where is the attention?

Posted on July 29, 2026 by Peter

Sometimes, my dog wonders something about me. Perhaps: Will I will play with him?

He stares at my face, which means he must look quite far above his own head. His nostrils may twitch, and I guess that he is gathering as much data as he can with his nose. His head is cocked, which signals to me that he has a question. His ears (being floppy) are harder to interpret, but usually you can tell that they are tensed forward to listen.

Where is he when he attends this way? One valid answer: between his nose and his tail. Or: in the space contained by his fur.

But it would be a normal use of the English language to say that his eyes–or his mind–are on me. Presumably, he is not thinking about his tail, whereas he is intentionally focused on my face. His eyesight is directed, so that he is not looking anywhere other than my face. Even the space between us and behind me is presumably blurred for him. I am the “figure,” and the rest is the “ground.”

The senses of smell and sound are less directed. Information can reach a nose and ears from any direction. But Luca is probably trying to screen out other olfactory and auditory data and lean into information about me that may be carried by smells and sounds.

He cannot feel me from a distance, and he is probably inattentive to the things that he can feel, such as the ground below him–unless it moves. He is not focused on touch because it will not tell him whether I am going to play with him.

Thus, if you ask where is he when he wonders about me, a plausible answer would be: In a zone centered on my face. But my face is merely a source of information, so another answer could be: He is in relation to me. Or: We are together. After all, the purpose of the cocked head is to tell me that he is attending to me so that I will be more likely to answer his question.

This act of attention has duration. Luca sustains his gaze, which is why I infer that he is attentive. Besides, he is interested in whether I will play with him in the future because I have played with him in the past. I don’t know whether a dog thinks about memories or plans, but humans certainly do. And neither memories nor plans are in the present.

If Luca already knew what he wanted to know, he would no longer pay attention. Nor would he attend if there were nothing present that might answer his question. Maurice Merleau-Ponty says that attention arises “in the process of learning” (1945, p. 34). He defines the “attention itself” as “circumscribed ignorance, an intention that is still ’empty’ but already determined” by what is really there.

Let’s say that any sentient being is its attention, or at least that its attention is a very significant aspect of the being. I have explored that thesis a bit here.

Our attention has a location that is related to the location of our body, but the two are not coterminous. In fact, we are rarely aware of most of our body, and we cannot become aware of some parts or aspects of it, such as the blood in our veins. Although Luca’s sensory capacity is concentrated inside his skull, he is not attentive to his skull and can never even see the back of it.

Still, the body has an important relationship to attention. If something happens to the body, we may immediately notice it and may be compelled to attend. I pulled a muscle in my back on Monday, and that certainly got my attention. If the body dies, the attention ends.

Our attention has a location in time that is related to the present hour and minute, but the two are not identical. We can be deeply engaged with a memory or a fear or hope for the future. And an instant of attention may make sense only as one part of an extended act. I may attend to one word while writing this whole post, but no word means much alone.

Two or more attentions can be connected, with each serving as the object of the other. Then it may be more meaningful to ask where we are than where I am.

Where? and When? seem to be questions about limitations. We are finite, limited creatures who cannot be everywhere or last forever. However, we are not limited in quite the way we may assume when we identify with our body at the moment that is shown on a clock. Our place and time are different from that.

Source: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Gallimard, 1945). (“La conscience en train d’apprendre” is “cette ignorance circonscrite, de cette intention <<vide>> encore, mais déjà déterminée“). The metaphor of figure and ground also comes from this text.

preparing for a threat to the fall election

Posted on July 27, 2026 by Peter

Under the headline “This Is What’s Keeping Me Up at Night,” New York Times columnist (and Charles F. Kettering Foundation Senior Fellow) David French sketches a disturbing scenario.

The Democrats may win a majority of House seats this fall. Donald Trump and many allies would decry the election as rigged and corrupt. When the House convenes in January, several defeated Republicans would file challenges, which the Committee on House Administration would consider. Controlled, as now, by Republicans, this committee would refer the final decision to the full House, also with its current composition. The Constitution says that “Each house shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members,” and the Supreme Court has clarified that there is no appeal to the courts. The House majority could vote to seat several incumbents who actually lost their elections, thus retaining Republican control.

[July 31: I have received well-informed feedback that the newly elected House would consider any challenges. I think that is different from what David French suggests, and I hope it is true!]

To accomplish this outcome, the House Republican majority of 218 would have to hold together. A disproportionate number of the defeated Republican incumbents would come from the party’s more centrist and institutionalist wing. Although they would have an incentive to award their seats to themselves, that would be crossing a Rubicon. If several defeated candidates were seated, then arguably the current Republic would have ended just after its 250th anniversary. That fact would probably deter at least three Republicans, thus defeating the effort. And we might hope that many more, including the Speaker, would avoid the temptation.

