Sunday, December 31, 2017

New Year's Resolutions

I may be jumping the gun a bit seeing as I haven't yet done my end-of-year recap, but the year hasn't quite ended yet, so I figure I'm good.

My resolutions for 2018 are going to be a bit different from previous years. While those resolutions worked well for me in those particular times, I'm not sure that the "submit one item per month or 12 over the course of the year" metric is the right now going forward -- the reasons why will become clear when I write up the end-of-year report and explain why/how I did/didn't meet my 2017 resolution. So last night while I was lying in bed, I thought about what alternative resolutions I might want to adopt instead, and what I decided on boiled down to these:

  • Read more stuff.
  • Write more stuff.
  • Make more stuff.
  • Do more stuff.
  • Hug more stuff.

For where I'm at and how 2018 will be shaping up, that's good enough for me.

Friday, December 1, 2017

November writing wrap-up

November was a rather hectic month. I opted in to NaNoWriMo again, not with a single novel but with the goal of completing a draft of a novella, Base 8, aiming for around 36k, and then using the rest of the 50k to develop my other novel, The Queen's Memory. But I was also going to continue doing the Any Good Thing writing challenge, which is 400 words per day for 5 out of every 7 days. BUT to make things harder (!), I was not going to let my NaNo words count for AGT. Thus, this set me up for needing to write just over 2000 words a day 5 days a week, plus 1667 on the weekends.

It was a crazy month of writing, but I did it. And I am so damn pleased with myself.

I wrote every day in November except for the 11th, which was G.'s birthday and we were in Delft for an SCA event; by the time we got back, late that night, to where we were staying, I was too exhausted to write anything. I wrote fiction every day except for two -- the 11th and one other day when teaching was hard and exhausting and I scraped together about 500 words of admin and nonfiction, and then just couldn't do anything more. If you miss two days of NaNo, it's hard to catch back up, but I did. I overshot the 1667 goal every day after I missed those two, so that when yesterday came around, I had only 1492 words left.

I averaged 2567 words per day over the course of November, and even though there were a few days where I dipped, never did my per-day-calculated average drop below 2k, which I am enormously proud of. One of my goals this year was to prove that I can indulge myself in my fiction writing without sacrificing my academic trajectory, and this is proof.

I wrote 77,034 words last month. Here's how things broke down:

  • Admin: Writing homework assignments and answer keys, letters of recommendation, reports for internal purposes, abstracts for conferences, etc.: 7096 words, about 300 more than last month. That's pretty steady.
  • Nonfiction: 11822 words. This is down from last month, but that's because last month I had a paper deadline that I was frantically writing towards. This month, pretty much all of my nonfiction words went straight in What Is Logic?, the textbook I am writing, which is suddenly reaching a point where the chapters that I primarily use to teach from are basically complete. Next year, I expect to have very little to do/add.
  • Blogs: 8116 words. This is a combination of Mystery Monday posts for the blog of the Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources and reviews for SFFReviews.com, most of which will be published in February given our current queue, but one post at Medieval Logic and Semantics ended up over 3000 words, and is very nearly a draft of a paper. I almost counted that one as nonfiction rather than blog.
  • Fiction: I did it. 50,000 words, on the dot.
    Base 8 is in a condition where I can almost dignify it with the label "draft". It needs a bunch of scenes woven together; I need to pin down the precise details of the mythology and start working them in from the start; and when I do that, I think one final point of conflict will resolve (in the sense that I will have a point of conflict, rather than have no point at that point, where I need conflict). Then it's just a matter of deepening everyone's relationships, making sure two particular arcs are strong, believable, and organic; getting all the interstitial bits right; and then sending it out to beta readers. The Queen's Memory, on the other hand is now about 14k bigger than it had been (started the month around 5k), with a couple more chapters inserted into the skeleton, but as evidence of the fact that I don't yet have my hands on the grips of a plot, pretty much the majority of that 14k is characters talking. It's a useful exercise, because it has helped me narrow in on what the story is about, but I suspect in the end the vast majority of those words will not make it into the final draft. But, hey, that's what the drafting process -- and NaNoWriMo -- is all about.

I'm going to take it somewhat easier in December, but I would love to aim for the same 400 words of admin/blogs/nonfic five out of every seven days, plus 400-500 words of fiction every day. I've got a couple of short story ideas in mind, and some potential deadlines coming up. But I could also use a bit of a rest!

Here's the comparison of November with September and October. I like the way this increase looks.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Women in late 19th/early 20th C Foundations of Mathematics

This post is essentially a scaffolding post for me to collect names and primary and secondary literature relating to women who worked in foundations of mathematics in the late 19th/early 20th C. The topic of today's post is actually something that came up in my 3rd year seminar last spring; I asked for input on the Foundations of Math mailing list, got a bunch of excellent replies, and never did anything with the material. I finally am now because I have the opportunity of soliciting some advanced undergraduate for short-term research projects, and would like to create at least one such project involving these women. Who are they, what did they do, what can we do to get their names better known?

  1. Alice Ambrose Lazerowitz wrote on logic and mathematical philosophy, and was a student of Wittgenstein.
  2. Marjorie Lee Browne wrote on set theory and logic.
  3. Izydora Dąmbska studied logic under Kazimierz Twardowski.
  4. Hilda Geiringer von Mises wrote on the geometrical foundations of mechanics.
  5. Olga Hahn-Neurath was a member of the Vienna Circle who worked in boolean algebras.
  6. Ellen Amanda Hayes taught logic.
  7. Grace Brewster Murray Hopper worked in the foundations of computation.
  8. Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum wrote on inductive logic and was the first person to publish on the ravens paradox.
  9. Sof'ja Aleksandrovna Janovskaja was Director of the Mathematical Logic Seminar at Moscow State University. She worked in the history and philosophy of mathematics, and was a host to Ludwig Wittgenstein when he visited Russia in the 1930. (Her wikipedia page.)
  10. Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones defended Frege against Russell's criticisms in a reply to "On Denoting".
  11. Lyudmila Keldysh was a set theorist and topologist.
  12. Maria Kokoszynska was a member of the Lvov-Warsaw school.
  13. Dina Stejnbarg Kotarbinska was a member of the Lvov-Warsaw school.
  14. Christine Ladd-Franklin was a student of Peirce's, and was originally denied a PhD by Johns Hopkins because she was a woman.
    • Russinoff, I.S., 1999, "The Syllogism's Final Solution", Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 5 (4): 451-469.
  15. Susanne Langer wrote a dissertation on Whitehead and published on type theory in the 1920s.
  16. Ruth Moufang wrote on foundations of geometry.
  17. Emmy Noether is responsible for a generalisation of mathematical induction known as Noetherian induction or well-founded induction.
  18. Eleanor Pairman worked in foundations of calculus, and also in early computing theory.
  19. Rózsa Péter wrote the first book in recursion theory and contributed to the field.
  20. Rose Rand was a member of the Vienna Circle.
  21. Susan Stebbing was one of the first people to write a logical textbook incorporating the new material of Russell and Whitehead.
    • Beaney, Michael & Siobhan Chapman, 2017. "Susan Stebbing", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2017 edition.
  22. Wanda Szmielew worked on the Axiom of Choice and proved the decidability of the first-order theory of abelian groups.
  23. Victoria Welby's significs, an analysis of communicative acts, was foundational to Brouwer's development of intuitionism.
    • Welby, V., 1896, "Sense, Meaning and Interpretation", Mind, N.S. 5(17): 24-37; (18): 186-202.
  24. Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler was an American mathematician who worked in linear algebra and functional analysis who studied under David Hilbert, Felix Klein, Hermann Minkowski, and Karl Schwarzschild at University of Göttingen.
  25. Dorothy Maud Wrinch was a mathematician influenced by Russell's mathematical logic.
  26. Grace Chisholm Young did research in set theory.

