Over at Philosophy Now, Peter Rickman argues no:

Many students of the mind sought the remedy for their failures and their lack of public esteem in modelling the methods of psychology on the physical sciences. An extreme example of this is behaviourism. Why not focus on studying observable human behaviour, as you can study the movements of falling bodies and theorise on that evidence? After all, humans are behaving bodies. There are various flaws in this approach, and one of them is illustrated by a well-targeted joke. Two behaviourists spend a night passionately making love. In the morning, one says to the other, “It was good for you. How was it for me?”

A proper starting point is to recognise the disciplines which study human nature as a distinct group which require, if not a complete alternative to the scientific method, at least some essential supplementary methodology.

The fact is that the bulk of the evidence given to the student of humanity on which to theorise, are not observable facts, but communications. These do not correspond to anything observable. In other words, what is in front of the psychologist are statements from interviews or completed questionnaires (eg, I am afraid of dying, I was abused in childhood, etc), responses to tests such as the Rorschach pictures, diaries, and the like. Similarly, sociologists use interviews, questionnaires and legal documents, while historians use biographies, letters, inscriptions on gravestones, eyewitness accounts of battles and revolutions and similar material. The same is true of other human studies such as social anthropology or politics.

All this is pretty obvious and non-controversial. It needs mentioning because of widespread error of taking what is communicated in this material as simple data whose meaning is transparent. What is thus ignored is the immense complexity of the process of communication.

The Spring Campaigns

Other men remember the false gardens
of love, and the days they were in love
or thought they were in love, and others
the books they read as children, books that marked
their lives forever, though they couldn’t know
in those days how the real world operates.
And all of them take comfort in this way
and even grow enthusiastic when
they realize that memory can shape
itself at will and provide the things
that love and books and gardens can’t provide.
I remember what I didn’t undertake:
more than anything, the spring campaigns.

by Julio Martínez Mesanza

Translated from the Spanish by Don Bogen
The Boston Review July/August 2009

From The Guardian:

Recently, two Italian journalists wrote a three-page newspaper article (in print, alas) about the decline of handwriting. By now it's well-known: most kids – what with computers (when they use them) and text messages – can no longer write by hand, except in laboured capital letters. In an interview, a teacher said that students also make lots of spelling mistakes, which strikes me as a separate problem: doctors know how to spell and yet they write poorly; and you can be an expert calligrapher and still write “guage” or “gage” instead of “gauge”. I know children whose handwriting is fairly good. But the article talks of 50% of Italian kids – and so I suppose it is thanks to an indulgent destiny that I frequent the other 50% (something that happens to me in the political arena, too).

The tragedy began long before the computer and the cellphone.

My parents' handwriting was slightly slanted because they held the sheet at an angle, and their letters were, at least by today's standards, minor works of art. At the time, some – probably those with poor hand- writing – said that fine writing was the art of fools. It's obvious that fine handwriting does not necessarily mean fine intelligence. But it was pleasing to read notes or documents written as they should be. My generation was schooled in good handwriting, and we spent the first months of elementary school learning to make the strokes of letters. The exercise was later held to be obtuse and repressive but it taught us to keep our wrists steady as we used our pens to form letters rounded and plump on one side and finely drawn on the other. Well, not always – because the inkwells, with which we soiled our desks, notebooks, fingers and clothing, would often produce a foul sludge that stuck to the pen and took 10 minutes of mucky contortions to clean.

More here.

John Tierney in The New York Times:

Researchers calculated that if deaths due to smoking were excluded, the United States would rise to the top half of the rankings for developed countries.

If you’re not rich and you get sick, in which industrialized country are you likely to get the best treatment? The conventional answer to this question has been: anywhere but the United States. With its many uninsured citizens and its relatively low life expectancy, the United States has been relegated to the bottom of international health scorecards. But a prominent researcher, Samuel H. Preston, has taken a closer look at the growing body of international data, and he finds no evidence that America’s health care system is to blame for the longevity gap between it and other industrialized countries. In fact, he concludes, the American system in many ways provides superior treatment even when uninsured Americans are included in the analysis.

“The U.S. actually does a pretty good job of identifying and treating the major diseases,” says Dr. Preston, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania who is among the leading experts on mortality rates from disease. “The international comparisons don’t show we’re in dire straits.” No one denies that the American system has problems, including its extraordinarily high costs and unnecessary treatments. But Dr. Preston and other researchers say that the costs aren’t solely due to inefficiency.

More here.

