Santa Claus: Myth or Lie?

Posted on December 24, 2011 by

At The Secular Outpost, Jeffery Jay Lowder has a brief blog piece about Tom Flynn, the Executive Director of the Council for Secular Humanism, and some of the reasons Flynn puts forth about why parents should not tell their children that there is a Santa Claus.

Of particular note are Flynn’s claims that parents “lie” in order to “perpetuate” the myth about Santa, that such “deceptions” lay “traps” for children’s intellectual development and, as a result, promote “unhealthy” fear along with selfishness and acquisitive attitudes among children.

Seriously?!?!?!

Lowder notes that Flynn’s presentation is imbued with “considerable humor”; so, perhaps – and let us hope – that humor is meant to be found in the pseudo-science (to be charitable in characterizing whatever non-sense there is) that is purported to actually support the notion that the Santa Claus myth is to be held in disdain and assuredly avoided.

Do parents “lie” to their children when they tell them tales about Little Red Riding Hood, the Three Little Pigs, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, or the Ugly Duckling?

Of course not.

If nothing else, myths, stories, and tales are critical – indeed, they are absolutely necessary – to the development of imagination and, therefore, the fullest flourishing of the intellect.

Contrary to Flynn’s (humorous?) assertion – or has it yet attained the status of myth itself? – that the Santa Claus story “encourages lazy parenting”, the shortcomings in parenting come not from the use of such tales; rather, any inadequacies in parenting that there might be come about as a result of parents’ failures to eventually tailor lessons to be had from such stories, including the Santa Claus myth.

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Hegel and the development of Feyerabend’s thought

Posted on December 19, 2011 by

In his paper Two models of epistemic change (1970), Feyerabend argued that we can distinguish between two approaches to prolonged stability of theories or concepts. The first interprets durability as a measure of success: on an instrumentalist view, it may be possible to improve predictive tools but there is little motive to overhaul the underlying framework; and for a realist, a commitment to increasing the degree of verisimilitude permits the development of theories but not of incommensurable concepts or the deliberate undermining of assumptions. The opposing view, which Feyerabend attributes to Hegel and Mill, holds that constancy is an indication of failure: there are always improvements to our theories to be made or sought and indeed a desire to escape the confines of a particular theoretical framework is, for Feyerabend, the spontaneity that is essential to science. (On the second view, it could even be argued that realism in a sense collapses into conceptual instrumentalism. This is to say that the assumptions involved are not required to be tested or subjected to further challenge because the success of the theories based upon them does not warrant it and even speaks against it.) Feyerabend concludes the paper by declaring the methodological lessons:

Do not work with stable concepts. Do not eliminate counterinduction. Do not be seduced into thinking that you have at last found the correct description of ‘the facts’ when all that has happened is that some new categories have been adapted to some older forms of thought, which are so familiar that we take their outlines to be the outlines of the world itself.

On the face of it, this conflicts with Feyerabend’s argument in his Consolations for the Specialist that proliferation, which Feyerabend is recommending in these lessons, is supportive of a principle of tenacity. This latter principle provides for the retention of stable concepts and theories, even in the face of anomalies or evidence to the contrary, because development and improvement are always possible; indeed, an accommodation between the theory held to tenaciously and the difficulties it faced may eventually be possible. However, in Feyerabend’s explication of the second approach to conceptual and theoretical stability, both principles emerge from a Hegelian perspective.

The influence Feyerabend attributes to Hegel is itself of interest to Feyerabend scholars. (Although the similarity between Feyerabend’s view of the development of theories and Hegel’s thought has been noted by Barnett (1998), he insists that Feyerabend did not mention Hegel.) In setting out the second (Hegelian) model of epistemic change, Feyerabend asserts that, following Hegel, any complete description of an object (such as a concept or a theory) is self-contradictory since it contains its negation and participates in all other objects. Through the dialectic process, which for Feyerabend involves ensuring that concepts interact with observations, experiments and basic statements (and vice versa), the negation of an object does not result in the same thing or nothing at all but instead in an enriched object, which is the unity of the original object and its negation. For Feyerabend and for Hegel, this process is a developmental one: it requires not merely attending to the possibility of change but noting that stable concepts and theories are those for which internal contradictions have yet to be revealed or exposed, and for which the apparent stability is actually born of isolation.