Not everyone on this list can be described as working in foundations, strictly speaking, but all of them were working logic and mathematics with a philosophical bent between roughly 1870 and 1940, and thus I'm happy to include them in the list.

Many thanks to Liam Kofi Bright, Gabriel Citron, Patrik Eklund, Richard Heck, Frederique Janssen-Lauret, Tatiana Levina, Alice ter Meulen, Aleksandra Samonek, Jeff Sarnat, Mate Szabo, and Rineke Verbrugge, who all contributed information in the list above. This page was last updated 17 January 2019.

Monday, November 13, 2017

A not-quite-review of The Intellectual Climate of the Early University, ed. Nancy Van Deusen

I have good friends. They know me well and care about my well-being. This is why when the most recent Oxbow Books catalogue showed up in many of our mailboxes, more than one of them sent me a like to this bargain: A collection of papers on The Intellectual Climate of the Early University, edited by Nancy Van Deusen and published by Kalamazoo in 1997. At 8GBP, I could hardly say no, and the book arrived yesterday.

Now, this isn't a review of it, because I make a point of reading the books I review cover to cover before writing said review, and I haven't had a chance to read any of this one yet. But even without having read it, there are a few things I can say about it.

It's a collection of papers in honor of Otto Gründler, which means the exact composition and subject coverage is subject to the whims of the contributors. Nevertheless, as I scanned the table of contents, I found the distribution of the papers over the possibilities quite telling.

The first three papers, by Marcia Colish, Nancy Spatz, and Gary Macy, are on theology. This is followed by one paper on arithmetic (by Barnabas Hughes), and two on music, one via theories of motion (by Nancy Van Deusen and Richard J. Wingell). Then there's a chapter on natural philosophy (by Richard C. Dales), and one on the condemnations of 1277 (by Leland Edward Wilshire), and then the book wraps up with a general discussion by Allan B. Wolter.

Anyone else notice what's missing?

That's right: The entire trivium. Now, maybe various aspects of trivial education are discussed throughout the chapters, but there is no index to the book, so there is no easy way to find out where these discussions are, other than by reading the entire book (which I do intend to do...eventually). (One could also note that there seems to be much more on the second half of the thirteenth century than on the first; perhaps it is because I am more of a thirteenth century person than a fourteenth century person, but 1250-1300 wasn't what I immediately thought of when I saw "early".)

This observation, regarding the lack of discussion of the trivium (and in particular, logic, my own pet topic), is not unique to this book, but is a part of a wider trend that I find quite perplexing. Part of the importance of the trivium stems from the fact that everyone who went to university would've studied it -- not every one went on to graduate school, and of those who did, not everyone went on to become a theologian, or a legal doctor, or a medical doctor. The trivium is what provides the foundation for all higher education in Europe from the early 13th century onwards, for clerics and non-clerics, for noblemen and non-noblemen. Given this, it always shocks me how little discussion there is of philosophical topics, and the trivium in particular, at medievalist conferences. The huge International Medieval Congress that Leeds puts on every year is an astonishing feat of organisation and medievalism, and I go every year that I can. But every year I go, I am astounded at how little there is that interacts with broadly philosophical concerns. Given how central the trivium was to the entire educated class in the High and Late Middle Ages, I don't see how one can read literature without knowing philosophy, or discuss politics without knowing philosophy, or investigate women's lives without knowing philosophy. These concerns intersect every other aspect of medieval life not only in subject matter but in the fact that the people who carried out that medieval life would have been educated in this fashion. It would be like medieval studies trying to conduct itself without a thorough grounding in the understanding of how the church influenced intellectual life not only among the clerics and monks and religious but also among the ordinary non-religious people. And yet, so often it feels like this is happening with respect to the fundamental philosophical education the movers and shakers were receiving.

This has something that has perplexed me from the very first IMC that I attended (in 2007, I think), where out of roughly 1300 papers there were precisely two on the topic of logic -- mine, and one scheduled exactly opposite mine (not just the same session slot, but the same paper slot within that session, so I couldn't even duck out of the session I was in and go to the other paper). It isn't quite so dire when broadened to philosophy as a whole, but even then the number of philosophical papers presented at conferences like these is a minuscule percentage. I have no idea where this isolation of medieval philosophy from much of the rest of the concerns of medieval studies comes from, and I'm doing my best to combat it, but it does sometimes feel like an uphill battle. (At Leeds 2017, it was a great victory that the session with three logic papers that I was a part of had nearly two audience members per speaker -- my personal bar for "successful logic session at Leeds" has always been "at least as many audience members as speakers", i.e., three speakers, and three nonspeakers. But this time we had 9-10 people! It was amazing! But also very sad that that should be a great victory.)

I'd love to hear thoughts from the more historically-oriented medievalists. How much do you know about medieval philosophy? About the curriculum of medieval education? Does it intersect with your own research? How so? If not, why not? Am I simply being egotistical, and ascribing to great a place of importance to the role of philosophy in the Middle Ages?

This has strayed rather far from my "not-review" of the book. But it is, after all, not a review. Hopefully after I have read the book, I can come back and do a proper review!

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

October writing wrap-up

In September I started using a lovely little word-tracker website, WordKeeperAlpha, which allows you to track your daily words on different projects, as well as progress towards goals. I've found I haven't used the goals part of the website at all, but that's because of how I've divided up my projects. I have too many different projects for each to be its own category, so I've roughly divided up my writing into four categories:

  • Blog posts (yay, I get to count these words for my daily word count!)
  • Nonfiction (including words written on my textbook What Is Logic?, journal articles, book chapters, conference abstracts, etc., but NOT blog posts)
  • Fiction (self-explanatory)
  • Admin (referee reports, reports for committees, letters of recommendation, teaching prep like writing up homework assignments or answers to homework assignments)

The site keeps track of running totals per day, per month, and all time, and also gives you an average words/day for each month. There are also a couple of nice charts plotting out what percentage each project gets, both all time and per month.

