Via Gillespie at Hit n' Run I found Dennis Dutton's review of Joseph Carroll's Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature.

I was most interested in Dutton's take on Carroll's criticism of Stephen Pinker's account of the adaptive function of literature. In his LRB review of Pinker's How the Mind Works, Jerry Fodor, no friend of "psychological Darwinism," makes hay with Pinker's view:

And here he is on why we like to read fiction: 'Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother?' Good question. Or what if it turns out that, having just used the ring that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to continue to be immortal and rule the world? It's important to think out the options betimes, because a thing like that could happen to anyone and you can never have too much insurance.

Ho! That Fodor is a pill! Yeah, so Fodor thinks Pinker's view of fiction is too absurd to require further comment. How many of us will ever be dwarves in need of an immortality ring? I mean, really! Now, Fodor has very general (weirdly motivated reasons, I think) for denying that adaptionist thinking tells us anything whatsoever about the mind, so he won't be much impressed by Carroll's view either, no matter how good it is. But it would be a nice thing about Carroll's theory if it makes pretty good sense of what we get of the story of the giant and dwarf.

Dutton reports:

On the first topic, the functional uses of fiction, Carroll, Pinker, and other evolutionary aestheticians agree. There is an enormous potential survival value for a species in being able to hypothesize non-obtaining states of affairs — imagining, contrary to known facts, what it would be for the neighboring tribe to attack the camp when the men are out hunting, or what it would be to travel in an area where water is scarce.

This is the view Fodor mocks. You will never be a dwarf who has accidentally sold of his immortality ring. Of course, you might be a person who sells something you don't know is incredibly valuable to someone much more powerful than you in order to get something less valuable that you wanted, and then discover you need to get it back. The dwarf story can help us navigate the basic schema, and so even Pinker's theory can stand up to Fodor's snark.

So what does Carroll add? Dutton tells us that

Carroll does not deny that literature gives us simulations that can act for models of behavior, game plans in Pinker’s sense. But art goes further: “It helps us to regulate our complex psychological organization, and it helps us cultivate our socially adaptive capacity for entering mentally into the experience of other people.” This is not quite the same thing as imaginatively encountering a dangerous elephant in a story. It is rather a matter of entering empathically into the minds of our fellows. It may come to us as entertainment, but fiction has profound effects on making us what we are.

I find this just fascinating. So the thing about the dwarf is not just that were are exploring the contours of a strategic schema, but practicing seeing and feeling things from somebody else's perspective -- and the dwarf perspective is as good as any for this purpose, because dwarf psychology really is just human psychology with a tweak here or there. (Gimli is no more exotic than a Kazakh, psychologically.) Dutton further explains Carroll's view in a very compelling way. He also does a nice job in splitting the difference between Pinker and Carroll's explanations for the reason we get pleasure from fiction. I encourage you to read the review.

However, I'm left with a question, and I guess I'll have to read Carroll to search out an answer. Doesn't the view that fictions train our ability to enter empathically into the minds of others, and to make finer discriminations in judgment about people's intentions, motives and so forth--and these are, I think we should agree, abilities with adaptive upshot--imply that people who are better at understanding and appreciating literature ought to (1) be better at reading people and (2) ought to therefore do better in life and reproduction? That is to say: Doesn't Carroll's theory imply that literature majors (or at any rate, good ought to get laid more? I mean, Nick Gillespie has a Ph.D. in literature. How's he doing?

I don't think Carroll's view really does imply this. But why not? I think Dutton may point the way.

[Crossposted on The Fly Bottle, where you are free, free! to leave your conjectures in the comments.]

Occasional co-Crescatter Heidi Bond has done the great service of liveblogging Justice Scalia's speech today at the University of Michigan Law School. It looks to me like an audience member asked a question that I've been mulling over about Bolling, the Federal Government, and affirmative action, and anybody who has more or another synopsis of it is invited to weigh in.

(via Pejman Yousefzadeh, among others) I see Stanley Kurtz's suggestion that my beloved University of Chicago is turning into a leftist-dominated University:

Conservative students and parents take note: The University of Chicago is not what it used to be–not by a longshot. And let the University of Chicago administration take note as well.

The ideas of different members of the University community will frequently conflict and we do not attempt to shield people from ideas that they may find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even offensive. Nor, as a general rule, does the University intervene to enforce social standards of civility.

Funny, I was one of the students Kurtz met with. I am not in despair.

John Phillips, a Ph.D. student in political theory at Brown, has some interesting thoughts on Samuel Freeman's arguments that libertarians aren't bona fide liberals.

Here's my take: If libertarianism just is the view that the state has no legitimacy and that agents of the state have no justifiable moral permission to use their powers of coercion AND the very concept of liberalism contains (in the Kantian sense) the idea of state legitimacy and permissible coercion by state agents, well, then of course libertarianism isn't a kind of liberalism.

But I don't think a political conception has to deny the legitimacy of the state or permissible coercion by state agents to count as libertarian. People think that I am a libertarian because I think that the state should be very small and limited in its powers, not that I think that there should be no state, or that coercion is never justified. There are, of course, libertarians who think coercion is never justified, and so conclude that there should be no state, but that's just the content of one conception of 'libertarianism.' That's not the concept. Negative income tax Friedmanites are also libertarians. Additionally, I don't think the connection between liberalism and state legitimacy, coercion, etc., is anything close to analytic. If there is an anarchic social order that fulfills substantive liberal ideals better than a state-based order, then that order should count as liberal.

I don't think that a view about the conferral of legitimacy on state coercion through democratic means is a part of the substantantive content of the concept of liberalism, although it is obviously a huge part of liberal conceptions such as Freeman's. Coercive democracy, in my view, is, at best, a contingent means to liberal ends. At far less than its worst, it is inconsistent with liberal ends.

Tons of great stuff over at Julian's today. In this post, he seems to be asking in part (he says a lot more) whether one can be a culture warrior and a good Rawlsian political liberal at the same time. If that's the question, then I think the answer is: yeah, sort of.

The point of public reason is not that one cannot attempt to change people's comprehensive conceptions in public. It is that when we are deliberating together about the public principles by which we are all going to be governed, we should ideally appeal to reasons that most people can endorse.

I do think there is a kind of rhetorical problem or tension when one shifts from publicly arguing over comprehensive conceptions ("There is no God! Free will is a lie! You are continuous with the apes!") to publicly arguing about political principles in Rawls-approved tones. If you're perceived as an aggressive flack for a particular comprehensive view, people will have a hard time taking you seriously when you attempt to set out an argument designed to appeal even to the very people you've just publicly accused of being dangerously blinkered. People will suspect you're being tricksy, trying to pull a fast one.

So it's probably tough to be a well-known comprehensive gladiator and a trusted voice of public reason all at the same time.

[Cross-posted on The Fly Bottle.]

Justice Scalia was quoted, it turned out wrongly, in September as having come out in favor of orgies as a way to "eliminate social tensions." Now comes news that Scalia revisited the topic during a speech last week at the annual Federalist Society convention:

"My wife hasn't heard this talk," he noted Friday evening at the Mayflower Hotel, [sources reported]. (Maureen Scalia was among those listening.) He used the famous line "I accept for the sake of argument that sexual orgies, homosexual or not, eliminate social tensions, and ought to be encouraged," according to one note-taker. Responding to hearty laughter, he ad-libbed: "Ah, the libertarian half of the Federalist Society."