In this reading of Hegel we can perhaps find something of the Popperian Feyerabend: the dialectic process calls for the negation of the theory under examination and this is seen as a positive step. However, the development is more than falsificationism provides for because the original theory is retained: for Feyerabend, we strengthen the knowledge we already possess by subjecting it to negation and vigorous challenging, even to the extent of undermining it, attacking it via alternative theories or by asserting that whatever concepts and theories we believe are secure should be treated with skepticism and assaulted. As an example, Feyerabend points to the Newtonian concept of space, retained for most purposes in spite of the development of Einstein’s version and yet permitting an enhanced understanding of the former’s utility and limitations.

On Feyerabend’s account, this skepticism cannot be selective. The result of such an approach is that we must constantly seek to criticise our theories via undermining their stability and elaborating alternatives, as well as using this process to enhance (and therefore preserve) what we started with. It is here that we find the principles of proliferation and tenacity emerging from Feyerabend’s reading of Hegel, which support the lessons Feyerabend has already taken from Mill (hence his claim in the paper that the second model of epistemic change can be characterised as following from either Mill or Hegel). Note also that these principles, derived from Hegel and Mill, are therefore intended by Feyerabend to be entirely positive.

References:

Barnett, S. (1998) Hegel after Derrida (London, Routledge).
Feyerabend, P.K. (1970) Two models of epistemic change, in P.K. Feyerabend (1981) Problems of empiricism: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).
Feyerabend, P.K. (1970) Consolations for the Specialist, in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Eds.) (1970) Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Evidence, Beliefs, and ‘Wise Blood’

Posted on November 30, 2011 by

In a previous essay, it was noted that the most objective, the most invariant-across-contexts feature of evidence is that evidence fits with a story.

To regard evidence as that which fits with (and, thereby, supports) a story is not to suggest – much less say – that being able to come up with a story makes the included evidence or that story as worthwhile as any other simply by virtue of there being a story.

Furthermore, evidence is not disparaged by identifying or regarding it as a facet of a story. After all, to say of something that it is a story is not necessarily to assert that it is comparatively unimportant, fictional, or in any way untrue.

Even so, describing a presentation as a story does often connote that what is presented is either fictional, untrue, more doubtable than not, or more a matter of subjective opinion than of objective fact.

Terms such as narrative and explanation seem less likely than story to suggest the possibility that what is being presented is relatively insignificant, extensively subjective, fictional, or false. Amongst narrative, explanation, and story, it is explanation which currently tends to be more readily, reflexively, automatically related with facticity and truth, and this is probably because explanation is most closely associated with the activities (and accomplishments) of science.

This could seem to suggest that evidence better relates to explanation than it does to story. This, in turn, might seem to recommend considering evidence as that which fits with an explanation rather than that which fits with a story, particularly since not all stories are necessarily intended as explanations.

However, it is when explanation is isolated from any connoted facticity that another characteristic of evidence becomes more apparent. Continue reading →

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About ‘Militant Modern Atheism’ and Religion

Posted on October 7, 2011 by

Abstract: This essay first discusses the non-eliminable shortcomings (or vacuousness) found in the most vociferous versions of contemporary atheism as put forth in Philip Kitcher’s “Militant Modern Atheism”. The essay then proceeds to the problems which Kitcher’s preferred secular humanism project would do well to anticipate as a result of the manner in which Kitcher frames the religious perspective. Finally, this essay addresses the very religious sense and experience which Kitcher too quickly dismisses as being useless to any evidential role. (In certain respects, this essay expands on some of the remarks found in this comment.)

1.

Philip Kitcher commences his paper, “Militant Modern Atheism”1, by paying homage to the atheism most commonly associated with the likes of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett as well as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris.2 Kitcher says that their Militant Modern Atheism is “an effective and necessary critique of fundamentalist forms of religion”. He then goes on to note that this atheism is also “incomplete (and likely counter-productive)”.3

It is not immediately obvious how a critique can be both effective and likely counter-productive; the militant modern atheists certainly do not intend to be counter-productive.

Kitcher provides a bit of an explanation regarding the conjoining of effective and counter-productive when he reports that he, “a secular humanist, … shares many of the conclusions of the Militant Modern Atheists” but also thinks that “valuable options are being foreclosed” with the approach undertaken by those sorts of atheists.4 Basically, then, Kitcher’s point is that the critiques produced by the militant modern atheists are, at best, only initially effective and, even then, only within a very narrow (or shallow) – certainly a very limited – part of the domain concerning religion and faith.

