy, but a feature needed to display the practical nature of faith as Hough’s narrator understands it. My review is coming out in Syndicate, as part of a book symposium.

New Philosopher Magazine, Issue #30

Issue on Perception with the newstand magainze New Philosopher. Interview with me covers three kinds of perception: sensory, stereotypes, and personal vision. I talk with editor Zan Boag about the relationships between the three kinds of perception, perception in digital vs spatial domains, propaganda and journalism, and more. Available here and at shops where magazines are sold.

Op-Eds in the Tampa Bay Times

On the ‘warrior mindset’ in policing and do-it-yourself security and how it undermines democracy. Written with Harvard Prof. Caroline Light. Published December 20, 2020.

On why hypocrisy is never the main problem in politics (examples: Chile, US). Published Oct 30, 2020

On why schadenfreude is the wrong reaction to the Trumps contracting Covid-19. Published Oct 2, 2020. Useful further discussion on Paul Geerligs’ blog here.

On why schadenfreude is so useful in propaganda. Written with Kelsey Ichikawa. Published July 31, 2020

On why the uptake of science during the pandemic may undermine authoritarianism. Published May 29, 2020.

In the Worcester Telegram, on the MA police reform bill (with Caroline Light). Published December 17, 2020.

PodcastS

Tent talk #63 on schadenfreude and authoritarianism with Cody Turner.

Episode of Writ Large: “Books that change the world”, on Hobbes’ Leviathan.

Recent paper on probability and perception

in Mind & Language: “How can experiences explain uncertainty?” Penultimate version here. Final version here (journal subscription required).

Philosophy and the pandemic

Interview with me in Clarín, major newspaper in Argentina, about the pandemic, from early April 2020. I discuss the role of scientific expertise in politics and behavior, and how political decisions taken now will affect the way life is after it passes.

This interview is with Gustau Alegret on Cuestión de Poder, a political talk show based on Bogotá. I discuss how bats shape the economy, the political potential under authoritarianism of behavior that’s sensitive to scientific expertise, and the ethics of hiring a babysitter during the pandemic.

The wonderful journalist Susana Samhan Arias conducted a series of interviews with philosophers all over the world about the pandemic. My portion is here, and a transcript is here.

Philosophers discuss the pandemic in English the Tampa Bay Times, April 10, 2020.

Read the Preface

…to The Rationality of Perception

Philosophy in Scotland

I was the 2019 Scots Cententary Fellow at the University of Glasgow, where I was visiting from 10 January until 23 January of this year.

What Can Philosophy Contribute to the study of the mind?

In The Philosophers’ Magazine, issue 88. Currently behind a paywall, but you can find the penultimate draft here. This piece is actually written for newcomers to philosophy, especally experimental scientists and people in the literary humanities. I focus on the role of fiction and fictional examples in the philosophy of mind, and highlight three roles for invented situations: posing a loaded question (think of Frank Jackson’s Mary), illustrating a philosphical problem, and testing normative and modal hypotheses. The material on the second of these roles was the focus of my debate with Steven Pinker about the role of the humanities in the philosophy of mind (video available under the “Media” menu), and the material on the third role relates to my debate with Adam Pautz about The Rationality of Perception.

Replies to Lord, Railton and Pautz on The Rationality of Perception

A symposium on The Rationality of Perception will soon be published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. The symposiasts are Errol Lord and Peter Railton, who focus on my theory of inference, and Adam Pautz, who raises methodological objections and defends phenomenal conservatism. You can read my replies here, and Pautz’s piece here.

Skill and Expertise in Perception

In E. Fridland and C. Pavese’s fantastic Routledge Handbook of Skill and Expertise (2020). You can read it here.

Tetralog on Perception and Reason

“The Uneasy Heirs of Acquaintance” is my contribution to a four-way exchange about perception and reason with Bill Brewer, Aniil Gupta, and John McDowell. In this tetralog, we have each written a piece responding to the other three on the topic “Empirical Reason.” My piece locates all of our views in relation to the attempts by Gareth Evans and others he influenced to refigure Russell’s notion of acquaintance in perception. I invite my interlocutors to explain how they would reconcile the primary role of the perceived objects in shaping perceptual experience with the highly constructive nature of perceptual processing. This issue also turns up in my exchange with Christopher Peacocke in “Perception as Guessing vs. Perception as Knowing.”

I’ve also written a reply to my three interlocutors’ comments on me, called “Replies to Brewer, Gupta, and McDowell.”

All eight essays (each of our four original contributions, and each of our replies) appear in the October 2019 volume of Philosophical Issues.