New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

A piece of their mind

Addendum: See the informative comment below by John Protevi on the substance of Balko’s column—the fallibility of drug-sniffing dogs (and their trainers), and the resulting miscarriages of justice.

My late cat Mr. H came to be very good at knowing when I was finished playing a piece on the piano. I have recordings in which, a second or two after the piano stops, Mr. H’s characteristic yowl supplies a coda. One might almost think he had a grasp of musical form, but I’m quite sure that his grasp was rather of my habits than of anything to do with music. He had likely picked up something in my posture that correlated with finishing a piece, something distinctive enough that he was rarely deceived by pauses during a piece.

I was reminded of this in reading first a column by Radley Balko on police dogs and then some extracts from a book cited by Balko, Alexandra Horowitz’s Inside of a dog (the title alludes to a Groucho Marx joke, in case you’re wondering). Horowitz describes experiments in which domestic canines, when humans are present, tend to do much worse than their wild cousins.

Tested on their ability to, say, get a bit of food in a well-closed container, wolves keep trying and trying, and if the test is not rigged they eventually succeed through trial and error. Dogs, by contrast, tend to go at the container only until it appears that it won’t easily be opened. Then they look at any person in the room and begin a variety of attention-getting and solicitation behaviors until the person relents and helps them get into the box (180).

Anyone who has a dog or cat will recognize the phenomenon. Are dogs, then, dumber than wolves? Horowitz doesn’t think so.

On denying the franchise

Eric Schliesser has quoted Jason Brennan to the effect that denying the franchise to certain people merits consideration. I think that to take such a proposal seriously exhibits either naïveté or ignorance—of a history not safely past but still with us. The philosopher wants to say something like: “If only we could bring it about that only well-informed, reasonable people voted, elections would yield much better results”. Yes, indeed, perhaps—if only. And if only despots were reliably benevolent, we could do away with all the messiness of democratic institutions…

Intellectual capital tends to track social and economic capital. Enfranchising only well-informed voters would have the effect of cementing into place existing inequalities. To show that I am not merely drawing on “intuitions”, let me quote a few passages from the suffrage debates. The quotations come from Selected Articles on Woman Suffrage (Minneapolis: H. W. Wilson, 1910). It is perhaps worth noting for those who don’t know the history of the women’s suffrage movement that after half a century of “agitation”, women in the US received the franchise in Federal elections in 1920; at the time the volume was published, whether women should have the vote was therefore very much a live issue. The authors I cite are against giving the franchise to women, and one of their arguments concerns women’s relative ignorance, on the basis of which the franchise ought to be withheld from them.

Make Kant sound as if from the protestant heartland of America...

I want to re-open a discussion we have had before somewhat indirectly on NewAPPS. In a recent review of Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A German-English Edition, translated by Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann , Arnulf Zweig writes,

"Gregor and Timmermann are not only faithful to his words; they replicated his syntax. Take a comparatively short and simple example; Kant writes: Man denke doch ja nicht, daß man das, was hier gefodert wird, schon an der Propädeutik des berühmten Wolf vor seiner Moralphilosophie, der von ihm so genannten allgemeinen practischen Weltweisheit, habe, und hier also nicht eben ein ganz neues Feld einzuschlagen sey. The translation: However, let it not be thought that what is here called for already exists in the guise of the propaedeutic of the famous Wolff for his moral philosophy, namely that which he called Universal Practical Philosophy, and that we do not therefore have to open up an entirely new field. (IV, 390 l.20 ff.) [the passage from Zweig continues after the fold--ES]

Did the DHS coordinate police action against OWS?

I had already been thinking that the incidents of police violence at UC Davis and UC Berkeley (whose chancellor is no less a creep than Katehi at Davis) seemed to be following a pattern.

Now Allison Kilkenny at In These Times reports that mayors at eighteen cities where Occupy groups have camped took part in a conference call “to share information and advice on how various cities were handling the demonstrations” (so said Mayor Sam Adams of Portland). Rick Ellis, a journalist in Minneapolis, spoke with an official from the Justice Department:

The official, who spoke on background to me late Monday evening, said that while local police agencies had received tactical and planning advice from national agencies, the ultimate decision on how each jurisdiction handles the Occupy protests ultimately rests with local law enforcement. According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear. In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.

Naomi Wolf offers an explanation for the Federal government’s involvement. I’m not entirely persuaded by the details. It seems to me that in any case the story above is “explosive” enough. If Obama’s DHS has a plan to suppress the Occupy protests by force, then I think he has broken faith entirely with the people who came out in such numbers to support him in 2008.

