Shame

I've been thinking about shame since the middle of summer, trying to figure out how to put together a presentation on the topic for the church. I've looked through over a dozen books on the subject, and just today have come upon one that stands so far above all the others that I am compelled to mention it: Stephen Pattison, Shame: Theory, Therapy, Theology, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). I do not know of another volume which does such a wonderful job integrating a wide range of interdisciplinary resources on shame. So far, I've had just one evening with the book. Rarely has such a short exposure helped me to focus and clarify my own thinking on a subject to the degree I am now experiencing. While I most certainly don't agree with everything Pattison says, I still very highly recommend his book to anyone interested in looking at shame in a way that balances Christian and secular western perspectives....

White and Nerdy

I am greatly impressed by cleverness in humor; so it shouldn't be a surprise that I have an abiding respect for Weird Al. Here is his recent work, a parody of Chamillionaire's Ridin'. It lifted my day to see the time-independent Schrodinger wave equation used in a music video....

EAC to FLAC encoding

Since the new hard drive setup seems to be working, I'm starting the project of ripping my CDs. I've decided to use Exact Audio Copy to rip and FLAC to encode. I set EAC for secure mode with "normal" error recovery. Grabbing a random CD, here's what I got:

• CD: Gregorianischer Choral - Death & Resurrection (1982)
• Length: 1hr, 15min
• Size: 750MB
• Compressed: 303MB
• Time Elapsed: 22min

This is with a disc that had no errors. This is extraordinarily slow, and it will take over 360 hours to rip 1000 cds.... Unfortunately, I don't see a way to make things significantly faster without risking corruption; I'm getting approximately 4x speed, and the EAC website says this is normal for secure mode, "because in secure mode EAC reads every sector at least twice". Perhaps the only way to help things is to install a second drive into the system and rip two discs at once.

Incidentally, it's a shame that a high-quality tool like EAC is so difficult to configure. I imagine that the reason it's difficult is because it is so powerful. In any case, I'll post these configurations in the hopes that they can make someone's life easier.

To configure EAC to work with FLAC: from the menu, select EAC → Compression options → External Compression. Check "Use external program for compression" and select "User Defined Encoder" for the parameter passing scheme. In the program path, find "flac.exe". Under "Additional Command Line Options", enter:

-T "artist=%a" -T "title=%t" -T "album=%g" -T "date=%y" -T "tracknumber=%n" -T "genre=%m" %s

To configure EAC's filenaming scheme: from the menu, select EAC → EAC Options → Filename. I use an "Artist\Year - Album\Track Number - Track Name.flac" scheme. To configure this, in the "Naming scheme", I use:

%A\%Y - %C\%N - %T

I also check the "Use various artist naming scheme", and there I input:

Various Artists\%Y - %C\%N - %T

On Predicting and Preventing Divorce

I typically do all I can to avoid pop-psychology self-help stuff. This is because I invariably find it to be the intellectual equivalent of fingernails scraping across a blackboard. Self-help books abuse my sensibilities so deeply that I seethe with vexation and irritation for hours after putting them aside.

As an example, take John Bradshaw's bestselling Healing the Shame That Binds You, which recommends the toxic-shame-afflicted person to come up with affirmations like, "I, Ang, am often loving and kind", and then proceed to:

1. Write each affirmation ten or twenty times.
2. Say and write each affirmation to yourself in the first, second and third person.
3. Continue working with the affirmations daily until they become totally integrated with your consciousness
4. Record your affirmations and play them back when you can.
5. Look into the mirror and say the affirmations to yourself out loud.
6. Use visualizations with your affirmations.

To my mind, such morbidly ridiculous behavior should induce far more shame on a person than any that it may (dubiously) manage to alleviate.

