the greycat blog

There’s a review of Alan Sokal’s latest book on his infamous hoax by philosopher Simon Blackburn in a recent National Review which is freely available via the Powell’s Books website. It is an interesting article, for three two reasons (not including its gratuitous and reflexive anti-Americanism, which is not interesting).

First, he puts the case for the importance of a historical, cultural and social understanding of science very well: ‘the reality is that science is a human activity, not an abstract calculus, and this properly makes its great achievements a subject of pride and awe, not suspicion and skepticism. It should also make us aware of its desperate fragility, and the hostile cultural forces that it constantly has to overcome’. There are scientists who reject any notion that putting science in its historical context as a human activity is helpful at all. As Blackburn argues, they are wrong, not least because such framing is their ally in resisting science-hostile forces, not a fifth column seeking to undermine science from within.

Second, he does precisely what he argues many postmodern critics of science have done, and dodges the central issue of the evidence-based nature of scientific claims. As he says, science describes the world, and its descriptions correspond to reality: ‘Our lasers and our cell phones work, our materials have their calculated strengths, our predictions are borne out to extraordinary numbers of decimal places: what can explain this, except that we are getting things right, or very nearly right? Or in other words, that we are on the track of the truth? If we were not, it would be an inexplicable coincidence — a miracle — that we are so often so successful’. He then goes on to say that science doesn’t often talk about ‘truth’. There’s a reason for that: it doesn’t have to. It talks about evidence. Scientific predictions about the world are attested by evidence, over and over again. The status of scientific assertions about the world as ‘truth’ derives from their status as evidence-based. Blackburn’s failure to see this point devalues the rest of his argument, as he goes on to prove by producing the term ‘uniformities’. Light, or water, or carbon behaving in the same way under given conditions becomes a ‘uniformity’:

The word ‘faith’ raises its annoying head at this point. [No it doesn’t. Why would it? Faith exists outside of evidence, science depends entirely upon evidence.] Is the human reliance on uniformities just as much a matter of faith as the creationist’s reliance on whatever message tells him that the earth is six thousand years old? [Not if those ‘uniformities’ are tested against the evidence and pass the test every time.] A lot of modern writing in the theory of knowledge more or less throws in the towel and supposes that it is. Wittgenstein summed it up in his last book, On Certainty, arguing that what we would like are rock-solid foundations for our beliefs, but what we find are things that simply ’stand fast’ for us — and this raises the disturbing possibility of others for whom different and in our eyes deplorable things equally stand fast.

If those ‘different … things’ are in the realm of metaphysics then there is not much you can do to prove them right or wrong - which is precisely why they are unscientific and cannot be considered as equivalent in status to scientific claims about the world. If someone turns up on my doorstep arguing that God the Son has not existed through eternity and was created by God the Father as a separate being I could neither prove nor disprove his assertion; I would have to close the door, muttering ‘gosh, the Arian heresy’. If, however, he asserted that human beings can breathe water as effectively as air, I could bring him in and drown him in the bath. Blackburn’s ‘uniformities’ aren’t just out there in the realm of ultimately unverifiable assertion: they make a difference.

[Third point redacted. It was pedantic, snarky and worthless.]

Very occasionally the World Wide Web throws up a jewel of a site; even more rarely, a jewel of a blog. I came upon one such today, the genuine sparkling precious article: JSBlog, ‘The weblog of Joel Segal Books - on varied topics inspired by working in a secondhand bookshop’.

The secondhand bookshop concerned is Joel Segal Books in Topsham, Devon, and it looks to be a wonderful place (I speak as someone for whom an hour in a good secondhand bookshop is nothing less than an anticipation of paradise). What drew me to JSBlog was a fascinating article on ‘Trains in literature’ which discusses an extraordinary range of rail-related topics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including my old favourite, ‘Railway Spine’. Everything’s fully referenced and linked to aid further exploration - start following the links from this article, or any other on this blog, and you’ll be engrossed for hours.

There’s much, much more at JSBlog: to list just a few articles which caught my eye, ‘Further beyond the woodshed’ (on Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm), ‘Encyclopaedic thoughts’ (very good on Wikipedia), ‘Predictions’ (on c19th views of the future, and has interesting things to say about Anthony Burgess’s 1985), and ‘Bizarre historical affectations’ (from the Alexandra Limp to the Bush/Blair Power Walk).

Blog Of The Year.

Robert Fisk’s name has been taken in vain by the author and publishers of a biography of Saddam Hussein. His name is given as author on the cover of the Cairo-published book, which he never wrote. In an article in The Independent he describes his unsuccessful hunt for the real author.

The book is called Saddam Hussein: From Birth to Martyrdom and is a fawning biography of the late Iraqi leader. It seems that is full of factual errors and distortions, plays fast and loose with history, is virulently anti-Western, and is written in lousy prose.

No wonder everyone finds it easy to believe Fisk wrote it.

Most-read article on greycat.org over the last week: ‘The shadow of Stonehenge: paganism, fate and redemption in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles’. For more, see the post from the last time it reached most-read status.

The most popular article on greycat.org during the last week has been ‘The shadow of Stonehenge: paganism, fate and redemption in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles‘. This essay seems to have a particularly strong following in the Indian subcontinent, for some reason.

Fundamentally, Stonehenge for Hardy stands for ‘the natural’, and – as Hardy himself made clear – Tess Durbeyfield, described in the subtitle of Tess as ‘a pure woman’, is pure in the sense of being natural, in her femininity, her beauty, and her motivations. It is therefore fitting that it is at Stonehenge that the climax of the story, the arrest of Tess, takes place, but this significance is prefigured in the early part of the book with the description in chapter II of the ritual of ‘Club-walking Day’, a pagan festival celebrating spring and fertility, in which Tess takes part. The story can thus be said to begin with moving circle of girls and women in white (among them is Tess, marked out by her red ribbon), performing a pagan ritual; it ends within the immobile circle of grey stones, a heathen temple of nature. The rough primitiveness of both these circles expresses the role that primal, instinctive drives take in this highly sensual and tragic story, and embodies one of the chief oppositional pairings that Hardy used as a fundamental structure of the novel: that between ‘nature’ and ’society’.

For much more on the interweaving of paganism and primitiveness, fertility and fate in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, have a look at ‘The Shadow of Stonehenge’.

Picture: ‘Something seemed to move on the verge of the dip eastward’, illustration by D. A. Wehrschmidt for chapter LVIII of Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). Scanned by Philip V. Allingham (image above resized) for the Victorian Web. [Source]

A couple of weeks ago I bought a 1909 edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam at a book fair. It didn’t cost very much, and it is not rare or remarkable.

What makes it unusual is the dedication on the right-hand front endpaper. Here is an image of the page; transcription follows.

Love from Gwen. August 2nd 1911

Uncle Jack

Your bed is not nice to sleep in, it goes down in the middle, and the flys in the room are dreadful, and they do so bite, I slept here on my way to Cricceith, but never again

Gwen

Poor Gwen. Her sufferings were clearly so acute that she determined to tell Uncle Jack just what she thought of his uneven mattress and fly-ridden bedroom; and she found her opportunity. One wonders with what pleasure Uncle Jack received the book from Gwen, and whether the shine was taken off it somewhat when he opened it and read the inscription.