Nick Byrd, Ph.D.

Grad School | Part 1: The Value Of A PhD

There are a few different kinds of advice about whether or not you should get a PhD. This series has a bit of each approach. Each post is just a few hundred words, but it explains and/or evaluates a crucial part of grad school.

Here’s the one-liner version: getting a PhD can be fantastic, but that doesn’t mean that it will give you an academic job, a non-academic job, or a solely positive experience.

The series has 5 parts. In Part 1, I start to help you decide whether you should apply to grad school. The crux of your decision, as I see it, depends on a central question. Before we get to this question, however, we need to cover some background stuff. …or you can skip to other parts of the series.

Do We Need Bargh’s Selfish Goals?

(Photo credit: “Crack [Cocaine]” by Agência Brasil licensed under CC by 3.0)

This week I will be at the 2013 Consciousness and Experiential Psychology conference and the 4th Annual Experimental Philosophy Workshop in Bristol, England. I look forward to (1) feedback and (2) afternoon tea. Below is a précis of a paper I will present:

John Bargh and colleagues have recently outlined “Selfish Goal Theory” (see Huang and Bargh, forthcoming). They claim that (1) mental representations called “goals” which are (2) selfish, (3) autonomous, and sometimes (4) consciously inaccessible adequately explain a variety of otherwise puzzling behaviors (e.g., addiction, self-destructive behavior, etc.). The details of (1) through (4) are below.

Continue reading Do We Need Bargh’s Selfish Goals?

Philosophers’ Carnival #154

Welcome to the 154th installment of the Philosophers’ Carnival. There’s lots to enjoy! Thanks to all those who submitted and thanks to all those who will read and enrich the discussion! Contact me if you find broken links so that I can fix them ASAP.

Continue reading Philosophers’ Carnival #154

Unconscious Perception in Infants?

Kouider et al have recently reported that infants’ cortical activity (when viewing faces) is isomorphic to that of adults who consciously perceive faces. They conclude that conscious perception develops between 5 and 15 months of age. After reading their paper, I want to consider a different conclusion. Perhaps Kouider et al didn’t find a marker of conscious perception. Maybe they found a marker of unconscious perception.

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Abstract

This paper attempts to specify the conditions under which a psychological explanation can undermine or debunk a set of beliefs. The focus will be on moral and religious beliefs, where a growing debate has emerged about the epistemic implications of cognitive science. Recent proposals by Joshua Greene and Paul Bloom will be taken as paradigmatic attempts to undermine beliefs with psychology. I will argue that a belief p may be undermined whenever: (i) p is evidentially based on an intuition which (ii) can be explained by a psychological mechanism that is (iii) unreliable for the task of believing p; and (iv) any other evidence for belief p is based on rationalization. I will also consider and defend two equally valid arguments for establishing unreliability:the redundancy argument and the argument from irrelevant factors. With this more specific understanding of debunking arguments, it is possible to develop new replies to some objections to psychological debunking arguments from both ethics and philosophy of religion.

Continue reading Derek Leben’s “When Psychology Undermines [Moral and Religious] Beliefs”

Rawls & Cosmopolitan Egalitarian Redistribution

I have ventured beyond my areas of competence again: ethics. I find ethics to be massively complicated because so much of it seems to be bypassing unsettled empirical questions. Anyway, to try to avoid a misstep, I am reaching out to the wiser.

I have finally read some of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice—I am continually surprised at how many alleged “classics” I have yet to read. While I am sympathetic to most of it (and perhaps naively so), I am curious about how Rawls’s theory would apply to not just a single society, but a plurality of societies (like the plurality of nations on our planet). I have surveyed the first 3 chapters, paying special attention to section 58 (where he deals, briefly, with this very question). I have also skimmed Leif Wenar’s “Why Rawls is Not a Cosmopolitan Egalitarian” [PDF] (2006).

The trouble I am having is the following. It seems that Rawls allows for redistribution within societies, but not between societies—that is, per his principle of self-determination in section 58.

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Intermountain Philosophy Conference: Abstract

(Image credit: “Legacy Bridge, University of Utah” by Daderot via Wikipedia [public domain])

I will be at the University of Utah presenting a paper at the Intermountain Philosophy Conference tomorrow entitled “Neurobiological Correlates of Philosophical Belief & Judgment: What This Means for Philosophy.” An abstract is below. The conference website is here.

It is becoming increasingly common to find journals publishing articles that demonstrate psychological correlates (e.g. Adelstein, Deyong, Arvan) and biological correlates (e.g. Harris, Hsu, Stern) of various self-reported beliefs and judgments. It is perhaps most common to find articles reporting the correlates of political beliefs and judgments (e.g. Amodio, Arvan, Hatemi, Kanai, Tost). This paper sets out to show that philosophical beliefs are also worth experimental attention. But that is not all: I hypothesize that variations in peoples’ biology—perhaps their neurobiology in particular—could correlate with variations in their proclivity towards or aversion to particular philosophical beliefs and judgments. In the first section of the paper, I lay out what we might expect to learn about our philosophical beliefs from our neurobiology. Before I conclude that philosophical beliefs (or philosophical cognition) are worthy of experimental attention, I mention some philosophical and methodological concerns and some objections to the suggested research. I am careful to note along the way that while many of the conclusions reached by this research could be illuminating, we none of it should be devastating to philosophy. That is not to say that the research wouldn’t inspire some methodological reform (e.g., whether and how philosophers appeal to intuition or exploit certain language), but it would by no means “end” philosophy.