September saw "blog posts" as receiving the biggest percentage of the words I wrote -- not surprising as I was gearing up for the launch of SFFReviews.com, a new review site for short sci-fi and fantasty stories. Now October has come to an end, and I can pause to reflect on my writing accomplishment that month.

In October, I wrote every day except for two; and of those 29 days, all of them except for two I wrote more than 400 words. In fact, my average over the course of the month was 1188 words/day, for a total of 36,855 words:

It's clear from the relative proportions of the four categories that the academic term started in October: My admin writing saw a huge jump compared to September, but also (very pleasingly) my nonfiction writing saw the same:

But what I find most pleasing is that my jump in admin and nonfiction writing did not occur at the expense of my fiction writing; slightly more than ~4500 words in September compared to ~6300 words in October. This is evidence for a claim that I've made before, which is that writing breeds writing: The more I write, the more I write. (It's hard to find a non-tautological way to express this sentiment. But it's not like I have X number of words in me to use up each month, and if I spend them all on nonfiction then I don't have any left over. No -- the more words I write, the more words I get to write.) Also pleasing is just how many days when I managed to write in three out of the four categories (I don't feel the need to strive for all four -- if I have a day when I don't have to do admin writing, I'm not going to count that as a loss). In fact, very few days did I write in only one category, and as the month went on, a clear correlation developed between making good progress on my nonfiction during the day setting me up well to work on my fiction during the evening (writing breeds writing).

I sometimes feel a bit guilty about writing fiction. One reason I like tracking my progress like this is that seeing these numbers and percentages makes it clear to me that I have no reason to feel guilty. I wrote over 17,000 words of nonfiction in October. If I had done nothing else, that would still have been a tremendous accomplishment. If I can maintain that, and write fiction along the way, I have absolutely nothing to feel guilty about.

November is going to be interesting. I'm participating in NaNoWriMo, so I hope to hit the 50,000 word count this month. But I'm not going to let that happen at the expense of my academic and other writing, which means my overall total for the month should hopefully be closer to 70,000 -- almost twice what I did this month. That's going to be quite the task, and I look forward to attempting it!

This post is a start. 747 words down, who knows how many left to go.

Monday, October 16, 2017

Information asymmetry and the "me too" meme

Since last night, my FB feed (but, strangely, given where it originated, not my twitter feed) has been filled with my friends posting "me too". The reason? (In case there is anyone who doesn't know):

If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote "Me too." as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.

(Some people have changed it to "all the people", recognizing that not only women are sexually harassed and assaulted; some people have compared such a change to the shift from #BlackLivesMatter to #AllLivesMatter. Which version you prefer matters not for the purposes of this post.) Friend after friend after friend of mine has posted it, to the point where there was a moment where all the feed visible on my phone was a litany of these posts, and many of these people have explicitly broken their "no meme participation" rules in order to do so.

So I've been thinking about this all day, because there is something about the final phrase about the explanation of the meme that bothers me, this idea that people by posting "me too" can indicate "the magnitude of the problem". I don't think that this is possible, or, at least, it depends on how you define magnitude, and this depends on the essential informational asymmetry about these types of memes.

With respect to memes of the "participate in this meme if you have had X happen" type, there are two types of people: Those who participate and those who do not. With respect to those who do participate, one can derive the consequence "if they participated in the meme, they had X happen to them" -- note that this is the converse of what the meme is actually saying! And that's where the problem arises. Participation in the meme can only get a greatest lower bound for an absolute number; that is, the sense of magnitude participation can convey any information about is the magnitude of "size". But this says nothing about proportion. This is because while every person who participates in the meme does so for the same reason, but not everyone who doesn't participates for the same reason. Some people are insular enough to never see it, and thus do not participate (this is probably a very low number of people, at least in some circles). Some people see it, but do not participate, for whatever reason -- perhaps they have a strict anti-meme participation rule. But some people will see it and not participate because doing so would falsify the "if they participated in the meme, they had X happen to them" consequence.

I've had reason to comment on a few of my friend's "me too" posts -- usually when someone else has said something to the effect "what's the point of this meme, we all know this has happened to EVERY woman". Well, no. I have never been sexually assaulted. I struggle to remember any incident which rises to the level of harassment. (Note that this latter fact is not entirely indicative; I've written before about my obliviousness about a lot of these things. However -- and this is best the topic of another post so I will not go into it in more detail here -- I also struggle with the possibility that one can be harassed without feeling that they are being harassed.) So the reason I have not posted "me too" is because I fall into that third category. Who knows how many other women are in my category? That isn't an idle rhetorical question: We don't know, and we can't, not with the way the meme is currently structured. This essential asymmetry between the participators and the non-participators mean that the magnitude that is being evidenced by the participators can only ever be one of strict cardinality, and not of proportion.

Maybe this isn't anything to be bothered by. Even (merely) demonstrating the magnitude of the cardinality is (perhaps) a worthy thing to do. But it does bother me, because it feels so imprecise. It feels like people are taking the data to say more than it really does -- that is, this is a bother to my scientific sensibilities more than anything else. But a bother is a bother and sometimes the best way to deal with the itch is to scratch it, hence this post.

But the bother isn't entirely a scientific one. It also bothers me on a more personal level. When I voiced my reasons for not participating in the meme, someone -- someone I don't know, a friend of a friend, and, more importantly, a woman -- questioned me on this. Someone whom I don't know did not believe me when reported my own experience (or lack thereof!) of sexual assault and harassment. As I commented in reply:

I'm rather curious that one issue that has given rise to this meme is women speaking out about harassment and assault and not being believed -- and yet, when I report on MY experience, people's response is to question. Trust me. Believe me. I have nothing to gain from lying in this context.

So, yeah, while I'm quite confident that speaking out about being assaulted or harassed and not being believed is way, way worse than speaking out about not being assaulted or harassed and not being believed, I do think that a misinterpretation of the "magnitude" being illustrated as one of proportion instead of cardinality contributed to my having to justify my own experiences to another person, whom I don't even know, but whose default position was to suspect my self-testimony.


EDIT: Thanks to the varied and thoughtful conversations of my friends on FB in response to linking to this post, I think I may have just discovered what bothers me. It certainly isn't the meme (other than the fact that so many of my friends have cause to participate in it -- that CERTAINLY bothers me), or people participating in the meme (ditto prev. parenthetical), but rather that one participates in the meme to show the magnitude of the problem.

THAT is what I think is the problem, because it doesn't do that, because of the information asymmetry.

