I opted for the latter and I can report my efforts were largely successful, at least as far as I could tell.

In playing around with ChatGPT, I found that it could easily summarize my assigned readings and answer my exam questions. But it would not use quotations from the readings. Even when I asked it to select the most important quotes from these readings, it simply refused to do so. (It’s now been several months since I’ve tested this, and it may have changed already.) Google’s Bard was the same. This seemed to me to be a feature of LLMs that I could exploit to make my exams AI-resistant.

First, I broke up my exams into two phases with separate due dates. I gave students the questions they’d have to eventually write essays on (for phase 2). But for phase 1, they just had to select 3-5 quotes from each reading that they planned to use in their essays. That was 20% of the exam. After they submitted them, I graded their quotes, looking for whether random sentences were selected and whether the selected quotes could be used to answer the essay questions. Students were even allowed to re-submit based on that feedback to select better quotes, if needed.

Then they had to write their essays, using those quotes. Because the quotes had to be in there, it was much harder for them to get ChatGPT to write their essays for them. When some tried it, their essays stood out. There typically were no quotes in them, an obvious red flag when grading. Now, if TurnItIn’s AI checker (or ZeroGPT or some other similar service), then I’m much more confident this isn’t a false positive.

To be clear, ChatGPT can still generate these essays that include the quotes, but the student has to work harder to get them. They have to revise the prompt significantly, instead of pasting in my essay question. At least one student tried it, but their essay still had telltale signs of AI generation that I, my chair, and my associate dean all agreed sufficiently demonstrated the student didn’t write it. Maybe some students got away with it, but if so, I believe they were few.

* This is primarily focused on my Intro to Philosophy course. For upper-level courses, my strategy will be different and will include some assignments that incorporate AI use.

ABSTRACT

This award supports a collaborative research project at the interface of philosophy of science and social studies of science. Researchers in philosophy of science, sociology, and anthropology will conduct an empirical study of the philosophical commitments of scientists across a broad range of scientific disciplines. It is often thought that these commitments are shared within each scientific discipline, that they differ considerably between scientific disciplines, and that these differences pose a serious challenge to engaging in effective cross-disciplinary research. This project will be the first study of philosophical commitments to be conducted with a large representative sample of scientists across many disciplines. The study has two fundamental goals: to achieve an analytical depth of understanding of how the philosophical commitments of scientists influence their scientific practices and to achieve a deeper understanding of the extent to which prior cross-disciplinary experiences of scientists shape their philosophical commitments. Beyond enhancing the efficacy of cross-disciplinary research, this project will serve to enhance public literacy of science by providing insights for revising the tools that experts in public understanding of science use to investigate how the views of non-scientists about science or scientific thinking relate to their views on social issues.

Philosophical commitments refer to how scientists conceptualize the world and its scientific study, framing how scientists understand and conduct their research. These philosophical commitments have three dimensions: what methods are effective in acquiring knowledge (epistemology), what categories are fundamental (ontology), and what social values are important (axiology). The project will begin by interviewing approximately 50 scientists to determine their philosophical commitments and how they manifest in their scientific practice. The interviews will facilitate the development of survey instruments that are to be used on a much larger scale to measure the philosophical commitments of scientists. These instruments will then be used to survey a national sample of approximately 3,500 US scientists from a wide range of scientific disciplines. The survey data will then be analyzed to test the hypotheses that philosophical commitments align with scientific disciplines and that such philosophical commitments vary when scientists have had prior cross-disciplinary research experience. The measurement instruments to be developed in this project will be generalizable; they can subsequently be used by others to investigate philosophical dimensions of scientific practice both within and outside of STEM fields, to inform science education, and efforts to facilitate cross-disciplinary research.

This volume couldn’t have come together without the tremendous efforts and brilliance of the authors of the twelve chapters, who persisted through a pandemic to complete their contributions. Thank you so much to each of you!

There were numerous times that I never expect to get to this point. I was on the job market for 6 seasons. At times it was pretty bleak. At least once, I got total of zero first-round interviews for TT positions. As I finished my third and final year as a visiting assistant professor, I had one on-campus interview and did not get the job. Going into summer, I had nothing lined up. With luck and the recommendation of a friend, an interview with Michael O’Rourke for a post-doc with the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative at Michigan State materialized. Being hired for that position was the only thing that kept me in academia. (So not only am I incredibly grateful to Michael O’Rourke and TDI for enabling me to stay in academia, he and they have been wonderful to work with! I couldn’t have asked for a better post-doc and group of people to still be collaborating with.) In my second year as at this post-doc, I had one on-campus interview for my current job, which I thankful to have gotten. I am incredibly lucky. Much, if not almost all, of my success is due to luck and the help of a lot of people.

I have a some exciting plans for tenured life. At the moment, I’m working on a couple of papers on ambiguity. Tracing the theory of ambiguity back through Plato has been very enlightening. I’m beginning the process of writing a book on philosophy of language and moral psychology. At the moment, some colleagues and I are awaiting news on an NSF grant proposal, which (if awarded) will fund a three-year project and end up generating one of the coolest data sets in philosophy of science. Some co-authored, TDI projects on integration are in the work as well. Lastly, if there’s time, I may conduct a few experiments in moral psychology.

