All done but the Grading

I was the first to finish both of my philosophy finals. Language took roughly an hour. Science took a bit over an hour. On both of them, I had reached the point where I had answered everything as best I was going to. I could have sat there and fiddled with wording for a while, but there didn't seem to be much point. I thought of one thing on the Science final that might have made a slight difference, but that's it, and there's no guarantee I would have thought of that if I had just stayed sitting there. I think I did decently on both of them.

As for papers, I did not care for my Philosophy of Science paper at all. I thought it was shallow and poorly conceived. It got an A. I thought my Philosophy of Language paper was much better and stronger, and I had a lot of fun with it. It got an A-. Whether that means anything beyond "different people have different reactions to things," I don't really know.

Since I got done early anyway, I stopped over at Galaxy to check on my laptop. I may not need a new one after all. It was a problem with the cable to the monitor that was causing the flickering. The cable will cost $30, which isn't bad at all. As for the random dying, they defragged the hard disc and fixed something else that I can't remember, but it was all basic maintenance. I'm still happy to have almost every file on it backed up, now. And I may spend the money I'd been expecting to spend on a new laptop on getting this blasted desktop running decently. It is ridiculously slow and the sound has never worked right. At the very least it needs more RAM. A faster processor would be nice. That might be enough to straighten out the sound if the only problem is low memory.

Anyway, I have two sets of tests to grade, and I'll do those tomorrow morning, then submit grades and be done. I've got one mystery no-show on a final, though. A student who had been doing very well did not show up to take the final. This dropped her from an A to a D. I haven't submitted her grade yet, in the hopes that she'll contact me and we can work out an alternate time. I've also got an extra final that someone took with my 025 students. I presume he was in someone's 025 class, but no one has claimed him yet. Oh well.

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Random Pre-Philosophy-Final Thoughts

(1) Rereading an entire semester's worth of both Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Language in 2-3 days is an effective way to make yourself go mad.

(2) LOLcats are an effective remedy for this sort of madness.

(3) Slow computer is sloooooooooooowwwwwwwww.

(4) Despite having spent less time on the material, I feel more prepared for the Language final than the Science one. I suspect this is because Pelleti's lectures are more organized, so it's very clear what he thinks the important points are. It is not so clear for Wahl.

(5) That is all. For now.

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A Thought on Conspiracy Theories

But the point is clear. The same people that peddle this crap are the ones who also assure us that no government program would work because it's so incompetent. Maybe they should just hire one of the many conspiracy groups who seem to be able to pull off extremely subtle and complex schemes without any trouble -- and even without any of us knowing about it (except for all the people who seem to be in on the secret and are blabbing it all over the internet).

~Revere at Effect Measure

My astrophysics professor once commented that the problem with supposed government cover-up of aliens was, well, that the same government was unable to cover up much more mundane scandals. The source article links to a longer article making much the same point. Still, there may be a related lesson to consider: if people put as much energy into finding solutions to real problems as they do into making up imaginary explanations for past failures, we might have a better functioning world, with fewer such failures to encourage ridiculous explanation. Or we might not, but it's an interesting idea all the same.

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Swept Under the Rug

When I took the course on Existentialism, we read some Heidegger. If you can slog through the word-salad of his book, there seem to be interesting and even useful ideas in it. Even before we started in on it, though, Dr. Levenson warned us about Heidegger's history, and commented that generally when Heidegger was mentioned in public forums, the conversation tended to degenerate and focus solely on what he called "The Catastrophe," rather than on Heidegger's actual ideas. The Catastrophe was that Heidegger, whose philosophy seemed to offer a broad and nuanced view of humanity, fell in with the Nazis.

For a while, the tendency was simply to claim that, well, he had no choice. He was an intellectual in a Nazi-run country, so of course he had to appear to conform to the mode. Sometime in the '70's, that view was overthrown by some of Heidegger's own writing and speeches coming to light. These were not merely spouting the party line, but willfully and cheerfully advocating it. Complicating the picture, Heidegger apparently engaged in a long, torrid affair with a Jewish woman, who ardently defended him.

Dr. Levenson, himself a Jewish rabbi, said that the thing that troubled him most was that Heidegger never recanted any of his pro-Nazi propaganda. He also claimed that Heidegger was against the extermination camps. So Levenson tried to take what he saw as the good in Heidegger's philosophy, and mention, but otherwise ignore, the fascist tendencies. I have a few problems with this. First, somewhere I ran across a claim that Heidegger's primary work (Being and Time) was translated into Japanese and used to justify the extant fascist regime. Second, the English translation is, as I said above, mostly word salad. If you think you find a thread of an idea, you can then look for it in the rest of the salad and probably find similar enough threads that you think you're justified in thinking that thread was intentional. I don't know if the original German is any better, though Dr. Pelletti claims that it's just as bad, but the English translation... I saw some of the parts with threads that seemed to suggest a near-humanist philosophy. I also saw some that could much more easily be taken as fascist.

I don't feel like beating my head against the wall of his text to go dig up examples, but I suspect that the truth of the matter is that the apparent humanist strains were accidental, artifacts of the difficulty of translation and Heidegger's own peculiar use of language, and the fascist strains expressed Heidegger's actual ideas. I could be wrong. Possibly he himself was confused, and reasoned to something more humanist, but simply couldn't get past his own fascist tendencies. The result is a confusing, beguiling text, with hints of greatness obscured by darkness.