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

"I'm thinking of an animal...": Public Announcements and Gricean Implicatures

Yesterday walking home from school, G. and I mutually stumbled upon a new game. Neither of us had ever played it before (or even heard of it before), and yet it was one of those games where it was completely obvious what the right rules were. The game is "I'm thinking of an animal", and it goes something like this:

  1. Person 1: "I'm thinking of an animal that swims."
  2. Person 2: "A fish."
  3. Person 1: "I'm thinking of an animal that swims and flies."
  4. Person 2: "A flying fish."
  5. Person 1: "I'm thinking of an animal that swims and flies and bends its head underwater to eat."
  6. Person 2: "A swan?"
  7. Person 1: "I'm thinking of an animal that swims, flies, bends its head underwater to eat, and has many colors."
  8. Person 2: "A duck!"
  9. Person 1: "Yaaay!!!"

Or another version:

  1. Person 1: "I'm thinking of an animal that lives in the desert."
  2. Person 2: "A camel!"
  3. Person 1: "Oh, I thought that one would be harder."

Or this fun instance:

  1. Person 1: "I'm thinking of an animal that loves to fly."
  2. Person 2: "A bird."
  3. Person 1: "I'm thinking of an animal that loves to fly and has clear wings."
  4. Person 2: "A fly?"
  5. Person 1: "I'm thinking of an animal that loves to fly, has clear wings, and isn't true."
  6. Person 2: "Oh, a fairy!"
  7. Person 1: "Yaaaayyyy!!!"

(It's a great game).

Of course, #occupationalhazard, I started thinking about what sort of strategies are being used to play such a game, and what sort of properties make certain moves good or bad, and how one would go about modeling this. Clearly, Player 1 is making public announcements that successively carve pieces out of Player 2's epistemic space until Player 2 is left with either the right option (in which case Player 2 wins) or no option (in which case Player 2 loses). But winning and losing isn't merely a matter of guessing the right answer or not; if Player 2 gets the answer right after the first clue, then it's a victory but not a very satisfying one; Player 1 should've been more strategic.

This strategic aspect of Player 1's choice of clues to give is intimately tied up with Grice's conversational maxims, specifically the maxim of quantity:

The maxim of quantity: Be as informative as one possibly can, giving as much information as is needed, and no more.

If Player 1 played according to this maxim, she'd offer as a first clue something like "I'm thinking of an animal that moos" or "I'm think of an animal that is called 'cow' in English" -- and these entirely defeat the purpose of the game. The first clue does need to narrow down the possibility space somewhat ("I'm thinking of an animal" is of no use, nor even is "I'm thinking of an animal that is alive" -- though the complement of that, "I'm thinking of an animal that is extinct", is a good first clue!), but after that, the best way to play the game is for Player 1 with each successive clue to:

  • Make an announcement that clearly excludes the previous wrong guess of Player 2
  • Exclude as little else as possible.

Bonus points if you can give clues that misdirect, e.g. "lives in England" followed by "has two legs" and a few others before following up with "talks", at which point I finally realised the answer wasn't any kind of bird, but rather humans! Or when I did "goes very slow", "likes water", "has a shell", hoping to trick her into saying snail when I was aiming for tortoise.

Another dimension that makes the game interesting is the presence of common knowledge amongst the group of players that is unlikely to be shared by people outside that group. For instance "you cuddle with this animal at night" and "I have a pair of socks with them on" are unlikely to elicit "lemur" from many other pairs of players, whereas it was a dead give away for us.

So, what then is the best strategy? The first public announcement Player 1 makes needs to be understood to be carving away a large portion of the candidates, while still leaving a large enough set behind, and successive announcements should be made flouting the maxim of quantity as much as possible, that is, one should try to say as little as possible with every given announcement, all the while being sensitive to the group knowledge of the players.

It's a fun game (and easily extendible to "I'm thinking of an X" for pretty much any X), and because Player 1 (who knows the answer) controls the rate of reduction of the model, it is less open ended than similar games like "20 Questions", where it is Player 2 (who doesn't know the answer but asks the questions) who controls the rate of reduction. You should play it!

Edit: Just after I published this, Rineke Verbrugge over on FB mentioned an excellent paper touching on many of the aspects illustrated in "I'm thinking of an animal...": Rineke Verbrugge & Lisette Mol, "Learning to Apply Theory of Mind", Journal of Logic, Language and Information 17 (2008): 489-511.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Advice to master's students writing seminar papers

Recently I marked two seminar papers written by master's students in my department, and despite the two papers being quite different in both style and content, at the end of my detailed comments I found I had comments to offer to both students that were virtually identical: General advice on how to go about writing a paper for a graduate seminar. This is advice that I never really got as a student, and I suspect many other philosophy graduate students haven't/didn't/won't get it either, because as a discipline philosophy seems remarkably bad at teaching people how to write. Given that in the span of a week I had cause to write up slightly different versions of this advice for similar contexts, I figured I'd write it up (with bits specific to the two papers I marked redacted because that content will vary from paper to paper) and post it here and then I can simply point students to the post. (Of course, this advice isn't only applicable to writing graduate seminar papers -- I'm sure some of it can be applied elsewhere!)

I'd like to make a few general comments about the structure of the paper and about the paper-writing process in general, that will hopefully be helpful for future essays.

A first draft is rarely (almost never) a final draft. The present paper is the sort of draft you need to write in order to figure out exactly what you want to say, but once you've figured that out, most papers then need to be almost completely overhauled. Once you've produced a draft like this, ask yourself:

1. What is it that I want to be able to claim?

This should already be articulated in the conclusion of the draft. Here, it seems that your primary conclusion is [conclusion redacted], which is quite an interesting conclusion, integrating a number of disparate topics and fields, one mark of good original and independent thinking.

Once you have this, then ask yourself:

2. What do I need in order to be able to make this claim?

This is a nuts and bolts questions: What are the tools and concepts you need/will use? A number of needs are immediately present from that conclusion: (a) a definition of [redacted], (b) information about [redacted], (c) definition of [redacted]; as well as the other pieces that you use in your argument along the way, such as the notions of [redacted], [redacted], [redacted], etc. Make a list of these, and make sure that every single one is clearly defined/articulated at some point in your final paper.

Once you have the list of things you know need to be defined at some point, then ask yourself:

3. How do all these pieces fit together into an argument for the conclusion I want?

The process of writing the first draft will help make it clear how you need to put the pieces together and structure your arguments; to find out if you've done it the way you need to in the draft, try reverse outlining: Construct an outline of the argument on the basis of what you've already written. Does it make sense? Are all the pieces in order? Are the parts defined before they are used? Is there a clear thread?

Once you have this, then you're in a position to write an introduction which clearly articulates your starting points, your conclusion, and how you will get from the one to the other, and from there, rewriting the paper should be straightforward.

Thursday, July 27, 2017

Conferencing with a kid: An experiment

Last week I conducted an experiment.

When I contemplated the path of academic motherhood, I had starry-eyed dreams of traveling to exotic places and bringing my child with me, of giving her the opportunity to go to countries she wouldn't otherwise go to, and to build up some special mother-daughter experiences of a lifetime with me.

