Logic as Liberation. Part 0.

When, in January 2023, my union (the University and College Union) announced 18 days of industrial action across February and March, my first action was to look at the schedule for my Fundamentals of Logic class, to see the impact of the strikes on the remainder of our year together (having already lost one lecture the previous term to industrial action).

I went from having eight lectures left to having three, one of which was the next day, with a fixed topic that couldn’t be changed at short notice, and which my co-lecturing was already scheduled to teach.

It was heartbreaking.

There was no way that I could cover all the things I normally cover, with the loss of five lectures. I gave myself an afternoon to mourn, and that sat down to answer the crucial question: If I only had two weeks left, what is it that I wanted my students to learn? Ordinarily, in term 2 we finish up the meta-theory of propositional logic, segue into predicate logic semantics and proof theory, and then wrap up the year by shifting gears entirely to look at Buddhist logic. If I had to lose a large chunk of material, I decided it was predicate logic that had to go, not the Buddhist stuff.

But how would I explain this to my students? Not just that the Buddhist logic material is important, but that it was more important that they learn about it than that they learn predicate logic. And how could I explain to them, too, why this was even an issue — why, despite the fact that there is literally nothing that I enjoy doing more than teach intro logic to enthusiastic students, I would be participating in industrial action, even with the disastrous effect it would have on my favorite activity.

So when my lecture came around the next week, I went and instead of talking about the language of predicate logic, I said I wanted to talk about why we were doing this.
Why are we even in this class.

I covered possible answers all the way from “so that you can achieve the subject-specific learning outcomes listed in the module description as published in the faculty handbook” to “I hope you learn what logic is and what logicians do” to “how to follow rules/directions and reason from a definition” and then we had a collective discussion on the bigger questions:

• Who is logic for? Who gets to be/count as a logician? Who is excluded?
• What are ways in which “logic” or “reason” or “rationality” (especially claims of “being reasonable” or “being rational”) weaponized in modern western society? Who does this weapon tend to be used against?
• If we are currently living in a society that is under the “rule of reason”, what would an alternative to this rule look like? Could reason/rationality/logic still play a role?

They probably would have talked with each other for far longer than they did, if I hadn’t had to draw things to a close so they could attend their other classes.

At the very end, I asked them “what good has it been to you to take this class?” (and then I told them “silence will be soul-destroying” 🙂 ) and the answers to this, and through the discussion throughout, made it clear that they are taking seriously these issues and ngl, there were points during the discussion when I thought I was going to cry because they think the things that matter most to me also matter to them, and what more could you ask for in teaching?

[Read Part 1 here]

Bob Ross and the Art of Learning Online

My 8yo and I both enjoy painting. She’s a very enthusiastic artist, in all media, but is sometimes hampered by being eight. My painting experience is limited to medieval illumination, and has been very hard fought for over the last 12 years or so. (In particular, I’m utterly baffled by anything involving realism. And anything involving watercolors. Baffling, I tell you.)

A few weeks ago, we started watching Bob Ross on Netflix. After about 5 episodes, we were like “I bet we could do that!” — despite the fact that (a) neither of us have any experience painting with oil paints, (b) we don’t have any oil paints, (c) we don’t have any canvases, and (d) we have almost none of the right brushes. But why let small hindrances like that stop us? I have a decent selection of gouaches, some high-quality watercolor paper that I was smart enough to purchase before lockdown started, and a decent selection of brushes for small-scale paintings. So we sat down one weekend to see what happens if you follow a Bob Ross episode and try to reconstruct it with entirely wrong materials and tools:

The results were quite literally miraculous. I have never painting anything (a) so large (6×9″) or (b) so realistic in my life. G, for her part, was amazed that if she tried to do the same things Ross was doing on TV, she got basically the same results.

The best part was, each painting only took half an hour. So this was something that I was willing to not only do with G on weekends as a special treat, but it was something we could plausibly fit in between supper and bedtime.

We took the techniques we’d learned and applied them to fall scenes:

We tried out winter, too:

All the while we worked, I’d hear G repeating back to me things she’d learned: Thin paint sticks to wet paint; things get darker as you come forward, away from the light source; there’s no such thing as a mistake, only a happy accident; every happy little tree needs a friend. In like 2.5 hours of watching TV, she and I had learned more about the mechanics of painting than I’d learned in 12 years of self-teaching and a variety of classes. We’ve continued to watch (so soothing!) and we’ve continued to experiment.

As should come as no surprise to anyone in academia, I’m facing the likelihood of having to teach remotely come fall — and teach what is in many respects a highly visual subject (formal/symbolic logic). Teaching online/remotely isn’t something I have any experience with — my being dumped into the deep edge for the final week of term in March does not count as experience! — and teaching logic presents unique complications that do not necessarily affect my colleagues in my department.

Which is the other reason why I found Bob Ross’s shows so fascinating: How successful he was at teaching someone such a visual — and physical — exercise remotely in the way he did. It seems like this is something that should be enormously difficult. And yet, he did it effortlessly, and effectively. So what have I learned about the art of teaching/learning remotely/online from watching Bob Ross?