Professor Daniel C. Dennett has picked the three winners:

1. Top Quark, $1000: Tomkow: Blackburn, Truth and other Hot Topics
2. Strange Quark, $300: PEA Soup: Scanlon on Moral Responsibility and Blame
3. Charm Quark, $200: 3 Quarks Daily: Penne For Your Thought

Here is Professor Dennett's judging essay:

I wish philosophy blog postings were more like the best science blog postings: short, jargon-free, and lively (if wit is too much to hope for, as apparently it is). Philosophers emerge from a training in which their writing efforts are almost always addressed to a captive audience: the grader is obliged to read the student’s essay, however turgid and ungainly, because that is the student’s right; then later, the others in the field with whom one is engaged in intellectual combat are obliged to read one’s latest sally simply because scholarship demands it. “You don’t know the literature” if you haven’t managed to claw your way through the books and articles of the competition. Moreover, writing something that is somewhat challenging to read, or even unpleasantly difficult to slog through, is seen by some as an enviable sign of depth. It is, I fear, the only way many philosophers can prove to colleagues and students–and to themselves–that they are doing hard work worth a professor’s salary.

Blogs, one might think, would be the ideal antidote, since nobody has to read your blog (not yet–the day will soon come when keeping up with the latest blog debates is the first rule for aspiring philosophical quidnuncs.) Alas, however, it seems that there is a countervailing pressure–or absence of pressure–that dissipates the effect: the blog genre is celebrated as a casual, self-indulgent form of self-expression. Easy to write, but not always delicious reading. (Remember, I tell my students, it is the reader, not the writer, who is supposed to have the fun.)

It is hard to see how blogs could survive without Google. If you are interested in the problem of reference in property dualism, or Buddhist anticipations of virtue ethics, or whatever, you can swiftly find the small gang who share your interest, and join the conversation without having to go through the long initiation process that introduces the outside reader to the terms, the state of the art, the current controversy. That means, however, that those who don’t share that interest will find nothing to appeal to them on those websites. Tastes in philosophy are deeply idiosyncratic, of course, and one conviction driven home to me by reading through the finalists is that my own taste in philosophy marks me as an outlier, far from the mean, if these nine entries represent the cream of the crop as determined by some suitably diverse judges. Most of them did not draw me in—but then they were not meant for my eyes. So one must bear in mind that my choices may well tell much more about the vector of my eccentricity than about the relative merits of the candidates. Still, I’ve agreed to judge the finalists, and here are my decisions.

All three winners exhibit the sort of calm clarity that philosophers pride themselves in providing and so seldom do. They are well-organized, explicit and–unlike most of the also-rans–efficient in the use of language. (My estimate is that a good editor could compress each of the others by close to 50 percent without any loss of content, and a considerable gain in memorability.)

Third Place: 3 Quarks Daily: “Penne For Your Thought”

A good example of philosophical perspective broadening, taking a proposition that at first blush seems hyperbolic–cuisine is an art form, alongside music and poetry and sculpture, for instance–and using it to explore the unexamined corners of our presuppositions and attitudes about art, about food, about language. Not particularly deep or life-changing, but it puts some big ideas into clearer focus.

Second Place: PEA Soup: “Scanlon on Moral Responsibility and Blame”

What I particularly liked about this piece was its constructive tone, which is echoed by the commentators. They all seem to understand that philosophy isn’t about scoring points and refuting each other, but about getting the best view out in the open for all to see.

First Place: Tomkow , “Blackburn, Truth and other Hot Topics”

The idea that Global Warming skepticism could be seen as an instance of Quinian indeterminism is provocative, and the case is very deftly constructed, introduced in terms accessible to readers who aren’t already steeped in the lore. I’m not persuaded by the argument, but it is the one blog post that I am seriously considering assigning to my students, since it is an excellent introduction to this very important and counterintuitive idea, particularly valuable because it shows that Quine is not talking about an idle or merely philosophical possibility (like grue and bleen, or Twin Earth) but a real world quandary that might have actual examples. Actual examples, I have argued, are apt to be unstable, like a tossed coin landing on its edge instead of falling heads or tails, and I suspect that Global Warming will eventually tumble one way or another, but that doesn’t prevent it from being a nicely worrisome phenomenon in the meantime. And Quine’s point–that there is no guarantee of a resolution in such cases–is untouched by the likelihood that there will be one, sooner or later.