But the risk is high enough that civil society must prepare. No republic can depend on the self-denying virtue of its current leaders. We should certainly expect step one: very prominent efforts to depict the election as stolen.

Citing Minnesota organizer Doran Schrantz and others, Micah Sifry envisions a mass response involving “coordinated work stoppages, business closures, and economic withdrawal, to put pressure on business elites and corporations.” I assume that the most effective time for such efforts would be while the House Administration Committee considers challenges to the election, although resistance should persist and grow in the event of an adverse vote in the full House.

Last winter, Minnesotans provided an example of a large-scale and disciplined civil action that depended on prior training and coordination. Robert F. Worth reported that 65,000 residents of the Twin Cities received training in civil resistance. Now is the time for more such preparation, and Sifry recommends Indivisible’s Hands Off Our Vote national kick-off call on Thursday July 30 and Freedom Trainers’ election defense resources. I’m also tracking the 10 Steps Campaign and Vote Riders, among othes.

These groups will tend–overall–to draw people who want the Republicans to lose the election in the first place. That category includes me. However, it is also important for people who may vote Republican to defend the election results, whoever wins. They can be more persuasive inside the House GOP caucus.

I doubt that 218 House Republicans will vote to seat candidates whom they know just lost the election. But it is plausible that 218 Republicans will convince themselves that the election really was stolen by Democrats, relying on lurid charges from the president that circulate in right-wing media. Conservatives will be the best sources of countervailing information.

As examples of efforts to organize and train people in defense of the election that are more likely to draw conservatives, I would cite The Advancing Liberty Coalition, Vet the Vote, and Mormon Women for Ethical Government, among others. Some of these groups emphasize recruiting people as volunteer poll workers while encouraging them to defend the election if necessary.

As Sherilyn Ifill wrote last year: “People are doing things. You will meet those people when you start doing things.”

what it would take for the public to trust science

Posted on July 22, 2026 by Peter

On July 19, the President posted on the social media platform that he owns:

The National Academy of Sciences has historically published analytical Scientific Manuals expressly for our Federal Judiciary. Of course, the Academy has been run by Radical Left Dumocrats who, it turns out, published fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change. These bogus Manuals were used by Judges to decide massive “Climate Change” Cases, and have created huge losses across our Country. These Manuals have been totally DISCREDITED. Our Nation’s Federal Judges deserve Facts and Science, not Political Fraud and False Science on Climate. With this TRUTH, I hereby order Federal Suspension and Debarment Officials to review this conduct. Our Taxpayers should not be funding Climate Fraud, and Judges should never have relied upon it. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

When I heard about this post, I assumed that I would trust the National Academies manual that Trump was denouncing. This was an interesting reaction because I had not seen the document.

I then looked at it (and you can too). It struck me as cogent, informative, and cautious. But I do not independently know whether its claims are true.

Nor do its authors. For the most part, the document refers to large, organized groups, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Research Council. But consider a scientist whose work is very close to the natural phenomena: collecting and measuring atmospheric samples. This person knows what they are doing but not what everyone else’s samples show, let alone how to build the instruments that they all use. And current CO₂ concentrations are only some of the variables that we must measure to understand the climate. The vast majority of what any individual scientist knows comes from reports of what others have done.

As the report that Trump denounced says,

The Earth’s climate system is enormous and complex, consisting of many nested and interlinked subsystems, including the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere. …. Owing to the breadth and complexity of the climate system, climate research spans many different scientific disciplines. For example, research on the physical science of climate and climate change (i.e., understanding of the physical properties of the climate system and how it is changing) encompasses: (1) mathematics and statistics; (2) basic sciences, e.g., physics and chemistry; (3) earth sciences, e.g., atmospheric sciences, climatology, physical geography, oceanography, meteorology, hydrology, biogeochemistry, and cryospheric sciences; and (4) computer sciences and data analysis. Most climate research involves collaboration across these different fields (National Academies 2025)

The chemists must trust the oceanographers, who must trust the computer scientists. In fact, each chemist must trust the other chemists.

Perhaps all of science depends on trust, although that is less obvious in classic cases, like Galileo dropping objects from the Tower of Pisa, than in climate science. The study of the earth’s climate is intensely collaborative, involving many more people than could ever know each other. It depends on the Integrated Assessment Models, which have developed for more than fifty years (Van Beek, Hajer, Pelzer, van Vuuren & Cassen 2020). Anyone who contributes to these models must presume that the previous contributions have been generally reliable, even when new data changes some of the current findings.

Why do I trust those models? Why do I trust the National Academies summaries of them, or Karen Zraick’s New York Times article that drew my attention to Trump’s “TRUTH”?