You don’t need bells and whistles. The shows are Ross, his canvas, his palate (already prepped with paints) and his brushes, brush stand, and cleaner. The background is dull black. There is no background music. It’s just him, doing his thing. Super effective.

Break the fourth wall. He’s not teaching into a vacuum, he’s teaching to a very real, very concrete (albeit not present) audience. When he asks his audience to send him photos of their attempts, he means it.

Care about your students. It is obvious that Ross does; when he says “so glad you could join us today,” he means it. When he hopes that we’re happy with what we’re doing, he means it. That real audience that he’s clearly talking to is an audience whose happiness and wellbeing he cares about, and his shows are opened and closed with an explicit statement of that care.

Slip-ups are part of the game. The shows were taped in one go, with no editing. Sometimes he misspeaks. He corrects himself and moves on. Sometimes he misspaints. He teaches the audience how to correct and move on.

Mistakes don’t exist. Or rather, things can happen that you didn’t want to happen or didn’t plan on happening, but none of them are ever significant enough to ruin things. He spent a lot of time talking about how to deal with these hiccoughs, so that there are no mistakes, only happy accidents.

Repetition works. Any individual show didn’t have much repetition, either in techniques, composition, or verbal phrases, but by the time you’ve watched *cough* 20+ episodes in two weeks *cough* they start feeling like little puzzles, built from the same basic pieces but combined in different ways. This is particularly noticeable in the way that he says the same things over and over again; this really does help reinforce the more global techniques that he’s trying to impart.

30 minutes is a good length if you are actively working alongside; if you’re not either painting along, or paying very close attention, it’s easy to zone out long enough to miss something crucial.

Is oil painting like doing logic? In many ways, not. The glory of his approach to painting is that so long as you’re happy with the result, it’s a success. That isn’t the case with formal proofs. Another feature of his approach is that he’s always encouraging people to work out their own idea of a scene, not slavishly copy his; what is true in his world may not be true in my world. That is another thing that isn’t true of formal logic — you don’t get to decide what is right and what is wrong. But logic does benefit from lots of repetitions of the same techniques in different combinations; it benefits from starting in one direction and having it go wrong and needing to go another direction to recover. It benefits from having someone who cares about their subject, and their audience. It benefits from having someone convinced that just giving it a go will make you happier.

So there’s a lot I’ve taken away from watching his shows that I intend to incorporate into logic videos that I’ll be doing for fall.

If you had told me 10 years ago, I could paint a painting like this (inspired by a photograph the father of a friend took), I would have laughed at you. If you had told me 2 weeks ago, I could paint a painting like this, I would have laughed at you. If I tell you that you, too, can become a logician, and you want to laugh at me — well, maybe you can follow along with my class remotely in fall.

Things I said I’d never do

I was homeschooled from kindergarten until 12th grade. So was my sister (the elder by 3 years). In the US in the 80s and 90s, this was only moderately unusual; in the Netherlands, people used to find my story marvelous and strange.

It started out with my parents (both college-educated, but neither in education/teaching) decided they could give me sister a better education at home than the public school could. The plan had always been to educate us at home in primary school, and then as we got older give the choice to us, to be homeschooled or go to public school. I’d always thought, when I was young, that I’d be homeschooled all the way up to high school and then go to actual high school, so that I could experience the social side of things. By the time 9th grade came around, my answer was “oh, hell, no”, because (a) I didn’t really like people, (b) home-schooling took a lot less time, and (c) being available during school hours meant my sister and I were highly sought after babysitters; in the mid 90s, I was making between $6-$10/hour babysitting.

Whenever I talked about being homeschooled, it was with nothing but positivity. I had the freedom to study what I wanted (in 9th grade, I discovered the Society for Creative Anachronism; my mom then assigned the Middle Ages for my history topic, and I had to develop my persona, research, design, and make clothing and food, and learn the history of my chosen period), I had the free time to do non-school things (cf. babysitting above; that’s how I could afford my first year at university), and the self-teaching/self-organising skills it taught me were invaluable particularly during my PhD. But whenever anyone asked if I was planning to homeschool my own children, the answer was always “oh, hell, no”. Because long before I ever had a kid, I knew that the optimal age of students for me to teach was 18+. I couldn’t fathom trying to teach a child to read; my experience tutoring middle schoolers left me with a huge appreciation for people who could help those children navigate life and teach them something. Also, there was no way that I would give up my working life in order to properly homeschool a young child.

And yet, here we are…

As it happened, G was due to start Easter break the week the UK government shut down schools. So we’re still in holiday mode and don’t have to really think about schooling. Her teachers have already set up some online sites for remote teaching come April, and sent home a few workbooks. But in the meantime, I’m still trying to work and G does better with having activities, so here is what homeschooling looks like in the Uckelhaus:

