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.]

The February 2008 issue of All The Rage is out, and the theme this month is ‘time’. I ramble on about the relative nature of time, the thought of Henri Bergson, and the cluelessness of post-modernist historians:

No past event is intrinsically in the past. It is only a past event in relation to other events that are in the present and the future. This does not mean, as some post-modernists like to tell us, that the relationship between past and future is consequently meaningless. Time passes and change occurs: did the trendy post-modernist historian write any of his vacuous articles before he was born? No, and nor will he write a single word once he is dead.

The highlight of the issue, however, is editor Leila Johnston’s mind-opening piece on ‘time and the future of writing’:

You could, if you wanted, read the great art of the past century as a laborious delivery of 21st century individualism. Maybe it was a kind of battle to own the unknowable years ahead. Whatever lay in front would still be beyond reference, but pehaps naming it as such meant it could be deliberately uncontrolled in ways the present and past could not. Unlike the past, which was vulnerable to subjective reading and revision, the future represented a lack of context, an absence of meaning. We can view this effort to represent chaos as rather quaint - so obviously idealistic, so clearly doomed to fail.

You can find the February issue of All The Rage here (PDF): go and read the lot, and look at the pictures.

The first ‘most-read’ of the new year, and the new favourite essay at greycat.org is ‘Burke and revolution: reform, revolution and constitutional conservatism in the thought of Edmund Burke’. Many of the visitors who have been interested in this essay have been from the United States - appropriately enough, for Burke was a friend of American independence.

A comparison between Burke’s reaction to the American Revolution and his response to the French Revolution is instructive in revealing the grounds of his opposition to the latter. In that the French Revolution was an attempt at the wholesale and instantaneous social and political transformation of society on abstract, rationalist principles, it presented a challenge to Burke’s world-view quite unlike that offered by the American Revolution, which Burke saw as essentially a problem in imperial constitutional and administrative relationships. The social and political ideas which Burke marshalled against the French Revolution in his Reflections on the Revolution in France were not new; his rejection of abstract political theorising and concepts such as universal rights, his belief in inheritance and slow historical development and his respect for the gradually evolving national society, his belief that the current generation is obliged to maintain what previous generations have created in the way of institutions and practices, his insistence that prejudice rather than reason holds society together, all are present in his speeches, addresses and letters on America. Yet there is nothing in Burke’s comments on America which foreshadows the violence of his reaction to the Revolution in France and the anger with which he denounced the French revolutionaries and their works.

Read ’Burke and revolution’ by clicking here. Other essays on eighteenth-century topics can be found here.

Picture: Edmund Burke, engraving after Joshua Reynolds. [Source]

See earlier posts here, here, here and here.

The most popular essay on greycat.org over the past week has been ‘Hobbes and liberty: the subject’s sphere of liberty in Leviathan‘.

Hobbes’s assertion that ‘Feare and Liberty are consistent’ (II: xxi, 262) has caused a certain amount of puzzlement and confusion: how freely can a person robbed at gunpoint really be said to be acting when he hands over his wallet? Yet it is consistent with Hobbes’s view that liberty can only be restricted by an external agent. If the robber knocks his victim to the ground and restrains him physically while extracting his wallet from his pocket, then the victim’s freedom has been restricted; but if the victim reaches into his own pocket and hands the robber his wallet out of fear that he will be shot if he does not, he has chosen that course of action freely, while others, no matter how unpalatable, remain open to him; and he has removed his wallet and surrendered it with his own hands and of his own volition. This is an important point for understanding the nature of the covenant which gives rise to Hobbes’s Commonwealth, for its ultimate motivation is fear (‘The Passions that encline men to Peace, are Feare of Death’ (I: xiii, 188)), and yet it is freely arrived at by all concerned.

Hobbes’s Leviathan is commonly seen as an argument for absolute despotism on the part of the sovereign and absolute submission on the part of the subject; yet Hobbes asserts that individual liberty is inalienable. How can these positions be reconciled? This is the question explored in ’Hobbes and liberty: the subject’s sphere of liberty in Leviathan‘. Click here to read the essay, in full and for free.