This is, of course, not to say that there is never anything of value in the self-help/personal growth industry. It's just that, when I take a look at that stuff, I feel like I'm wading through a sewer to find a nickel here and a quarter there. This is why I was pleasantly surprised by the low "scorn-factor" which John Gottman's 2000 book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, elicited in me. Not all was good, of course. There's quite a bit of triumphalist self-promotion in Seven Principles. For instance, Gottman starts out by saying:

When I first began researching marriage in 1972, you could probably have held all of the "good" scientific data on marriage in one hand.... To address this paucity of good research, my colleagues and I have supplemented traditional approaches to studying marriage with many innovative, more extensive methods.... So far my colleagues and I are the only researchers to conduct such an exhaustive observation and analysis of married couples. Our data offer the first real glimpse of the inner workings---the anatomy---of marriage. The results of these studies, not my own opinions, form the basis of my Seven Principles for making marriage work [pp. 7-8].

Such bold claims prompt skepticism, but I was willing to give Gottman some slack on this. After all, he does have his claim to fame: a >90%-accurate formula for predicting divorce from a few minutes of observation of a couple's conversation. This empirical success was enough to prompt me to look up his published research, The Timing of Divorce: Predicting When a Couple Will Divorce over a 14-Year Period, in the peer-reviewed Journal of Marriage and Family.

The article describes Gottman's methodology. Situate couples (who have been separated for 8 hours) in a relaxed environment and videotape 30 minutes of conversation, divided evenly between random talk about their day and a focused discussion of a problem area of continuing disagreement. Then, code the conversations numerically in terms of the number of positive and negative vocalizations and facial/kinesic acts made by the husband and the wife. This generates scores on negative affect (criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling) and positive affect (affection-caring, humor, interest-curiosity, and joy-enthusiasm). They then followed up with the couples 4 years and 14 years afterwards. After running statistical models on these data, Gottman found that high scores on the negative-affect model predicted early divorce (within the first 7 years of marriage), while low scores on the positive-affect model predicted late divorce (after the first child reaches 14 years). Overall, the model predicted divorce with 93% accuracy.

Pretty impressive results. The high accuracy suggests not only that the studied factors are significant factors for divorce, but also that other factors not studied (e.g., having common interests, conflict avoidance, personality problems, etc.) need not be considered for successful prediction. But unfortunately, a bit of additional searching turned up "The Hazards of Predicting Divorce Without Cross-validation", an article that shows that Gottman's work fails cross-validation tests. This indicates that Gottman got his 93% accuracy by over-fitting the data he had, so his models are of greatly reduced value for predicting divorce in situations outside the data set gathered in the study. To be fair, Gottman published Seven Principles a year before the article on cross-validation failure was published, so his exuberant optimism about his work was not dishonest. But this does show how fragile statistical investigations of human behavior can be. (I hear that Gottman presents a more sober appraisal of his work in his newest book, Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage.)

Generally speaking, it seems that scientific work in this and related fields makes the significant assumption that our minds can be investigated successfully through the observation and cataloguing of our behavior. I'm not sure how promising I should judge this approach to be. But it, and the neuroscientific approach, appear to be the only scientific methods we have to investigating human psychology.

Notwithstanding all this, Gottman poses an interesting model for marital success. Negative affect in conflict correlates with early divorce. So couples should avoid the criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling that characterizes early divorcers. (Gottman goes as far as to say that there is no such thing as "constructive criticism" in a marriage.) Lack of positive affect correlates with late divorce. So couples should work to foster the attentiveness, transparency, fondness, mutual admiration, shared meaning, and openness to mutual influence which characterizes long-lasting marriages.

For instance, one sign that you have a healthy marriage, on Gottman's model, is that you don't exhibit stress indicators (elevated blood pressure, increased heart rate, etc.) when you discuss difficult areas of conflict with your spouse. A sign you have an unhealthy marriage is that you live parallel lives with minimal significant involvement with one another.

This is a plausible model. But I should point out that this is based on research which has exhibited only limited predictive success (limited by the cross-validation fault), and even if Gottman has gotten the predictive indicators of divorce right, it is debatable whether techniques designed to address those indicators will reduce divorce. Gottman spent 15 years studying divorce to get the data needed to develop his models. We'll need to wait at least that long to determine whether his therapeutic techniques are effective.