• English: She needs to spend some time reading every day. I’m hoping to direct her towards some slightly more sophisticated books than what she has been reading, but I’m also fine with her just reading something every day. Next month, I’m doing a prompt-a-day poetry course, and I’m going to encourage her to write with me, so that covers writing.
• Science: A week or so ago, I opened up a notebook from my childhood, and discovered systematic notes I took 30 years — almost exactly the same age G is now — on observations made about the attraction of different insects to different types of baits. Monday we set up a bait jar in the backyard, and she built a bug hotel, and she’s doing daily observations, in the same notebook.
• Mathematics: Tracking distances via PokemonGo when we go out for our daily walk, measuring and calculating with measures for cooking, and plenty of discussions on various topics over dinner (the other day, I taught her the sieve of Eratosthenes). She has also been writing up word problems for her stuffed toys, and has access to Times Tables Rockstars.
• History: If things continue, I’ll add in some nonfiction/history books to her reading repertoire, but honestly, I’m fine if this slides a bit.
• Music: After about a year and a half, we finally purchased a stand and a stool for her keyboard, and set things up. She has (voluntarily!) spent time playing each day, practising pieces she’d been set by her teacher and composing new songs.
• Languages: She’s been doing German on duolingo for quite some time, and a friend has offered to skype with her and talk French, which we’ll start doing after the break is over. Also, the FrogPlay account school set up for her has quizzes tests in German, even though that’s not a language they teach at school, so she’s enjoyed trying a few of those!
• Art: Every day she’s spent some time drawing freehand or following a how-to-draw video, and yesterday we painted together. There’s also plenty of sewing to be done.

This is more than sufficient education for an 8yo for the rest of the academic year. So, I guess I’m homeschooling!

Dear students: We’re all anxious and uncertain too

Dear students,

With only a few days’ notice, all your in-person classes were cancelled, with promises of online content delivery instead. Your last week of term is in upheaval. All your plans, gone. And you have no idea what’s going to happen, not this week, not during the break, not next term. Everything is uncertain, everything is anxiety-making.

Dear students, we’re all anxious and uncertain, too. Many of us have never done online teaching before — we don’t know the software, we don’t have the hardware, we never imagined we’d be doing this without months of preparation — and those of us who were on strike last week have either had no time to think/prepare or had to break our strike to do so.

We’re sitting in our offices today doing our best, trying our hardest to ensure your education is not disrupted more than it has to, learning new software, sourcing new hardware. We’re constantly emailing colleagues, taking advantage of the offers of those who have done online teaching before to help us through Blackboard Collaborative Ultra, or Panopto, or even just simple things like “use a headset if you’re able to” (one colleague even offered to come in and video my whiteboard if I need her to), we’re chatting in WhatsApp groups designed to share best practices and provide moral support, we’re passing tips on in googledocs and Facebook groups and Twitter.

I don’t know how to teach logic without access to a whiteboard. I’m lucky enough that I (a) have a whiteboard in my office and (b) am (for the time being) still allowed into my office to access it. (If (b) changes before I can do my videos, I’ll take my whiteboard home with me.) Over the weekend, I googled “how to take videos on linux”, because so many of the options that are offered are for Windows computers only. I’ve found a programme that I’ll test out this afternoon, figuring out where I can perch my laptop so that it’s got a full view of the board but is still close enough to me that I don’t accidentally topple it by being connected to it with a headset! If I can’t do my videos in my office, I’m already mentally planning where there’s space to set up at home…and how to keep random cat-butts out of the video. Whatever I end up with, it won’t be pretty. It won’t be flashy. It will not be optimal. But it will be as close to sitting in class with me as I can get, because I owe you that.

And then there’s exams. We don’t know what’s going to happen with exams, any more than you do. Will we be given a chance to revise the exam questions, set way back in January? Is it possible to change the modes of assessment for a module — to drop an exam or make it a take-home one instead of a timed one? If this were any country other than the UK, doing either of these would be easy — of all the countries that I’ve worked in higher education in, only the UK is so bureaucratic about its exams and assessments. The lack of flexibility is stifling. I want to be able to examine my students on the material they have been taught, in a format that will best allow them to demonstrate to me what they have learned in my classes. Between the strikes and now Covid-19, I don’t see how that is going to happen. No wonder I’m anxious.

The situation is so fast-changing, there’s no way to say now what things will be like at the end of this week, much less at the start of next term. Which research deadlines will be postponed, and which ones won’t be? When will schools and holiday camps and clubs be closed, and I have to start juggling all of this along with taking care of my child? How can I do my best by her in this difficult and uncertain time? How can I do my best by my students? I want to be able to give you all reassurances, but I can’t. I can’t say everything will be all right or that we’ll figure it out or that in the long run it’ll all work out.

Dear students, I wish we had more answers for you. I wish you weren’t in this situation, especially those of you in your final year, who’ve had far more disruption to your education than any other cohort in at least a generation. We’re doing our best, and will continue to do so. I know you’re anxious and uncertain; we are too. We’re all in this together.

Take care, and wash your hands!,
Doctor Logic

—
Dr. Sara L. Uckelman
Assistant professor of logic and philosophy of language
Durham University

How do we (teach students to) ask questions?

Yesterday I gave a talk with this title at Nottingham Philosophy’s departmental colloquium. The post below isn’t a transcription of the talk but it’s the notes I wrote up on the train down which I mostly followed when speaking. I’m reproducing the notes here unchanged, not because I didn’t get loads of useful feedback from the Q&A, but because I don’t have the time to amend/augment it now, and in any case I’m planning to take this and try to turn it into an actual journal paper.