There's a great deal of irony to think that a fascist helped shape, and even begin, a philosophical movement that is very much humanity-based. What brought all this to mind this morning was an article discussing new revelations about Heidegger and his Jewish mistress. Some of its claims directly contradict Levenson's. I don't have the source-material to know which is the true account, but I suspect Levenson is determined to give Heidegger the benefit of the doubt, due to the positive threads he sees in his work, while others without that axe to grind are likely to be more objective. HT: Evolving Thoughts

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Non-Attachment

I've just started reading Duhem for Philosophy of Science, and came across a rather beautiful quote (which, strangely, does not seem to be in any quote databases):

Men who have an excessive faith in their theories or in their ideas are not only poorly disposed to make discoveries but they also make very poor observations. They necessarily observe with a preconceived idea and, when they have begun an experiment, they want to see in its results only a confirmation of their theory. Thus they distort observation and often neglect very important facts because they go counter to their goal.

At least, I think the quote is from Duhem himself. It's in quotes in an article written by Duhem (Physical Theory and Experiment), but the only source cited is a book also written by Duhem. * shrugs * Whoever the real author is, I agree with the sentiment. "Excessive faith" might also be described as "attachment." A good scientist must remain detached from any particular result.

ADDENDUM: Google books has the article/chapter in question here. The section we're reading starts at "Section 1" preceding the place the link will go to.

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R-E-S-P-E-C-T-?

Via Effect Measure, I came across a piece entitled, "My God Problem." It's an interesting read, and highlights some disparities in public discourse. Compare the two bolded sentences, expressing sentiments from the same person.

Consider the very different treatments accorded two questions presented to Cornell University's "Ask an Astronomer" Web site. To the query, "Do most astronomers believe in God, based on the available evidence?" the astronomer Dave Rothstein replies that, in his opinion, "modern science leaves plenty of room for the existence of God . . . places where people who do believe in God can fit their beliefs in the scientific framework without creating any contradictions." He cites the Big Bang as offering solace to those who want to believe in a Genesis equivalent and the probabilistic realms of quantum mechanics as raising the possibility of "God intervening every time a measurement occurs" before concluding that, ultimately, science can never prove or disprove the existence of a god, and religious belief doesn't—and shouldn't—"have anything to do with scientific reasoning."

How much less velveteen is the response to the reader asking whether astronomers believe in astrology. "No, astronomers do not believe in astrology," snarls Dave Kornreich. "It is considered to be a ludicrous scam. There is no evidence that it works, and plenty of evidence to the contrary." Dr. Kornreich ends his dismissal with the assertion that in science "one does not need a reason not to believe in something." Skepticism is "the default position" and "one requires proof if one is to be convinced of something's existence."

Anyone else see a problem there? To be consistent, he would need to say something like, "In science, the default position is that there is no god. One requires proof if one is to be convinced of something's existence." He could then add some nice platitudes about quantum mechanics and the Big Bang, and say something like "Certain formulations of God are not incompatible with scientific knowledge," but he should still add, "but God as a concept has no place in science." I don't mind that he is a "compatibilist" (to use a recent phrase, almost always used condescendingly, unfortunately), but it bothers me that he bends over backwards to avoid criticizing the idea of god, while he just stomps right down on astrology.

So the question becomes, why is religion (supposedly) entitled to more respect than astrology? As far as truth-values go, I consider astrology and religion equivalent. Both make strange claims about the nature of the universe and how certain things will influence us both now and in the future. The primary difference is that most of astrology's claims are testable, and such tests never come out in its favor when run by people without a stake in the truth of astrology. It would be fair to say that astrology has been falsified. Now, some religions don't make any testable claims, but plenty of them make patently false claims. Shouldn't religions that make patently false claims receive exactly the same amount of respect as astrology, i.e. none?

Even for religions that avoid making testable claims, I would state the accommodation as something like, "If a religion makes no testable claims, science cannot prove or disprove it. Still, skepticism is the default position of science and one requires proof if one is to be convinced of something's existence." To say that scientific reasoning should not play a part in religious thinking is absurd. Of course one should reject a religion that makes false scientific claims.

The question remains, then, why does religion get more respect than astrology? It's not because religion is any more true than astrology. I can think of two potential reasons. (1) Religion is perceived as serving a useful social function. (2) The majority of the public are religious, and scientists have to deal with the tyranny of that majority. I actually think it's a combination of (1) and (2). Whether the "perception" in (1) is true or not isn't something I want to get into just now, but it's a point that I haven't seen brought up much. (2), though, is a problem. It has nothing to do with whether religion deserves respect and everything to do with a mob mentality. There also seems to be more than a touch of moral relativism in the culture, and not just regarding criticisms of religion. Criticizing anything is seen as somehow "wrong" ... except, perhaps, criticizing those who criticize. That's a problem, because some things need to be criticized.