Picture: Frontispiece from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, 1651 (detail). [Source]

I didn’t post a ‘most-read’ article last week because it was Aristotle yet again. The latests stats indicate that, barring a last minute rush of interest, Aristotle will not be topping the charts this week, so that’s a relief.

Everyone loves Aristotle. This week’s web statistics report reveals that once again the most popular paper on greycat.org is ‘Aristotle and citizenship: the responsibilities of citizenship in the Politics’. If you’re not already among this essay’s countless fans, you are hereby invited to read and enjoy.

Picture: Plato and Aristotle, representing ‘Philosophy’, marble panel (1437) by Luca della Robbia, from the exterior of the campanile of Florence cathedral. [Source]

Once again the most-read paper on greycat.org over the past seven days is ‘Aristotle and citizenship: the responsibilities of citizenship in the Politics‘.

Picture: Alexander the Great and Aristotle. [Source]

The United States Marine Corps have a recruiting office in Berkeley, California. The local anti-war totalitarians of Code Pink have been trying to shut it down. There’s excellent pictorial coverage of the confrontation (if it can be dignified with the term) at Zombietime. My own attention was attracted to all this when I was sent a link to a thoroughly admirable letter sent to the Berkeley Daily Planet by Captain Richard Lund, the Marine officer in charge of the recruitment office.

My attention was also attracted by a poster the recruiting office staff put up in their window, upon which was printed a quote from the English political philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Here it is, as represented on the recruiting office poster:

‘War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.’

Looking around the internet, I find that this is a popular quote with those in the U.S. who define themselves as supporting the military, and understandably so. However, it is an inaccurate (in minor ways) and an incomplete quote. Here is the full passage from which this text comes:

‘War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice - is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.’

The passage comes from Mill’s essay The Contest in America, originally published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1862. In this essay Mill condemns his own country for siding with the Confederacy in the American Civil War, and harshly criticizes those who, to use his own words, ‘cry, Peace, peace’ without considering what ‘peace’ would mean. There are evils worse than war in a good cause: slavery is one such evil. The passage quoted above is not a defence of the waging of war in itself, but a demand that those responsible for taking a state to war should do so when the cause is just, but further, should only do so when the cause is just.

Mill’s words, when read carefully and in context, thus hardly constitute a manifesto for the uncritical support of the military; but a more powerful statement of the role of the armed forces in the cause of liberty and justice could hardly be wished for. Of course, what precisely constitutes ‘liberty and justice’ is open to debate - or at least it is for those of us living in freedom, thanks to the men and women in uniform whose sacrifices keep us in that happy state.

[Note: Mill’s The Contest in America is freely available in full via Google Book Search and Project Gutenberg. The passage quoted above comes from p. 31 of the Little, Brown edition made available by Google. Some of my own thoughts about John Stuart Mill can be found here.]

The most popular paper on greycat.org at the moment, according to the site statistics, is ‘Aristotle and citizenship’; I suspect lots of students are starting the new term with papers on Aristotle and political thought, which is certainly a good way to begin.

The political responsibilities of citizenship could hardly be greater, but for Aristotle they are entirely in accordance with nature. Citizenship is nothing less than the fullest fulfillment of human potential in terms of the ‘good life’. In this respect, as throughout Aristotle’s politics, the essence of citizenship lies in active participation. The citizen is not merely an inhabitant of the state, nor simply a member of a politically privileged class; he is the essence of the state’s ability to achieve the greatest measure of happiness and virtue as a community. For this, the citizen must have the leisure to devote himself to the educative cultural pursuits which facilitate his understanding of virtue.

The whole paper can be found here: ‘Aristotle and citizenship: the responsibilities of citizenship in the Politics‘.

Picture: Plato and Aristotle, representing ‘Philosophy’, marble panel (1437) by Luca della Robbia, from the exterior of the campanile of Florence cathedral. [Source]