In slightly more rational moments, I knew that such dreams don't just come true on a whim, but need to be worked towards. G. has been integrated into my research activities from the start; her first academic event was Latin reading group when she was 11 days old, and her first conference was when she was a few days shy of one month. While I usually leave her behind when I travel, I have accepted some invitations to speak on the condition that accommodations for her be included in the accommodations for me. I've hired childcare on the other end, with the help of local friends. I've flown my mom over from the US to meet us in Portugal so she could watch G. for me; I've brought my husband with a couple of times; I once replied to an invitation to speak with the suggestion that if the budget covered it, they also invite him because we both worked on the same project and we could both speak on different aspects of it. But since she stopped being a sleeping babe in arms, I'd never brought her to a conference without any childcare provisions.

She's 5.5 now, and just finished up her first year of school, meaning she has a full year's worth of understanding of sitting still, being quiet, listening to others, and asking questions -- which is basically what a conference is. I'd already been away for three conferences since the beginning of June, so when I was making plans to go to the Time and Modality workshop in Bonn last week, it occurred to me that I should bring her with.

This seemed like a good venue for experimenting, a relatively short workshop with a smallish group of people, many of them I have known for a long time. If worse came to worst, I could skip a few talks and wander the city with G., but what I hoped was that she would be able to sit with me and learn how to be a conference participant. We had a long talk about proper conference behavior, and I asked her if she still wanted to come with, and she said she did. In exchange, I went armed with everything I thought would help make things go smoothly. We brought plenty of books, three brand-new new coloring books, as many stuffed toys as she could fit in her suitcase, and I promised that in the afternoons, she could watch a movie or two on my laptop.

And she did brilliantly. I'm not sure I have ever been so proud of my daughter. Our plane was delayed so we didn't get to Bonn until the end of the first day of talks, but we joined the group for supper, and she sat and colored and didn't complain even though it was long past her usual supper time, and we didn't get back to the hotel until long past bedtime. (Repeat this refrain for the next two evenings!). The next day, she spent the entire morning sitting quietly next to me, or under the table, coloring, and during the coffee breaks she gave out colored pictures to each of the participants. In the afternoon, she sat in the anteroom of where we were, and watched movies, and then came and sat on my lap while we played pen and paper games that didn't involve any talking. Rarely did she interrupt me (e.g., for the bathroom), and she always slipped into the room and came to me as quietly as possible. The next morning, my talk was the second one of the day. It was an hour-long talk (including discussion), and she was an absolute star, sitting and coloring near the front of the room (and then eventually sitting next to one of the participants who kindly started coloring and making paper rabbits with her), once or twice come over for a hug. (I've long learned how to continue lecturing on logic in the midst of hug interruptions.). In the afternoon we settled her in the office of one of the organizers -- rather far away from where the workshop actually was, but because it was a weekend the building was empty, and we practised the trip back and forth so she knew how to come find me if needed -- and the quiet time (in a much cooler place than the actual venue!) was really useful as it perked her up enough to be able to survive another late night.

Some observations drawn from this experiment:

  • Having lots of conversations in advance with G. about what conferences are, what would happen at them, what proper conference behavior is, and what my expectations of her was really useful. She rose to the occasion admirably because she knew what was going on and what she needed to do.
  • If you miss the talks on the first day of a conference, and then show up to join the group for dinner with a child in tow, someone will assume that you're someone else's +1 (or +2 in our case!); I'm sure the fact that I was a woman contributed to this.
  • 5 year olds are very good at spotting gender disparities at conferences. That first dinner, there was ~15 of us, and G. loudly announced at one point, "Mummy, there's only THREE girls! You, me, and that lady!"
  • Things were a bit better during the days, with more women in the audience, but I had a startling realisation on the last day of the conference that I -- 35 years old, on the cusp of getting of the UK equivalent of tenure -- was the senior woman at the conference. That is the topic for another post, but when I realised this, I realised how much more significant it was that I was there with my child.
  • If you take a child to a conference, no matter perfectly well behaved they are, you will never be able to do enough to feel entirely comfortable. There is only so far you can go, and the other conference participants have to go the rest of the way in order to make things work. Luckily, people here did.
  • So, you're at a conference where someone else has brought their child. What can you do do go the rest of the way? Plenty:
    1. If you've ever brought your child to a conference, tell the parent this. It's amazingly reassuring to hear retired senior men recount stories of when they brought their child to conferences with them.
    2. Volunteer to read to the child during, e.g., lunch. Not only will the child love having someone read to her, the parent will appreciate the change to have an uninterrupted conversation with fellow participants!
    3. If the child is well behaved, tell the parent this. Though G. was always quiet as a mouse when she would interrupt me, it was hard not to feel like I was a distraction when I'd slip out to take her to the bathroom. Having someone say "My kids are her age, I don't think they would have done anywhere near as well as she's done" means a lot.

There were a couple of "above and beyond" encounters that also contributed to this being such a positive experience. One fellow parent happily colored with G. during my talk (he was also the one who then read to her during lunch; after this, G. announced to him, "I want to stay with you FOREVER!"), and he also said "next time you see my name on the programme of a conference you're going to with G., tell me, and I'll bring my kids." THAT is one of the best things that can be done, to help normalize such situations. Not everyone has the luxury of bringing their children with you; sometimes, it's a necessity (it wasn't a necessity for me, this time, but there have been other times). If you do have that luxury, exercise it. This helps make it more accepted for those who have to do it. Here's a place where using your privilege can actually benefit those with less privilege.

All in all, the experiment was a rousing success. I'm glad we did it, and look forward to when we get to do it again (because it will only get easier).

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

"Grief should never be met with suspicion"

Yesterday, an article was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education which I am NOT going to link to, because I am saddened that it was given a voice in the first place and will not be party to giving it a further voice. Since then, there has been quite a bit of backlash on my twitter feed in response to the article -- thankfully -- and I tried to articulate my own feelings in 140 character capsules. I didn't succeed, so here's a blog post instead.

The crux of my feelings are summed up in the title of this post. These are not my words, but the words of someone who COULD articulate in 140 characters:

These words are worth saying again: Grief should never ever be met with suspicion.

Two further points:

  1. The assumption that a student is lying should NEVER EVER be the default.
  2. If students are lying about things like this we should instead be asking ourselves what's gone wrong that they end up in such a position.

Ad (1). The entire student-teacher relationship is predicated on trust. My students trust me to give them the information they need -- to learn the course material, to do the exercises, to pass the exam. In return, I must trust that they are coming willing to learn and willing to work. Our relationship must be collaborative, not combative. We are not antagonists here. If I approach my interactions with my students from the assumption that they are lying to me or trying to pull one over me, the foundation for my entire relationship with them is destroyed. It isn't just a matter of whether or not family members die at inconvenient times. I don't assume that students are cheating until proven otherwise. Why would I assume that they are lying to me about something as important as a death in the family?