Thus, I don't think respect should be the default position for anything that happens to be labeled "religion." Respect must be earned. Then what should it take for a religion, or even a single church, to earn respect? (1) The first criterion has to be that any institution wanting respect must in turn respect others. Intolerant hatemongers need not apply. (2) The second criterion is that it must not make patently false claims about the world; in particular, such claims must not be part of its dogma. (3) The third is that it should provide one or more genuinely useful social services without making those services contingent on proselytization. That may or may not be a complete list, but it's a good start. Certainly any religion failing to meet (1) and (2) deserves no respect. Likewise, a church that makes its services contingent on conversion deserves no respect. I think an institution meeting (1) and (2) without offering social services deserves simple tolerance, and no more. A church or religion that meets all 3 criteria is deserving of respect.

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Imre Lakatos

Our next reading for Philosophy of Science comes from Imre Lakatos. This reading made a lot more sense to me than any of Kuhn's stuff. As it turns out, Kuhn argues strenuously that his theory of science is not a stepstone to post-modernism, but most people who look at it think it makes even less sense taken that way.

This article compares Kuhn, Lakatos, and Laudan (whom we haven't read yet). Wikipedia has a decent summary of Lakatos's ideas:

The scientists involved in a programme will attempt to shield the theoretical core from falsification attempts behind a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses. Whereas Popper was generally regarded as disparaging such measures as 'ad hoc', Lakatos wanted to show that adjusting and developing a protective belt is not necessarily a bad thing for a research programme. Instead of asking whether a hypothesis is true or false, Lakatos wanted us to ask whether one research programme is better than another, so that there is a rational basis for preferring it. He showed that in some cases one research programme can be described as progressive while its rivals are degenerating. A progressive research programme is marked by its growth, along with the discovery of stunning novel facts, development of new experimental techniques, more precise predictions, etc. A degenerating research program is marked by lack of growth, or growth of the protective belt that does not lead to novel facts.

As the comparative article points out, not all of Lakatos's criteria are well-defined, yet I found myself nodding agreement through our reading from Lakatos, so I think he's onto something even if it needs to be fleshed out more. The problem with strict Popperianism is that, given a refutation, scientists usually don't throw out the overarching theory, but instead try to adjust it. Popper seems to say that such adjustments are always ad hoc and to be avoided. Lakatos says that if such adjustments lead to novel predictions independent of the monkey wrench that induced them, then there's no problem with them. For instance, variations in the observed orbit of planets resulted in the hypothesis that there was another large planet in the solar system. The result? Neptune's existence was predicted, and it was later found. That didn't work so well with Mercury's orbit, though a similar tack was tried.

The question for a strict Popperian is why, when it failed to find an explanation for Mercury's orbit, was Newtonian gravity not abandoned. Lakatos has a partial answer: an overarching theory won't be abandoned unless a rational alternative exists. Thus Mercury became an "unsolved problem" until Einstein's modified theory of gravity came to the fore. Still, note that Einsteinian gravity theory has not really replaced Newtonian gravity theory. In most frames of reference, Newton's methods give accurate enough results. When more precision is needed, or in cases where relativistic effects become significant, then Einstein's version is used.

I may have more to say about Lakatos later, but I found that he's also contributed quite a bit to the Philosophy of Mathematics. Non-Deductive Methods in Mathematics gives a taste of his work there.

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Russell v. Strawson

For philosophy of language, we've read Bertrand Russell's On Denoting, and Strawson's response, On Referring. I wanted to lay down a few thoughts here before I read Russell's response to Strawson.

For the first half of Strawson's article, he seems to be making reasonable points. But then we get to this example:

Let me now take an example of the uniquely referring use of an
expression not of the form, "the so-and-so ". Suppose I advance
my hands, cautiously cupped, towards someone, saying, as I do so,
" This is a fine red one ". He, looking into my hands and seeing
nothing there, may say : "What is ? What are you talking
about ? " Or perhaps, " But there's nothing in your hands ".
Of course it would be absurd to say that in saying " But you've
got nothing in your hands ",he was denying or contradicting what
I said.

My response? Of course I would be contradicting the speaker if I said "But there's nothing there." It doesn't matter if it was in pretense or not. If I take the speaker seriously, and say there's nothing there, I at least believe that I am contradicting an assertion. The article was pretty much downhill from there.

I think that Strawson is trying to make an argument for how we use language, and tie that to its meaning, while Russell is interested in the meaning itself, independent of usage. Strawson wants to take context into account; Russell wants to explicate the context using quantifiers. Strawson somehow tries to argue that the context itself is not part of the meaning of the sentence, even though he is rather adamant that we use the context to determine the meaning. Russell seems to think that if it is required to determine the meaning, then the context itself is part of the meaning, and, again, must be explicitly included.

I tend to side with Russell. One more example from Strawson and then I'll go see what Russell has to say about him. Strawson argues that these two statements are completely equivalent: "Napoleon was the man who ordered the execution of the
Duc D'Enghien." & "Napoleon ordered the execution of the Duc D'Enghien." Nonsense. Even if I accept the premise that only a human can order an execution (which I do not), the first sentence indicates the gender of Napoleon and makes it explicit that Napoleon refers to one person rather than to a group of people. No. Those are not completely equivalent. If we already knew who Napoleon was, we could use them interchangeably, but only because we already knew that Napoleon was one, and only one, man.