On one hand, I have no doubt that the cautiously presented conclusions of the National Academies are valid. On the other hand, my confidence has a sociological explanation. Institutions like universities, scientific disciplines, and the Times have treated me well all my life. I have benefited from operating with an overall model that incorporates confidence in what these institutions say plus direct observations that concur with their findings. I have observed the climate get hotter in New England, but I only believe that this is a global trend and a function of humans’ burning carbon because I believe in institutions, like The New York Times, that report on institutions like the National Academies.

Few people are treated as well or have as much experience with these institutions as I do; I am a college professor in the United States. It is unreasonable to ask people to trust institutions that are unaccountable to them and distant from them. I think that scientific institutions can adjust their behavior to be somewhat less distant from the public, but they cannot bear that responsibility alone.

The classic solution has been intermediary organizations that obtain people’s trust and then independently present information. An important example was the 20th century city or town newspaper. In 1972, the General Social Survey (GSS) found that 69 percent of Americans read a newspaper daily.

Some 20th century US newspapers had specific social or ideological slants, but the market was dominated by local monopoly publications. Like the broadcast television networks of the same period, newspapers would have presented the American Academies’ position on the climate as scientific truth. In those days, Trump’s response would have been much more marginal.

In 1998 and 2008, the GSS asked people whether we trust too much in science. In both years, those who never read a newspaper were much more likely to distrust science than those who did read one. When I made a model that controled for age, race, gender, and years of education, reading the newspaper still predicted less distrust in science, net of the other factors (p <.001).

This doesn’t mean that newspapers caused people to trust science. It could be the other way around–people who trusted science subscribed to newspapers. But I think that newspapers devoted resources and skill to building trust and then guided people’s reactions to other institutions, such as science.

The recipe that sustained metropolitan daily newspapers during the 1900s included hard news plus human-interest stories, comics, sports, gossip, and other features aimed at various members of each household, all funded by a combination of revenue from subscribers and advertisers. Once the internet captured advertising revenue, this model disintegrated. By 2014, just one-quarter of respondents told the GSS that they read a newspaper daily, and the GSS subsequently retired the question, as it ceased to be a useful measure of news consumption.

All intermediary institutions have “business models” of some kind. A 20th century newspaper relied on subscribers and advertisers. An American high school typically gets most of its resources from local property taxes in return for training and minding the community’s teenagers and providing sports and entertainment. Among other things, a school teaches scientific findings and respect for science. Similarly, a public university in the United States offers job training and credentials, health services, quasi-professional sports, patented inventions, and high culture in return for tuition, donations, state subsidies, and fees. Meanwhile, the big social media platforms use algorithms to attract attention, which they sell to advertisers.

Each business model determines the institution’s results, including its impact on trust or distrust for science. Metropolitan daily newspapers tended to boost trust, while today’s social media degrade it.

Trust in science is not self-evidently good; in fact, we can trust too much. And the fact that most newspapers were local monopolies was problematic. They generated trust, but arguably at the expense of freedom. The question is whether we can invent business models for the 21st century that yield genuinely civic outcomes.

Sources: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence: Fourth Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; Van Beek, L., Hajer, M., Pelzer, P., van Vuuren, D., & Cassen, C. (2020). Anticipating futures through models: the rise of Integrated Assessment Modelling in the climate science-policy interface since 1970. Global Environmental Change, 65, 102191.

paradigms of attention

Posted on July 20, 2026 by Peter

Attention as selecting information to accomplish a task

Imagine that you run a laboratory in which you give people or animals stimuli (for instance, showing them shapes on a screen or making sounds) and you record their responses.

Sometimes, your subjects miss things in interesting ways. For example, in the Invisible Gorilla experiment, viewers are told to count how many times players pass a basketball, and most fail to notice a person in a gorilla suit who walks across the court (Chabris and Simon 2011).

This general approach dates back at least as far as Wilhelm Wundt’s psychology lab in Leipzig in the 1880s. Since World War II, psychologists have often posed an analogy between their subjects and computers–specifically, the large class of computers called “von Neumann Machines” (van Neumann 1945). These familiar devices have components that collect data (keyboards, cables, cameras), components that apply stored instructions to process data, components that store data, and components (such as printers and screens) that output the computed data.

Von Neuman sketched the design of a “very high speed automatic digital computing system” and then directed the team that built a prototype computer at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1948-51. According to his sketch, this machine’s computing function, its command function, and its memory function would “correspond to the associative neurons in the human nervous system.” The equivalents of our sensory and motor neurons would be “the input and the output organs of the device” (2.6).

If indeed a person or an animal is like a von Neumann machine, and it fails to notice something, the likely causes would seem to be a limitation of sensory function, a scarcity of computing power, or a failure of memory-storage. For example, if we miss the guy in the gorilla suit–as I did when I was first shown the video–it’s either because something was wrong with my eyes, I was focusing all my processing power on counting the basketball passes, or (conceivably) I saw the guy dressed as a gorilla but I failed to remember him. Most explanations emphasize limitations in our processing power, or “information-bottlenecks.” Then “attention” is whatever process we use to direct our finite processing capacity.