Kitcher’s contention is that Militant Modern Atheism “fails to attend systematically to the roles religion fills in human lives”, and the ultimate “challenge is to develop a well-articulated and convincing version of secular humanism.”5 Kitcher clearly intends that this well-articulated secular humanism would attend to those fulfilling roles which – for the most part and to this point, according to Kitcher – have been and are most effectively served by religion. Presumably, Kitcher thinks that the development of just such a secular humanism is in the long-term interests of the militant modern atheists inasmuch as, without it, it is irrational to expect that religion would – or should – disappear. Continue reading →

Posted in Arendt, Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Politics, Religion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Selves, Subjects, and Reductionism

Posted on September 9, 2011 by

In a recent blog entry, John Wilkins denounces the notion of an existent self saying, “Humans have an insistent need for illusions. … The most interesting illusion to me is that we have selves. It is quite obvious to me that selves are dynamic, fractured, transitory things that occur largely in a single head, which is why we think they are unitary.”

Responding to one commenter’s question about whether the “me” which Wilkins uses has a referent, a referent which might well be the very sort of self which Wilkins seemingly denies, Wilkins explains, “I often rail against what I call the Reification Fallacy: the notion that if we use a word as a noun there has to be a thing the word denotes. ‘Me’ is a social, legal and semantic concept … I, me, we and the other self-referent terms … are just a way to anchor talk. It does not follow that there actually are unitary selves.”

Is Wilkins’ position simply “that selves are dynamic, fractured, [and] transitory” rather than “unitary”? Since “dynamic, fractured, transitory” selves are “obvious”, is it only the “unitary selves” which are illusions?

The state of being dynamic or transitory is not necessarily incompatible with being unitary. Indeed, the very notion of dynamic suggests a coherence – a unitariness – despite changes, and transitoriness does not assuredly preclude unitariness, either by itself or in conjunction with dynamism. This, then, leaves the term fractured as the only descriptor which Wilkins offers that might eliminate the possibility that selves are unitary.

The problem is that fractured is the most loaded of these three descriptors; it can either be intended simply as another way of denying (instead of arguing against) unitariness, or it can be used (in this case by opponents of Wilkins) to indicate an original (even if no longer existent) unitariness. Wilkins could then substitute some other term. He might, for example, replace fractured with disjointed, but it is very highly unlikely that any such substituted term would itself be anything other than a shorthand representation for a more involved argument.

Does Wilkins provide any indication of just what might be such an argument?

Wilkins seems to view favorably the notion that “there is no single you … instead there are a bunch of interconnected, arguing neural networks”, but that notion in no way precludes the unitariness which Wilkins denies. As a matter of semantic fact, that notion actually endorses unitariness (via “bunch” and “interconnected”).

Of course, Wilkins accepts “’Me’ [as] a … semantic concept … just a way to anchor talk”, and it is reasonable to expect that he would be perfectly at ease acknowledging self as a semantic concept. Wilkins would likely also accept the idea of a semantically unitary self, in which case remarks about selves being illusions or fictions are, at best, merely provocative semantics.

But what is the point of such provocative semantics? Is it supposed to effect consideration into the possibility that the self is not irreducible? After all, Wilkins says that it is the notion of experience as (or in terms of ) “an irreducible something or process … that I am disputing.” The question which then immediately rises to the fore is: What does it mean for anything to be irreducible? And, close upon that is this question: Is there anything which is irreducible?

That which were irreducible could be called simple, yet it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone who thinks or speaks in terms of selves regards a self as simple. Wilkins does not object to describing a semantic self in terms of neural networks, but neural networks are not irreducible. For that matter, neurons are not irreducible.

So, what is it that Wilkins thinks distinguishes a reducible neural network (and neurons) from a reducible self?

Well, he does say that “we should not accept things exist that have no definite and expressible nature and which are not investigable.” It is very difficult to imagine how a self is not investigable. On the other hand, it does seem more correct to describe a self as indefinite rather than as definite at least inasmuch as the self is dynamic and since the self is (seems) largely or often unpredictable. Still, these characteristics of the self hardly seem to justify the claim that selves do not exist.

Be that as it may, the really interesting point regards the notion that accepting the existence of a thing somehow depends on there being something expressible about that thing. As a practical or instrumental matter, this is certainly the case. However, as stated, the necessary expressible condition tends towards the most radical conceivable subjectivism, and that certainly is not what Wilkins intends. Rather, it is only the “objective feature[s] of the world” which he seems to mean to have accepted as existing.

Now, the semantics for the term objective is no simple matter. As an antonym of subjective, the term objective is commonly used to indicate mind-independence. In this way an objective feature would be one which exists regardless of whether or not – and regardless of in what way – any mind conceived of or was aware of that feature. In like manner, the term object at its most basic (in this type of discussion) is supposed to indicate something that exists regardless of whether any mind is in any way sensitive to or aware of that object.