Take a less familiar name. (A) "Trimnald ordered all handkerchiefs to be burned." Is Trimnald a man? A woman? An organization? An alien invader? (B) "Trimnald was the (x) who ordered all handkerchiefs to be burned." Now we know that Trimnald was an x. That sentence gives extra information. To suggest otherwise is absurd. Strawson might argue that in the context where A is written, it is clear what Trimnald is, but that would be the meaning of A plus its context, which would need to be explicitly given.

One of my earlier lessons in writing math proofs was to indicate where everything comes from. So if I want to use x, I can't just insert x and go from there. I have to explicate it as something like "Let x be any real number," or "Let x be any positive integer," or even, "Consider the irrational number x." If I want a decent proof, I cannot allow any of that to be inferred from context alone. If we want the meaning of language to be clear, we must be equally careful not to assume context when it's not actually given.

Okay, going to read Russell's response now.

POST-READING: Mr. Strawson On Referring. First, wow. This is a 5 page article, much shorter than either of the previous ones. It's a bit like a roast, actually, in that Russell, while using the most scholarly of language, manages to call Strawson a dishonest idiot, without ever using those exact words. And I meant to bring up that Strawson analyzes "The King of France is wise," while Russell's example said, "The present King of France is bald," which is a different beast altogether, especially, as Russel points out, if you specify the year.

The terminology is different than I used in my analysis, but I think when Russell mentions "egocentricity," he is referring to what I called "use," and when he refers to "descriptions," that is what I called "meaning." Russell says that, fine, he didn't deal with egocentricity in Denoting, but he did in plenty of other places, and shouldn't Mr. Strawson have read them before going off the deep end? Likewise, Russell would like more precision in language when it is used in philosophy than when it is used in everyday life, just as every other discipline has its own unique jargon.

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A Bit More on Kuhn

I asked Dr. Wahl about Kuhn at the end of class today. Essentially, he thinks that there is a body of assumptions that contribute to the decision about how to test a hypothesis, and some of those assumptions are ones that no one would ever think of questioning.

On a certain level, he's correct. In the normal course of things, such assumptions exist. However, every time they are used, that is a test. If a consistent difficulty is noticed by many researchers, in many different labs, the assumptions will eventually be looked at. Examples that come to mind immediately are the orbit of Mercury and Newtonian gravity's failure to explain it and Conservation of Mass (which does not hold when mass changes to energy or at speeds near c). Yes, assumptions were made and held onto tenaciously, but, in the end, those assumptions were overturned.

So I profess myself still unimpressed with Kuhn.

ADDENDUM: I'll probably have more to say after class next Wednesday, but I finally got some idea of why Popper might need some criticism from Dr. Wahl yesterday. The problem is that Popper leans on falsification to the exclusion of all else. In his view the goal of any test done by any scientist should be to falsify the theory. He wants to downplay any role of confirmation/corroboration. In other words, if the test goes as the theory predicts, Popper would see it as a failure.

So possibly what Kuhn is getting at is that the first reaction of a scientist who gets a result that does not accord with the prevailing theory is not to discard the theory, but, rather, to see what else might have gone wrong. But he still writes as though the theory itself is sacrosanct, which just isn't the case. It's held as true until some discrepancy becomes noticeable, and then it's either adapted or replaced. The process may be slow and painful, and full of argument, but if there is a genuine discrepancy, it will eventually be examined, and, more eventually, fixed in some fashion.

One sidenote. We discussed the case of Mercury in class, and Wahl pointed out that the response of 19th century scientists was not to abandon Newtonian gravitation, which, if they operated according to strict Popperian principles, they should have. After several failed attempts to solve the problem, it was largely ignored, until Einstein's theory of General Relativity turned out to give the correct solution. The problem with simply throwing out Newtonian gravitation was that it worked in most situations. The one discrepancy revealed its limitations, but it had so much corroborating evidence from other sources that no one was going to just give up on it. In other words, falsification is not the whole story, but it's an important part of the story.

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Thomas Samuel Kuhn

I haven't found the entire article online yet, but much of it is available through a Google Books preview. Skimming through the preview, it looks like we only have the first part in our book anyway. The article is called, "Logic of Discovery, or Psychology of Research?" It argues that Popper's view of science, while it has its place, is not how science is actually practiced on a day-to-day basis.

I haven't read enough of Popper or Kuhn to be sure that Kuhn isn't demolishing a straw-man, or even just dissembling about the meaning of "falsification" and "test." Kuhn argues that science is more about "puzzle solving" than it is about "problem solving." His main point seems to be that in the normal run of things scientists simply assume the currently accepted theory and work within it. At least in this excerpt, I get the feeling he's missing a crucial point.

Yes, in any run-of-the-mill lab, a groundwork of theory is assumed. The puzzle-solving involves figuring out how that theory applies to whatever work the lab does, whether the work is growing cells, or running current through vases, or whatever. But Kuhn seems to miss that the run-of-the-mill work will be a test of the deduced application. If it turns out to predict different results than those observed, there are three possible culprits: (1) Bad data; (2) Bad interpretation; (3) Bad theory. In the majority of cases, the first two are the most likely. Assuming that instrumentation problems can be sorted out, and enough trials are run to make chance systematic errors extremely unlikely, (1) can be dealt with. The next level to check is (2). How can the interpretation be modified to fit what has been observed? All of this fits in the realm of Kuhn's "puzzle-solving", but fits equally well with Popper's "falsification." Level (3) will only be engaged after levels (1) and (2) have been exhausted, but it takes more than one research group to really effect a change on level (3). Multiple groups have to have similar problems before anyone credible will seriously consider mucking with level (3).