Attention as care for another person

Now imagine that you are observing two friends in a conversation. One tells the other a sad story, and you think that she seeks an expression of sympathy or compassion from the other. But instead of displaying any emotion in response to the story, the other begins to talk about himself.

Here it is unlikely that we will think of a computer or an information-bottleneck. The problem is not that Harry is receiving too much data to be able to process Sally’s story. The problem is motivational. Harry does not care enough about Sally, possibly because he cares too much about himself.

Von Neumann machines have no motives and do not care. Their designers do. Engineers can make machines that scan patients to assist with medical care or that identify enemy soldiers to destroy them. Such differences are crucial, but they are not caused by the machines. They are encoded in the machines’ design, which could be different and which can be changed. Further upstream is an institution, such as a hospital or an army, that paid for (or ordered) the machine to be built. Behind the institution are the people who designed, supported, and led it.

Thus, when we think about this second case, we are likely to ask what Harry and Sally want and possibly what the culture and society have taught or encouraged each of them to do–not about their cognitive limitations.

In fact, people can overcome their inability to grasp or process another’s story by devoting more time to it. In lab experiments, reaction-time is often treated as evidence of attention, but in relationships, the time that we devote to attending anything or anyone is a variable under our control. Indeed, some people choose to devote their whole lives to attending to one thing.

Attention as respect for something beyond me

Another example comes from Iris Murdoch:

If I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal (2001, p. 87)

In his beautiful and important book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford quotes this passage and suggests that the same is true of “any hard discipline, whether it be gardening, structural engineering, or Russian,” when “one submits to things that have their own intractable ways. Such hardness is at odds with the ontology of consumerism” (p. 65).

In these cases, a person attends less to another human being than to a complex and integrated object, whether it is a motorcycle, a natural language, or a garden. Duration is a sign of attention. I am not attending to a foreign language unless I commit considerable time to studying it.

The important questions about attention

I have learned from the laboratory research on attention, and I am sure that I would learn more if I read more and would benefit from that study. But this whole literature seems only distantly relevant (if at all) to urgent concerns about attention:

What should we attend to?
Who should we attend to?
What should we do when we notice something about someone else?
Do we attend too much to some things? (Candidates: ourselves, our own pleasures and aversions, trivia, doomscrolling)
Do we attend too little to other things? (Candidates: nature, people who suffer)
Which actions tend to involve worthy attention? (Candidates: skilled manual crafts, “deep reading,” friendship, prayer)
Who and what affects our attention? Is their impact positive or negative?
How can we design contexts in which attention is more often beneficial?

Why the first paradigm came to dominate

Graham Burnett (2026) offers a compelling history of the idea that attention means selecting information to accomplish a task. He mentions that “a huge percentage of the laboratory research on human attention conducted in laboratories in the United States across the watershed decades of the last century was hot-war- and Cold War–directed inquiry into human abilities to track and trigger on a stimulus—work centrally concerned with military operations” (Burnett 2026). Partly due to funding from the Defense Department, but not only for that reason, psychologists used increasingly sophisticated tools for measuring responses to stimuli. I would also emphasize the powerful metaphor of von Neumann-style computers after 1945 and the genuinely fascinating, interdisciplinary field of cybernetics, which peaked in the 1960s. All of these factors help explain why so much research has treated attention as selection of data to process.

Burnett says, “if in the 1950s the entire budget of the U.S. Department of Defense had been rerouted to fund the attentional research of a set of Tibetan monks, we would surely have inherited by 2020 quite a different scientific literature on human attention. Probably less essentially ‘cybernetic,’ and, it stands to reason, less focused on a variety of operationally oriented ‘tasks.'”

As Burnett acknowledges, the fact that any body of research has contingent reasons does not invalidate it. Psychology labs have generated real findings about attention as a solution to cognitive limitations. It’s just that we need to understand other phenomena that also deserve the word “attention” and that seem barely connected to this experimental literature.

Weil’s alternative

Simone Weil (1909-1943) suggests a very different agenda. She begins her short essay (or long aphorism) on “Attention and Will” by announcing, “It is not about understanding new things, but—through patience, effort, and method—coming to understand self-evident truths with one’s whole being.”

As if imagining a psychology lab (although I doubt she had that in mind), she writes, “The will has power only over a few movements of a few muscles, associated with the model of moving nearby objects. I can will to place my hand flat on the table. If inner purity, or inspiration, or truth in thought were necessarily associated with postures of this kind, they could be objects of the will.” But the will is not what concerns Weil. “Attention is an entirely different thing.”

