pilgrim.not.wanderer

One of the ways we make sense of our lives is by narrating them according to certain culturally meaningful stories.

There is almost always a grain of truth to these stories.  But they can become stale.

One of our great stories is the one where the heroic rebel steps out from the monolithic crowd.  He or she finally gets to ‘be themselves’.

Whenever things go bad for us in a group we belong to, we always narrate the situation as if we’re a heroic rebel and the group is a monolithic crowd.  We end up as the hero.

Sure, there is grain of truth to this story.  But it is getting really stale.

In our culture, we ALL think we’re the rebel hero.  That sensibility is now deeply imbued into our mass culture. The need to stand out is the engine which drives ‘the system’. 

The way we step out from the crowd and achieve authenticity is through our clothes, our music, our cars, our hobbies, etc.  All of this is consumed.  To be rebel is to be an edgy shopper.  To be rebel is to consume on the cutting edge.  Then everyone will want to be like you.  They’ll all become like you.  Then a new rebel will emerge, and the cycle continues.  This is how consumer culture works.

True rebellion now requires us to fade into the crowd.

On the other hand, what’s so wrong with consumption?  What we consume really does shape us into the kind person we are.  I like finding quirky, interesting things to buy.  Is this so bad?  Always?

Isn’t the problem with the way sellers try to harness us by our base passions, bypassing our critical judgment?  

Again, being ‘passionate’ is always praised in our society.  Maybe the problem isn’t really with consumerism, but with ‘passion-ism’.  Who is praised for having good judgment?  

Embodied creatures must consume, right?  That’s how life works, right?  So isn’t a good and interesting life built (at least in part) by consumption?

The only person who is free from self-limitation in view of the other, is the other.

The only person who can issue a naked demand for what’s in their interest, with no shame, is the other.

Only the other can boldly engage in overt self-assertion, even violently, without a hint of shame.

The Nazis were able to rise to ascendancy because of their ability, thanks to post WWI realities, to cast themselves as the other.  How else were they able to lead the Germans in such bold self-assertion without shame?

You can bet that soon we’ll all be trying to narrate history such that we end up as the other.  In the world of tomorrow, which has already broken in upon today in many parts of the West, this will be THE way to achieve cultural power.

Only the other is free from social pressure to engage in self-questioning and self-doubt.  

The icon of righteousness is the other, fist raised high, defiantly culture-warring against larger society.

How do you think white-power racism groups get off the ground?  They ‘otherize’ themselves, right?

I hear many folks these days speaking in hush tones about ‘the other’.  How do we treat ‘the other’?  Hmm.

This, most often from the lips of the self-professed enemies of abstraction.  Ironic, no?  Isn’t ‘the other’ among the most repulsive of abstractions?  And it positively reeks of Cartesianism, right?.  

I’m prejudiced against these kinds of folks.  

I much prefer the company of those who concern themselves with the well-being of others, rather than ringing their hands, faces ashen, in worry about ‘the other’.

BTW, if you still think being ‘the other’ is a sorry state to be in, you are living in the past.  ’The other’ sits on the throne of political/cultural power.  That’s why everyone is in such a rush to belong to a minority community.  And that’s why minority communities are in such a rush to establish sub-communities.  I suspect that most talk these days in praise of community and in criticism of individualism is phony.  Its end game is 7 billion communities of one.  Community is the new individualism.  This is the engine which drives consumer culture.  

The decision to retreat to an ivory tower to engage in philosophical reflection is a moral decision.  That is, it is subject to moral evaluation.  Why not feed some starving children?  Even to stop and think about this question is to choose to delay helping the starving.  What about the safety and luxury of life in an ivory tower?  Somehow you obtained this.  From whom?  Justly?  

Ever notice that when folks do embark on this kind of philosophical retreat, they imagine it to be a noble, even heroic, thing to do?  The reality of our moral obligations precedes even our philosophical reflections on them.  We find ourselves with them.