My biggest issue with Kuhn so far is that I don't see how you can possibly have "puzzle-solving" without of necessity having "falsification." How do you know when the puzzle is solved, otherwise? Part of the puzzle solving is figuring out what the accepted theory says should happen in a situation, and that automatically creates a way to falsify the interpretation. I will grant that it takes a lot of broken puzzles before an accepted theory is itself called into question, but that's almost the point. If all it took was one "problem," then every time a machine malfunctioned we'd have a paradigm shift.

Some of Kuhn's examples also make me question his reasoning. He writes that "many theories, for example the Ptolemaic, were replaced before they had in fact been tested." Now, the Ptolemaic theory kept having to add in more and more epicycles to account for the observed astronomical data, and that, to me, would be a sort of test. The more data came in, the more the Ptolemaic system had to be modified. It was never sufficient as it was to explain every aberration. Also, the ad hoc adding of epicycles smacks of Popper's "irrefutability," since, given any conflicting data, more epicycles could be tacked on to "explain" it.

I'll be curious to find out in class if there's more to Kuhn in stuff that we didn't read. It's possible, and maybe likely, that we got the simplest version of his ideas, and that they don't really make sense until they're fleshed out a bit more.

Further reading on Wikipedia:
Kuhn
Popper

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Karl Popper

The second reading for Philosophy of Science this semester is Science: Conjectures and Refutations. It's a beautiful thing. Now, there are some problems with defining 'scientific' solely in terms of falsifiability, but it is certainly an important feature to note in any theory. I particularly liked that what brought Popper to use that as a criterion was that two competing psychological theories (those of Freud and Adler) were sufficiently vague as to be able to explain any conceivable set of behaviors. He had at first been impressed with their seemingly endless lists of confirmations...until he noticed that there seemed to be no behavior that could be taken as falsifying either one. The link above is to the full article, but I just thought I'd post his summary list. Closely related: Confirmation Bias. I've bolded a few of the parts that I find most significant.

1. It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory — if we look for confirmations.

2. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory.

3. Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.

4. A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.

5. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.

6. Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of "corroborating evidence.")

7. Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers — for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing operation as a "conventionalist twist" or a "conventionalist stratagem.")

One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.

Shorter Popper: A scientific approach to any idea is to throw rocks at it and see if it breaks. If you throw marshmallows, you're doing it wrong.

Redefinition is trickier. There are cases where the breaks simply indicate the limits of an idea, rather than its overall refutation, and it might be able to be modified to account for those breaks. There are also cases where lunatics liberally apply duct tape and declare it as good as new.

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Moral Foundations?

Via 3 Quarks Daily, I discovered a morality quiz/survey site. It's got a nice variety of topics. Here are my results for the "Foundations" Survey. Green = my result; blue = average liberal result; red = average conservative result.


Apparently I object more to harm and less to unfairness than the typical liberal. I don't see much point in the Authority/Purity categories, especially not for mature adults. Anyway, there's a lot of material on the site, and it's...not as fluffy as the typical internet quiz site.

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Irony:

Working on a torture scene in a story and then going to a discussion group on Kant's "Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals." (Amazon)

Which reminds me, I think the reason I've been posting less is that I've been working on outside writing projects, and have felt less of a need to write here. I'll try to work on that.

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Interesting Quote

At least with science, adaptive knowledge is self-consistent within the context of evolution and science. Tautological and limited? Perhaps, but it is at least an internally consistent truth system. Within the system, adaptive knowledge will tend to be closer to the truth than non-adaptive knowledge.

Philosophical naturalists assume, of course, that there actually is an absolute noumenon or truth, and that science is the path to it - which IMO, is difficult, if not impossible, to defend.

They also assume that our knowledge is always becoming progressively more accurate, approaching the noumenon in a linear or asymptotic way - but there is no way of knowing that. We could simply be approaching a local maxima in our tiny local truth system, without realizing that greater and possibly unrelated maximas exist elsewhere in what we call reality.

~Tom S. (seventh comment here)

Based on my readings in Pragmatism, we accept that science produces knowledge because doing so seems to "work." (see this xkcd) However, suppose it didn't work. We would then try something else, and that itself would be invoking the scientific method. I definitely need to take a philosophy of science class. At the very least, I'll know what things to be confused about then.

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Henry William* James: The Will to Believe

The next section of Pragmatism: A Reader was a selection of writings by William James. I found myself nodding agreement to the vast majority of his paragraphs, but then he'd suddenly go off the deep end and I had no idea what connection there was supposed to be between one idea and the next. For the moment, I'll just focus on the first essay (I'd planned on looking at all of them, but looking at just this one got rather long).
*For some reason I keep wanting to call him "Henry" instead of "William". Not really sure why.

The Will to Believe was a fascinating read, honestly. Flawed, but fascinating. Essentially, James is acknowledging that there is little to no empirical evidence of any sort of deity (and evidence against certain specific formulations of deities), but wants to argue that belief is still the better choice. It might be more convincing did he not resort to an artificial limitation of the field (or two), and a false dichotomy.