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I’d like to thank Matthew and the rest of you for the invitation to come give a talk, because it gives me an opportunity to explore some things that I spend a lot of time thinking about but which I feel like we (as a profession) spend very little time talking about – either with each other or with our students. I know from Matthew and Ian that Nottingham is a very open and pluralistic department, so I wanted to do something a little bit different. This is going to be more of an interactive exercise where I get you guys to think reflectively about a bunch of stuff and then share your thoughts with each other and with me. It’s primarily selfish in nature: I want to get better at this, so I want to get as much different input as I can.

What is philosophy?

1. Is it content?
   

   Is it about who our predecessors are, and what they thought? Is it names, dates, influences, concepts, theories, questions, applications, problems, paradoxes? [If it is, what distinguishes philosophy from history of philosophy?] Is it about investigating fundamental reality?

2. (2) Is it method?
   

   Or is it method? Can any topic be philosophical so long as we apply certain kinds (the right kinds?) of methods to it?

   What are the methods? Formal logic; informal logic; concept analysis; phenomenology; thought experiments; etc.

One needn’t place themselves firmly in one camp or the other – it’s possible to take any position on the spectrum between these two extremes, and probably most philosophers find themselves somewhere in the middle. But if hard pressed to come up with a means of excluding philosophy from non-philosophy, each of you will end up favoring one side or another.

Why is it important to know where you stand on this issue? It’s because it relates to another topic, namely:

What are we teaching when we teach undergraduates philosophy?

3. Is it philosophy?
4. Is it how to be a philosopher?

These are not quite the same question as the previous question, but if you say the answer is (3) then whether you take (1) or (2) will make a difference.

Think back to your own undergraduate career. What did you learn? What courses were you required to take? In the US, I had to do history of ancient and history of modern; I had to take at least one ethics course; I had to take at least one logic course. For the rest, I had choice, but the classes I took tended to focus on particular areas/subfields/figures in philosophy: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein; philosophy of language; metaphysics; epistemology; philosophy of math. As I got higher up (and started taking grad classes) I got focused topics like compositionality and vagueness and logicism. But there was a very clear sense that we were learning who the important figures, themes, concepts, developments in philosophy were. In only one case did I get the feeling that my professor was teaching me what he was teaching me because he thought it was right (Terry Penner doing Plato was amazing.)

If there was an expectation that we would learn how to be philosophers, it was that this would fall out of reading and seeing how the great philosophers did philosophy. (This is, if you think about it, an interesting pedagogical assumption. Would we expect people to learn how to become engineers by reading/seeing how other engineers do engineering? Would we expect people to learn how to write fiction by reading/seeing how other authors write fiction? It’s a pedagogical technique that seems more appropriate in some cases than in others, and not appropriate across the board: So we must ask the question, “Is it appropriate for philosophy?”)

Does anyone else’s experiences differ from mine?

Anyway, the takeaway I took from this, as a student, is that this is what I was supposed to teach my own (undergraduate) students – that there were certain figures, concepts, disputes, etc. that any student having gotten a philosophy degree should come away with some degree of knowledge/familiarity with. (Let me just say as an aside here that this is where questions of canon come in…questions I’m not going to talk about so much, but not because I don’t think they’re important.) So if I was teaching philosophy of language, I should teach people about Frege/Sense/Reference; Russell/Donnellan/Kaplan/definite descriptions; Kripke; possibly Geach. Maybe at a higher level I could teach semantics, and compositionality, and theories of truth.

That’s what I should teach…but what I really wanted to teach was all the ways in which philosophy of language gets fiction wrong, and how to deal with lies, and what do we mean by “meaning” and “nonsense” and “meaningless”, and the problems fanfiction causes. But if I did that, then I’d have to give up on giving them the broad foundation in the historical debates and developments – there simply isn’t enough time.

But what if what we were really supposed to be doing was teaching students how to do philosophy or how to be philosophers?

Then all the things I wanted to be teaching them and talking to them about, I could. But if that’s what our goal is, then I think for the most part, we don’t do a very good job at it.

In my capacity as director of undergrad dissertations at Durham, the biggest thing concern I’ve seen over the years is that students don’t really know how to come up with dissertation topics. They look at the grand topics they’ve covered in their classes – the problem of evil, why is there something rather than nothing, what are numbers, etc. – and worry (quite rightly) that (a) they can’t come up with a grand topic like this; (b) if they do, they won’t be able to come up with an original contribution; (c) if they do, they can’t adequately discuss it in 12k. Or, they look at the sorts of essay topics they’re given in their classes or exams, and try to come up with something that sounds like that, and invariably end up with something clunky, awkward, and not very much fun.

My first experience with teaching (UK) students how to come up with their own questions was a few years ago when I taught a 2nd year course on Language, Logic, and Reality. I talked with the other person running the module and we agreed on a plan. The course had one formative paper and two summative papers. The formative paper, we would give them one question – everyone had to write on it. (It tied back to the very first lecture when I wrote three quotes up on the board – one in medieval Welsh, one in Sindarin, and one in Linear B. We asked them whether the quote in Linear B was meaningful, and why/why not.) The second paper we had around 7 pre-set questions students could choose from. But their final paper, they had to come up with their own topic. We told them this at the very beginning of the year, and provided a lot of “and this would be an EXCELLENT topic for your final paper” during lectures and discussions. We also arranged for my students to talk to the other lecturer to get their questions vetted, and vice versa, so that no one ended up picking something unreasonable for 3000 words. These final papers were across the board a much higher quality than the other ones.