A bit later, she writes,

The poet creates beauty through attention fixed upon reality. The same is true of the act of love. To know that this man—who is hungry and thirsty—truly exists just as I do: that is enough; the rest follows of its own accord. The authentic, pure values ?of truth, beauty, and goodness in human activity arise from one and the same act: a certain application of full attention to the object. The sole aim of education should be to prepare for the possibility of such an act through the exercise of attention.

I conclude with a passage from the same essay:

Solitude: In what, then, does its value lie? For one is in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, the blossoming trees)—of things of lesser worth (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the superior capacity for attention. If only one could be attentive to the same degree in the presence of a human being…

Sources: Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us (Harmony 2011); John von Neumann, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (1945); Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good (Routledge Classics, 2001); Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin 2009); Graham D. Burnett, “Human Attention as a Philosophical Problem: The Question, and the Nature of Questions,” Metaphilosophy 57:1-2 (2026): 3–22; Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce (Librairie Plon, 1947).

profiles of engaged scholars

Posted on July 16, 2026 by Peter

“Civically engaged political science (CER) research …. involves political scientists collaborating in a mutually beneficial way with people and groups beyond the academy to co-produce, share, and apply knowledge related to power or politics, contributing to self-governance” (Rasmussen et al 2021).

In this definition, the word “civic” refers to “How people govern themselves. Engaged research teams are self-governing collaborative groups (composed of community organizations, government actors, social movements, and others); their research strengthens self-governance for others.e with a central focus onquestions of power, politics, and governance.”

What does it look like to be involved in CER? Here are some successful trajectories. These are fictional profiles, but they are based on many real examples that I have known. I share the list partly to broaden people’s conceptions of what success might look like:

Hired as an assistant professor in a research-intensive university that grants PhDs in political science, a scholar does some CER before winning tenure–along with other research. Publishes some results of the CER along with much other work. Gets tenure on the basis of the publication record.
Someone with a PhD in political science takes those skills to a job in a nongovernmental organization (NGO). She works in research and evaluation, rising ultimately to be the CEO of the organization.
A political scientist in a college located in a smaller community becomes an important convener and civic leader in that community. This person brings public figures to town and organizes community forums. The college comes to value this role.
An experienced social movement activist earns a PhD by studying the movement (studying part-time while continuing to do practical work) and then continues to contribute to the movement as a teacher, scholar, and activist.
A political scientist takes a first job after earning a PhD is in a research lab based in a university that is entirely funded by grants and contracts. One grants leads to another, and this person ends up directing the lab.
A professor has a heavy teaching load in an institution that emphasizes teaching. This instructor incorporates students in applied research projects with the local community. They publish informally, for local audiences.
A scholar’s research agenda is mostly driven by a methodological or theoretical innovation, but they realize they need to do their research with partners. They gain skills in forming and sustaining partnerships.
A political science professor does positivist research by day and social movement activism in the evenings and weekends. There is little connection between these two full-time jobs.
An early-career scholar takes job in a community engagement center in a university and makes a career in that center and in others like it, ending as the vice provost for public engagement.
A graduate student interested in CER cannot find a way to do CER until after tenure, when his early ideas suddenly germinate, and he conducts a CER project.
An academic expert on a social group serves frequently on the boards of relevant organizations, moving from local groups to national and international ones.
A political scientist studies local issues, often in dialogue with local activists. This person runs for political office and leaves academia when elected mayor.

I would offer all of these as successful profiles, although one might argue that some represent structural challenges that individuals have partially overcome through unreasonable amounts of struggle.

Source: Amy Cabrera Rasmussen, Peter Levine, Robert Lieberman, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman & Rogers Smith “Preface,” PS: Political Science & Politics symposium on Civically Engaged Research (2021). See also: civically engaged research in political science.

civically engaged research in political science

Posted on July 15, 2026 by Peter

I am at the eighth Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER), a program of the American Political Science Association. Each summer, we gather about 20 political scientists (advanced PhD students, professors, and PhDs working outside academia) for four days of discussions about engaged research, which generally means research conducted in partnership with people or entities that are outside of academia. As we did last year, we are meeting at UCLA in Los Angeles, thanks to the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation and UCLA’s Ralph Bunche Center.

I have been thinking about the standing of this kind of research and how it is viewed by powerful institutions. You could think of the following as a draft of a “power map” for civically engaged research in political science.

To start, we might think that colleges and universities are powerful institutions. On the other hand, many organizations and communities or social groups lack power. A junior scholar who wants to remedy that gap should collaborate with a disadvantaged group in ways that empower it. This requires humility by the scholar. In turn, the university and relevant discipline will probably dislike this style of research because it tends to shift power away. Therefore, the scholar will have to struggle against the university. Finally, the government may support engaged research when progressive are in charge, but when the government is right-wing, it will attack engaged research.

This model is not false, but I would like to complicate it.

All communities have power. Some geographical communities that are poor nevertheless wield considerable power though their elected governments. On the other hand, colleges and universities face significant constraints, economic and otherwise.