First, James is only interested in people for whom belief is what he terms a "living possibility," meaning that it exists as a genuine possibility for a person. A "dead possibility" would be something that has already been rejected, even before the question is asked. For example, belief in Zeus would be a dead possibility for most modern people. So James is limiting his argument to doubters, agnostics, and people who already believe.

Then he pulls an interesting narrative trick. He discusses Pascal's wager, and denigrates it as an insult to any self-respecting deity. What he's trying to do, it becomes clear later, is eliminate the possibility that anyone is believing solely out of fear they may be wrong (and then condemned to hellfire, etc.). Instead, he's going to argue that people who don't believe do so out of fear, so he has to make sure he's cleared away the opposing possibility.

James also limits his discussion to something on the order of the deist god, or maybe the Divine Providence of the Founding Fathers. Again, this has a clear purpose: to avoid any specific truth-claims that could be falsified. As if in justification, he denigrates "superstitious" formulations of god. Now, if James just stopped there, with his unfalsifiable deity, and said "believe or don't," I'd be okay with it. But he still wants to argue that belief is better.

This is where the false dichotomy comes in. Since it is a choice, and there is no evidence either way, James argues that the only reason not to believe is out of fear that one would be wrong. Now, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. If this was mentioned as a single possibility among many, it might be more palatable, but even then I'd find it strange. Why would someone be afraid of being wrong when choosing to believe in a deity? It only makes sense in a Pascalian sort of way, if said person is afraid he's chosen the wrong deity. It makes no sense at all from an epistemic point of view, which is what James is trying to use. It's much more likely to go the other way: where someone believes in a deity out of fear of the supposed hellfire that awaits nonbelievers...which is why James tries to eliminate Pascal's wager as a reasonable option. It doesn't work, but it's still worth reading through.

One other interesting argument. James thinks that if a belief, whether true or not, produces positive effects in a person, then that person is justified in that belief. This is a precursor to his later "verification" theory of truth (which was likely a precursor to the verification theory of meaning), but it's a bit too utilitarian for my tastes. James does acknowledge that the belief must not conflict with other strongly held beliefs, but it still seems a bit of a stretch to call "positive personal effects" a "justification" for a belief. If I behave better because I think some invisible shadow is watching me and reporting on me, and arrange it so that this belief is unfalsifiable, it may produce positive observable effects on my behavior, but it is in no ways justified.

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Pragmatism: More from Peirce

The other selections from Peirce in the book I've been reading are "How to Make Our Ideas Clear", "A Definition of Pragmatism" (probably online somewhere, but a quick search didn't find it), "Evolutionary Love" and some selections from longer works, presumably chosen because they shed light on pragmatism.

Of these three, the first is probably the most interesting. In essence, Peirce argues that the only way for an idea to be clear is to look at its effects. He doesn't use the words "testable" or "falsifiable" but it would be reasonable to think of Peirce's idea of "clarity" in those terms. He argues that if two seemingly different ideas would produce exactly the same observable effects, then those two ideas are merely different variations of the exact same idea. To a certain extent, this makes sense, but just because all predictions thusfar agree is no guarantee that all predictions will agree. Either we need to establish an isomorphism between the ideas to see why they should be the same, or we need to think some more to find a way to distinguish between the two.

In the second, I think I finally found at least part of what Heidegger was arguing about when he discussed "signs" and "signification." He repudiated it outright, and now that I've seen what he was trying to repudiate, I may have to go back and reread those pages. It's very frustrating to read a refutation of an idea when you've never actually encountered the idea itself. There are also strong hints of phenomenological thought in Peirce's writing, so I have a suspicion he may have been an influence on, say, Husserl, and probably other phenomenologists.

For the third, I'm not quite sure what to think. Essentially Peirce is attacking the "nature red in tooth and claw" interpretation that was often attached to Darwin's ideas. Not having read Darwin myself, I can't say whether that was a misunderstanding on Peirce's part or just an early idea that turned out to be an oversimplification for how evolution actually works. Peirce is arguing that there are also love, altruism and cooperation in animals, and so a model based solely on competition is inadequate to explain the diversity in nature. This is quite correct; I just don't know when, exactly, such ideas started to be widely incorporated into evolutionary theory, but they're certainly incorporated now. I'm not sure how this article fits with an intro to pragmatism, either, unless it was an example of applying pragmatic thought to the sciences.

At any rate, if you're going to read just one of the articles by Peirce, I'd recommend "The Fixation of Belief". If you want a second, I'd suggest "How to Make Our Ideas Clear". The others, so far, don't seem to add as much.

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Peirce and Pragmatism

A while back, I picked up a book called Pragmatism: A Reader, edited by Louis Menand. It was a name I'd encountered before, but I wasn't sure what it actually signified in philosophy. I've made it through the introduction and the first two selections so far, but the short version of pragmatism is that human beings think in particular ways, and we need to take that into account when we examine beliefs. There's more to it than that, but that's a decent starting point, and seems to be Peirce's main point in the essay, "The Fixation of Belief".