A subject, on the other hand, is not just that which is sensitive to any object. A nerve, for example, can be sensitive, reactive, and, yet, it is not a subject. This is why a subject is most commonly equated to a mind. Is a self necessarily something other than a subject? For that matter, is a subject something other than a mind?

If there is no difference between self, subject, and mind, then consistency would demand of Wilkins that if he denies that the self exists outside of semantics, then he also needs deny that subjects and minds exist.

Some strict reductive physicalists will be inclined to deny that minds exist. They will claim that minds reduce to brains. But, brains are also reducible as are the components of brains, and, yet, at some event in the reductive process, awareness is lost.

Wilkins says that “’consciousness’ [is] a word that has, so far as I can tell, no actual meaning whatsoever, and should be abandoned”, and some physicalists may be willing to call for the abandonment of the use of the term awareness for the sake of reductionistic explications in terms of simple physical objects.

The result will be an assured and unremitting unintelligibility (an unintelligibility which might be at least mitigated with a non-reductive version of physicalism).

Wilkins resorts to an apparent attempt at giving some degree of primacy to the matter of what exists. Philosophy of – or in terms of – existence has come to be often referred to as existentialism. There are, of course, varieties of existentialisms, and it is worth noting what Jacques Maritain had to say about this matter:

there are two fundamentally different ways of interpreting the word existentialism. One way is to affirm the primacy of existence … as manifesting the supreme victory of the intellect and of intelligibility. This is what I consider to be authentic existentialism. The other way is to affirm the primacy of existence, but … as manifesting the supreme defeat of the intellect and of intelligibility. This is what I consider to be apocryphal existentialism, the current kind which ‘no longer signifies anything at all.’ [Existence and the Existent, p. 13]

Eliminativist physicalists (or, possibly more precisely, denialist physicalists), some of them at any rate, may shrug off Maritain’s remarks or assert that it is science alone which provides for the “victory of the intellect” while also claiming that it is their physicalism alone that follows from science. Such physicalists are woefully unreflective about science, and that woeful condition was well captured by Karl Jaspers when he said:

materialism and a naturalistic realism have always been with us; similarly, man’s disposition to believe in the absurd is as unchanged as ever … It is only the contents of this faith in the absurd that are partly new: for example, belief in the advent of a definitive happiness for all in a classless society magically brought to birth through violence. … The absurd faiths of the modern era, ranging from astrology to theosophy, and from National Socialism to Bolshevism, suggest that superstition has no less power over the human mind today than it had formerly. … Absurd modern faiths may very well make occasional use of scientific results, without grasping their origin or meaning.

… This science, however, whose name is invoked by everyone, is known to surprisingly few: indeed, there are many scholars … who are unfamiliar with its principles. A crucial feature of modern science is that it does not provide a total world-view, because it recognizes that this is impossible. … science [at least ideally] is always aware of its limitations, understands the particularities of its insights, and knows that it nowhere explores Being, but only objects in the world. … Down to the present, this science has been accessible to the masses only in the form of final results referring to the totality of things, a form that absolutizes and distorts the actual results of science, giving rise to spuriously scientific total views. These reflect modern scientific superstition rather than real knowledge or insight into the meaning, content, and boundaries of science. [Myth & Christianity: An Inquiry into the Possibility of Religion Without Myth, pp. 23-24]

Is a physicalism of the gaps any more justified than a so-called God of the gaps? No.

Posted in History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Science, Religion, Science | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Feyerabend and historiographic proliferation

Posted on August 28, 2011 by

In the introduction to his Against Method, Paul Feyerabend paraphrased V.I. Lenin by claiming that history is “always richer in content, more varied, more many-sided, more lively and subtle” than “the best historian and the best methodologist can imagine”. He went on to quote Einstein’s remark that the scientist who necessarily resists “the adherence to an epistemological system”, which the practise of science (rather than its form according to those advocating just such an epistemological system) requires, “must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist”. This characterisation has often been applied to Feyerabend himself and is one Feyerabend made of Galileo as he sought to establish Einstein’s (and, earlier, Mill’s) point. Based on this understanding of the historiography of science, Feyerabend constructed a reductio argument against those he called “capital R Rationalists” and anyone who proposed to methodologically restrict science. His reductio took the following general form:

i. Select a example from the history of science of a transition between theories that is paradigmatically accepted as scientific progress;
ii. Demonstrate that those actors involved argued (successfully) in irrational or non-rational terms (whether wholly or in part), where rationality is defined by adherence to the methodology purported to define or characterise science;
iii. Demonstrate further that they could not have achieved progress otherwise; and
iv. Conclude that insisting on the methodology at the time would have forced the actors to give up.

