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Tuesday, April 13, 2004 |
Explanation Again.
OK I better write something that's actually got philosophical content after the last two posts. I was kinda shocked by something that came up when I was preparing my seminar class for tomorrow. We're working through various papers on explanation in economics, and social science more generally, and for this week we're looking at various papers by Philip Pettit. (It isn't the central paper we're looking at, but if you've got JSTOR access you can see one of these papers here.)
Now the unsurprising thing is that the papers are very good and the conclusions seem sound. The surprising thing is one of the presuppositions.
The topic is the objection to functionalist explanations that they don't really explain anything because they don't provide a mechanism whereby the institution with a useful function comes into existence or persists. Philip thinks this is a prima facie problem, and I agree. But he thinks the same problem hurts rational choice explanations, since it doesn't provide a plausible mechanism. (Rational-choice explanations are backed up by a mechanism, but it doesn't seem to resemble the decision-making mechanisms real people actually use.)
Philip goes on to argue, rightly I think, that both functionalist and rational choice explanations can properly explain the resilience of certain institutions and practices, even if they don't explain the introduction or even the persistence of those phenomena. There's lots here to talk about, but as I said I want to look back at the presuppositions involved.
Why think there is even a problem with the functionalist explanations to start with? And at this point I should note that thinking there's a problem here isn't some idiosyncratic feature of Philip Pettit - the problem is reasonably widely discussed. For one thing, functionalist explanations fit the old DN model of explanations that Hempel and Oppenheim advocated. More interestingly, they seem to fit the unificationist model of explanation that Michael Friedman and Phillip Kitcher advocate as a replacement for the DN model.
Why is this interesting? Well for one thing it looks like a clear case where intuitions of the relevant scientists simply don't match up with the predictions of the unificationists. And given that what they are trying to explain is a social/cognitive phenomenon, what counts as a good explanation in our scientific culture, these intuitions should be important even to naturalists.
For another thing, this does not look like a merely technical problem, in the way that cases like the flagpole case feel a little artificial. (The flagpole problem is that on the DN theory there's no way to distinguish the good explanation of a flagpole's shadow length in terms of its height from the bad explanation of a flagpole's height in terms of its length.) This is a naturally occuring putative explanation that fits the criteria but of the unificationist but doesn't strike people as explanatory at all.
But something about this puzzles me. The problem for unificationists is so obvious that someone must have commented on this before me. And really I should do a huge lit search now to find out who. Since the Red Sox are rained out and '24' has been bumped for some press conference, maybe I'll make a start on this, but I'm not sure how far I'll get. [Thoughts Arguments and Rants]
9:53:26 PM 
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BusinessWeek: Sneek Peeks at Tomorrow's Office. All of these ideas have one goal in common: To raise white-collar productivity -- or at least preserve the huge gains of recent years while avoiding employee burnout. The idea is to build upon the innovations that have transformed offices over the past 15 years. [Tomalak's Realm]
5:32:55 PM
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Jakob Nielsen: "It's apparently easier to tune out the continuous drone of a complete conversation, in which two people take turns speaking, than it is to ignore a person speaking and falling silent in turns." [Scripting News]
7:27:51 AM
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Online Journalism Review: Teaching Online Journalism: How to Build the First College-Level Course. After all, they've seen newspaper stories and TV news segments on Web sites, and there is very little difference between the Web versions and the originals. Your first challenge will be to show students that there is something called online journalism that can be distinguished from other forms of journalism. [Tomalak's Realm]
7:27:26 AM
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No Time for Bullies: Baboons Retool Their Culture, By NATALIE ANGIER, in the New York Times.
This fell out of my aggregator (user error) before I could post it, so it doesn't have the groovy stayalongwhile hyperlink.
