Open access publication

In a recent incident, a number of fake academic papers, which were computer-generated gibberish, got published (and then withdrawn when the problem was spotted). Nature's account is here:

http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763

It is all very entertaining. It is also not surprising that there should be occasional incidents like this, when so much gets published, and appropriate peer reviewers may be in short supply. At least we can hope that when a paper is gibberish, as opposed to merely bad, even a first year student would be able to see that it was gibberish. That is, there should be an effective control at the point of reading.

But is this a problem that could be solved, at least partially, by the purest form of the open access approach to academic publishing, an approach that is in any case gaining ground?

I have in mind the free publication of papers on websites, in ways that make them freely accessible, rather than in traditional journals. This is happening anyway. The arXiv, http://arxiv.org/ , sets a particularly high standard of organization and ease of use, including the tracking of revisions of papers, but there are other worthy sites too. Such sites do need funding: the arXiv is funded by Cornell University Library and others. But the expense must be modest, compared to the immense value of the service.

Often, a paper published in this way is a draft, not the final version, which will typically appear in a traditional journal and will be the version of record, the version for others to cite. Publication in a traditional journal creates expense, either for the author, or for libraries or individual readers. Some of that expense is justified, because the selection of papers, the organization of peer review and the checking of formatting takes effort - although reviewers themselves are not likely to be paid, and the rise of LaTeX and stylesheets to use with it means that formatting, and the checking of it, involves much less work than it used to require. But some publishers exploit the prestige of their journals, and the ability to deny online access to past years' editions if one stops paying the subscription, in order to make very large profits, at the expense of university libraries who could otherwise use the money elsewhere.

The obvious solution would be to move to free online publication of the version of record of each paper, and to buy permanent open access to past years' editions of journals with one-off payments to publishers.

But what would then happen to quality control?

It could be imposed by all who read papers - and open access would greatly increase the pool of potential readers, improving the effectiveness of this form of quality control. A well-organized website could allow readers to rate papers on a simple scale, and to leave comments. Ideally, the raters and commentators should be identified, and should be allowed to rate one another, so that expert commentators (as identified by the ratings of others) found that their ratings and comments carried more weight than those of people without such recognition. Indeed, people who were highly rated should have their ratings of other commentators given more weight than the ratings of commentators that were given by those who were not themselves highly rated.

There would be interesting problems here in the design of voting systems. How could the risk of conspiracies to distort the voting be minimized? (The risk could not be eliminated, unless an authority imposed weights by reference to a list of approved academics.) But something that was good enough should be possible.

But what about the academic job market, the allocation of research grants, and so on? Lists of publications in prestigious journals currently form important parts of applications. Here, I think there is not much difficulty. An application would include links to papers, and to the comments on them. Those who allocated jobs and grants would know whose comments were most worthy of note. They would then have the advantage of often having more than one opinion on the applicant's work. And one would also eliminate the unfairness that springs from the current element of luck in publication. Luck arises because each journal can publish far fewer papers than are submitted, and is therefore likely to reject papers that were just as worthy of publication as the accepted ones. Finally, any papers by an applicant that had not been exposed to open comment in this way would be treated with suspicion by the allocators of jobs and of grants, encouraging a fairly rapid shift to the system.

So how would this solve the problem of fake papers? The first people to look at such a paper would simply leave comments to the effect that it was gibberish. It would then be ignored by the academic community.

Finally, why should we cut out commercial publishers? Why is the purest form of open access publishing the most desirable form in this context, apart from the obvious point that it would allow universities to make better use of their funds? The answer is that if there is no commercial interest, there is no reason to design a system that would be any other than the best system for the academic purposes of honest appraisal and the encouragement of good work. A commercial publisher would always have an urge to control adverse comment on papers that it had published, and to solicit favourable comment from prestigious commentators. Good publishers would resist the urge, but it would be safer to take money out of the system altogether.

