My time in Cambridge is drawing to a close. I will be back at Pacific on Faculty Development Day. It is time to take stock of what I have learned here. I followed three lines of thought through many contacts and continued my scholarship.
Ethics
My principal concern has been to explore the moral community from the perceptive of game theory. A game is defined formally by a set of rules, a payoff schedule, and the fact that one’s rewards are determined based on the combination of what one does and what others do. The moral community flows from the fact that we are never in complete control of what happens to us or to others. Here are some of the points I have been able to verify:
- No one can be ethical by himself or herself.
- We need not know the right way of doing things in order to start being ethical.
- An equilibrium is a point where those playing the game would be satisfied to continue playing — no alternative is more fair to all.
- “Unethical” means interfering with fair games by misrepresentation, reneging, or coercing others.
- Groups, such as schools or professional communities, also have an interest in preventing private games that damage the common good.
- Failure to enforce the payoffs of the agreed game is free-riding that undermines the community.
- Stable moral communities necessarily involve a mixture of strategies.
- Perfect rationality and complete information are not required; in fact, a little forgetting and bounded rationality promote conversion and stability.
- Moral communities evolve across time; higher standards, personal growth, and forgiveness are natural features.
- People who think they know all the rules that others should follow are a pain in the anatomy.
Epistemology
This is the technical term for the branch of philosophy that investigates how we know things. Its counterpart in the social sciences is learning theory. This has been a long-standing, but background interest of mine and one that was only addressed incidentally here in Cambridge.
My view is that there is a difference between “knowing” and “knowing that.” The latter phrasing represents propositions that can be made public and can be tested as true or false. The former are changes in our disposition or what is likely to happen to us in the future. Most philosophers collapse across these categories and hold a position known as “realism”: we know a directly given objective world, either truly or mistakenly.
I came to Cambridge partially because of a faculty member here named Simon Blackburn who has been my sponsor and who is a quasi-realist. He and I think there is a chance that we can make slips when translating what we know into what we say we know and that while the latter can be evaluated publicly most of what matters is tacit.
This is important in dentistry. A significant handicap in the scientific literature is the failure to distinguish between the validity of a scientific “claim” supported by its p-value and the substance of the claim translated into what dentists can do with it. I believe there are large and important differences between what dental students do in the lecture halls and what they do in the clinic. We need to know more about the relationship between these two kinds of knowing.
The Dental Literature
I have been able to pursue my interest in alternative means of analyzing and reporting the dental research literature. Traditional statistical conventions are of more use to researchers than practitioners. There are methods, however, that are rigorous yet tailored to the decisions practitioners make. Among these are measures of likelihood of being surprised, robustness, identification of interaction effects (factors related to treatment that can be ignored or which must be accounted for), and ordering the impact of various factors by their likelihood of affecting treatment outcomes. I was able to verify the soundness of these approaches with faculty members in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science and the Mathematics Department. I also presented these findings at Leeds University Dental School as I have at several schools in the States. I have had a request before the DFC for a year to make this presentation at Pacific.
Scholarship
Manuscripts accepted for publication:
- Lessons from Students in a Critical Thinking Course: Reflections on the Third Pedagogy, David W. Chambers: Journal of Dental Education
- Issues in the Interpretation and Reporting of Surveys in Dental Education, David W. Chambers and Frank W. Licari: Journal of Dental Education
- Manuscripts accepted subject to minor revisions
- Effects of Clinical Experience and Explorer Type on Judged Crown Margin Acceptability, Casimir Leknius, Lola Giusti, David Chambers, Christopher Hong: Journal of Prosthodontics
- Money, David W. Chambers: Journal of the American Dental Association
Manuscripts reviewed and requiring substantial revision
- Toothbrush Wear Comparison for Two different Toothbrush Designs, DJ Horlak, P Watson, LJ Lyon, DW Chambers, and WP Lundergan: American Dental Hygiene Association Journal
- Alternative Methods for Evaluating the Equivalence of Measurement Systems, David W. Chambers, HeeSoo Oh, Gurminder Sidhu. Dentomaxillofacial Radiology