Addendum: In response to a FOIA request from Truthout, the FBI denied that it had any documents pertaining to Occupy Wall Street. For what it’s worth, the FBI has also denied involvement with local police in “addressing” Occupy Wall Street camps: “these reports are false. At no time has the FBI engaged with local police in this capacity”.

Joshua Holland at Alternet denies that there is any evidence for a federally ordered crackdown, while at the same time granting that there was “cooperation”. He talked to an official in the mayor’s office in Oakland, who, not surprisingly, downplayed the significance of the conference calls. There was, however, an independent avenue of coordination through the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) (see Shawn Gaynor, “The cop group coordinating the Occupy crackdowns”, SFBG 18 Nov).

One may well want to draw a moral distinction between the White House’s urging or demanding that Occupy sites be cleared and its merely acquiescing in their (politically convenient) removal. For the record, their position is this: “[…] obviously every municipality has to make its own decisions about how to handle these issues, and we would hope and want, as these decisions are made, that it balances between a long tradition of freedom of assembly and freedom of speech in this country and obviously of demonstrating and protesting, and also the very important need to maintain law and order and health and safety standards, which was obviously a concern in this case”.

I think Holland is correct in holding that the immediate violations of civil liberties and the violence perpetrated by the police, rather than speculations about forces behind the scenes, provide ample motive for political action. (Thanks to GPTLA in comments for the links leading to the Alternet story.)

Ten to the sixth

NewAPPS will soon reach its millionth page view. How many is that? The image below contains a million dots.

To see them all, download it (right-click or control-click on the image and choose one of the “Download” options), view it in Preview or something similar and blow it up five or six times. The file’s name is “OybTz.png”, and even though it contains a million dots it is very small.

Just for you compulsive types, I’ve made one dot red.

On Mathematicians and Philosophers.

In the exchange over Dennis' wonderful post on infinitesimals, Dennis writes, "Casting doubt on someone’s pronouncements is very far from devising a consistent theory to show them false (consistent because it has models in the category of sets). A mathematician would regard that as the difference between gilt and gold." I call Dennis' move here (and it is one that Russell also was frequently attracted to), an instance of "Newton's Challenge to Philosophy." That is, a philosopher appeals to natural science (or mathematics) to settle a dispute within philosophy. Let me grant Dennis' claim about the "mathematician." But within philosophy burden-shifting is no small achievement. Note, in particular, that Russell appeals to mathematics in order to condemn Leibniz's wrong turn to "speculation." That is to say, it is one thing to get the math wrong or to be unable to provide a mathematical proof for a claim within mathematics. It is another thing to make a claim to the effect that metaphysics of mathematics has been settled. I suspect it was inevitable that Russell would be wrong about the latter.

On Citations

The distinguished historian of philosophy (and fellow NewAPPSer), Dennis Des Chene, appeals to lack of citations to claim that Benardete's Infinity had no influence in the "real world." (For the record: I hope any of my works will get cited more than 70 times in the real world!) But as any historian of early modern philosophy can tell you, citations don't tell the whole story. Here's a relevant example from the recent history of metaphysics (I am recycling an earlier post): let's focus on the methodology of one of the classic papers of contemporary metaphysics (Hawthorne & Cortens, 1995), "Toward Ontological Nihilism." This piece follows the rhetorical/argumentative-methodology of Bennett's Rationality (which I like to call his Fable of the Bees) almost exactly. This is no surprise because Bennett (who was one of Hawthorne's teachers; I believe also Cortens but less sure) is generously cited in the paper, although Rationality isn't. I think this is a nice case of very plausible, unconscious influence (something Hawthorne proposed to me in correspondence after I asked him about it).

The “flow of anecdotes” versus the “syndrome”

Following up the links in Jeff Bell’s last post I came upon the following passage in John Hussman’s weekly comment:

The way you spot a thoughtful economist, in my view, is to listen for an understanding of both data analysis and equilibrium. In our experience, most economists and Wall Street analysts seem to analyze the economy as what I’d call a “flow of anecdotes”—weekly unemployment claims did this, retail sales did that, we got a positive surprise here, and so forth, without putting that information into any real structure and without knowing which data points actually matter or in what combination. In contrast, good economists think about the economy as a system—where multiple sectors interact. We tend to use words like “equilibrium” and “syndrome” when we talk about economic data—emphasizing that the best signals involve a whole conformation of evidence, not one or two indicators, where the data—in combination—captures a particular signature of recession or recovery.