The result was to place the epistemic systematists in the absurd position of advocating a methodology for science that would have killed the very progress allegedly brought about because early scientists followed the methodology.

Although this reductio succeeds, I want to suggest that Feyerabend’s historiography, and perhaps the historical approach in general, is somewhat paradoxical. The aim of his historiography is to free us from methodological or epistemological strictures but we find ourselves using the lessons of history to show that there are no lessons to be learned from history. This is too simplistic, though: what Feyerabend argued was not that there is and can be no methodology worth adopting but rather that all methods have their limits. Nevertheless, the paradoxical aspect comes from considering the use Feyerabend makes of history. Faced with a methodological rule, we can look to the history of science – and to apparently paradigmatic cases of good practice in particular – and show that an application of the rule would have been disastrous. However, it seems that this relies implicitly on a fixed interpretation of the events under consideration; after all, if it were possible for a rationalist or anyone else to recast the episode in a more favourable light for the rule at issue, we might be able to show that in fact its application would have worked then as now. Cases like dogmatic falsificationism are relatively straightforward insofar as they present so restrictive a rule that almost any interpretation would contradict it, but what of others? If, for example, it is possible to view Galileo not as a master rhetorician and opportunist but as a prototypical or actual rationalist, then it would seem reasonable and indeed advisable to not be restricted in historiography any more than in methodology or epistemology.

How might Feyerabend respond? He would probably argue that this is exactly the kind of criticism that is needed and hence that if the rationalist can identify this limitation of the reductio then he will likely also appreciate and accept the limits on his own methodology. It might be objected that Feyerabend’s interpretation of historical events is but one of many, with the rationalist versions at least having the merit of supporting a rational account of scientific history. The difference perhaps lies in Feyerabend’s commitment to proliferation, notwithstanding that he would approve of the tenacity of the rationalist view; after all, we can view Feyerabend’s approving quote of Lenin as pointing to the inevitability of conflicting historiographies. This tension between tenacity and proliferation will be further explored in a subsequent entry.

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The Tree of Life and The Way of Grace

Posted on August 9, 2011 by

Abstract. Terrence Malick’s movie, The Tree of Life, suggests a stark contrast between the way of nature and the way of grace. At first, this contrast – but especially its starkness – seems to set the context for a choice that no individual person ever escapes: the choice of whether to live in accord with the way of nature or to live by the way of grace. However, the manner in which the ways of nature and grace are explained in a voiceover very early in the movie, in conjunction with the manner in which the pervasive opportunity for grace is eventually brought to the fore within the movie, actually results in a more elegant and more stark contrast, one which is less immediately apparent than the contrast between the ways of nature and grace, but one which goes much farther in capturing the very crux of being human: The choice which no individual person escapes is whether or not to live by the way of grace, with charity and imbued with the love which goes beyond mere preference. This more exhaustive contrast corrects the common notion that nature and grace are incompatible and sets focus upon the discernment necessary to make grace more manifest within life and nature.

(See also this previous essay.)

I. When did you first touch my heart?

A voiceover which occurs very early during Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life explains that the way of nature is to seek its own pleasure and to have its own way. The way of grace, on the other hand, is put forth more apophatically: It is not the way of grace to seek its own pleasure; grace does not expect or demand its own way,1 and the way of grace does not – and does not seek to – lord over anything. From this it is supposed to be apparent that a person who lives by the way of nature lives seeking his or her own pleasure and trying to have his or her own way. In contradistinction, people of grace are not devoted to the pursuit of their own pleasure; they do not demand their own way, and they do not wish to dominate.

This explanation comes in the voice of Mrs. O’Brien (played by Jessica Chastain), and it occurs so early in the movie that there can yet be no indication whether this expression is presented as a supposed fact of reality or simply as the gist of a personal understanding arrived at by Mrs. O’Brien.

One problem with this depiction, a problem which suggests that this voiceover explanation is but a personal understanding and a limited expression rather than a fact about reality is that the portrayal of the way of nature is exceedingly simplistic. That portrayal makes it quite an easy matter for virtually all persons to insist – with justification – that they most certainly do not live in accord with what appears to be the thorough self-serving identified as characteristic of the way of nature.

Whether not failing to be thoroughly self-serving is sufficient to claim to be living by grace is another matter altogether, but the fact that grace and its way seem to be best characterized by extensively apophatic statements contributes to the ease with which any person could claim to live in the way of grace simply by virtue of not being primarily devoted to his or her own pleasure or to having his or her own way.