Government accountability and freedom of information

Gus O'Donnell, Cabinet Secretary until the end of 2011, has made waves recently by making proposals for improving the government of the UK which include vetting prospective MPs before they stand for Parliament. Amongst the responses has been an excellent one from Douglas Carswell, calling for accountability in the other direction: we the electorate, and backbench MPs, need to be able to hold civil servants and ministers to account. His piece is available at:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/douglascarswellmp/100242390/how-to-expose-whitehall-cock-ups-give-us-the-power-to-sack-ministers-and-civil-servants/

It is, however, difficult to hold a government to account, unless we can see what considerations ministers and civil servants have weighed, and how they have reached their decisions. Unfortunately, there is a major obstacle to that in the exemptions from disclosure of documents that are conferred by Freedom of Information Act 2000, sections 35 - Formation of government policy, etc and 36 - Prejudice to effective conduct of public affairs. As a rule, we cannot get to see the policy papers that go back and forth among civil servants, and between them and ministers, and which show what evidence was considered and how decisions were reached. If the exemptions were abolished, MPs, journalists and the public could see the papers, and would have a valuable way to keep tabs on civil servants and on ministers.

The traditional argument is that if these papers had to be disclosed, that would inhibit free and frank discussion among civil servants, and between them and ministers. We should not accept this argument. Everyone would know in advance that such papers would be full of odd policy ideas that got rejected as silly, uncertainties about data (which should be disclosed anyway), queries over the value of evidence received from external consultees, and mentions of factors that might be seen either as risks of policies, or as advantages of them, depending on one's political stance. We know that the policy formation process is messy, and we would not think any the less of governments if we had confirmation of that fact. The worst consequence would be a bit of political embarrassment, and that matters far less than our ability to see whether the people we pay to run the public sector, and to formulate legislation, are doing a good job.

One might fear that there would be too much paper, through which to plough, and no good way to identify the key documents quickly. There would also be the difficulty of wording freedom of information requests so as to find out what was wanted. If such a request asks for the wrong thing, or leaves it open to the relevant department to supply very little information, the response can very easily not be what the person who made the request wanted.

These difficulties could, however, be overcome if external users had access to departmental document management systems, so they could search the stock of documents themselves. The official response to such a radical move might well be, "But then you might get access to personal data on taxpayers, or NHS patients, or litigants". But it is unlikely that this would really be a problem. It would not be difficult to tag documents as needing redaction before they could be accessed - although there would need to be severe disciplinary measures against civil servants who were found to be tagging everything, just so as to make life difficult for outsiders.

Will any of this happen? Maybe not. But if enough backbenchers from all parties wanted it to happen, they could force it on those who are in government, or who are on the Opposition front bench and hope that they will in due course be in government.

The life without examination

In the Apology, at 38a5, Plato famously reports Socrates as saying that the unexamined life is not worth living. At least, that is the standard English translation. But every now and then, someone contests the claim. Why should a life be worthless if it is wholly outward-looking, devoid of introspection? (We may note in passing that "not worth living" may be too strong a translation. "Not the sort of life one should live" would be a possible reading.)

Sometimes, when I have seen this view, or some related view, I have wondered out loud about the translation. (Examples where I have commented are Brian Leiter's blog on 17 January 2012, and Stephen Law's blog on 12 September 2013 - original post dated 7 September.)

I put my thoughts here now, in the hope that some expert in Plato's Greek may have a view. I am not such an expert, so my own thoughts are mere speculation.

My concern is the word "anexetastos". This is the word that is standardly translated as "unexamined", with the implication that it is one's own life that needs examining. Liddell and Scott (the big one, colloquially known as the Great Scott) gives two meanings:

(a) not searched out, not inquired into or examined;

(b) without inquiry or investigation.

This dictionary refers to Apology 38a5 in giving the latter meaning.

An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (the Middle Liddell) reinforces the point by giving (a) not inquired into or examined, (b) uninquiring, and again links Plato to the latter meaning, although without a reference to the Apology.