Software RAID-5 on the Sil3114

Well, I decided that I don't think there are any legal or ethical problems with hex editing my copy of XP, and I can report that XP Pro SP2 (with all the latest security updates from Microsoft) can, in fact, be easily modified to support software RAID-5, per the instructions on the web.

Now, my biggest concern is about the stability of the Silicon Image Sil3114 chipset SATA controller that I'm using to run 4 of the drives. There are reports that the Sil3114 can be flaky when used in a RAID. I'm hoping to avoid this issue, since I'm not using the controller's RAID (instead, the drives are arranged as JBOD and XP is handling the RAID). Even so I probably need to spend a few weeks copying data around and doing other random stuff to the drive to determine to my satisfaction that my data won't get corrupted.

More work. Ah well.

Psychological Origins of Relativism

I've started to think about moral relativism again, so I dug out the paper I wrote on the general subject last semester. There, I argued that the psychological source of some forms of relativism is a sort of partial apathy. The position seemed plausible to me when applied to relativism involving predicates of personal taste (cf. Peter Lasersohn). It may account for relativism involving vague predicates (cf. Mark Richard). Partial apathy is clearly not the motivating factor for relativism involving future contingents (cf. John MacFarlane) or epistemic modals (cf. Egan, Hawthorne, and Weatherson). I'm trying to determine if I think the idea can apply to moral relativism....

A central motivation for relativism is discourse which we are intuitively drawn to characterize as faultless disagreement. Two people appear to contradict one another, e.g., Jay says "Roller coasters are fun," and Kay says "No, roller coasters are not fun." It seems they disagree. But it also seems that they're both right. It is extremely plausible to think that roller coasters really are fun for Jay, and not fun for Kay. So we have disagreement (Jay accepts and Kay rejects the same proposition: that roller coasters are fun), but both parties are faultless (what Jay says is true for him; what Kay says is true for her).

A natural question is: why do our intuitive judgements come out this way? My claim is that partial apathy will cause us to make assessments of faultless disagreement. My claim depends crucially on the argument in "Relativism and Disagreement", a recent paper (to be published in Philosophical Studies) by John MacFarlane. There, he argues (convincingly, I think) that it is insufficient for disagreement for one party to accept a proposition and another party to reject it. According to MacFarlane, our assessment of disagreement is perspectival. Consider a person, Elle, who observes Jay and Kay's conversation. MacFarlane says, roughly, that Elle concludes that Jay and Kay disagree when she concludes that their claims cannot both be correct, when assessed against her (Elle's) own standard of taste. (I omit much detail, mainly because the argument for this is somewhat complex and would take too much space here. See "Relativism and Disagreement" for MacFarlane's specific claim, and his argument for the claim.)

If MacFarlane is right, then we face a curious fact about faultless disagreement. The relativist judges that there is disagreement between two parties because she assesses their claims according to her own standards. But the relativist judges that the two parties are faultless because she assesses their claims according to their respective standards. Elle thinks Jay and Kay disagree when she notices that their claims can't both be correct, given her own standard of taste. But if Elle is a relativist, she thinks Jay and Kay both speak faultlessly: what Jay says is correct given Jay's standards of taste, and what Kay says is correct given Kay's standards of taste.

So the question is this: why does Elle do this? Why does she import her own standard of taste when she assesses Jay and Kay for disagreement, but she determines the truth of Jay and Kay's claims according to their respective standards of taste?

To get an answer, I bring in an idea from Simon Blackburn's Ruling Passions. Blackburn is concerned with locating the domain of ethics within our overall values. He uses the analogy of what he calls a "staircase of practical and emotional ascent." Blackburn starts with "simple preferences" (such as having a favorite particular color), noting that these choices typically evoke neither aversion nor favor from others. (You tell me your favorite color is blue. I may make a note of it, but will not have much emotional reaction to this information.) The next steps up yield cases where we are provoked by someone's preferences to some reactive attitude--whether aversion, contempt, etc.--and we may also react to these reactions. (I note, for instance, that I thoroughly enjoyed Snakes On A Plane, and you marvel with dismay at how anyone could be amused with such mindless sensory stimulation. A third party may despise those who take such highbrow views against populist entertainment.) At a higher level of ascent, we are compelled to evangelize our perspective. (Perhaps an example of this is the effort of computer advocates who urge their friends on XP to switch to Mac.) Going further up the staircase, we not only evangelize our position, but also take it to be compulsory. Blackburn locates the ethical realm in the highest domains of emotional ascent.