The person who refuses to acknowledge that they find themselves with these moral obligations is seriously unwell, bluffing, self-deceptive, or satanic.  

Acknowledging these moral obligations is not a matter of fideism.  Such an acknowledgement is the beginning of moral reason, not its end or its crowning achievement.  

Unless we are are seriously unwell, we all know that moral obligations exist, even before we stop to philosophize about it.  This, regardless of what we have to say about it.  Even the false heroism of blanket skepticism is animated by a knowledge of our moral obligations.  How else would this kind of skepticism have attained such an aura of bravery and nobility?  

In other words, while a radical denial of absolute obligations cannot destroy the moral passions of man, it can render them homeless.  The desire for justice and brotherhood can then no more confess itself for what it is, but will seek embodiment in some theory of salvation through violence.  Thus we see arising those skeptical, hard-boiled, allegedly scientific forms of fanaticism which are so characteristic of our modern age.

{snip}

[Academic freedom] consists in certain metaphysical assumptions without which freedom is logically untenable, and without the firm profession of which freedom can be upheld only in a state of suspended logic, which threatens to collapse at any moment and which in these searching and revolutionary times cannot fail to collapse before long.

Man’s rapidly increasing destructive power will soon put the ideas of our time to crucial test.  We may be faced with the fact that only by resuming the great tradition which embodies faith in these realities can the continuance of the human race on earth, equipped with the powers of modern science, be made both possible and desirable.

Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty, 58.

Science or scholarship can never be more than an affirmation of the things we believe in.  These beliefs will by their very nature, be of a normative character, claiming universal validity; they must also be responsible beliefs, held in due consideration of evidence and of the fallibility of all beliefs; but eventually they are ultimate commitments, issued under the seal of our personal judgement.  To all further critical scruples we must at some point finally reply: “For I believe so.”

We are living in the midst of a period requiring great readjustments.  One of these is to learn once more to hold beliefs, our own beliefs.  The task is formidable, for we have been taught for centuries to hold as belief only the residue which no doubt can conceivably assail.  There is no such residue left to-day, and that is why the ability to believe with open eyes must once more be systematically re-acquired.  

Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty, 37.

I’d say all of my philosophical interests revolve around this.

I’m especially interested in academic or intellectual conflict.  

It is a sign of your inexperience or immaturity if you are scandalized by the persistence of conflict even amongst seemingly trustworthy and intelligent ‘experts’.  

We used to think (we still do?) that if set we two brilliant minds (or groups of minds) into conflict with each other, the battle will eventually end with a winner and the truth will be uncovered.  

Things haven’t panned out like this.  Conflict persists and seems to be hardened by these battles.

In my experience, if you give both sides a sympathetic ear you’ll find that each is somewhat convincing.  To the partisans, however, the other side will always be wrong in some plain and obvious way.  Folks on the right-wing are simply greedy and are pandering to the corporations.  Plain and simple.  Folks on the left-wing care more about seeming nice and growing bureaucracies than in actually helpful real people.  Their economics has been proven false, plain and simple.  I can’t accept either view.

Once problem is that we can’t even agree on what the problem is or what the relevant data are.  We can’t even agree on what sorts of things would rightly confirm or disconfirm the opposing positions.

Sometimes I’m tempted to think the side you choose has more to do with constructing your identity, with deciding what kind of person you want to be, than it has to do with arguments or truth.

A thought experiment conducted out on the thin branches:

Suppose someone convinced to you that an explicit and formal argument that you put forward was faulty in some way.

Would you stop believing in the conclusion of the argument? Or would you be strongly inclined to think that the problem was with your particular formulation of the argument? If so, you’d try to reformulate it. You’d try to capture it in a better way.

Somehow an informal and tacitly known argument lurks beneath the formal and explicit one.

