Experts and Epistemic Monopolies

hayek

Having just received copies of the book in which our paper appears, here is another excuse to plug both our paper and the rest of the book’s contents. Here is an extract from Roger Koppl’s introduction:

This volume contains papers given at the third biennial Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies Conference on Austrian Economics. The conference was held at a beautiful waterfront facility of Simon Fraser University on October 15 and 16, 2010. In spite of all warnings to expect fog and rain in the Pacific Northwest, the weather was sunny and mild, as were the spirits of the conferees. Our topic title, ‘‘Austrian Views on Experts and Epistemic Monopolies,’’ was perhaps a bit misleading because some of the views represented were not ‘‘Austrian.’’ Indeed, the editorial mission of Advances in Austrian Economics has been to promote dialogue between the ‘‘Austrian’’ tradition of economics and other traditions both within in economics and beyond. Participants discussed the problem of experts from several Austrian and non-Austrian perspectives. While representing different points of view, the participants did tend toward the view that experts may pose a problem in one way or another, especially when they enjoy an epistemic monopoly.

A Companion to Michael Oakeshott

michael oakeshott

After a four year gestation with many, often quite bizarre twists and turns, today this project officially reaches its fruition. To read excerpts from each chapter, type “oakeshott” into this site’s search box.

The Morphology of Liberalism

liberalism, libertarianism

Here’s a book review in The Economist looking at the morphology in meaning attached to (neo)liberalism. Here is the publisher’s blurb.

But the line between Smith and Friedman is not a straight one, as Mr Stedman Jones points out. Smith thought one of the state’s jobs should be to build public works and forge institutions that would otherwise fail under market pressure. Here he sounds more like Franklin Roosevelt. Smith believed the state should fund schools, bridges and roads. Friedman said that was the job of the private sector.

The Pursuit of Intimacy, or Rationalism in Love

oakeshott, robert grant

Bob Grant’s highly distinctive essay on Oakeshott’s private life.

In what follows I shall refer to Michael Oakeshott by his first name, as I also shall to those connected with him. This is partly to avoid the confusion of shared surnames, though I did actually come myself to address him by his first name. My main topic will be his love life, which is not the same as his sex life, though the two are obviously connected. And perhaps both are, more distantly, with his work. As we shall see, Michael in several places says that love was the main business of his life. If we are to take him literally, therefore, his work appears as more of a sideline or an antidote, and even he admits from time to time that he is using it to deaden his sorrows or drive away his demons.

How Music Works

aesthetics

Some very positive reviews in The Economist, The Telegraph, the NYT, and The Independent. I’d imagine that readers attracted to Byrne’s book might also appreciate Oliver Sacks’ book Musicopilia.

 Unless new profit-sharing models evolve, musicians can no longer make a living from recording. Something will have to give, he says: “I smell another revolution in the works.”

The flip side of the record—and the good news—is that digital technology has also freed music-making from its corporate straitjacket and returned it to the place it started: in bedrooms, on laptops, a free-for-all of experimentation in which authorship is less important than collaboration and performance.

His observations on the nature of pattern and repetition, and on people’s neurological response to aesthetic experience, apply to all creative fields. “How Music Works” should be required reading for all writers and publishers: this song is coming soon to an e-reader near you.

Squeak, Rumble, Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!: A Sonic Adventure

sound

Another lovely collaboration between Wynton and Paul. Read their chat about working together. As usual, Paul talks about the process.

The Victim of Thought: The Idealist Inheritance

oakeshott

The penultimate chapter to be trailed – David Boucher on Oakeshott’s idealism.

Oakeshott’s indebtedness to philosophical idealism has been touched upon by many commentators as incidental to their main concerns, and his relative silence after the Second World War compared with his defiant proclamations of loyalty before it gave rise to suspicions that he was no longer as committed to its tenets as he once was, or that if there were remnants of idealism to be detected in the later work they were almost unrecognizable. This is not a view unanimously shared. There may be many reasons why Oakeshott ceased to wear his idealist credentials on his sleeve, but the fact that he had abandoned them was not one. He seems to have had a certain sensitivity to the criticisms of him as a philosopher of the day before yesterday. On the presentation of his Festschrift, Oakeshott made light of the honor, expressing surprise given that he had read somewhere: “Oakeshott, yes, an interesting survival; out of date before he was born; you can’t take him seriously. Not the sort of thing to make one exactly glow with pride. True enough, though; and I thought that perhaps I really would be able to get over this vast expanse of sand intact leaving a foot-print” (BLPES 1/3, various speeches). After the Second World War the sorts of metaphysical and epistemological considerations that permeated Experience and its Modes were touched upon but not systematically addressed in his later writings. Some modifications in the vocabulary were necessary in order to accommodate developments in his thought and incorporate them into the larger point of view, but they were added in essays which deliberately left “much to the reader, often saying too little for fear of saying too much” (OHC vii). Commentators such as W. H. Greenleaf, Wendell John Coats, Jr. and Efraim Podoksik acknowledge the changes in vocabulary and nuance but insist upon a basic consistency in his philosophy. Podoksik, for instance, contends that Oakeshott’s philosophical framework and the nature of his engagements were “consistent throughout his writings, although he modified his views on some points.”