But I can’t recall how many people I had in my office telling me things like “I didn’t know that I could talk about X in philosophy” or “Is this philosophical enough?” (Those two words are the bane of my existence). The worry whether something is “philosophical enough” connects to a concern that philosophy is demarcated by its subject matter, rather than its method, and that if one wants to talk about something in a philosophical context one must relate it back and anchor it in that subject matter. Whereas if one things that philosophy is a matter of method, then anything can be philosophical enough. It was working with students that convinced them that method is the way forward, and that method is what we should be teaching them, and what we should be teaching them explicitly.

(Side note: As a graduate student in the US, I remember being utterly baffled how my compatriots wrote journal articles. How did one come up with an idea that was suited to an article? I didn’t have much problem writing seminar papers, but journal articles seemed a very different thing, and not once did I get any explicit guidance as to what the difference is or how I should approach one vs. the other.)

So how do we teach students to ask questions? Well, here’s how I teach them:

When students are in my office wondering what to write their dissertations on, I have a surefire method of finding them a topic that excites and interests them. First, I ask them what interests them outside of philosophy. What do they read, what do they listen to, what do they watch, what do they talk about with friends, what are their hobbies? [Only once did I have a student tell me he had no hobbies.] Then, I ask them what interests them in philosophy – is it ethics, is it metaphysics, is it epistemology, is it language/logic? That is…are they interested in what is right? What is? What we know? How we say true things about it/draw inferences about it? Finally, I ask them: What’s in the intersection. There’s your thesis topic.

But that just gets a topic. How does one know what to say about it? These are the questions I have them go through:

• What do you want to know?
• What would count as an answer to this question? How are you going to discriminate between things that answer the question and things that don’t?
• What would count as a good answer to this question? How are you going to discriminate between competing answers? What are your foundational principles, the things that you cannot give up? What is the purpose of this answer (are you looking for something functional, moral, epistemological, etc.)? State these at the beginning of what you are writing, as part of your motivation.
• Then, once you’ve answered the question…who cares? Why does it matter? What has changed as a result of having this answer? What must change as a result of having this answer? Does having this answer affect our behavior? Does it affect what philosophical position we must adopt to remain consistent? Does it change the philosophical landscape by either removing or adding possible positions? What difference does it make?

These are, at the heart of it, the questions I think philosophers should be asking, whatever other questions they ask. Do not ask “Why is there something rather than nothing?” or “What is a fact?” unless you have some idea of what could possibly count as an answer, and some idea of what could possibly count as a good answer. And when it’s boiled down to this, these are fairly straightforward things to teach students to ask.

Answering them, on the other hand… is another matter altogether.

How to write academic papers for fun and profit

Back in spring, I chatted briefly with a group of master’s students about what I was looking for in their final papers, and how they could go about structuring them (this was in the context of encouraging them to think beyond the length of paper they’d been used to writing — instead of 3k, 5-6k). It took about 15 minutes and some scribbling on the board, but afterwards one of them thanked me and said no one had ever taught them this before.

Today I took 15 min. to tell some 2nd year master's students what, exactly, should go into a philosophy/logic research paper.

Later, one of them told me that no one had ever told them that before.

We really are failing our students sometimes. 😦

— Doctor Logic (@SaraLUckelman) April 11, 2019

Following up on that tweet, I wrote up what I could remember of the advice I’d given.

Then, last week, someone in an FB group for fiction writing that I’m in was struggling with writing a paper for one of her classes, unsure how to get started. This group has 17+k members, and I often end up putting on my “professional academic” hat and giving people advice on picking classes, applying to uni, talking to their profs, etc., and this post was no different. The topic was an argumentative paper on quality management in insurance companies with special regard for business customers — a topic I know nothing about, but you know what? I know what sort of paper I’d want to read on this subject…and the structure it has turned out to be rather similar to what I’d given the philosophy students for their logic papers!

So I thought I’d compile this advice into a blog post. Note that this isn’t the only way to write such papers, but it’s a way, and it’s a good one, and it’s one that not only do I encourage my students and other students to use, but I use myself quite often, too.

Advice from twitter:

• Your intro should include what your problem/puzzle/issue is; what motivated your choice; and what tools you’ll use to solve it.
• You should say what other people have done that’s relevant, and why it’s inadequate (if it isn’t inadequate, then you don’t have a puzzle/problem to solve).
• You should define all your technical apparatus. This can be done in two ways:
  1. Either you introduce the technical apparatus and the motivating examples/material concurrently, in an interleaved fashion.
  2. Or you present all the technical apparatus, and then apply it to your motivating examples/material.

  It’s REALLY HARD to know which route is best. I often end up starting with one method, finding it wholly inadequate, switching to the other, hating it, and then switching back.

• After you’ve applied your technical appartus, say something about the consequences. What have you gained from doing this? What have you learned? What are the problems? What still needs to be done?
• And all of that will segue into your conclusion/recap/future work section. I think that’s about it.