We know the whole argument before we attempt to explicitly formulate it. We don’t suddenly realize the conclusion as we finish explicitly formulating the argument step by step. The formal and explicit argument is an expression of the informal tacit argument.

Now we might eventually become convinced that the informal and tacitly known argument can never be expressed formally in a valid way. In this way, and I think ONLY this way, do we ever decide to give up an argument.

But even here, if it is true that all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge, then in certain situations it may not count against an argument that it cannot be explicitly formalized according to a set of explicit logical rules.

Not everything we know can be rendered explicit. In other words, we know more than we can say.

What we cannot speak or write can neither become a premise nor a conclusion in an any explicit argument.

It is impossible to formalize and render explicit all of our actual beliefs, even those upon which some of our explicit beliefs are premised.

So the fact that we find ourselves unable to provide an explicit argument for something doesn’t mean we don’t know it, or don’t need to worry about it.

So it is not always wrong to allow a practice or policy or belief to prevail even though we have no explicit argument for it. It is sometimes right to keep with tradition, and it is completely rational for us to do so.

But not always.

There are no explicit rules to tell us when and when not to keep with tradition. That is just one of the many burdens of human life. We need to learn to live wisely in the midst of the uncertainty.

I’ve heard it said somewhere that if we were all pacifists war would be extinct.

But isn’t it true that if we all held to just war theory war would be extinct as well?

Given that we aren’t all pacifists, isn’t pacifism immoral?  That is, given that defense will be needed, and given that pacifism rules out this needed defense, isn’t pacifism immoral for ruling out a needed defense?

‘Pacifist’ isn’t the right label for someone who’s against a particular war, right?  You can hold to just war theory and be against nearly every war (or peace keeping mission or whatever).  What distinguishes a pacifist from the rest of us is their being against absolutely all use of violence, right?

I know physics does.  I know biology does.  I know chemistry does.  But does science exist?  

If by science you mean the collection of the sciences, then obviously science does exist.  

But is there a thing called science which can speak with its own voice?  

Who gets to say what counts as physics?  

Someone will say that the physicists do.  After all, they are the people doing physics, so they’re in the best position to know what physics is.  Physics is what the physicists do, so if we want to know what physics is we need to ask the physicists what they’re doing.

But that’s circular, right?  How do we know what a physicist is?  They are the people who do physics. How do we what physics is?  It is what the physicists do.

Given that it seems possible that the physicists could do something as physics which isn’t rightly physics (e.g. baking banana muffins), we can’t be satisfied with the circular definition.

The domain of inquiry which constitutes physics is handed to the physicists from somewhere else.  It is known by other means than physics itself.  Physics begins with the recognition of this domain of inquiry, it does not establish it.

Isn’t the same true of biology, chemistry and all the rest?

So I watched the Agenda with Steve Paikin last night.  It was about public confidence in science.  It was funny for a couple reasons.

First, a few of the guests seemed to have no concept of the problem of demarcation.  The problem is that we don’t know how to sort out the scientific from the non-scientific, in any principled way.  It might be easy to sort out some extreme cases (the tooth fairy).  But if you think that the division is always clear, I’ll bet you haven’t thought carefully enough about it.  The scientific community might have an established policy concerning what counts as scientific.  But that doesn’t mean they have a principled basis for the policy, capable of withstanding philosophical scrutiny.  

At least one of the guests seemed to think that the whole hullaballoo would dissolve if people only understood what science is.  There is surely some truth this this, but in my judgment not nearly as much as you might think.  What science is isn’t obvious, is it?

Second, one of the guests talked about what he called ‘the illusion of consensus on the matter of climate change’.  Another of the guests, a pretty young research scientist, was asked to respond.  Her only response was that she had no response.  She smiled, batted her pretty eyes in utter disbelief, and said she simply had no response.  