Ad (2). Suppose it is a lie. Suppose that no grandmother has died. Shouldn't that be far less a concern than understanding how a student could end up in a position where it seemed like the best thing to do was to lie?

So maybe they are lying. Drawing from that the conclusion that they are lying out of laziness or lack of organisation is, in my opinion, near the height of hubris. I do not know what my students' lives are like -- and I don't need to. I make an explicit point of telling students this, that they do NOT need to divulge more details than they are comfortable with, once I have fulfilled my duty of care and ensured that no one is in danger. On a principle of epistemic humility alone, I should not assume the least charitable explanation. I guess this is what bothers me the most about the original post -- that it should seem so difficult for the author to imagine that the situation is far more complex than the mere death of a relative at an inconvenient time.

Further, the fact that students can end up in a position where it seems like their best option is to lie happens points to structural problems in academia. I don't know how to address them, but I do know I don't want to participate in them any more than I have to.

Suppose it is a lie. Suppose I develop a reputation as the gullible bleeding-heart professor who is willing to be generous and lenient. You know what? I'm actually good with that. If my students can't come to me about a death in the family, why on earth would they ever come to me about anything more serious? And if I -- a responsible adult in a secure situation -- am not someone they can go to when they are in difficulties and need help, then, really, what good am I? There is no amount of logic that I can teach my students that would ever make up for me standing by the side and doing nothing when instead I could help someone.

Grief should never, ever be met with suspicion. That our students are lying to us should never, ever be our default position.

Saturday, June 3, 2017

Writing like Hemingway...or not

I spent the last couple of days in Oxford at a Fiction Writing for Philosophers workshop (at which I gave a talk arguing that plot is argument and argument is plot; more on this in another post here within a few weeks, I hope). Thursday morning the keynote speaker was James Hawes, who gave us a brief writing assignment part-way through.

We were given the opening paragraphs of Heminway's For Whom the Bell Tolls:

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.

"Is that the mill?" he asked.

"Yes."

"I do not remember it."

"It was built since you were here. The old mill is farther down; much below the pass."

He spread the photostated military map out on the forest floor and looked at it carefully. The old man looked over his shoulder. He was a short and solid old man in a black peasant's smock and gray iron-stiff trousers and he wore rope-soled shoes. He was breathing heavily from the climb and his hand rested on one of the two heavy packs they had been carrying.

And then we were told to rewrite it, but using our own story and own characters. By "rewrite", we were instructed to follow the structure of the sentences one by one: The first one beginning with a pronoun (not a name! not a description!) and an action, with a specification of the action, and a description of the setting. The second sentence needed to be an expanding on the description, and involve a passive action on behalf of the initial character. The third sentence needed to be more description, but slightly more poetic and fancifcul, with a repetition of the action. Then the first character had to ask a question; an unnamed character had to answer; the first character reply; and the second elaborate. The first character then needed to do an action with a prop, and the second character act and then be described.

The point was to show how through quiet economy of language and setting of scene, one can evoke sympathy for a character by starting at a bird's eye approach and then zeroing in to the details, with some action.

I found the exercise infuriating.

My first thought was that I would try this task with one of my current short stories being drafted, because I have been struggling with it and thought maybe this might get me unstuck. But that was a resounding "no" from the very first word, when I would have had to decide between "He" and "She". See, one of the things I'm doing this story is seeing how far I can get without ever explicitly confirming the genders of any of the characters. So the Hemingway-route is right out for that story.

My next thought was that I would try rewriting the prologue of The Novel in this style, especially because the prologue already has some superficial similarity in initial structure. That was also very quickly a "no": First, because the prologue is in the present tense (for a very specific reason), and changing it to the past just isn't an option. Second, because there is no dialogue in the prologue, and this is again for a very specific, plot-governed, world-building reason.

Since the prologue didn't work, I figured I'd try rewriting chapter 1, since in that chapter things actually happen, there is a location and an action and two characters and a discussion. I followed the template, and what I came away with was so awkward and static and so unexciting. In the actual chapter, Luneta comes sweeping in to Duska's office and spreads her maps on the table with a flourish, announcing that they are finished before Duska can even inquire. There is a sense of vibrancy and action and vitality. We do not know why it is important that the maps are finished, but we do know that it is important that they are.

In the end, I wasn't all that surprised that my Hemingway-esque rewriting fell so flat, because I actually think the original opening is pretty flat. What I found most useful about the exercise was articulating why Hemingway just doesn't do it for me. (It's not just this chapter; I haven't read Hemingway since university, but I remember being mostly unmoved by him then. A Moveable Feast I remember being better than the others, though.) (1) The omniscient perspective doesn't allow me any access to the character's heads, what they are thinking, what they are feeling. I am not intrinsically motivated by the actions of men, so simply having them converse does not make me interested in them. (2) Description. All the description. The light glinting on the water and the wind blowing through the trees and the brown leaves...I don't need it. I realized at one point while drafting The Novel that there was a marked lack of description in it (unless we are talking about ecclesiastical architectural details). One of the main characters has zero physical description; the only thing that is ever said explicitly about him is that he is young and he is male. When I realized this, and I realized I wasn't writing it because I didn't know what to describe or where to put the description, I started paying attention to where and how description appears in the books I like to read, to see if I could get guidance from that. And I found something very interesting: I don't actually read description. If it's more than a sentence or two, I just skip over it until I'm back to the characters. It just doesn't interest me, and there are two reasons for this: (a) I just don't see it. For the most part, the sort of details that are being described in descriptive passages are details that I just do not see when I navigate through my (actual) world. (You can ask my husband about the sheer quantity of things that I do not notice about household details -- whether we have skirting board, what color it is, what type of profile it has, what color the door frames are, etc., etc., etc. I just don't see it). (b) I can't generally reconstruct a mental picture from a spoken description, whether this is a description of a person or a place. So both coming and going, description doesn't do it for me, for the most part. (3) The general lack of urgency about any of it. I have been given absolutely nothing in this opening to make me excited about the characters, or to make me worried about them -- which is funny, because this was given as an example of an opening that gets the reader emotionally invested from the start.

The final interesting thing that came out of this exercise was the number of other people who participated in it who also said that Hemingway does very little for them!

Thursday, March 9, 2017

Continental philosophy of math

I am about as far from the continental tradition in 20th-21st C philosophy as you can get. Some of my students, however, are not, and they keep asking me questions about what various continental people would say in response to issues coming up in our philosophy of math discussions.

So I've done what any self-respecting academic would do: I've gone to twitter to ask for recommendations on continental philosophy of math

I've now gotten enough recommendations that it makes sense to collate them all in a blog post. Note that that is all this is: a collation. I haven't read any of these texts, don't even recognize many of the authors, and thus inclusion here is not any indication of quality or agreement!