Advice from FB:

The first thing you need is what question you’re trying to answer, and what your answer is: Everything else gets built around that. I often recommend to my students to work backwards: What do you want your reader to come away with at the end? Set up your entire paper to drive that point home:

• Motivate the question — which is this a question worth answering? Why this question rather than another question?
• Contextualise the question — what has already been said to answer this question? Why are these previous answers inadequate? How will your answer differ?
• Motivate the answer — what will count as a good answer? How will you discriminate good answers from bad answers? (This will, of course, be connected to the previous, in that you want answers that do things that previous answers haven’t done).
• Answer the question.
• Explain how your answer answers the question and why it is a good answer.
• Remind your reader what the question and answer were, and conclude.

Aim for 1000 words for the first two, maybe 1500 for the third, 2000 for the fourth, and another ~2.5k for the fifth and sixth — that’s 7000 words and should be about 20 pages.

There you go! Have fun. Oh, wait, you want to know how to make money from all of this? Ahahahahahahah….

the "I forgot to wear trousers to lecture" dream

[Note: I originally posted this to my personal blog, which I don’t share the link around to much, and kept wanting to share it with people because it’s so funny, so I finally decided to copy the post over to this blog, so I can share this link.]

Last night [April 28, 2016] I dreamt it was my first introduction to logic tutorial, and as I was waiting for everyone to file in I realized there was a lot more people there than I was expecting — instead of 10-12, or even max 20, it was more than three times that (as the people kept filing in, the room kept growing, but even so, it was a small room and it was full). And then someone else professorial showed up, expecting to teach there at the same time; his course was on the Swedish/Danish October 1844-1846 Revolt between the red coats and the green coats. But we compared notes, and realized that I was scheduled to teach there at 9:00am, which it was, and he was scheduled to teach there at 8:00am, and had thus missed his first lecture. Oops.

Nevertheless, the room was still awfully full, so I realized this must’ve been the first lecture, not the first tutorial, and adjusted my plan correspondingly and when the trickle slowed, I launched into my “What is logic?” with full vim.

Lots of vim, because right about then was when I realized that I was lecturing in my underwear. On the other hand, I also had my coronet on, so it all evened out, and I blithely Emperor’s New Clothesed my way through the opening words until someone tentatively raised her hand and asked “Uhhh, what class is this supposed to be?”

“Introduction to Logic.”,/p>

“Not dance?”

“Uhhh, no. But what kind of dance? I can teach medieval and Renaissance dance, as well as tap, ballet, and jazz.” [Note: This is true]

“Modern hip-hop.”

“Sorry, no, not this room.” And about twenty of the students filed out.

At that point I was poking my head out the door to see if there was anyone else planning to show up, and realized there were people with pitchforks running through the halls! — the red coats and the green coats. A red coat, pursued by two green coats, saw my open door and dashed into the lecture hall, swooped me up, flung me over his shoulder, and ran down the stairs. I did have to ask him if he was one of the good guys or one of the bad guys, because, to be honest my knowledge of the October 1844-1846 Revolt was quite minimal — the only thing I knew about it was that Joel has a wargame based on it, entitled “Bugles and Bubbles” — and I didn’t even remember who won in the end. I don’t remember his answer, and things became a bit fuzzy for a bit, but eventually I escaped him, found some proper clothing to match my crown, snuck through various halls and into the cathedral where the funeral service for the king was happening, and somehow by the time I woke up, I ended up queen of Sweden.

So, you know, it wasn’t all bad.

Approaching philosophy as a speculative fiction author

Two days ago I had the brilliant opportunity of giving a skype guest lecture in Michael Rea‘s undergraduate class on Science Fiction and Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Michael invited me to speak to his students not in my capacity as a philosopher but in my capacity as a Real, Live Author (a capacity which I still find a bit boggling that I have!), to speak to his students about the ways in which philosophy feeds into my writing and how my writing feeds into my philosophy. He asked that I speak for 15-20 minutes, and then there’d be a Q&A, both them to me and me to them. It was an excellent hour and a quarter full of living discussion from which I came away with many thoughts about things I’d never considered before, and I thought I’d write up the brief notes I had for my kick-off presentation, as well as put together some lists that I promised the class during the course of class.

In advance of the class, I had them read Kate Elliott’s blog post, The Omniscient Breasts, on the problematic internalisation of the “male gaze”:

A problem arises when people write and/or read without knowing or realizing they are writing and reading exclusively from the perspective of a male gaze. When this perspective has been internalized as the most authentic or real perspective, it can subsume and devour all other perspectives because it is treated as the truest or only one.

Why does this matter? Because:

Stories told through a female gaze are just as valid, just as true, just as authentic and universal. And they are just as necessary, not just for women but for men, too.

ALL OF THE STORIES ARE NECESSARY

A fortuitious series of events also lead me to read this interview with Sheri S. Tepper in Strange Horizons a few days before giving the talk, and many of the topics discussed in it informed what I wanted to say.

Notes for my presentation

Topic: Why is my reading/writing spec fic relevant/important to my being a philosopher?