She said all her colleagues believe in climate change, she asserted climate change, she said climate change was a working assumption in much of her daily work as a research scientist, but she could say no more.  Maybe this was the right response for her to make.  But it didn’t address his specific point that the document people inevitably make reference to when they talk about the scientific consensus on climate change is not a true expression of scientific consensus (for a number of reasons).  

Since she believes in climate change, she doesn’t need to consider the case against it.  Given limited time and money, that might be how it works.  But then the case for her beliefs on climate change isn’t ‘evidence based’ in the relevant sense.  Instead,  her beliefs are legitimated by the plausibility structure of the community which matters for her success, along with other evidentially irrelevant pragmatic factors.  

My only point here is that this does not square with what the apologists of science have to say about science when they are trying to convince the unwashed masses of the greatness of science.  They’re always bragging about how different they are from the humanities departments: they have to base all their beliefs on the evidence and they have to relinquish any belief that isn’t supported by the evidence.  Sort of, but not quite.

The best observation of the evening was by a fellow who noted that people don’t distrust science per se, they distrust the corporations and institutions who bankroll science.  Isn’t this distrust at least somewhat appropriate? 

(BTW - if you read the preceding as a personal endorsement of anti-climate change beliefs you’ve misread me.)

Aristotle said man (humankind) is an animal with reason (a rational animal).  This is the definition of man, not the definition of the name ‘man’.  It is one thing to say how we use the word ‘man’.  It is another thing to say what this thing is (man), which we use the word ‘man’ to pick out.  People always get the definition of names and the definition of things confused.

‘Animal’ is the genus, and ‘rational’ is the specific difference.  

The genus of ‘animal’ would be something like ‘living bodies’.  The specific difference of ‘animal’ would probably be ’self-locomotion’.  (This rules out plant life.)

The genus of living bodies would be ‘bodies’. 

Anyway, if an alien landed on earth, presumably it would be an animal (a living, self-moving body) with reason.  So then, according to Aristotle, it would be human.  Even if it lacked genetic humanity, which is probably how we define humanity nowadays.  Except that’s not really a definition, is it?  A definition is supposed to tell us what a thing is, not describe one of its incidental properties.   (If there really are rational animals without genetic humanity, then having genetic humanity is incidental to being a rational animal.  Just like being black or white is incidental.  Whether black or white, you’re still human.)

Read about the gambler’s fallacy here.  The basic idea is this: it is false to think that, if a fair coin is flipped 10 times in row and tails comes up each time, heads will be more likely on the 11th flip.

If the coin is truly fair, the chances will be 50/50 every single time.  So 11th flip will be 50/50 too.

It strikes me that those who call this a fallacy misunderstand those who think that the 11th is more likely to be heads than tails.  

If you flip a coin a hundred times and every time it comes up tails, isn’t this good evidence that the coin isn’t a fair coin?

Sure, it is logically possible that tails will be flipped 100 times in row.  But it has never happened to me or (probably) anyone you know.  And if it did happen you’d be very suspicious that something funny was going on.  Admit it. You’d be suspicious.

So while the 100th flip is still 50/50, that’s besides the point.  What makes the head seem more likely after 99 tails is the joint meaning of the 100th flip together with the previous 99 flips.  100 tails in a row with a fair coin is unlikely, i.e. we don’t expect it to happen and if it did happen we’d be suspicious.  (This is true even as we acknowledge that each flip has 50/50 chance of being tails.)

If the coin really is fair, then sooner or later heads will start being flipped.  And, given that the coin is fair, we expect it will happen sooner rather than later.  So heads seems more likely than tails.

The standard response to this is to admit that, before any coins have been flipped, the chances of 100 tails is low.  But once some flips have been made the probability needs to be re-evaluated in light of these flips.  So after 99 tails have been flipped, the chances of 100 tails in a row is considerably higher than before.  But the fact that 100 tails is now more likely than before doesn’t mean the 100th is more likely than before to be tails.  The chances are still 50/50.