It is an easy matter to think that the character of Mr. O’Brien (played by Brad Pitt) is to be understood as nothing more than an exemplification of the way of nature while Mrs. O’Brien exemplifies the way of grace. After all, Mr. O’Brien himself makes it quite clear that he has chosen to live according to the way of nature, where the way of nature is more properly identified as the way of the world, where that world is primarily the human social order which makes itself enticing primarily by the rewards it offers.2 It is the pleasure and benefits to be had from those rewards which Mr. O’Brien seeks. Continue reading →

Posted in Film, Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Religion | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

The Tree of Life

Posted on July 20, 2011 by

Abstract. With his movie, The Tree of Life,Terrence Malick escapes the confines of mere rationalism and the poverty of meager empiricism to remind of the enchantment that is always with and within the ordinariness of reality. Malick locates this enchantment in – or identifies it with – grace. It is not a grace which is distantly transcendent; it is not wholly other than or apart from physical reality. No matter how often it is unseen, it is not even a grace that hides; rather, it is an infusing grace. Precisely because this grace is not remote, Malick eschews the gross symbolism which too often leaves an excessive sense of distance and otherness, and, instead, Malick resorts – not to the indirectness of narrative, but – mostly to the naked juxtaposition of the very sorts of scenes which would often – too often – be ignored as being commonplace. As a result, just as the banal can be a root of evil, the commonplace often contains that grace which waits to be made ever more intensely manifest within our selves and, then, our world.

This past Saturday night I trekked the sixty or seventy miles into town to see Terrence Malick’s film, The Tree of Life. I went without having read any reviews of the movie, and the only description I had seen was the synopsis which appeared when I went to check out the show times. That brief description read in part:

The Tree of Life is an impressionistic story of a Midwestern family in the 1950′s. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt). Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn) finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith. Through Malick’s signature imagery, we see how both brute nature and spiritual grace shape not only our lives as individuals and families, but all life.

Aside from the fact that the family actually lives in Texas rather than the Midwest, the synopsis cannot really be said to be flat out wrong; it is just that the description does not come anywhere close to capturing the essence, the spirit of – frankly, the experience which is – this movie.

Of course, an experience is wholly subjective, and anything which is strongly subjective may well be a singular experience. One thing that led me immediately to consider the possibility – maybe the strong possibility – that my experience might not be widely – if at all – shared occurred right in the theater as soon as the movie ended. As the final credits rolled, I overheard the reactions of three gentleman sitting directly in front of me. One of them said, “I don’t know. That went right over my head.” Another wondered aloud whether they should ask their parish priest to see the movie so that he could tell them “what it was about.” Continue reading →

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The Left

Posted on July 4, 2011 by

Sometimes, some remarks should be cherished by themselves and for themselves, for their insight, for their truth. Here is one such passage from Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear by Javier Marías:

The Left has always been a manner of speaking everywhere. I mean, the Left that you … refer to, as if it existed or ever had existed outside the realm of the imaginary and the speculative. You should have seen it in the ’30s, or even before. A mere collective fantasy. Disguises, rhetoric, the more austere the uniform, the more fraudulent, all pompous facets or forms of the same thing, always hateful and always unjust, and invulnerable too. … They’re all oppressors, it’s amazing that people don’t realise this ab ovo, it makes little difference what cause they’re fighting for, what public cause, or what their propaganda motives are. Frauds and transcendental innocents alike all describe these motives as historical or ideological, I would never call them that, it’s too ridiculous. It’s still amazing that some people still believe there are exceptions, because there aren’t any, not in the long run, and there never have been. Well, can you think of any? The Left as the exception, how absurd. What a waste.

————————————————-
Marías, Javier . Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. New Directions Books, New York: 2005, p. 81.

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Anything goes? Feyerabend and method

Posted on June 26, 2011 by

This entry looks at Paul Feyerabend’s reductio ad absurdum of specific rationalist conceptions of scientific method, perhaps one of the least understood arguments in the philosophy of science. I explain the structure of the reductio before considering how Feyerabend applied it.

The first point to note is that the misunderstanding of Feyerabend’s argument is due to his critics. When Feyerabend first published his Against Method, he was explicit about his aim:

My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is, rather, to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits. The best way to show this is to demonstrate the limits and even the irrationality of some rules which she, or he, is likely to regard as basic. (1975, 32)

He went on to entreat the reader to “always remember that the demonstrations and the rhetorics used do not express any ‘deep convictions’ of mine”. Nevertheless, this work has consistently been described as an attempt to advance and defend the methodological principle “anything goes”, so much so that Munévar complained that “it should be an embarrassment to the profession that many reviews were completely unable to see the structure of this simple reductio” (1991, 181). (See Laudan, 1996, and Newton-Smith, 1981, for examples of such failures.) As a measure of his exasperation at such empty critiques, Feyerabend’s Science in a Free Society contains an appendix entitled “Conversations with Illiterates” (1975, 125-218), in which he responded to some of his detractors.