• Brief intro: Who am I?
• Writer since age 4. 10 year gap while I wrote a PhD/established an academic career.
• Picked up writing again in 2014; started submitting in 2015. Since then, I’ve had 9 short stories or pieces of flash fic published or forthcoming. I’m currently in my 3rd year participating in NaNoWriMo
• Practical aspects: The first way in which integrating the practice of reading and writing fiction into my philosophical research is beneficial is a straightforward practical one: It gives me concrete philosophical research questions to try to answer.
• What is “creation”? What is being created? “If creation is important to something or someone or is going to become important, then all subcreations of it are also important. Everything is important. There is nothing so unimportant you can ignore it or destroy it with complete impunity.” (Tepper interview, op. cit.)
• What are fictional characters?
• Truth in fiction.
• Emotions and fiction.

But this is a rather low-level reason to integrate philosophy and reading/writing fiction: Any of these research questions I could perfectly well engage in without engaging in the production or consumption of fiction; it’s just that certain aspects are highlighted or more interesting to me given that I do.

I want to contrast those pragmatic/practical aspects with two other types of aspects which I think are intrinsically tied up in the production and consumption of fiction, and cannot be dealt with separately.

• Epistemic aspects:
• Thought experiments: What if?
• The opportunity to explore ideas (through writing) without having arguments for them.
• But stories are arguments, and arguments are stories. (see here, here, and here).
• “Things done in imagination have meaning in the world. Faery is imagination, right? Things done in imagination are transferable to reality. Promises made there can become real.” (Tepper interview, op. cit.)
• We cannot get from here to there without having an idea of what there looks like. We cannot start working towards the future we want to make real until we have a way of conceptualising what the future could be like. Fiction helps us imagine that.
• Moral aspects:
• No one is ever persuaded by argument alone. We need stories to persuade people.
• Every choice matters: In fiction we can chose whether to perpetuate problematic social structures. “The male gaze occurs when the audience, or viewer, is put into the perspective of a heterosexual male.” (Laura Mulvey, quoted in Elliott’s post, op. cit.). Kate Elliott and the “homosexual agenda”: “to him, a sexual gaze was by default a male gaze”.
• “All of the stories are necessary”: Necessary how/why?

The Q&A section of the class covered a tremendously wide spectrum of topics, from the very practical questions of how can we shift mainstream media (movies and books) when everything comes down to money; how do we deal with mainstream media where the narratives of the stories (e.g., strong female leadership in the new Star Wars movies) are in conflict with the actual production of the stories (how many women in executive/production roles in the making of the movies?); how do we talk to our friends, families, colleagues about these internalised defaults; how much should we, as writers of fiction, care about how our words might be used against us or misunderstood?

A few specific points came out that I though were really perceptive. One person asked if there were anything like a trans gaze (as opposed to a male or female gaze), and if I could recommend any stories that center that. I’m not sure if it makes sense to speak of a trans gaze (as opposed to, e.g., a nonbinary or genderfluid one), but I could certainly give them recommendations for stories that center trans characters and trans authors. I have elsewhere enthusiastically reviewed a collection of short stories by trans author Ana Mardoll, and I recommend them enthusiastically here. I also recommend the detailed and unending work that that Bogi Takács does, writing, editing, and promoting spec fic by trans authors. They are the editor volumes 2 and 3 of the Transcendent: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction anthologies (volume 2; volume 3; checkout the rest of Lethe Press’s trans and genderqueer fiction), and they also review speculative fiction widely and have a very helpful index of author demographics: Bogi Reads the World. (Follow them on Twitter for more recommendations.)

Another person, who has read enough of my reviews of short SFF fiction for SFFReviews.com to know of my resistance to 2nd person POV, wondered if there was a connection between that and the problematic centering of the male gaze. I thought that was really perceptive, because I’d never put the two together but I think there’s something there: I don’t really like 2nd person POV because it feels too often like I am being told what to do and what to think and what to feel, and I resist this very strongly. But in a sense, centering the male gaze when the reader is themself not male is similarly problematic — I am forced into viewing as an object something that I do not want to view as an object. This is certainly something I’d like to pursue further.

Finally, people asked what, concretely, they can do to fight against the problematic structures that are sadly all too entrenched in contemporary SFF media. My best recommendation there was to read the transgressive stuff and to recommend it widely. SFFReviews (linked above) provides one means of identifying stories to read; but I also promised the class a list of mainstream SFF journals that are publishing stories that push back against problems and are freely available online. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it will give people more than enough stories to start with:

• Apex
• Beneath Ceaseless Skies
• Daily Science Fiction
• Diabolical Plots
• A family of podcasts: Escape Pod (science fiction)/Podcastle (fantasy)/Pseudopod (horror)
• Strange Horizons
• Uncanny

All in all, an excellent experience, and no one seemed to mind too much that — because I was skyping in from my bedroom — I got photobombed by two different cat butts and a 7yo.

"What are the philosophy books that one needs to know to be a philosopher?"

The title of this post is a question one of our undergraduates asked, and which all members of staff were asked to answer. I wrote up my answer today, and thought it would be worth sharing why I think this is the wrong question to ask. (The answer below is written to my fellow colleagues who were asked to answer this question, not to the student who originally asked it.)