But this completely misses the point.  No one will deny that every flip of a fair coin is 50/50.  Heads seems more likely because of its joint meaning together with other 99 tails flipped.  This has nothing to do with the 100th flip itself.  It has everything to do with its role in providing what is necessary for a very unlikely event - 100 straight tails.  If 100 straight tails is indeed unlikely (and everyone admits this), then the conditions which would obtain this must be unlikely, right? For if the conditions were likely, then the 100 straight tails would be likely.  But it is not.  (Remember, we aren’t talking about these conditions taken in isolation, but according to their joint meaning as parts of a whole.)

As I see things, it all comes back to this: those who think that the gambler’s fallacy really is a fallacy think that rationality demands we consider each flip in isolation from the joint meaning it provides to a greater whole.  But why think that?  The standard response (see above) doesn’t give us a reason to think that.  So don’t bother repeating the standard response to me.  I don’t doubt that each flip is 50/50.  I just think this has nothing to do with our rational and justifiable shock in the face of an ever increasing run of tails in a row.

Evidently I believe that it is perfectly consistent to believe: (a) that a flip is 50/50 and (b) it is also more likely to be a either a head or tail given its joint meaning in a greater whole.

Show me why I’m wrong.

The history of science reveals that we often believe the right things for the wrong reasons.  Sometimes for embarrassingly wrong reasons.  This suggests to me that our knowledge of things proceeds on a basis other than the explicit reasons we give.  These explicit reasons are more like after-the-fact rationalizations.  It seems that we know things before we know how we know them.  So a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting that goes on is aimed at explaining and justifying what we seem to know by other means.  If that’s all true, then it is the height of existential dishonesty when the champions of reason pretend that only explicit arguments and/or explicit scientific research furnishes us with knowledge.

The history of science also suggests that some of the scientific theories that seem most obvious today will be overturned or be drastically re-conceptualized in the future.  This will happen because of unanticipated, surprise developments.  Because of the surprising nature of these developments, we don’t know what we will be most embarrassed about in 30 years.  We’ll have to wait until the surprises happen.

If it is irrational (or otherwise improper) to question the scientific consensus, wouldn’t rationality (or propriety) bring scientific progress to a halt?  Admittedly, there would be a little bit of room for progress as we chased down all the implications entailed by the current scientific consensus.  But don’t we expect surprises?  Aren’t we at least open to surprise?  

If it is wrong to question the scientific consensus, then aren’t we left trapped within the confines of this consensus?  It is not as if we are free to move where the consensus moves.  For the consensus will never move unless individuals or small groups first begin to step outside of it.

If someone asks you how you deal with the relationship between faith and reason, throw a question back at them.  ”Whose reason?”

It is not as if there’s an uncontroversial, unambiguous conception of what reason is or what its deliverances are.  

Someone will say, “It is science!  What science says, and nothing else, is reason.”

But this is laughable.  Science depends for its very existence upon a kind of common pre-scientific reasoning.  And the most basic truths that we depend on everyday are not knowable via science.

If you want to, I suppose you could call science a subsection of reason.  Fine.  But whatever else we know, we know science (understood in the modern sense) is not simply another name for this thing, reason.  

Unless you think our pre-scientific knowledge which gives life to science is known by ‘faith’.  But then science will be based on faith, no?  The champions of science as reason will not want to make that move, will they?

I reject most of the negotiated truces between ‘reason’ and ‘faith’.  I find that the more you poke at them the faster they crumble under their own weight.

I think it is funny when a journalist, scientist or a theologian pontificates on the relationship between ‘reason’ and ‘faith’, presuming that one of these negotiated truces is obviously binding on anyone of sound mind.  Often they will being with, “We all know now, thanks to Immanuel Kant, that…”  Then they’ll have a few nasty things to say about fundamentalists.  Everyone of good manners is expected to cluck their tongues in disgust.

OK, so I listened to an atheist/theist debate over the existence of God a couple days ago.  I may not attend or participate in debates, but I do sometimes listen to them on my iPod for kicks.