Herbert Simon in Red

Herbert Simon

Many of you who follow this website will know of my enthusiasm for Herbert Simon. Here is an unusual portrait of Simon painted by the very distinguished Richard Rappaport (wikipedia entry) that I chanced upon and for good measure, I include a link to Simon’s last interview.

Philosophy and its Moods: Oakeshott on the Practice of Philosophy

oakeshott

Extract from Ken McIntyre’s chapter:

Among non-academic intellectuals and political theorists, Michael Oakeshott is known primarily as a conservative political thinker who produced a series of essays in the 1950s which were critical of “rationalist” or “ideological” politics. Others who have read more deeply in Oakeshott’s corpus are aware of his contributions to the philosophy of history and of his considerable achievement as a philosopher of practical and political life. Although there has been a significant increase in the attention paid to Oakeshott’s contributions to the theoretical understanding of history and politics, Oakeshott’s understanding of the character of philosophical activity has remained relatively neglected. This neglect is unfortunate because Oakeshott was one of the few political philosophers of the 20th century who also provided a more-or-less systematic theoretical context to his political philosophy. Thus, an examination of his understanding of the character and activity of philosophizing is a necessary part of any treatment of his more generally known ideas about the logic of historical explanation, the nature of poetic experience, or the character of practical life and the place of politics within that life.

In this essay, I examine Oakeshott’s understanding of the character of philosophical activity. Oakeshott’s thoughts on the subject are scattered throughout his essays, but his most extensive and concentrated reflections on philosophy are found in three works: Experience and Its Modes, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” and the first essay of On Human Conduct. His treatment of the activity of philosophizing in these three different pieces manifests a remarkable degree of continuity in terms of the kinds of questions and concerns which animate his inquiry and in terms of the proper disposition of the philosopher. Oakeshott understands philosophical activity as informed by an unconditional commitment to the interrogation of the conditions of understanding, and thus maintains that the disposition of the philosopher is fundamentally skeptical toward the world as it normally appears. Philosophy is understood as a kind of mood which draws us away from the various practices in which we normally engage in order to question the logic of those practices. Thus, there is a distinction between the activity of philosophizing, which is expressive of a disposition toward appearances, and the particular conclusions of a philosopher, which, as such, represent a further invitation to reflect on their specific conditions and on conditionality itself. In terms of his own philosophical conclusions, Oakeshott’s work manifests a consistent commitment to conceiving various practices or modes of understanding, like history, science, and art, as quasi-sufficient, autonomous, and independent worlds logically unrelated to each other, and in viewing philosophy as a non-normative, second-order, explanatory activity in relation to the modes. However, his essays also reveal significant terminological changes related to Oakeshott’s various attempts to stress different aspects of the character of modality, and they strongly suggest substantial equivocation on Oakeshott’s part concerning the criterion of a successful or coherent set of philosophical conclusions.

Slime Mould, Extended Mind and Stigmergy

stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy

Those familiar with my work will know that I’ve been banging on about the idea that while mind is not extended in the sense that Adams and Aizawa rightly I think take issue with, i.e. specifying the “mark of the cognitive”, it is extended in the stigmergic sense – and this seems to me what’s being proposed here even though they do not invoke the term stigmergy.

Slime mold uses an externalized spatial “memory” to navigate in complex environments

Spatial memory enhances an organism’s navigational ability. Memory typically resides within the brain, but what if an organism has no brain? We show that the brainless slime mold Physarum polycephalum constructs a form of spatial memory by avoiding areas it has previously explored. This mechanism allows the slime mold to solve the U-shaped trap problem—a classic test of autonomous navigational ability commonly used in robotics—requiring the slime mold to reach a chemoattractive goal behind a U-shaped barrier. Drawn into the trap, the organism must rely on other methods than gradient-following to escape and reach the goal. Our data show that spatial memory enhances the organism’s ability to navigate in complex environments. We provide a unique demonstration of a spatial memory system in a nonneuronal organism, supporting the theory that an externalized spatial memory may be the functional precursor to the internal memory of higher organisms.