In a study appearing today in the journal PloS Biology (online at www.plosbiology.org), researchers describe the drastic temperamental and tonal shift that occurred in a troop of 62 baboons when its most belligerent members vanished from the scene. The victims were all dominant adult males that had been strong and snarly enough to fight with a neighboring baboon troop over the spoils at a tourist lodge garbage dump, and were exposed there to meat tainted with bovine tuberculosis, which soon killed them. Left behind in the troop, designated the Forest Troop, were the 50 percent of males that had been too subordinate to try dump brawling, as well as all the females and their young. With that change in demographics came a cultural swing toward pacifism, a relaxing of the usually parlous baboon hierarchy, and a willingness to use affection and mutual grooming rather than threats, swipes and bites to foster a patriotic spirit.
Remarkably, the Forest Troop has maintained its genial style over two decades, even though the male survivors of the epidemic have since died or disappeared and been replaced by males from the outside. (As is the case for most primates, baboon females spend their lives in their natal home, while the males leave at puberty to seek their fortunes elsewhere.) The persistence of communal comity suggests that the resident baboons must somehow be instructing the immigrants in the unusual customs of the tribe.
We don't yet understand the mechanism of transmittal, said Dr. Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford, but the jerky new guys are obviously learning, `We don't do things like that around here.' Dr. Sapolsky wrote the report with his colleague and wife, Dr. Lisa J. Share.
. . .
The new-fashioned Forest Troop is no United Nations, or even the average frat house. Its citizens remain highly aggressive and argumentative, and the males still obsess over hierarchy. We're talking about baboons here, said Dr. Sapolsky.
What most distinguishes this congregation from others is that the males resist taking out their bad moods on females and underlings. When a dominant male wants to pick a fight, he finds someone his own size and rank. As a result, a greater percentage of male-male conflicts in the Forest Troop occur between closely ranked individuals than is seen in the control populations, where the bullies seek easier pickings. Moreover, Forest Troop males of all ranks spend more time grooming and being groomed, and just generally huddling close to troop mates, than do their counterpart males in the study.
Interestingly, the male faces in the Forest Troop may have changed over time, but the relative numbers have not. Ever since the tuberculosis epidemic killed half the adult males, the ratio has remained skewed, with twice as many females as males. Yet the researchers have demonstrated that the troop's sexual complexion alone cannot explain its character. Examining other troops with a similar preponderance of females, the Stanford scientists saw no evidence of the Forest Troop's relative amity.
Dr. Sapolsky has no idea how long the good times will last. I confess I'm rooting for the troop to stay like this forever, but I worry about how vulnerable they may be, he said. All it would take is two or three jerky adolescent males entering at the same time to tilt the balance and destroy the culture.
7:26:19 AM
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Data Disclosure Contradicts Feds. American Airlines becomes the third airline in eight months to admit it has shared passenger data with the government. But for months the government has claimed it never asked for or received any data. What's going on? By Ryan Singel. [Wired News]
7:14:50 AM
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Festival Takes Stock of Old Films. What do dancing boxes have to do with tear gas, crowd control and calm cars? It's up to entrants in an unusual film festival to provide the answer, using snippets of old commercials and propaganda films now available in an online archive. By Katie Dean. [Wired News]
7:11:35 AM
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Chongqing Government Shuts Down Internet Bar (ChinaTechNews)
The Industrial and Commercial Administration of Shapingba
District, where the bar was located, confiscated five computers and illegal
gains after two junior middle school students were crushed to death by a
train on March 31 when they fell asleep on the train track having surfed
the Internet for over 48 hours in the bar.
During the accident, another Internet-addicted student Luo Hua was awakened
by the train and narrowly escaped the tragedy, according to Li Bo, director
of the district bureau of culture, radio and television, one of the local
watchdogs over Internet services. . . . .
Internet bars appeared in the rural Huilongba Town a year ago as a result
of increasing restrictions over Internet bar services in the downtown city.
Many of the bars, attracting students to surf online around-the-clock, were
not officially approved for operation and therefore moved to rural areas to
escape inspections, according to officials of the investigation
team.
I assume that's just drawn from Official Reports.
1:18:51 AM
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