Demagogues pose a long-recognized danger to democracies. Recently, Jason Stanley and others have discussed it, though recognition of this danger goes back at least to Plato. Demagogues, using the power of rhetoric and propaganda, can sway the masses, irrationally convincing them to abandon democratic ideals and even democracy itself. The demagogue takes people participating in and supportive of democracy and turns them against it to support the demagogue instead. The demagogue does this by exploiting democracy’s embrace of freedom of speech.

This danger has been well explored, and I have nothing to add to it here. This week, however, it has seemed to me that there is a second danger posed by demagogues. Democracies at least almost always have some citizens eligible to participate in the democratic process who nevertheless do not._¹ These individuals feel disenfranchised, even if they legally are allowed to vote. They believe no political party or any politician actually cares about them or those like them. They believe they are being passed over, looked over, and forgotten. So they don’t participate in the democratic process.

The second danger of the demagogue is that he will activate this group of the body politic, people with no prior loyalty to any political party, ideals, or values. They become loyal to him. This is different from the first danger, where the demagogue takes those already participating and turns them against democracy.

It is important to distinguish these problems for several reasons. One has to do with how to respond to the rise of a demagogue. Because of the demagogue’s use of propaganda to appeal to emotion over reason, responding to the first danger has an obvious counter and reason for hope. Given enough time, those that previously supported democratic ideals may be convinced through reason and cooling of emotions to abandon a demagogue and renew their support for democracy. They can be won back. The demagogue’s spell can be broken.

The formerly effectively disenfranchised–the source of the second danger of a demagogue–pose a different challenge. They are loyal to the demagogue and have no prior loyalty to which they can be persuaded to return. They feel little to no loyalty to the democracy they believe had little to no loyalty to them. Time and reason will do far less to tamp down this danger.

A second reason for distinguishing these differences has to do with the precursors to the rise of a demagogue. Plato and Stanley see the first danger as a background condition of democracy, an eternal danger ever-present and baked into the nature of democracy. By allowing free speech, democracy allows for demagogues.

The second danger is not omnipresent. It may be that all democracies effectively disenfranchise some of their citizens because the needs of all cannot always be satisfied, because there will always be some whose values are antithetical to democracy and equality, or because there will always be some lacking the desire or disposition to engage in democratic processes requiring time and careful reasoning. But perhaps not; maybe a democratic nation-state could maintain full participation of its citizens. Regardless, the amount of the citizenry that feel disenfranchised and abandoned can and does vary over time. The more people in a democratic society that feel even voting isn’t worth their time because none of the politicians care and nothing will change for the better regardless of who wins, the greater the second demagogic danger is for that society. It means there are more people primed to be loyal to a demagogue instead of the democracy. So, the percentage of a population that regularly do not vote is a warning sign for a democracy.²

While I need to examine more data to make this case in detail, I contend that this warning light has been flashing in this American democracy for a while now. Donald Trump activated multitudes of voters that felt ignored for years and haven’t voted for Democrats or Republicans in many elections, if ever. Thus, many are loyal to him, not to the Republican party, not to Republican values of small government and lower taxes on the rich, and not to American democracy.³

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_¹ This is to say nothing of those lawfully but immorally excluded from democratic participation; that is a failure of a particular democracy itself without a demagogue.

² This is different from citizens that technically a have a right to vote but who nevertheless are widely and commonly prevented from voting by other laws, policies, and practices. Twentieth and Twenty-first century Jim Crow laws that inhibit minority voters do not pertain to this demagogic danger to democracy and are not this kind of warning sign. They are a massive and deeply troubling warning sign of a very different problem in a democracy.

³ This post is not intended as a piece of apologetics for all or even some of these formerly disaffected, now fiercely loyal Trump voters. When their feelings of disenfranchisement stem from white supremacy that is no longer tolerated, the appropriate response is NOT to tolerate white supremacy. If white supremacy is a significant factor driving widespread feelings of disenfranchisement, then white supremacy must be addressed directly; we must try to remove it not only from law and policy, but hearts and minds as well.

In my Introduction to Philosophy class, I assign three Dialogue Projects during the term. Each over two sections that we’ve just covered. The first one covers ethics and epistemology. (Download the assignment here for details.) Students are required to sit down and talk with another student from the class for 10 minutes. They record the audio of their dialogue. Then each separately writes a report on the dialogue.

The report asks them to spend twice as much on their partner’s views (and the reasons given for them) as it does their own. To do well on the assignment, they have to listen to and report what their partner thinks.

Students are also required to ask follow-up questions. These can’t be scripted ahead of time, since they must be based on what the other person has just said. Asking good questions requires good listening, and it allows you to listen and learn more.

For anyone interested in using or adapting this assignment, I should note that how long students have to talk increases to 15 and then 20 minutes for the next two projects. Additionally, for the first one, I give them a full page of conversational prompts over the material we’ve covered. For the second, however, I give half as many, and they have to write some of their own. For the third, I give them none, and they have to write all the prompts. The students also have in-class exercises to help them learn how to have philosophical dialogues. I’m presenting that part at the upcoming APA-Pacific in San Francisco; come see me if you have questions. Anyone not attending is welcome to email me with questions or for more of the materials I use.