On the scope for a verbal adjective to have both active and passive meanings, see Smyth's Greek Grammar, page 157, paragraph 472.

Liddell and Scott's decision to link Plato to (b) and not (a) does not in itself prove anything. I assume that they simply followed the opinion of Plato scholars as to the translation. But if (b) were the meaning to adopt, Socrates' prescription would look rather different. It would amount to saying that you should enquire into things and strive to find out the truth about the world. You might yourself be a main object of your enquiry, or you might turn your gaze outwards, making enquiries in physics, natural history, geography, philosophy, or whatever else was of interest. The prescription would amount to an injunction not to be slothful intellectually, but to pursue knowledge and understanding.

Most recent common ancestor

There has been a pause in my blogging. I have been engrossed in other work. The pause may last for a while longer. So here is a little puzzle, as an entr'acte.

According to Wikipedia, Elizabeth of York, wife of Henry VII, is the most recent common ancestor of all English monarchs. I have not checked this claim, but let us assume that it is correct. The puzzle, which we would need to solve before checking the correctness of the claim, is as follows.

How should we define "most recent common ancestor" in this context, so that a determinate person, or a determinate couple, is picked out, and so that it is interesting that this person, or this couple, is picked out?

The condition of interest would be failed if our definition led us to pick out George VI, or even if it led us to pick out George V, or Victoria. We want some sense of "furthest back most recent". But then, we must not allow Elizabeth of York's mother, Elizabeth Woodville, to displace her.

Technical terms from mathematics may be used freely.

Blogspot does not, so far as I know, support LaTeX math environment, so please feel free either to cut and paste logical symbols from elsewhere, or to use E for the existential quantifier, V for the universal quantifier, - for negation, and > for implication.

Bonn, Berlin and Gettier

This month, we are fifty years on from the publication of Edmund Gettier's celebrated paper, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" (Analysis, volume 23, number 6, June 1963, pages 121-123). Today, 17 June, is the sixtieth anniversary of the uprising in East Germany, which might have led to the early reunification of Germany (at least according to a broadcast on B5 radio this morning), had the Soviets not sent the tanks in.

We may also recall, for no particular calendrical reason, Bertrand Russell's note of the Gettier phenomenon, avant la lettre. The story is told in J E Littlewood, Littlewood's Miscellany, edited by Béla Bollobás, 1986, page 128. "He told me (c.1911) that he had conceived a theory that 'knowledge' was 'belief' in something which was 'true'. But he met a man who believed that the Prime Minister's name began with a B. So it did, but it was Bannerman and not Balfour as the man had supposed." [Balfour was Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, and Bannerman from 1905 to 1908.]

Let us stick with the letter B, but move forward to the present day. Suppose that Claude, who has never lived in Germany, and whose access to German news is very limited, was taught in school, in the 1970s, that Bonn was the capital of West Germany, that West Germany was much larger, and much more significant economically, that East Germany, and that one part of Berlin was the capital of East Germany. Since then, Claude has heard of German reunification, but not of any change of capital. He reasons that the capital of Germany is probably still Bonn, but that it might have been moved somewhere else, and that if it had been moved, Berlin would have been the most likely choice.

He therefore forms the justified true belief that the name of the capital of Germany begins with a B. Does he know this?

The case is not on all fours with the Balfour-Bannerman case. Claude is aware that he might be wrong in his belief that Bonn is the capital, but reasons that even if he is, there is still a good chance that he is right in his belief that the name begins with a B. That reasoning is perfectly sound, and not just because the capital was in fact moved to Berlin. It would still have been sound reasoning, had Frankfurt or Hamburg been chosen. The problem then would have been not lack of justification for the belief that the name began with a B, but its falsity.

The reasoning would also have been sound if Bielefeld had been chosen, but then the truth of the belief that the name began with a B would have had no connection with Claude's reasoning, and we would probably have wanted to say that Claude's belief did not qualify as knowledge.