Another useful note:

And now I want to teach a class where I can use this as an essay question:

I'll continue to update this page as further suggestions come in.

Thursday, March 2, 2017

How did we know things before the internet?

Last night re-reading ch. 5 of Shapiro's Thinking of Mathematics, preparing for this morning's seminar, I realized that my students might not actually be familiar with the import of his example of Fermat's Theorem.

I remember very distinctly the progress of Wiles's presentation and the final published proof. It is a vivid memory, in that I followed the development day by day, catching the excitement as people suddenly started speculating, is he going to prove that I think he's going to prove? And then he did! This centuries-old "theorem" had finally become a theorem! It was amazing, and the process was a definitive moment in my scientific upbringing.

I thought back on these memories last night, and tried to triangulate exactly when it happened. My edition of Shapiro's book was published in 2000, and I figured it had to have been not too much before that, '97 or '98. (But in retrospect, writing this now, even '98 would've been rather early for me to have been so interested in the result; that was the year I took my first logic class, and prior to that I was still very much a math-phobe). Then I did the math and realized that there was a very good chance that not only would my students not know about the importance of Wiles's proof, but that they might not even have been born. #waytomakemefeelold.

Earlier this evening I decided to find out exactly when Wiles's proof was, and looked it up, only to find that the presentation was in 1994, and the proof in 1995.

Nineteen Ninety-Four. NINETY-FOUR. I was TWELVE.

But relative chronology and whether I feel old or young isn't the point of this post. The point of this post is that if Wiles's proof happened in '94-'95, I have no idea how I knew anything about it. Part of the reason I assumed it had to be '97 or '98 was that surely I followed the progress of it via the internet. Surely. But...in 1994, we didn't have internet at home. We didn't own a TV. (Well, we did. But it was stored in the basement, unplugged.) We didn't subscribe to any newspapers, and I lived in a small town in central Wisconsin so I'm pretty sure I didn't hear about it over the radio.

This is mystifying. How on earth did I know things before the internet? And isn't it weird that I remember distinctly the process of receiving this information, but not the means by which I received it?

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

How I run my advanced seminar

The topic of how to run seminars came up tonight on twitter:

I chimed in with some 140 character summaries of how I do things, and given some of the responses figured it would be worthwhile to lay things out in more detail here.

Last year I introduced a new 3rd year elective logic module at Durham. Over the course of 22 weeks I wanted to cover both basic model and proof theory of modal logic (essentially, the first half of Hughes & Cresswell's book) and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem(s), and I was given the option of either one 1-hour lecture a week plus a 1-hour tutorial every other week, or a 2-hour seminar every week. You do the math; the seminar nets me more face-time, so that's what I went for.

One of the most important lessons I learned about learning logic I learned in my very first logic class. I was a senior in high school, enrolled at my local two-year university as a special student, and I was taking intro logic along with 8 other people. By the end of the semester, 6 of the other 7 had come to me for tutoring, because I was the only one who had any idea what was going on. And this is when I learned that the single best way to learn logic is to teach it to someone else. It's easy enough to read a textbook, read a proof, listen to someone go through a proof on a board and at each step go "yeah, okay, I buy that. Seems reasonable to me." It's a totally different story to be forced to understand the content well enough to be able to explain and justify it to someone else.

With this knowledge in hand, I went into the seminar with a plan, one that I figured would either work brilliantly or go completely pear-shaped: I would do the first seminar or two, to get everything going, but after that, we were going to treat this as a proper seminar, which means active student participation, which in my specific case meant: Every student was to be responsible for two of the seminars over the course of the year. And by "be responsible", they'd take the assign material and learn it well enough to be able to present it to the rest of the class, handling any questions. My primary role in the course was to (a) be available while they prepared for their presentations, in case they had any questions or needed clarification in advance; (b) to answer any questions that arose during the course of the presentation that the presenter couldn't answer; and (c) to add information or supplementary material that wasn't present in the textbook so I couldn't expect the presenter to know anyway. A secondary role was to be the back-up, so that if something went terribly wrong, I could step in and finish off the seminar.

When I explained the plan to the students, I specifically said that I didn't want to assign seminars, that I'd much rather take volunteers on a rolling basis; this way, people could pick weeks that worked for them in terms of content and their other workloads. And you know what? Only once or twice did I have to suggest to someone "Hey, you haven't yet done a seminar on this topic---" (since there were two broad topics, and each student had to do two seminars) "---why don't you do next week?" The first year I also had a number of auditors, and I, of course, didn't require that they do the presentations---but even some of them volunteered (some more than once!) The presentations are not assessed, and they do not contribute in any way to the student's final mark.

And it worked great. This was clear both from the capability of which they handled their responsibilities, giving clear and well-thought-out presentations, but also from the informal feedback I got---one student said that there is a lot more pressure to really understand the material if you are to present it, and thus he felt he learned it a lot better, and that of course gives them a better foundation for receiving the content they aren't presenting on.

Last year, the course was primarily technical in nature, so the extent of the content to be presented each week was pretty well circumscribed: We'd set a number of pages we hoped to get through---always a number that if we didn't get through them all, there was space in the schedule to let them roll over to the next week. This year, the course is half Gödel and half philosophy of math, but with the same seminar-presentation principle, I expect each student to do one technical presentation and one philosophical. We had our first of the philosophical ones last week, and I'll admit, I wasn't sure how it would go: On the one hand, it's relatively straightforward to take two hours worth of technical material, learn it, present it, and answer clarification or explanatory questions along the way. It's a completely different thing to, on the other hand, summarize and explain philosophical concepts and stimulate a good discussion. I was bowled over by how well it went. Because each of them has already been the person in the spotlight at least once in the course already, everyone knows everyone else and everyone is happy to talk to everyone else, so it meant that when discussion did get going, they were talking to each other (or to the presenter) and not to me, which is the thing I find most difficult about running a good discussion; as soon as I say something, they all turn and focus on me and try to answer to me, rather than to just talk.

So, 1.5 years into using this technique in my advanced seminar, and I have found it an utterly resounding success, and everything I have heard from my students has been positive. If you've got the right number of people do do it (I've 15-18 students; occasionally two will present jointly, either one doing the first hour and the other doing the second hour, or both doing it in tandem---and this reminds me of a important point which is that given that it's two hours, and logic is hard, we ALWAYS take a short break half-way through), I highly recommend this approach.

Tuesday, February 7, 2017

What interdisciplinarity looks like

I had a very varied day today.

A colleague in classics and I hope to become the co-directors of a new Center for Ancient and Medieval Philosophy in Durham (the meeting to approved the center will be next week, and we've been assured it'll happen, but it isn't official yet). We met this morning for our first "directorial" meeting, to discuss what we want to do, assuming we get approval, to launch the center in fall. There was a lot of discussion of what sorts of philosophy cut across both the ancient and medieval periods so that we can truly get our two departments (plus history and theology) all involved.