The structure of Feyerabend’s reductio is quite straightforward, notwithstanding its confusion with a positive argument for anarchism: faced with the methodological principles of certain forms of rationalism (or what Feyerabend considered under this rubric, most notably logical positivism and falsificationism) and their proponents, together with so-called paradigmatic instances of these at work in the history of science, Feyerabend sought to show that the same rationalists would have to admit that science has developed in a fashion either contrary to their standards or otherwise in a manner that they would have to characterise as irrational. As a consequence, the standards would have to be dropped.

As a result of this rhetorical strategy, Feyerabend was able to explain his argument clearly:

‘Anything goes’ is not the one and only ‘principle’ of a new methodology, recommended by me. It is the only way in which those firmly committed to universal standards and wishing to understand history in their terms can describe my account of traditions and research practices … If this account is correct then all a rationalist can say about science (and about any other interesting activity) is: anything goes.

The reductio thus took the following form:

  • Take the principles of a rationalist methodology for science;
  • Consider what these rationalists propose as a representative example of such a methodology at work in the history of science;
  • Note that the decisions made on the basis of a rational methodology should, ceteris paribus, be rational; and
  • Demonstrate that an account of this episode in such terms forces us to describe the actions of those purportedly following the rules as irrational or in violation of them.

Before we look at Feyerabend’s argument, it is useful to take a simple example of a reductio at work. If we are dogmatic falsificationists (or else advocate basing our acceptance and rejection of scientific theories on so-called decisive experiments) and suppose Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity to have been a step in the right direction with regard to gaining knowledge of our universe, we find that we run into a problem. Falsificationists do not dispute the historical account of 1905, in which the first response to Einstein’s paper noted that his theory had already been refuted by Kaufman’s experimental results, published in the Annalen der Physik in that year. The dogmatic falsificationist is thus forced to admit that Einstein should have dismissed his theory as falsified – which, of course, he did not. (This example is discussed in detail here.) We are led to the unfortunate position of either arguing that Einstein was irrational in his refusal to give up the special theory (and moreover that we, as good falsificationists, would have rejected it, along with any consequences), which is a demand we would now consider absurd, or else accepting that dogmatic falsificationism fails.

Feyerabend preferred to use another – more famous – example from the history of science: Galileo’s work on geostaticism. Feyerabend’s reductio here consisted in three stages, designed to critique naïve empiricism, Popper’s falsificationism and Lakatos’ Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes in turn, each being an instance of a rationalist approach to science (and, in the case of the latter two, the most common even today).

For the first of these, he considered the famous Tower Argument, which had been used by Aristotelians to discount the possibility of a moving Earth. Its proponents pointed to the fact that a stone dropped from a tower lands at its base. If the Earth was moving, as some supposed, the tower would move with it and hence we would expect the stone to drop some distance away. (A variant of the same argument stated that an arrow fired vertically into the air should fall far from the firer, since he or she would have moved – along with the earth – while the arrow was in flight.) This was an idea everyone could understand and hence served as a powerful refutation of the notion that the Earth moves.

It does not matter at this stage whether Galileo was an empiricist or not: in order to undertake the reductio, we assume that he was and see what follows. What Galileo did was to accept the observations made by those who had tested this theory (that the stone falls at the base) and then appeal to a principle of relativity (often called Galilean relativity). He asked his readers to imagine two friends throwing a ball to each other while inside a cabin on a ship alongside and then to consider the same situation while the ship was underway, asking whether more (or less) force would be required to throw the ball when the ship was moving. This was also a thought experiment that people could follow and it helped him to explain that there was in fact no difference, since any motion of the ship would also be shared by the passengers. That is, whichever direction the ship moved in, the cabin would as well, along with everything inside it.

As a result of this discussion, Galileo was able to demonstrate that the very same “fact” used in the Tower Argument – the stone falling at the base – also supported the idea that the Earth was rotating, since any evidence that the geostaticist could appeal to would likewise support the alternative (indeed, this is actually an example of underdetermination by data and the theory-ladenness of observational terms). The naïve empiricist has no means of deciding between these two rival theories and hence any choice made by Galileo would violate this form of empiricism. If our methodology insists that only those decisions made on the basis of evidence can be called rational then Galileo and the Aristotelians alike were irrational to prefer geokineticism or geostaticism respectively. We are thus forced either to give up on describing Galileo’s behaviour as rational or else admit that naïve empiricism is inadequate.