Senior faculty in departments that chase prestige may not appreciate engaged research because it may seem methodologically unsophisticated and may not yield generalizable conclusions. On the other hand, the discipline of political science has conferred its highest honors on some scholars whose research depended on partnerships, people like Elinor Ostrom and Jenny Mansbridge (or Ralph Bunche, back in the day). Thanks to the original leadership of Rogers Smith while he was APSA president–sustained by his successors–the Association offers ICER to boost this kind of research.

Also, senior administrators in prestigious universities sometimes prefer engaged research because it is interdisciplinary, it engages students, it attracts philanthropy, and it can improve local relationships.

At this moment, federal funding for political science is endangered, and one would expect the Trump Administration to target civically engaged research. Yet political scientists are involved today in federally funded interdisciplinary engaged research projects, and private philanthropic support may be expanding.

In short, I think the power map is quite complex. My ideal end-state would not be a world in which every political scientist does engaged research. I admire other kinds of research as well. But I would like to see more and better civically engaged research, and moving toward that goal requires navigating a context of both opportunities and risks.

See also: the landscape for civically engaged research (2025; rather similar to these remarks); Civically Engaged Research in Political Science (2023); bootstrapping value commitments (2022)

there will always be an England

Posted on July 10, 2026 by Peter

I don’t think most of you are following the multidimensional “Posh George” story as closely as you should.

George Cottrell, 32, is reported to have given substantial but undisclosed gifts to Nigel Farage, the Reform MP for Clacton and the would-be Donald Trump of the UK.

“Posh George” grew up on the private Caribbean island of Mustique (home to about 120 private villas). His mum, the Honourable Fiona Watson, daughter of the 3rd Baron Manton, is a former girlfriend of King Charles, who reportedly nicknamed her “Yum Yum.” George served eight months in a US federal prison for wire fraud. A professional gambler, he has reportedly lost $20 million in a single night.

Farage faces ethical scrutiny for his failure to disclose Posh George’s largess. To neutralize the scandal, Farage is resigning his parliamentary seat, which triggers a by-election in which he will stand. His idea is to return to Westminster triumphantly with the support of the good citizens of Clacton.

The other professional parties are refusing to contest this election. However, Count Binface has declared his intention to run. The Count is an intergalactic space warrior who wears a garbage can (a “dustbin,” in British English) over his head. He was formerly Lord Buckethead but had to change his nom de guerre because of a copyright complaint.

I thought that Count Binface might capture the silly vote and give Farage a run for his money. Unfortunately, the silly bloc may now be split, given the entrance of Rob Pownall, 27, aka “The man in a fox costume.” There is also at least one right-wing candidate who takes himself seriously. We can only hope that silly voters–and those who are silly-adjacent or in solidarity with the silly–will unite behind Count Binface (who, after all, was the first to jump into the ring) and at least embarrass the most embarrassing candidate in the race, the Hon. Nigel.

Propose a Session for Frontiers of Democracy 2026

Posted on July 9, 2026 by Peter

Propose a session for Frontiers of Democracy 2026. The conference theme is “The United States at 250: Meeting the Moment for Democracy, in the US and Aound the World” (October 2 – 4 at Tufts University in Medford, MA)

Frontiers of Democracy is an annual conference at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life that convenes practitioners, scholars, leaders, and community members.

Please hold the dates and consider proposing one or more sessions for the conference by July 19.

Danielle R. Holley, President of Mount Holyoke College, will be this year’s keynote speaker.

Stay tuned for a notice soon when registration opens, and be sure to take advantage of the “early bird” discounted rate.

ten thoughts about time

Posted on July 7, 2026 by Peter

[Caveat: there is a large literature on the philosophy of time that I have not investigated carefully. The following thoughts may be naive.]

Our habitat exhibits temporal regularities

Like all species on this planet, we evolved in an environment strongly marked by the regular movements of the earth and moon in the presence of the sun. Most species respond to these regularities–resting by night or by day, budding every spring, foraging at low tide. For species that are sentient, it pays to be aware of at least the most relevant regularities.

We perceive rhythms

Human beings can sense temporal regularities. We can notice that a frog is croaking at an even pace or that each day is about as long as the next one. We can also make rhythmic sounds of our own. My colleague Anirudh Patel shows that some birds experience rhythm much as we do, but that monkeys do not. As hard as they try, monkeys cannot predict the next beat. It seems likely that our ways of perceiving and creating temporal regularities are adaptive for us, as highly social creatures living on a planet with pervasive temporal rhythms. For one thing, music and dance strengthen social bonds. But different species have adapted to the same context differently.

Our ideas of time are deeply cultural

People are taught how to perceive time from a very early age. We learn words for minutes, days, and years. Our languages mark time in complex (but diverse) ways, such as verb tenses or adverbial expressions. We learn metaphors for time, such as the clock’s round face or a calendar’s rows and columns. And elements of time are deeply imbued with significance, sometimes even sacredness.