In the afternoon, I'd arranged to meet someone in the algorithms and computation group, who is interested in having Durham host Computability in Europe here in 2019. I haven't been to CiE since 2010, but when he approached the governing board of the conference series, someone on it suggested he get in contact with me, as someone who wants to promote the profile of logic in Durham. So we had a lively discussion about model checking and logics for verification and descriptive complexity.

In between the two, I popped by the library to pick up an ILL book, containing the diary of an early 15th century Florentine shipping captain.

Afterwards, it was back to my office to do some quick fact checking in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child for a student of mine working on logical models of time-travel, and then prepare to give a seminar on recursive sets and recursive functions.

Yeah. This is what interdisciplinarity looks like.

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Norms of publication

As Draft Two of my novel continues percolating with my beta readers, I've been thinking about publication. Not because I have any concrete plans (perhaps my ontology only allows for plans to be abstract) in that direction myself, at the moment, but because I hang out in an FB group for NaNoWriMo participants and many of THEM are interested in publication and write about their pursuit of it. And there's a number of ways in which the whole "publication of a novel" business is so different from the whole "publication fo a journal article" business.

Join me for a moment in putting on Idealist Glasses, and take a look at the academic publication process -- for journal articles, book manuscripts, conference proceedings, etc. Seen through those glasses, the (or maybe an) ultimate goal of publication is to Promote Truth. How do we decide what gets published, in academia? At one point, we decided that Truth was what mattered. So many artefacts of the academic publication process can be traced to an attempt to realize this goal: Anonymity. Peer review. Retractions. How do we determine whether something is true? We get other experts to read it and give their opinion on it. (In some fields, they may also give their opinions on other things, such as novelty, importance, linguistic beauty, and many, less relevant, aspects.) How do we ensure that it is Truth we are promoting, and not some lesser virtue such as Nepotism? We make the reviewing system anonymous, not only for the people doing the reviewing but also (though not always) the authors. If sufficient doubt is cast on The Truth of an academic publication, there are means in place to issue corrections or even to retract the piece altogether (though that doesn't seem to prevent some people from still acting as if the retraction never happened.)

All of these seems sensible provisions to put in place when seeking The Truth. But when that is not the ultimate goal, some of these provisions seem downright weird. Can you imagine someone retracting a novel? We can all imagine someone prohibiting or banning a novel (and there fiction does not differ from nonfiction, for Aristotle's works were routinely banned and their study prohiited), and we can also imagine someone issuing a new and improved edition, one which takes into account certain infelicities which arose when the narrator did not want his traveling companions to know just exactly he had found that magical ring -- but on what sort of basis would someone retract their novel? "I'm sorry, I made a mistake, what I said was wrong." One of the deliciously freeing parts about writing fiction is that it is difficult to actually write anything wrong. You can write something badly, or you can write something self-contradictory, or you can write something offensive, but (and this is basically the problem of fictional entities and fictional discourse in a nutshell) in what sense can a novel be described as wrong, in the way that academic publications can be wrong in failing to adhere to The Truth? It's certainly not clear to me. Maybe I just haven't thought about it enough.

One might think that anonymity would still be a good thing, because it is there not because it promotes Truth directly but because it helps demote other things, such as Nepotism or Cronyism. One might think that even if promoting Truth is not the aim of the publication process in fiction, reducing cronyism might be. Which is why I find it so weird, coming from a well-entrenched position in the academic side of things, the requirements of certain publishers. For example, the "Rules for Submitting" for one Australian publisher include:

In the body of your email, tell us about yourself:

  • 100 words about you
  • Where in cyberspace we can find you (links are good)
  • What you've done, including any previously published or self-published works
  • Whether you're part of any writers groups
  • Whether you have any media contacts/a blogger profile

If you're an academic, I'd like you to pause for a moment and reflect on what you'd feel like being asked to provide this information before sending off your next journal article or book manuscript. If you're like me, you're probably thinking "why the hell should any of that matter??"

It's because the aim of fiction publication is not The Truth but The Readers. The point of publication is to be read -- either as an end in itself, or as a means to money. One may complain about the failings of academic peer review and publication processes in the early 21st century, but I have to admit, I am really really glad that whether my work gets published does not depend solely on whether the publisher thinks its worth their financial while to publish it. [Note: I am going to completely avoid the issue of predatory academic publishers whether they be genuine scams which take payment and provide no guarantee of quality of publication or whether they be things like Springer and Elsevier, whose bottom line is money. They are not -- yet -- the ones making the individual decision on my individual publications.] Of course, for many academic presses, financial matters do matter, and not every book that says true things is going to be published. But there is still much more space out there for academics books which say true things but will not generate much money than there are for non-revenue-generating fiction.

Which brings up another norm where the two fields differ significantly, and that's the legitimate possibility of self-publication in the fiction side of things. Sure, there is a lot of self-published dross out there, but there are also some really good things, and increasingly (but not universally), saying a book is self-published is not taken as a slur. While blogs, et al., are all plausibly construed as "self-publishing" venues in academia, I think very few people would, upon having their academic book turned down by press after press after press, decide that the thing to do was to self-publish. And I would be surprised if such a book would carry much weight when it came to the author's annual review, or tenure/promotion. (Maybe I'm wrong. If anyone has any good examples of recent -- last 10-15 years -- self-published academic books which are treated as legitimate in their fields, please comment, I'd love to know.) The academic alternative to self-publication is perhaps the setting up of academic small presses (College Publications, I'm looking at you), but these are still rare, and few people have the wherewithal (including the clout!) to establish a new one.

There are plenty of other differing norms. Simultaneous submissions are often acceptable unless otherwise stated in the fiction side of things, whereas they are seriously and significantly frowned upon in academic publishing. In academic publication, we generally have the luxury of submitting without having to pay for the right to have our submission be read by the referee/editor -- not so for many fiction venues, particularly journals. But there is one norm that I look at from my comfortable academic seat and wonder -- wouldn't that be nice? or at least how would it work in academic context? -- and that is the literary agent. You convince an agent your work is worth representing, and they promote you and support you. They are your go-between with the publisher. And they only get paid if you get paid (Oh. There it is. That's why it wouldn't work. When was the last time you got paid for a piece of academic writing?). I find the idea of having one's own personal cheerleader, essentially, someone who believes enough in you to be your champion, a really attractive idea. Too often academic publishing is a horrible and horribly isolating process. Wouldn't it be nice to have someone whose job was to be on your side -- but since you aren't paying them to be on your side, you know that they're on your side because they think you can do it? (Sort of like Your Personal Penguin for academics.)

But, I'm really not sure at all how one could adapt the idea of a literary agent to the academic realm. Until then, I guess I'll just have to keep Believing in Myself.