Let us return to the real world, in which the capital is moved to Berlin, Claude's reasoning is sound, and the truth of his belief that the name begins with a B is connected with his reasoning. Does he know that the name begins with a B?

It may depend on how Claude assesses the risk that the capital has moved. If he thinks there is a pretty good chance that the capital has moved, that supports a claim to knowledge, because it gives significance to the reasoning that Berlin would be the most likely new location. In giving significance to that reasoning, it also gives significance to what it is that actually makes the belief true. Claude reduces his reliance on the false lemma (that Bonn is the capital), and increases his reliance on the true lemma (that Berlin is the capital). If, on the other hand, Claude does not think it at all likely that the capital has moved, then his conscious reliance is on the false lemma, and the reasoning about the move is merely a precaution, upon which he does not expect to rely. We might then wish to deny Claude knowledge.

There is one more twist. Suppose that Claude thinks it is quite likely that the capital has moved, and that inclines us to allow him knowledge that the name begins with a B. That puts pressure on the quality of his reasoning that if the capital has moved, it has moved to Berlin. He cannot be sure of this. So unless he has good reason to think that any move would be to Berlin, with no other city in serious contention, we might not allow him to know that the name began with a B after all.

Phenomenal consciousness

An e-mail has just invited me to consider whether phenomenal consciousness is a causally inert epiphenomenon, and a pointless by-product of brain activity. It is the sort of question that can be transformed into a different question.

First, to what does the claim amount?

It is not a claim about self-awareness of the type that underpins an agent's knowledge that the actions that she can make happen just by thinking, are the actions that will take place in her immediate vicinity, and are performed by the entity that must be kept fed in order for her thought processes to continue. That sort of self-consciousness can be characterized as having a grasp of what Perry called the essential indexical. It is the sort of self-consciousness that lies at the heart of Lucy O'Brien's argument in her book, Self-Knowing Agents. It is something that must be represented in our brain cells, one way or another, in order for us to function as we do.

Rather, the claim is about how things feel to us, the qualia (or apparent qualia, if one thinks that there are no qualia) that we have, but that zombies would not have. So the second part of the claim, that phenomenal consciousness is a pointless by-product of brain activity, is a claim that zombies could do just as well as we do. It might happen to be that any creature that functioned as we function could not be a zombie, for example, because we would need to wire up the cells in certain ways which would inevitably produce phenomenal consciousness as a by-product. But even if that were so, the second part of the claim could still be made. It would merely need to be worded as "Disregarding the practicalities of making zombies, they could do just as well as we do".

If, however, one were able to substantiate the second part of the claim, in the form of a claim that zombies could do just as well as we do, that would not mean that we would have established the first part of the claim. (It may be that the second part of the claim could be taken in some other form, such that substantiating it would substantiate the first part of the claim, but it is not obvious how to re-cast the second part in order to give this result.)

We would not be able to move straight from the second part to the first part, because phenomenal consciousness might be causally effective in human beings, creatures who have it, even though an alternative way of achieving the same results that we achieve, an alternative that did not involve phenomenal consciousness, would be available. We should not suppose that the difference between a human being and a zombie is simply the presence or absence of phenomenal consciousness, with no other differences. And if there are other differences, such that we would not get from a zombie to a human being simply by adding phenomenal consciousness, those differences could build in a causal role for phenomenal consciousness.

We need to say something about how phenomenal consciousness could have a causal role. It could be said that only fundamental particles and forces have causal roles. But that would be a very narrow way of speaking. We are more inclined to say that macroscopic objects also have causal roles. Now suppose that a subject has his fingers on some buttons, which carry modest electrical charges that produce a pleasant tingling sensation, but which are also getting steadily hotter. If a particular configuration of brain cells corresponded to a particular feeling in the subject, and could not be picked out in any other way than by saying "this is the configuration when the subject feels heat at his fingertips", and an analysis of his brain processes showed that the configuration led to conscious thoughts about when it would become sensible for him to withdraw his fingers and forgo the pleasant tingling sensation, then it would not be obviously inappropriate to say that the feeling played a causal role, any more than it is inappropriate to say that a ball that rolls off a table and onto the floor plays a causal role in making a noise, rather than saying that the particles of which the ball is comprised play causal roles in disturbing particles in the atmosphere. Berent Enç's thoughts on causation and conditionals, in his book How We Act, are relevant here.