Blackburn's picture suggests that we posit a scale of emotional involvement, which measures the degree of importance which we attach to making a particular choice and taking a particular perspective. At the low end of emotional involvement, we may have a preference but attach little importance to it. At the high end, we find our perspectives to be of such importance that we take them to be compulsory.

So here is my proposal. When we don't care about what others' preferences are regarding an issue, we will not import our own standards into our assessments of disagreement. I find, for instance, no disagreement between two parties who have different favorite colors. But when we start to care enough about what others' preferences are, then we will import our standards into our assessments of disagreement. At this higher level of emotional involvement, we take conflicting claims on an issue to be cases of disagreement. But our emotional involvement may still not be high enough to support the finding of fault. So we do not import our standards into the evaluation of fault, and we assess disputes as cases of faultless disagreement. On issues where our emotional involvement is high enough, we end up concluding not only that there is disagreement, but also that one party is at fault. We import our own standards into our evaluation of both disagreement and fault.

In summary:

1. Low Emotional Involvement: Do not import our own standards into evaluation of either fault or disagreement. Assess as: faultless, no disagreement.
2. Medium Emotional Involvement: Import our own standards into evaluation of disagreement, but not fault. Assess as: faultless disagreement.
3. High Emotional Involvement: Import our own standards into evaluation of both fault and disagreement. Assess as: at-fault disagreement.

So we end up as relativists when our emotional involvement is enough to get us to import our own standards into our assessment of disagreement, but not enough to import our own standards into our assessment of fault. We notice that the debating parties make claims that cannot both be correct, given our own standards (this generates disagreement). But we think that both parties speak faultlessly because what they say seems correct, given their respective standards.

If the relativist cared less about the issue, she wouldn't bother to import her own standards into her assessment of disagreement. She would not think that the parties have any substantial disagreement at all. But if she cared more about the issue, she might find herself compelled to import her own standards into her assessment of fault. She would no longer think that the debating parties are, in fact, both faultless in their claims. So relativism is sustained by a partial apathy.

In regards to moral relativism, I think much of this carries over. I would add, though, that insufficient emotional involvement is, most likely, not the only source of the intuitions that lead us to relativism. Consider a debate: Jay says "You ought to bomb the abortion clinic." Kay says, "You ought not bomb the abortion clinic." Suppose you are a relativist, and it is clear to you that, on your own moral standards, the claims cannot both be true. So you import your own standard into your detection of disagreement and you find that Jay and Kay disagree. But as a relativist, you wish to refrain from importing your own moral standards into your evaluation of whether Jay or Kay is at fault. Why? Is it because you're not sure who is correct? Because you want to be tolerant? Something else? Or is my entire framework inappropriate for moral relativism (or relativism in general)?

Academic goals for this semester

Well, the semester is beginning tomorrow. As usual, I am excited, and when I get excited I get optimistic about all the things I am going to accomplish. Here's a prioritized list, just so I have a record of my ambition that I can laugh about in December.

1. Finish my writing sample.

   This is going to be a ~15-page version of my work on truthlikeness, which began as a 25-page paper for a class and burgeoned into a 95-page thesis (which I just turned in last week) to complete my MA in Theology at SWBTS. Here's what it's about.
   