This inheritance makes it hard to tell whether individuals could perceive (or invent) temporal regularities all by themselves. When one of my daughters was about two, she went to nursery school every other weekday. She said that this pattern was a “stripe.” I don’t know whether she was reinventing the metaphor of time as a line divided into periods (in which case this metaphor could be hard-wired) or whether she was simply applying a metaphor that she had already learned from us. But at least some of our notions of time are cultural inheritances.

Our direct perceptions of temporal regularities are imperfect

We can perceive that a clock’s ticks are spaced evenly, but if the clock slows down very gradually, we will not notice. We can perceive that the seasons rotate through an annual pattern that takes hundreds of days to complete, but I do not think we would notice that a year took 350 or 400 days if we didn’t measure and record the passage of time.

We use tools to measure time

Because we can recognize temporal patterns, we can identify objects that are particularly regular and use them as measures by comparing them to other objects. For our ancestors, the regular motions of heavenly bodies provided reliable measures, and they erected objects that cast shadows to track these motions. Sometimes we simply perceive that something (such as water dripping through a narrow hole) is regular and use it as a measurement tool. But it is better to have an explanation of the object’s regularity. For instance, Newtonian physics can explain why the earth has rotated at an even pace during our recorded history. With modern physics, we can now invent quantum clocks. All of the objects that exhibit temporal regularities are consistent with each other.

These five background conditions encourage us to model time in certain ways

We pervasively think of time as a line (whether straight, circular or oval), with the present as a point that moves along steadily. We may think that only the present point is real or actual. The past has left residues in the present, including effects on our nervous system that we can summon as memories. And the regularities of nature allow us to predict the future. But all of our direct perceptions are of the present, which has no duration and turns instantly into the past.

Such models may be contingent on our background conditions: our physical capacities, which evolved for a particular environment, plus the tools and cultural apparatus that we have developed. A different culture–let alone a different species on a different planet–might grasp time in fundamentally different ways that would work just as well.

On the other hand, I would not quickly assume that a linear model of time is “Western” or “modern,” whatever those categories mean. Writing ca. 400s CE, the Buddhist monk Buddhaghosa introduces a simile of a chariot wheel that touches the ground at one point while it spins, saying that the “life-moment of living beings” is equally brief. Although we perceive a moving wheel as a continuous thing, Buddhaghosa wants us to see each instant as discrete.

Our sense of time causes distress

To varying degrees, we are troubled by feelings that time is running out, that we are wasting the present, that we would change the past if we could, that the future will be bad in certain ways, or that we wish we could directly experience what we did in the past (nostalgia).

A linear model of time might be the root of the distress

These feelings seem rooted in the class of models that I mentioned above, which represent time as linear with the present as a point.

Linear models do not describe our consciousness of time

A linear model of time works well to describe history or physical processes. It enables useful objects such as chronologies, calendars, and time-stamps. Because of its utility, we will always return to it. But it does not describe how we experience time.

As many have noted, if we only experienced the present, we could not hear a melody. We would only hear the current note or chord. We could not understand a sentence; we would only hear the word being uttered. And we could not catch (or duck) an incoming ball, because it would appear as a circle in our visual field. Evidently, we perceive objects that extend in time and change.

Kant thought that our perceptions were momentary, but there must be a persistent self that puts our perceptions together. William James disagreed that the perceptions themselves lack duration. “The practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were—a rearward- and a forward-looking end” (p. 609).

Edmund Husserl reached a similar conclusion, in a different way. I suspect that he and James were right, but their disagreement with Kant is relatively subtle. The main point is that mental models that represent time as a line, which we have developed to understand history and nature, do not reflect how we actually experience time.

It may be possible to experience time differently

If a linear model of time is highly useful and embedded in our language and culture, we will never just drop it. But if it is contingent on our circumstances and fails to describe our own experience, then it is not exactly objective or obligatory. We may be able to think in different ways, at least at times.

The great Zen thinker Dogen (1200-1253 CE) worked out a theory in which time is not separate from being, a vessel or dimension or space in which things occur. Instead, being and time are the same. “The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world. See each thing in this entire world as a moment of time” (p. 92).

I am not sure that his abstract metaphysics persuades me or communicates what he perceived while he meditated on time. I get more from his verse (p. 177):

For thousands of yards, the cold lake soaks up the color of the sky. 
Evening quiet: a fish of brocade scales reaches the bottom, 
then flits this way and that; an arrow notch splits. 
Endless water surface, moonlight brilliant.