It would not be obviously inappropriate to speak in that way, but it might still be inappropriate. What might make it appropriate, or inappropriate?

A claim of appropriateness would best be sustained by a claim that states of phenomenal consciousness were on a par with macroscopic physical objects. There is a sense in which both are not really there, but are mere causally inert epiphenomena of the fundamental particles and forces. If they were causally inert in the same sense, that would strengthen the position of those who said that it was appropriate to regard states of phenomenal consciousness as more than epiphenomena, to the extent that it was appropriate to regard macroscopic physical objects as more than epiphenomena.

So the new question, into which we can transform the original question, is this: Are states of phenomenal consciousness epiphenomenal on the fundamental particles and forces, in the same way as macroscopic physical objects?

One reason to say that states of phenomenal consciousness and macroscopic physical objects were epiphenomenal in different ways, would be that laws of the same general type, physical laws, give us a grip on the behaviour of particles, and on the behaviour of macroscopic physical objects. It is a debatable claim, but not a crazy claim, that we could derive the whole of chemistry and biology from physics, too. (This is an upwards claim, different from the claim that we could reduce biology and chemistry downwards to physics.) We could claim that any emergence would not obstruct such an upwards derivation.

But then, could one also argue that no emergence would get in the way of an upwards derivation of facts about states of phenomenal consciousness? If it would not, and if this upwards derivation were feasible, we would have failed to separate off consciousness as something different from biology in a relevant way.

One sign that there might be an obstacle to such an upwards derivation is that descriptions of states of phenomenal consciousness are readily appreciated by us, but they might not mean anything to, for example, Martians, whereas human biology would be perfectly meaningful to Martians.

Another sign is that we do not yet have much idea of what such an upwards derivation would look like, whereas we have a pretty good conception of upwards derivations of chemistry, and of biology, from physics. But it would be unwise to assume that this is how things will rest. Our knowledge of the brain has advanced enormously over the last 20 years. We do not know how much we will learn in the next 20 years.

Finally, we must consider the objection that if we did see how facts about states of phenomenal consciousness were to be derived, the descriptions of the derived objects would not look like descriptions of states of phenomenal consciousness. They would be descriptions of brain states. The descriptions would not glow with the feelings that we have, when our brains are in those states. But it is only Martians who definitely could not see the descriptions as glowing with those feelings. If we were to follow a Churchland-type programme of reform of our manner of speaking, so that we started to speak in terms of brain states, and if we associated descriptions of brain states with inner feelings, the descriptions might well come to glow with the corresponding feelings, even when we read them in neurology textbooks.

Wings of Desire

Every so often in the film Wings of Desire (alternatively entitled Der Himmel über Berlin), directed by Wim Wenders and released in 1987, we hear extracts from the Lied vom Kindsein, by Peter Handke. The text is here:

http://www.wim-wenders.com/movies/movies_spec/wingsofdesire/wod-song-of-childhood-german.htm

and an English translation is here:

http://www.wim-wenders.com/movies/movies_spec/wingsofdesire/wod-song-of-childhood.htm

Plenty of lines in the Lied illustrate the claim that philosophy begins in wonder (Plato, Theaetetus 155d; Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b11-13): for example, "Warum bin ich ich und warum nicht du?"; and "Wann begann die Zeit und wo endet der Raum?".