That seems reasonable to me, but I’m no expert. Two questions: (i) is it indeed the practice of “good economists” to look for “signatures” in some sort of combination of indicators? (ii) if so, is it then the case that the news cycle, with its demand for a constant flow of events, is actively functioning to misinform the public about the likelihood of recession or recovery? And won’t that itself feed into the events that the indicators reported on are supposed to summarize? Some feedback loops are beneficial, but others will drive a system to its extremes…

499 words: Tuzet’s Cosmos

The philosophy of science directs its attention mostly to successful science—to Darwin, not to Lamarck or Driesch—and even when it turns to theories that have proved false, it tends to study only the “honorable” failures.

It avoids the Helmonts and Fouriers, the Fechners and Josephsons—those who have sinned (or so it thinks) against reason, and given too free a rein to imagination. After all, if your aim is to understand how reason works, how knowledge is most efficiently attained, you will want the best specimens; the ill-formed, the dubious, the fake, you leave aside.

The past of science, especially before 1900, presents a much more heterogeneous picture than one would gather from the carefully tended cabinets of the philosophers. Where established truths are sparse, the imagination roams freely; and, as Descartes and Kant have warned us, to speculate beyond experience (let alone “all possible experience”) puts us at risk not merely of believing falsehoods, but of allowing the spirit of pure inquiry to consort with phantasms of desire.

Cosmology—the study of the translunar universe, and (latterly) of the earth itself as one world among many in that universe—has given ample scope to both fantasy and desire. Hélène Tuzet’s study, first published in 1965 …

Living history?

One of the many things people do with the past is to “recreate” it. In a piece on “digital humanities”, a project by Heidi Rae Cooley, presented at an NEH symposium on Tuesday, described a game called Desperate Fishwives (see Steve Kolowich, “The promise of digital humanities”, Inside higher ed). The game

“intends to introduce students to the kinds of social and cultural practices that would have been in play in a 17th Century British village,” Cooley explained. Students will be tasked with accumulating resources, completing social rituals, and solving some social ill “before church or state intervene,” she continued. Afterward, students would render a prose account of their experiences — “and thereby learn of the nature and complexities of historiography.”

A second item comes from that esteemed journal The Daily Mail. The headline is: “The amazingly detailed ‘living pictures’ that show how scenes throughout history may really have looked”. The reporter, Lauren Paxman, describes Red Saunders’ “living tableaux” (a genre seldom mentioned, by the way, in the philosophy of art).

At his behest “dozens of actors […] recreate moments from British history including the English Civil War, the Chartist movement and the Peasants' Revolt”. The results are impressive, and whoever wrote the captions for the photos in this story very effectively recreates the responses of certain nineteenth-century critics: “The detail Saunders goes to—and the number of models he uses—is inspiring. […] You could spend hours in front of each photo […] admiring the different characters”. The tableaux resemble historical paintings of 150 years ago, when wall-sized depictions of famous moments were among the staples of academic painting. That’s what history “really looked like” to a nineteenth-century audience, and what it still often looks like now.

You would never know from Saunders’ tableaux alone that the Levellers he depicts wanted to end corruption, introduce religious tolerance, and expand the franchise. Likewise if the students playing Desperate Fishwives merely re-enact village life, they may learn a little bit of “what it was like” to be a seventeenth-century villager. But no more than we do as we enact our village lives will they gain the kind of insight the historian hopes to arrive at concerning the structures underlying the village way of life, or the long-term changes that led to the extinction of many of the characteristic features of rural existence.

The point here isn’t to criticize. Rather I’m interested in re-creation as an instrument of knowledge. It’s clear, first of all, that it is at best a secondary tool. Saunders and Cooley got the information they needed to re-create the past from primary and secondary sources that were not re-creations. Similarly I, in trying to get inside Leibniz's head, read his works along with others, primary and secondary, that help me grasp the intentions with which he wrote the texts I’m studying. Having done so, I sometimes think I can answer questions of the form “What would Leibniz have said in response to X?” I have built a Leibniz simulator in my head with which I can extend his discourse in various ways. Historians of philosophy do this regularly.

Of course my ability to simulate Leibniz is just one application of an ability I use elsewhere, an ability we depend on quite a bit in everyday life. I’ll end with a query, to which I don’t have a definitive (even for me) answer:

• Can the results of a simulation count as knowledge for the historian? as evidence for historical claims?
• Or is re-creation better regarded as a rhetorical device by which to present vividly claims known by, or supported by, other means?
• If so, is it nevertheless the case that a spectator or participant in a simulation can be said to gain knowledge in seeing or taking part in it (so that it might the case that what would not be evidence for me, the historian, on behalf of a claim might nevertheless be evidence for you)?

A big oops in neuroscience?