I do not think that this question is properly formed. Philosophy is not a discipline of authors and their works but of techniques and concepts and ideas. Putting the emphasis on books and philosophers misses the point, in my opinion, because it is predicated on the idea that our goal in an undergraduate philosophy programme is to teach students philosophy.

“But of course that’s what we’re supposed to be doing!” you reply. I’m not so sure it’s so obvious, and I’ll counter with a different proposal for what we should be doing, instead of teaching them philosophy: We should be teaching them how to be philosophers.

Equipping a student to be a philosopher is equipping them with a variety of philosophical tools stemming from different philosophical traditions:

• The ability to write clearly and precisely.
• The ability to read a complex article and understand it.
• The ability to draw distinctions and reason from definitions.
• The ability to recognise and create counterexamples.
• The ability to ask appropriate questions.
• An understanding of how we know things and what counts as evidence.
• An understanding of what exists.
• An understanding of what we ought to do.
• An understanding of praise and blame.
• (And other things; this list is not complete.)

How we get students to the point where we have all of these doesn’t matter; we can do it with any texts and any authors that suit the purposes. Focusing on “required” or “canonical” books and authors reduces philosophy to a set of principles, a set of truths, a set of facts. In my opinion, this misses entirely the point of studying philosophy! Now, if you put concepts and techniques first, then it’s likely that certain texts will fall out as “canonical”, since certain texts are the first/clearest place in which a specific concept or technique is presented. But often the first place something is articulated is not the best place in which to introduce a student to the subject — for example, I think students should know about the syllogism, propositional logic, and predicate logic. But I wouldn’t advocate teaching any of these via Aristotle, the Stoics, or Frege (at least not as the primary texts!)

I’ve written more on the difference between teaching philosophy vs. teaching how to be a philosopher (since writing that post, my views have become rather more radical, in that I think the balance should be skewed much more towards teaching them how to be philosophers, even if this means that they end up with “gaps” in their education, e.g., because they haven’t read Aristotle, or Descartes, or Russell. Also relevant to this discussion is why I think it is so crucial that we teach logic to our first year students, especially if our goal is to train them to be philosophers.

Advice to new students: Be brave

Dear new student,

It’s your first year at university. You may have started classes already, or maybe you still have another week or two to go. But soon, if you haven’t already, you’ll find yourself in a huge room of people, most of whom you don’t know, with someone standing at the front who you don’t know and who doesn’t know you. It can be terrifying. Everyone around you is nodding their head at what the professor is saying, they’re taking details notes (some people even color code them!), while you’re still sitting there wondering — what was that thing the professor wrote on the board, five minutes ago? Is it a word, or a symbol? A mistake, a smudge? Now you’ve been thinking about that so long, you’ve missed what the professor said next, and you tune back in to hear, “…and that’s why this concept is going to be crucial to what we’re doing for the rest of the term.” What concept??.

It can be a lonely and isolating place, sitting in a room where you know no one and no one knows you and everyone seems to know everyone else and to have it altogether. But I’m here to tell you, none of it’s true: No one comes to university knowing everyone and everything. Everyone is sitting there thinking “I wish I knew more people here than I do.” Or “I don’t understand what just happened, but I don’t want to look stupid in front of everyone else by asking a question.”

So here’s my advice to you: Own this. Be brave — be the one who is willing to look stupid in front of a sea of people you don’t know, including your professor. Put your hand in the air and ask the questions: “What is the thing you wrote on the board?”, “Can you repeat what you just said about that concept?” If you think you sort of got something, but aren’t sure, try summarising what you think was said, and ask for confirmation, “Am I understanding this right?” Do it today. Do it again tomorrow. Do it every time you have a question.

Why? Because I can guarantee you that every question you have, someone else in the class is going to have it too, and they’re not going to be brave enough to ask, and they will be so grateful to you that you were. They may even come up to you after class and say, “I’m so glad you asked about that concept, I didn’t understand it either,” and there you are — your first step towards making friends.

And another reason: Your professor is not a mind-reader. They are not going to know if things are not being understood if no one says anything. One of the hardest parts of standing in front of a group of students — always nameless, faceless at the beginning of term — is having no idea if anything you’re saying is making any sense. We need feedback when we’re going too fast — or too slow. An inert class who never gives us any response is terrifying.

Now, you’re going to get the professor who never pauses for people to answer questions, or who gets irritated when they are interrupted. Be brave, and do it anyway. Put your hand in the air and keep it there until they address you. The purpose of a lecture is for you to learn, not for the professor to pontificate. If you aren’t learning, then be stubborn until you are.

You’re also going to get the professor who mocks you for your ignorance, and for that, I’m truly sorry. There is no excuse for ridiculing students who ask questions. All I can say is — we are not all like that. Find the ones who are not, and take advantage of them. Many of us are truly here first and foremost to make sure that you understand what we are trying to teach.

Be brave. Embrace your ignorance and confusion. Be the one in the class who’s willing to ask the dumb questions. Your classmates (and hopefully your professor) will thank you for it.

Best of luck,

Doctor Logic, assistant professor, Department of Philosophy, Durham University

ETA: P.S. Martin Lenz wrote an awesome follow-up to this post, with great advice on how to ask questions.