The reductio of Popper’s falsificationism proceeded in a similar way. Copernicus’ system predicted magnitudes for both Venus and Mars that were refuted by observations, which led to the same conclusion with regard to dogmatic falsificationism as in the example of Einstein above. Feyerabend instead considered the sophisticated version of falsificationism, according to which Copernicanism should have excess empirical content over the Ptolemaic model, including the prediction of novel facts that were falsifiable. Unfortunately, Copernicanism was of equal empirical content to its rival (see Kuhn, 1985 and Swerdlow, 1973) and was incompatible with the Aristotelianism of the day. This latter point is an important one to appreciate: Aristotelianism did not merely consist in an astronomical theory concerning the heavens but was an integrated system that applied widely. In particular, Aristotle’s dynamics was a theory of change, including explanations of generation, corruption, locomotion and qualitative change. The theory that Galileo proposed in its stead dealt only with locomotion, which was a decrease in truth-content (as always, from the perspective of that time). Thus we find that Copernicanism represented a theory that was falsified, of equal empirical content and of lesser-truth content. As Popperian falsificationists, we are forced again to admit either that Galileo was irrational to persist in his studies or that Popper’s methodology is flawed.

The last reductio that Feyerabend attempted – that of Lakatos’ much more insightful approach – could not rely on his analysis of Galileo’s behaviour, since Lakatos was in complete agreement (Lakatos and Zahar, 1975; see also Lakatos, 1978). Since Lakatos’ methodology was careful to incorporate the lessons of the failure of falsificationism, his classification of research programmes as progressive if they demonstrate excess empirical content that has been confirmed (and degenerating for the converse) was far better equipped to survive problematic episodes in the history of science. Indeed, Lakatos accepted that a new theory would initially show a loss in empirical content as it took time to become established, and further that ad hoc measures are acceptable insofar as they help the theory avoid falsification and thus allow it to develop. The obvious difficulty with such a methodology, of course, is where to draw the line when so much wriggling is permitted; after all, a degenerating theory could eventually become progressive if given the opportunity (or even if not). It was at this difficulty that Feyerabend aimed his argument and here we finally meet the notion that “anything goes”.

Introducing the concept of an epistemological anarchist, or a person with an aversion to ideologies and opposed “positively and absolutely” to all universal standards (1975, 175), Feyerabend asked how, at the time of Galileo, the actions of an epistemological anarchist would differ from those of a Lakatosian. It was immediately clear that the former could do as he or she liked, by definition, but what of the Lakatosian? Herein lies the problem: Lakatos’ Methodology enables us to describe a situation but it does not tell us how we should act. A Lakatosian could accept Aristotelianism as a progressive research programme and reject Copernicanism as degenerating, but he or she could also do the converse. No restriction is placed on what should be done; all we have is a new vocabulary to explain ourselves.

The reductio in this last case thus consisted in referring again to the “methodology” of epistemological anarchism – or the “anything goes” we began with – and showing that Lakatos’ approach could not be distinguished from it. Since “anything goes” is no method at all, rendering everything rational at a stroke, it follows that we either adopt a method that is not a method (which is absurd) or else reject the approach of the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes.

The glaring point to notice in each of these arguments is that it is nowhere necessary for us to accept that there is no possible scientific method; that “anything goes”; that we should all become epistemological anarchists; or that Feyerabend was advocating any of these. All these terms and concepts, employed in critiques of Feyerabend then and since, are intended for use only inside the context of a reductio ad absurdum. The subtlety of this form of rhetoric (which Galileo himself had mastered) is lost when we interpret it as an attempt to replace one set of rules with another (and inexplicably in the face of Feyerabend’s own declaiming the possibility).

In summary, the common (mis)characterisation of Feyerabend’s “anything goes” bears no resemblance to what he wrote and completely ignores both the nature of his reductio argument and its targets. His intention was to free science from methodological and philosophical restrictions, not saddle it with yet another.

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References:

Feyerabend, P., Against Method (London: Verso, 1975)
Feyerabend, P., Science in a Free Society (London: New Left Books, 1978)
Kuhn, T.S., The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985)
Lakatos, I., The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978)
Lakatos, I. and Zahar, E., Why did Copernicus’ Research Program Supersede Ptolemy’s?, in Westman (ed), The Copernican Achievement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975)
Laudan, L., Beyond Positivism and Relativism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996)
Newton-Smith, W.H., The Rationality of Science (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981)
Swerdlow, N., The derivation and first draft of Copernicus’s planetary theory: a translation of the Commentariolus with commentary (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1973, 117: 423-512)

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