Congratulations to the winners (please contact me by email, I will send the prize money later today. And feel free to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here!), and thanks to everyone who participated. Thanks also, of course, to Professor Dennett for doing the final judging.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed, respectively, by Jaffer Kolb, Alia Raza & Sheherzad Preisler, and Jennifer Prevatt. Our thanks to each of them. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about how the 3QD prizes work, here.

Tuomas Manninen in Metapsychology:

Put succinctly, what Alva Noë is offering in Out of Our Heads is nothing short of a paradigm shift, complete with an incisive criticism of the status quo of neurosciences and a suggestion for an alternative model. The scientific study of consciousness in general, and what Noë calls the establishment neuroscience in particular claims to have broken free from its philosophical foundations. Although Noë acknowledges that the problem of consciousness is a scientific problem, one for which a scientific answer should be expected, he challenges the scientific community's contention that consciousness no longer remains a philosophical problem.

The key assumption behind the science of consciousness is that consciousness is an internal process that occurs in the brain. Noë's chief goal in the book is to show that this highly questionable, yet unquestioned assumption, has led the consciousness research astray; in brief, the search for consciousness has focused on where it isn't. Noë opens by challenging this assumption, and offers an alternative picture. Instead of characterizing consciousness as an internal process (like digestion) Noë proposes a picture which takes consciousness to be an activity (like dancing).

More here.

Barbara Kiviat in Time:

There are higher-yielding varieties of groundnut than those that farmers in Malawi tend to plant, but getting them to switch is tough. Better seed is pricey, increasing their risk. So researchers from the World Bank ran an experiment. With local NGOs, they offered the farmers loans. Some loans even came with a crop-insurance policy: if the season was dry and the yield a dud, the debt would be forgiven. The farmers' risk was lowered. Of farmers offered conventional loans, 33% signed up. With the added incentive of insurance, 18% did. The researchers were puzzled.

It's been more than 30 years since microfinance began its fantastic rise, spreading billions of dollars in credit to hundreds of millions of overlooked borrowers around the world. Insurance is the next big promise of financial services for the poor.

But there aren't many takers.

That's not from lack of interest on the part of suppliers. The Gates Foundation has plowed millions of dollars into microinsurance initiatives, and in June, LeapFrog Investments raised $44 million for the world's first microinsurance-investment fund.

More here.

Aamer Hussein in The International Literary Quarterly:

It was happenstance, of course. Lady L and her old adversary Reza Shah fell in the same year. He from his throne, she from her bicycle. A broken limb meant that, given the battle of succession that followed, she never did reclaim her role as High Priestess of Persian in our department.
Lady Jane would have been more appropriate a title: she was born into the minor nobility but had never married, and would not have been addressed as Lady Lambert. In the hallowed halls of Middle Eastern Studies she was known as The Professor. Reputed to be a martinet, or, at her less than benign best, an academic Mary Poppins. She was tall, thin and hollow-cheeked; she scraped back her steel-wire hair into a little bun. She wore masculine tweed jackets over severely-tailored skirts. But she had a soft accent when she spoke Persian, and sometimes she wore an agate brooch coquettishly pinned above a breast.

More here.

Report: Growing Ranks Of Nouveau Poor Facing Discrimination From Old Poor

From Salon:

By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil.

Such sentiments, in the opinion of Dennis Baron, are nostalgic, uninformed hogwash. A professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Baron seeks to provide the historical context that is often missing from debates about the way technology is transforming our lives in his new book, “A Better Pencil.” His thesis is clear: Every communication advancement throughout human history, from the pencil to the typewriter to writing itself, has been met with fear, skepticism and a longing for the medium that's been displaced. Far from heralding in a “2001: Space Odyssey” dystopia, Baron believes that social networking sites, blogs and the Internet are actually making us better writers and improving our ability to reach out to our fellow man. “A Better Pencil” is both a defense of the digital revolution and a keen examination of how technology both improves and complicates our lives.

More here.

Croix-des-Bouquets, Haiti

Most were naked but for the locked tin masks
which stop them sucking the cane they harvest.
We could see they had been made tigerish

by their whippings. Our sabres stuck in bone,
our saddle-girths were slashed by their children,
crones tore shot from the mouths of primed cannon

while our powder-monkeys fumbled and wept.
But we have laid them up in lavender.
They think their dead will wake in Africa.

by Ian Duhig

from The Bradford Count
Publisher: Bloodaxe, Newcastle, 1991

Matthew Zapruder in the Los Angeles Times:

Mostly at the beginning I was putting down stray lines, and trying to fit them into what it seemed to me at the time were poems. The problem was that I had absolutely no idea what a poem was. Or maybe I had too many shallow ideas. I knew what you were if you were a good poet — a winner of the Nobel Prize, a professor, published in the New Yorker — but I didn't know why the poems those people wrote were considered good. They were all so different. Once I started reading literary magazines, and books haphazardly recommended to me, I just got more confused.