Just out is the new edited volume on team science, Strategies for Success edited by Kara L. Hall, Amanda L. Vogel, and Robert T. Croyle. I have a co-authored chapter in the book: “Disciplinary Diversity in Teams: Integrative Approaches from Unidisciplinarity to Transdisciplinarity“.

The chapter is written with several other members of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (Michael O’Rourke, Stephen Crowley, Bethany Laursen, Brian Robinson, and Stephanie E. Vasko). We review many of the challenges facing inter- or transdisciplinary research and provide some remarks on how to overcome them.

This chapter is part of my larger research project in the philosophy of interdisciplinarity on metaphysics and social epistemology of integration. ‘Integration’ is something of a buzzword when talking about interdisciplinary. It’s generally agreed that it is important for teams composed of researchers from a diverse mix of disciplines. But often metaphors or magic are invoked when discussing it. The metaphors are loose and inconsistent. Some talk like integration almost magically happens for unexplainable reasons.

The thing is, however, I hate buzzwords, at least when the meaning is unclear. They just allow lazy thinking. In this chapter (and another forthcoming), part of my contribution was to elaborate a more concrete notion of integration and how to do it. In the chapter, we follow O’Rourke et al. (2016) in taking integration to be a process that takes inputs and produces a combined output(s). We can talk about social integration (creating a team from the input of team members) or epistemic integration (creating new, integrated knowledge from the input of the team member’s disciplinary knowledge).

The social epistemology of integration is, I think, one of the exciting and important areas of contemporary epistemology these days. It’s a place where philosophy has the opportunity to make an impact as well.

Anyway, the book and the chapter are now available. Check them out.

The big news of today is the release of the transcript of the call between Pres. Trump and Ukrainian Pres. Zelensky. During that call, Pres. Trump asks for the Ukrainians “to do us a favor.” So the big question is what is favor? What does ‘favor’ mean, specifically does it entail the expectation that the favor should be repaid?

While it’s hard to answer that question definitively, it is actually quite clear that for Pres. Trump the answer is yes. A favor is to be repaid.

The reason this question is so important is that already the debate is raging about whether there was any “quid pro quo” in this request for a favor. Many of the President’s defenders are loudly saying there was no hint of a quid pro quo, and so the president is exonerated by the transcript.

To consider this question of whether asking for a favor is suggesting a quid pro quo, I first considered doing a detailed semantic analysis of ‘favor’ in part by investigating its etymology, its synonyms, and patterns of usage. But then it occurred to me that how the word tends to be used may be largely irrelevant in this case. While convention matters in meaning, a speaker’s intention is king. So how has Pres. Trump used the word?

Luckily, Trump is a prolific Twitter user. So we can do a quick search on Twitter for every time he has used the word ‘favor’ in tweet. By my count, there are 63 tweets in total with that word. Of these three seem clearly to convey that for Pres. Trump, favors are to be repaid. Here they are:

Then there is also this one, which I take to be suggestive, but not definitive:

I take this tweet to convey that Donny Deutsch should have returned the favor but didn’t, and therefore is open to criticism.

These tweets, I believe, constitute a clear pattern of usage by Pres. Trump, indicating that for him favors are to be repaid. We should, therefore, interpret the transcript in light of this pattern of usage.

In the interests of transparency, it is important, I think, to review the other tweets. Most of them can be ignored because ‘favor’ is used as a verb (2 times) or as ‘in favor’ like a court ruling in his favor or someone being “in favor” of Hillary Clinton (39 times). Another contains a quote from the founder of the New York Times, who said the news should be “without fear or favor.” Several more are ambiguous, not clearly addressing the issue of whether a favor should be repaid or is merely an act of kindness to another (19). Many of are re-tweets from supports saying he should do the country “a favor” and run for the presidency. Of his own, he said that A-Rod should do the Yankees a favor by retiring and Brent Musburger did himself a favor. There is room for interpretation of these 19 tweets, but I don’t read any of them as clearly stating or even implying one doesn’t need to repay a favor.

One of the widespread assumptions in work on interdisciplinarity or interdisciplinary philosophy of science is that the different scientific disciplines are very different and that is why interdisciplinary research is so hard. In particular, they appear to differ in their philosophical commitments. I wanted to test that assumption.

The TDI has conducted workshops with hundreds (if not thousands now) of scientists around the world, soliciting their views on a wide range of issues in philosophy of science. These scientists come from a wide range of disciplines. Even with our large data set, there were too many disciplines and too few representatives from each to analyze philosophical differences between disciplines. But we could look at branches of sciences, such as physical science and social science. Using a very conservative method to guard against false positives, we found several differences, which we detail in the paper.

We presented this work as an example of experimental philosophy of science, which surprisingly is still a small field. Our hope is that this paper can spur additional research suggesting many additional, more focused lines of future inquiry.