After reading the article, I'm a bit surprised it never came up in Epistemology. Admittedly, we only had a semester to cover several hundred years of thought, but we never even mentioned the pragmatists. Still, I'd encountered Peirce's name before. At least one of the philosophers at ISU, McCurdy, is quite into Peirce, and has enthused many of the philosophy students about him as well. To be honest, most of what I heard secondhand turned me off, but the firsthand encounter with the article was more than enough to counter that. The "whole thing is well worth reading, but I wanted to post a few sections that I particularly liked. This first one is how Peirce phrases the assumption required to engage meaningfully in science:

Its fundamental hypothesis, restated in more familiar language, is this: There are Real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those Reals affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as are our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really and truly are; and any man, if he have sufficient experience and he reason enough about it, will be led to the one True conclusion. The new conception here involved is that of Reality. It may be asked how I know that there are any Reals. If this hypothesis is the sole support of my method of inquiry, my method of inquiry must not be used to support my hypothesis. The reply is this: 1. If investigation cannot be regarded as proving that there are Real things, it at least does not lead to a contrary conclusion; but the method and the conception on which it is based remain ever in harmony. No doubts of the method, therefore, necessarily arise from its practice, as is the case with all the others. 2. The feeling which gives rise to any method of fixing belief is a dissatisfaction at two repugnant propositions. But here already is a vague concession that there is some one thing which a proposition should represent. Nobody, therefore, can really doubt that there are Reals, for, if he did, doubt would not be a source of dissatisfaction. The hypothesis, therefore, is one which every mind admits. So that the social impulse does not cause men to doubt it. 3. Everybody uses the scientific method about a great many things, and only ceases to use it when he does not know how to apply it. 4. Experience of the method has not led us to doubt it, but, on the contrary, scientific investigation has had the most wonderful triumphs in the way of settling opinion. These afford the explanation of my not doubting the method or the hypothesis which it supposes; and not having any doubt, nor believing that anybody else whom I could influence has, it would be the merest babble for me to say more about it. If there be anybody with a living doubt upon the subject, let him consider it.

This last paragraph is a summary of the nonscientific means that people often use to hold or justify their beliefs.

On the contrary, each has some peculiar convenience of its own. The a priori method is distinguished for its comfortable conclusions. It is the nature of the process to adopt whatever belief we are inclined to, and there are certain flatteries to the vanity of man which we all believe by nature, until we are awakened from our pleasing dream by rough facts. The method of authority will always govern the mass of mankind; and those who wield the various forms of organized force in the state will never be convinced that dangerous reasoning ought not to be suppressed in some way. If liberty of speech is to be untrammeled from the grosser forms of constraint, then uniformity of opinion will be secured by a moral terrorism to which the respectability of society will give its thorough approval. Following the method of authority is the path of peace. Certain non-conformities are permitted; certain others (considered unsafe) are forbidden. These are different in different countries and in different ages; but, wherever you are, let it be known that you seriously hold a tabooed belief, and you may be perfectly sure of being treated with a cruelty less brutal but more refined than hunting you like a wolf. Thus, the greatest intellectual benefactors of mankind have never dared, and dare not now, to utter the whole of their thought; and thus a shade of prima facie doubt is cast upon every proposition which is considered essential to the security of society. Singularly enough, the persecution does not all come from without; but a man torments himself and is oftentimes most distressed at finding himself believing propositions which he has been brought up to regard with aversion. The peaceful and sympathetic man will, therefore, find it hard to resist the temptation to submit his opinions to authority. But most of all I admire the method of tenacity for its strength, simplicity, and directness. Men who pursue it are distinguished for their decision of character, which becomes very easy with such a mental rule. They do not waste time in trying to make up their minds what they want, but, fastening like lightning upon whatever alternative comes first, they hold to it to the end, whatever happens, without an instant's irresolution. This is one of the splendid qualities which generally accompany brilliant, unlasting success. It is impossible not to envy the man who can dismiss reason, although we know how it must turn out at last.

I can definitely recommend Peirce to anyone with an interest in this area. Hopefully the rest of the book will be just as good.

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Timelessness

I've often encountered the claim that "there is no time" or "time is an illusion." Taken at face value, I could find no sensible meaning in those statements. I think I finally figured out what at least some of these claims mean, and it was sparked by an offhand comment from Pelletti, about "change." When they deny time, they're not denying that things change, but they hold that separate from time. However, something is required for things to change, and it makes no sense to me to call that anything other than time. That's where my confusion came in. What they're denying is the view of time as a genuine fourth dimension. That may not be clear either, so I'll try to clarify.

Think about a reel of film. Each frame represents one moment of the film. If we stacked these frames on top of each other, we'd get a representation of the film plus its time element as a dimension. Now, we've got three spatial dimensions (that we perceive, at least), and it's harder to picture stacking "cubes" to add in time as a fourth dimension, but the idea is the same. What this implies is, just like the film, there is a physical record of changes through time, and that record exists regardless of what the current "present moment" is. There's a stack of previous frames "behind" us that, if we knew how, we could access and sort through. This, I think, is what scientists who deny time are actually denying.

Instead, they see what I would call time (and they might call change) as something more like ripples in a pond. The ripples rise and fade away and rise and fade away, but leave no permanent record of their presence. There is only a dynamic process, and not anything like a physical dimension of time. Now, even if this view is correct (and I currently don't feel I'm in a position to have a useful opinion on that), it would still be useful to treat time as a dimension. We know the rates with which certain things change, and within the same inertial frame of reference, we can use those to establish the "time coordinates" in that frame. At 0 seconds, a drop of water falls into the puddle. At 1 second, a series of concentric ripples can be seen across the pool. Etc. Just as if we recorded the scene with a camera, we could treat the waves and the relative time at which they occur as a four-dimensional object.