One burning question I remember having at the time was: Why doesn't poetry rhyme anymore? From what I could remember, the limited amount of poetry I had read in high school and college was formal. Even the 20th century poets we read — Yeats, Frost, Auden — wrote in forms. The only exception was T.S. Eliot's “The Wasteland,” which was completely baffling to me.

Of course, I knew there was something called “free verse,” because I had seen it in magazines and books, and even heard it read by poets like Robert Hass and Gary Snyder, at readings upstairs in Cody's Bookstore on Telegraph Avenue. What they read sure felt like poetry to me, and I liked that feeling. But I was also suspicious of it. It seemed too easy, not as hard as writing something that rhymed.

More here. [Thanks to Christine Klocek-Lim.]

Carl Zimmer in Discover:

On April 11, 1944, a doctor named T. C. Erickson addressed the Chicago Neurological Society about a patient he called Mrs. C. W. At age 43 she had started to wake up many nights feeling as if she were having sex—or as she put it to Erickson, feeling “hot all over.” As the years passed her hot spells struck more often, even in the daytime, and began to be followed by seizures that left her unable to speak. Erickson examined Mrs. C. W. when she was 54 and diagnosed her with nymphomania. He prescribed a treatment that was shockingly common at the time: He blasted her ovaries with X-rays.

Despite the X-rays, Mrs. C. W.’s seizures became worse, leaving her motionless and feeling as if an egg yolk were running down her throat. Erickson began to suspect that her sexual feelings were emanating not from her ovaries but from her head. Doctors opened up her skull and discovered a slow-growing tumor pressing against her brain. After the tumor was removed and Mrs. C. W. recovered, the seizures faded. “When asked if she still had any ‘passionate spells,’” Erickson recounted, “she said, ‘No, I haven’t had any; they were terrible things.’”

More here.

Adil Najam in All Things Pakistan:

Pakistan’s blasphemy law, as written and used, is a blot on the basic principles of justice, on Pakistan, and even on Islam, the religion in whose name its defenders so often abuse it.

The recent death-in-custody of a Pakistani citizen, Robert Fanish Masih, has once again challenged all notions of human decency and demands our attention, our indignation, and indeed our anger. It reminds us – yet again, and as if more reminder was needed – of the inhumanity of the situation that this law places us in. A bold call has come from the Punjab Governor to repeal the law. It is well past time to do so. But there are others, including our Federal Minister for Religious Affairs, who continue to waver with excuses. But this is only one more incident in what has become a nearly routinized parade of inhumanity in the name of blasphemy laws.

Incidences of violence and abuse in the name of blasphemy have increased perceptibly. So must the indignation in society and so must the calls by all honorable people for its repeal. Two editorials today, in the Daily Times and in Dawn, make exactly that point. And they are exactly right.

More here.

Husain discusses the novel with Akhil Sharma, author of An Obedient Father.

Nathan Schneider interviews Terry Eagleton over at The Immanent Frame:

Literary critic Terry Eagleton discusses his new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, which argues that “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens “buy their rejection of religion on the cheap.” He believes that, in these controversies, politics has been an unacknowledged elephant in the room.

NS: Rather than focusing on “believers” or “atheists,” which are typically the categories that we hear about in the new atheist debates, you write about “a version of the Christian gospel relevant to radicals and humanists.” Who are these people? Why do you choose to address them?

TE: I wanted to move the arguments beyond the usual, rather narrow circuits in order to bring out the political implications of these arguments about God, which hasn’t been done enough. We need to put these arguments in a much wider context. To that extent, in my view, radicals and humanists certainly should be in on the arguments, regardless of what they think about God. The arguments aren’t just about God or just about religion.

NS: Are you urging people to go to church, or to read the Bible, or simply to acknowledge the historical connections between, say, Marxism and Christianity?

TE: I’m certainly not urging them to go to church. I’m urging them, I suppose, to read the Bible because it’s very relevant to radical political concerns. In many ways, I agree with someone like Christopher Hitchens that most religion is fairly hideous and purely ideological. But I think that Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are gravely one-sided about the issue. There are other potentials in the gospel and in the Christian tradition which are, or should be, of great interest to radicals, and radicals haven’t sufficiently recognized that.