Sources: Buddhaghosa, The Path of Purification, translated by Bhikkhu Nanamoli (Buddhist Publication Society, 2010), viii.7 (p. 476); James, The Principles of Psychology (Henry Holt, 1918); Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt (editors and translators), The Essential Dogen: Writings of the Great Zen Master (Shambhala, 2013)

why the humanities could never be automated

Posted on July 2, 2026 by Peter

Sometimes, we want to answer questions to accomplish practical outcomes. For example, we want to know whether a vaccine works so that we can decide whether to use it. Or we may seek basic insights about viruses so that we can develop vaccines in the first place.

Sometimes, we want to know things because we are simply curious. It is hard to justify a lot of astronomy (for example) on the basis of its practical implications. But we want to understand the universe.

And sometimes, we want to understand people–and perhaps animals–because we are in relationships with them. When you ask friends how they’re doing, your motive may not be to solve a problem, nor mere curiosity, but care. You should give your friend your attention. The benefits are psychological, ethical, or spiritual–a change in one’s mind and in the relationship with the other person.

Friends may tell you things that you should believe for practical reasons or to satisfy pure curiosity. Someone might tell you that a vaccine works, so that you will take it, or that all the planets in our solar system could fit between the earth and the moon, because that’s kind of interesting to know. Paying attention means taking such claims seriously. But the main point of learning what other people think is not to find out what is objectively true; it is to know the other people. In fact, exploring the beliefs and values of a wide range of people can shake our confidence in beliefs, in general, and hence our feelings that we can and must get our own beliefs right.

Attending to a text or an artifact from a distant time or place is a little different from an ordinary conversation. For one thing, you cannot directly benefit long-dead or faraway authors by giving them your attention. Although we have ethical obligations to the dead, the influence is basically one-way. However, reading, listening to music, and viewing art are similar to regular conversations in important ways. They too are practices that develop compassion and reduce our attachment to our own prejudices and concerns.

While Michel de Montaigne’s married friend Diane de Foix was expecting a child, he sent her advice about education. He recommended foreign travel and conversation with peers. A youth should listen and appreciate, he said, not try to form and share beliefs.

And so should adults. Montaigne told de Foix, “In this school of human interaction, I have often observed this vice: instead of getting to know others, we only strive to give ourselves and are more concerned with using our own goods than with acquiring new ones. Silence and modesty are qualities very well suited to conversation.” A passage in the same letter could stand as a justification of Montaigne’s whole way of life:

This vast world, which some think is just one species in a larger genus, is the mirror in which we must look to truly know ourselves. In short, I want [our world] to be my student’s book. The variety of moods, sects, judgments, opinions, laws, and customs teach us to judge our own people soundly and teach our judgment to recognize its imperfection and natural weakness: which is no small apprenticeship.

If the purpose of the humanities–the disciplines that interpret texts and artifacts–is not to determine truth but to attend to other people, then we cannot outsource this thinking to machines or even to other human beings. The point is the experience, not the outcome.

Here is a complication: professional scholars in the humanities do pursue the answers to questions. At one extreme, they may seem much like scientists when they establish the date and provenance of a painting or correct a primary text. At the opposite extreme, they may offer highly creative or even counterintuitive interpretations, but usually they still claim to be telling us something valid about an object in the world. We can ask whether they are right or wrong, persuasive or unconvincing.

I think scholarship is very valuable, but it ultimately contributes to the humanities as experience. The point of watching or reading Shakespeare is to get out of one’s own head by attending to the author and his characters. The point of philological, historical, or interpretive scholarship about Shakespeare is to enrich performances and readings of the works.

Some of the scholarly labor can be assigned to machines. Because I cannot read Pali but I am interested in classical Indian philosophy, I have been very carefully using ClaudeAI to give me dictionary-type definitions of all the Pali words in select passages. This is an algorithmic task. Claude is probably using published Pali-English dictionaries, plus previous translations made by people who used the same dictionaries. A dictionary is also an algorithmic device, a kind of machine that generates a range of words in one language for each word in the other language. I believe that the first dual-language dictionary (Sumerian-Akkadian) was written more than 4,000 years ago.

Thus there is nothing fundamentally new about creating devices that automatically assist readers, listeners, and viewers of human artifacts. In addition to lexicons and dictionaries, we might mention grammars, concordances, indices, card catalogues, provenance lists for artworks, search functions for digital texts, and many other scholarly resources. LLMs can often do these things better.

The difference is that we were never tempted to view the tools as ends in themselves. They were meant to assist a reader in a practice that would enrich that person’s mind. Because the LLM’s speak in the first-person and purport to interpret and explain texts, it is tempting–and I feel this temptation–to imagine that they can do our reading for us. To use a simile that is becoming a cliché, that would be like getting a machine to lift barbells to save us the effort. This would not count as exercise.

Source: Montaigne, vol. 1, essay :26 (“Of the instruction of children”). I follow Screech in interpreting “que les uns multiplient encore comme especes soubs un genre” to mean that our world is one species in a greater genre of worlds.

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