It would be an interesting exercise to answer all of the questions that the Lied poses, and an equally interesting one to make all the connections that could be made between the text of the Lied and contemporary philosophy. For example, "Wie kann es sein, daß ich, der ich bin, bevor ich wurde, nicht war, und daß einmal ich, der ich bin, nicht mehr der ich bin, sein werde?", invites us to think about the conditions under which indexical and non-indexical terms can refer, and about the peculiar effects of using non-indexical terms to refer to oneself (with echoes both of Moore's Paradox and of Perry's essential indexical), as well as inviting us to think about coming to be and ceasing to be.

I shall here take a look at these words: "Ist das Leben unter der Sonne nicht bloß ein Traum? Ist was ich sehe und höre und rieche nicht bloß der Schein einer Welt vor der Welt?".

They have a particular relevance in the context of the film, in which angels see the world and the people in it only in black and white, and they cannot intervene causally to change people's lives, but on the other hand, they can listen to people's thoughts. But let us allow ourselves to go beyond that context, and ask what connection there may be between the idea that life is merely a dream, and the idea that we may perceive only an appearance, rather than the world.

I shall take the former idea to be that life is but a fleeting set of impressions, which if properly understood, could not be taken to be of any importance. The sentiment here is Pindar's, that a person is but a dream of a shadow (skias onar: Pythian Ode 8, line 95), ignoring the comfort that the following two lines give, with their reference to the effects of Zeus's favour. If we take the idea that life is a dream to concern importance, that idea is kept securely, and interestingly, separate from the idea that we do not perceive the real world. If we took the former idea to concern the process that produced our perceptions, then there would be a risk that the two ideas could come together, especially if it were possible to have dreams that were reliably veridical, for example by virtue of a mechanism of pre-established harmony, or by virtue of some unknowable that produced both the real world and our perceptions in parallel.

I shall take the latter idea to be that we perceive an appearance of a world, where that perceived world is distinct from the real world, and stands between us and the real world. The presence of the additional world, required by the text ("der Schein einer Welt vor der Welt", not "der Schein der Welt vor der Welt"), might be thought to steer us towards the sort of picture that would be given by a two-world interpretation of Kant, but we must allow for two non-Kantian elements. The first is that there is no requirement to regard the perceived world as empirically real. The second is the possibility (but not the certainty) that the perceived world is straightforwardly caused by the real world. The talk of our perceiving an appearance of the additional world also gives scope to introduce sense-data, or some such intermediary, but that is not the main point. The essential thing is the additional world.

First, suppose that life was a dream, in the sense of unimportance that I have just given. Could it be that we would nonetheless perceive the real world, and do so accurately - or, alternatively, perceive an intermediate world that was like the real world in its details, so that we at least had an accurate representation of the real world, and arguably did (indirectly) perceive the real world?

We could, so long as we could not act in the real world. That is, we would need to be in the impotent position of the angels in Wings of Desire, or of the deceased in Sartre's Les jeux sont faits. That would be both necessary and sufficient to make our perceptions of no importance, even though what was perceived or at least represented to us, the real world, was of importance, and even though the perceptions of people who could act in the real world, perceptions that might be qualitatively identical to our own, would be important.

If we could act to change the real world, perceptions that conveyed the state of the real world would matter, no matter how convoluted the process by which they conveyed that state. Perceptions of a world that was not the real world, and that did not convey the state of the real world, would not matter. They would be like the dreams that we, real agents in the world, in fact have when we sleep. Those actual dreams do not matter, except perhaps in indirect ways that do not rely on the accuracy with which they represent the real world.

Now suppose that life was not a dream, in the sense that our perceptions did matter. Would that impose any restrictions on the perceptual process?

We would need to be able to act in the real world, in order for our perceptions to be important. But our perceptions would also need to be useful guides to action. They would not need to give us wholly accurate information about the real world, but they would need to be such that paying attention to them led to action that was, on the whole, more appropriate than our actions would be if we did not pay attention to them. They could, however, fulfil that condition, whether we perceived the real world or some other, intermediate, world.