   It is a common belief among scientists that: while all of our scientific theories are incomplete and are wrong in places, science is generally progressive. In particular: newer theories are generally "closer to the truth" than the theories they replace. But what does it mean for one theory to be "closer to the truth" than another theory? Karl Popper thought, roughly, that it means that the new theory has more true consequences and less false consequences than the old theory. It may surprise you that, in 1974, this idea was proven to fail. This is, in fact, one of the very few knock-down, drag-out [i.e., conclusive] disproofs I've encountered of a significant and initially plausible philosophical idea.
   
   Since then, logicians and philosophers of science have been trying to put together a workable definition of "closer to the truth". As you'd expect, there's a whole lot of disagreement among them. I try to argue that we can appeal to the scientific practice of statistical hypothesis testing to show that one of the definitions (by Finnish philosopher Ilkka Niiniluoto) is better than the others.
   
   A good introduction to all this is Graham Oddie's article on the subject, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

2. Apply to PhD programs.

   Right now, I have ten programs in mind. Listed in alphabetical order, they are:

   • Harvard University
   • New York University
   • Princeton University
   • Rutgers University, New Brunswick
   • Stanford University
   • University of California, Irvine
   • University of California, Los Angeles
   • University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
   • University of Notre Dame
   • University of Pittsburgh

   This list isn't perfect: for one, I'm not sure whether to include Columbia University. But I think the app, transcript, GRE, etc. fees already add up to over $800, and I've got to stop the hemorrhaging of cash somewhere. Perhaps I will refine this list when the 2007 Philosophical Gourmet Report comes out in November.

3. Finish my incomplete.

   I've been thinking about perception for almost a year now, but I still haven't been able to write a paper on the subject yet. The basic task I've been focussing on is giving an analysis of our concept of perception, to explain what we mean when we say that we are perceiving something. [Since I'm focusing on our concept of perception and not its nature, this will limit, but not eliminate, the relevance of our scientific investigation of perception. Common folks can employ the concept of perception just fine without lots of specialized scientific knowledge, and I'm interested in the ordinary usage of the concept.] One answer I'm highly attracted to is a theory called the causal theory of perception. Obviously, to perceive an object o, one must have a sensory experience of o. To this, the causal theory of perception adds a claim: that it is necessary for o to cause this sensory experience. This much seems right to me, but there are two problems I am worrying about.
   
   First, any sensory experience is going to have an entire chain of causes. Nuclear fusion in the sun causes light to be produced which travels to earth, bounces off the tree, is focussed by my cornea, excites rods and cones in my retina, sending a signal through my optic nerve which creates neural patterns in my brain. Out of all of these causes, it is the tree which I see. How do we pick out the perceived object from all these causes?
   
   Second, there are all sorts of causal chains which end up with our having beliefs about objects. I can feel depressed and think of my dead dog: but even if it really is the death of my dog which caused my depression, I'm not perceiving the dog, am I? A.D. Smith suggests a situation where my having a headache makes me think of my mother. Says Smith: "I should not, however, thereby be perceiving my mother---even if she were indeed present, and even if she had somehow caused the headache" [Smith, The Problem of Perception, p. 74]. I agree. So what is it about some causal chains (like the one involving the tree) which allow them to result in perception, while other causal chains (like the one involving the headache) do not?

4. Take Phil 167, Science Before Newton's Principia

   I put this near the end, but this is what I am most looking forward to this semester. It will let me get back into physics, as it covers the history of celestial mechanics that led up to Newton. It will also expose me to enough history to help me decide how much of a historical emphasis I want to include in my PhD work.

5. Audit Phil 121, 131, and 195

   OK, this is where I'm going a bit nuts. But there are just too many classes that look so interesting. And useful.

6. Take the metaphysics and philosophy of science comps.

   The Tufts MA in philosophy has two requirements: pass nine classes (including logic) and four comprehensive exams. They don't give out reading lists or study guides of any sort for the comps: they only provide lists of past test questions. You have to figure out on your own how best to answer the questions. It seems to me that students should share their work to help each other pass these things: to put together a list of resources for answering previous test questions, along with outlines of answers that cover some basics. I'm going to try my best to do this while I do my own preparation. If all goes well, I'll have a few documents to post on this website....