Anyway, the atheist presented the usual case against God - the lack of evidence and the problem of evil.  Fair enough.

But then the theist offered an argument for God based on some scientific evidence.  He was either a working research scientist or PhD student in science, I can’t remember.  The argument had 3 or 4 premises, and he claimed they were all backed up by articles in well respected scientific journals, which he listed.  The argument was obviously logically valid - if the premises were true then the conclusion would be true.  

The problem was that the atheist wasn’t a scientist, let alone a scientist in the appropriate field.  She was a philosopher.  So she couldn’t really interact with the argument in any interesting way.  All she could say was that she was sure that if Richard Dawkins was present he could rip the argument to pieces.  (This was an appeal to authority and an expression of faith, no?)

Anyway, why have a debate if one side can’t properly deal with the other side’s major argument?  It is not that she didn’t have a convincing response to it, it is that she couldn’t even begin to deal with it because she wasn’t a scientist, let alone a scientist in the appropriate field.

Take this as another example of why debates are dumb.

What’s wrong with inequality and exploitation?  Aren’t these terms already loaded to sound bad from the get go?  Isn’t it a cheap shot to use this kind of language in a debate?

Surely some forms of inequality are bad, as are some forms of exploitation.  But all?  Always?

Suppose I exploit someone’s excess supply of potato chips and their need for cash.  I give them the cash they want and I get the chips I want.  

That’s exploitation isn’t it?  (I could have just given them the money.)  What’s wrong with that?  Isn’t trade always based upon exploitation of some kind?  Is trade then always wrong?

Is it fundamentally unjust that we don’t all have an equal amount of chips?   Is it really the government’s job to redistribute all the chips in Canada to make sure everyone is equal?  

The problem is that chips are NOT just sitting out there waiting to be redistributed by the state.  They belong to someone, right?  Somebody grew the potatoes.  Somebody cooked ‘em.  And then the government gets to come in and forcefully take them away?

Shouldn’t we be less worried about equality and more concerned to see that the poorest folks do better?

BTW - I believe in the welfare state, and I believe in government regulation to protect us from some kinds of exploitation.  I do.

“The government has no business in the bedrooms of Canadians!”

I dare you to find a politician who would disagree with this.  It is now a political truism.  If you don’t know, you should know that until the late sixties homosex was illegal in Britain.  From what I gather, you could actually be jailed for it.

OK.  I accept this. (Keep the government out of our bedrooms.)

But does the government have any business in a business’ human resources room?  

What if I decide to hire only men?  Only women?  Only asians?  What business does the government have in intruding on this?  Me and the men/women/asians are consenting adults conducting business privately.  

What if decided to only have sex with asians?  I’d be a sexual racist of sorts.  How come the government does NOT intrude on my private sexual practices (between consenting adults), but they DO intrude on my private hiring practices (between consenting adults).

How come human rights tribunals don’t bring folks up on charges for promiscuous sexual racism?

Sex is private.  Yes.  But so is my small business.

BTW - I shouldn’t have to say this, but obviously I don’t advocate sexism or racism!  I’m just wondering what the principled basis is for the government’s different policies with regard to racism/sexism in the bedroom and boardroom.

I recently wrote a paper on Aristotle’s argument from motion to a first movement.  (After this Aristotle argues to a unmoved mover, God.  I didn’t cover that part.) I spent some time defending it from the criticism that the law of inertia renders it obsolete.  (It seems that the law of inertia calls Aristotle’s principle that everything in motion must be moved by something into question.)

Anyway, it never crossed my mind to believe in God on the basis of an argument like this.  (Although the public knowledge of God this kind of argument would afford us does intrigue me.)  I bet most believers in God feel the same way.  

If you feel your temperature rising in anger, ask yourself this question: Why think that evidence and/or arguments are necessary for knowledge of God?