From an everyday standpoint, there doesn't seem to be a way to tell whether time is an actual dimension or merely a process of change. What I wonder, though, is whether treating it as only a process of change is consistent in various relativistic and quantum applications. I remember in A Brief History of Time, Hawking espoused the idea that in a black hole, an outside observer would see time stop as an unfortunate victim plunged towards the event horizon, but that the unfortunate individual would not see that at all; things would continue to change for him but in a time dimension perpendicular to the outside one. I'm not seeing a way to reconcile that with the "dynamic change" model of time. If from the outside we see all change stop, but on the inside change is still occurring, we have a physical presence for one of the prior moments of the falling individual, so that moment continues to exist for us, even as the person within the event horizon moves past it in his time. Maybe there's a way to reconcile dynamic change with this, or maybe Hawking was wrong, or... who knows.

From a purely philosophical standpoint, I variously find the "dynamic change" model liberating and depressing, depending on my mood. It's not a model I care for at all when I'm feeling a bit depressed, as it would mean that all of the people/places/things from my past have actually and completely ceased to exist, rather than continuing to exist in a time that I no longer have access to. However, in a better mood, it's liberating to think that each moment is completely new and fresh with no physical past weighing it down. Neither viewpoint is a useful argument for or against the position, but I find it amusing how completely opposite my own reactions are.

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Merleau-Ponty and Post-Modernism

I finished reading the required chapters in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception last night. For the most part, I was impressed. This is the first time I've ever encountered a non-taiji player describing something like the bodily sensations that I notice in push-hands, the way the body can move before conscious thought sets in. I felt like 90% of what Merleau-Ponty was saying made perfect sense and was exactly the way I myself experienced things like the body and time.

But one thing troubles me. I can see little pointers scattered through the text that almost certainly paved the way for the post-modern movement. I have no problem with the idea that nothing can be known with absolute certainty, but post-modernism generally doesn't tack on those last three words. It tends towards an absolute relativism that I find to be at odds with the phenomenological reduction. Rather than putting the world in brackets, and not worrying about what the phenomena can or can't tell us about that [world], post-modernists seem to bury the world entirely. Essentially, there are no facts, and all viewpoints are equally valid. Pelletti commented that it was pointless to argue with real postmodernists, as they have no interest in coming to any sort of common truth; instead, it becomes nothing more than a game of manipulation and power.

He also gave a rather extreme example of a French post-modern philosopher (can't remember the name, but I think he was at Harvard) who scoffed at the idea that King Tut might have died of smallpox. Since smallpox wasn't discovered (read: created/invented) until the 1800's, it was completely impossible that King Tut could have died of it! Now, with the qualification that no one in King Tut's day would have known about smallpox, and therefore experientially he could not have died of smallpox, I can say, fine. But lacking that qualification...

Essentially (according to the pomos), there are no facts or truths. There are only ideas that have won some sort of ideological battle, and so are currently accepted. So ... if it was not accepted that rattlesnakes had deadly venom, would no one die of rattlesnake bites? If it was not accepted that people don't fall through solid material, would no one be able to walk down the street without sinking into the earth? Going by the post-modern perspective, these would both seem to be the case. It also becomes clear why this viewpoint is attractive to nutjobs of all stripes. If a non-philosopher justifies some bizarre idea by an appeal to post-modernism, I'd estimate that there's a 99.99999% chance that said person is a crackpot. This estimate is probably low.

Back to Merleau Ponty, I'm hoping to read the rest of the book after finals are done, and then I might have more to say specifically about his ideas.

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The Stranger

We actually didn't quite make it to Albert Camus' The Stranger in Existentialism this semester. Levenson wound up making it an optional read, though he spent the last ten minutes or so of the last class discussing some of its themes. It's...a strangely compelling, yet disturbing, read. Meursault is the main character, and he is pathologically without attachment. Whatever comes his way, he accepts, and accepts without examination or thought, or even much resembling a reaction. In the middle, this leads him to kill a man.

There can be pathological detachment as well as pathological attachment. The latter is more common, so most people need to learn some distance. Meursault, though, is too detached. What came to mind when I was trying to think what bothered me about his character was a taiji reference. The goal is to relax the body, but not have it be limp: alert relaxation, we often call it. The muscles are relaxed but there is still life in them, and they can respond. Meursault only ever yields; throughout most of the book he never actually responds. "Yield and neutralize" is a decent summary of all you need to know for push-hands, but if all you ever do is yield, you eventually are pushed further and further back until your root breaks. This is a surprisingly apt description for all that happens to Meursault.

Perhaps the strangest thing about this book is how much I wanted to keep reading it, to find out what happened next. The next strangest thing is the effect the ending had on me. I don't want to spoil it, but what should by all rights have been a depressing, demoralizing ending is instead empowering and freeing, and I'm not quite sure I understand why just yet. Perhaps it's because Meursault finally responds to his situation rather than just passively accepting it. I'm not entirely certain.

I am certain that the Matthew Ward translation is excellent. It does not feel like a translation at all. The prose is brilliantly crisp.

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