A new paper by Nieuwenhuis, Forstmann, & Wagenmakers in Nature argues that roughly half of all papers in five top neuroscience journals assert differences between the effects of interventions when at most they are entitled to is to assert that an intervention has had a statistically significant effect. Their argument is explained very well in a Guardian article by Ben Goldacre. The authors write in their introduction:

Are all these articles wrong about their main conclusions? We do not think so. First, we counted any paper containing at least one erroneous analysis of an interaction. For a given paper, the main conclusions may not depend on the erroneous analysis. Second, in roughly one third of the error cases, we were convinced that the critical, but missing, interaction effect would have been statistically significant (consistent with the researchers’ claim), either because there was an enormous difference between the two effect sizes or because the reported methodological information allowed us to determine the approximate significance level. Nonetheless, in roughly two thirds of the error cases, the error may have had serious consequences.

So the headline should not be: “Half of Neuroscience Papers are Wrong”, but rather “Half of Neuroscience Papers are Insufficiently Well Argued/One-Third Need Fixing”. We’ll see what the headline-writers do…

A sidelight: the authors, whose affiliations are Dutch, use “intuition” in more-or-less the philosopher’s sense. Is that use diffusing into world outside philosophy?

On magnets and lies, and checking sources

The historian’s attitude toward his or her sources, when attempting to establish matters of fact, is one of tempered but universal skepticism. The same applies to the history of the present. For example:

Don’t depend on popularizations for your knowledge of neuroscience (see also the previous item in this blog for a similar issue concerning the biology of sex). A recent headline in several newspapers and online sources reads something like this: “Magnetic Pulses To The Brain Make It Impossible To Lie”. Wow! That’s exciting! And scary too…

The only problem is, it’s false.

The Greasy Pole Updated

The Greasy Pole was meant light-heartedly, but it got a couple of interesting people seriously interested.

First, Dennis Des Chene tried to model how citations tend to get magnified; then Tony Chemero chimed in saying how power law distributions provide a rich ground for speculation in cognitive science. In the meanwhile, Eric Schliesser reminded us how important Pareto distributions are in the economics of wealth distribution: it's the Matthew principle referred to by Dennis. (The rich get richer.)

As Dennis realized, these kinds of statistical distributions betoken underlying interactions, and Tony says that they can thus provide an argument against modularity in domains where they occur. He provides a reference to a terrific review article on non-Gaussian scaling laws by Christopher Kello et al: there's a link in comment 11 of my post. Kello et al. write:

Measurements of living systems often obey scaling laws rather than linear relations or Gaussian statistics. Bringing order to such regularities, which are inherent in nature’s complexities, including the complexities of cognition, has proven to be as difficult as bringing order to randomness.

 

Williamson on naturalism

Timothy Williamson opinionates on naturalism at the Times.

He starts with a pre-1960 view of physics and biology: considered at a “sufficiently abstract level”, they are hypothetico-deductive. (I’ll let other people deal with that.) Naturalism would then be the view that all that exists is what will be asserted to exist in a completed hypothetico-deductive science of everything.

Williamson’s next move is not to refute that claim; instead he argues that not all science is hypothetico-deductive. It seems to me that the naturalist can happily agree & yet still affirm that all that exists is what will be asserted to exist in a completed science of everything. The notion of a science, to be sure, must be clarified if that claim is to be clear. Williamson seems to regard the project as hopeless. In other words: if science can’t be characterized as HD (and it can’t), then there is no adequate characterization of science, and so the naturalistic view fails to assert anything definite.

There cannot be an adequate philosophical characterization of science, it would seem, because to be scientific is to have the scientific spirit, a wild horse no theory can tame… (It’s idle to say that no theory can “replace” that spirit. My theory of aerodynamics won’t get me to New York either.) But why can’t there be a theory of curiosity, honesty, precision, and rigor (but doesn’t the Church-Turing thesis affirm successful characterization of rigor in mathematical reasoning)? The naturalist is going to hold—is bound to hold—that if there is such a thing as the scientific spirit, then it too must fall within the purview of science. Williamson’s argument hinges on a Romantic assertion of art against science which comes close to begging the question it wants to answer.

Beiser on doing history

Fred Beiser has written a strongly worded, very critical NDPR review of a volume edited by Schrift and Conway in The history of continental philosophy 8-volume set. The volume in question is entitled Nineteenth century philosophy: revolutionary responses to the existing order; it is the only volume in the set dealing with its period (1840–1900), although the next volume does seem to overlap with it a little, since it includes a chapter on Neo-Kantianism (whose omission Beiser criticizes in the Schrift and Conway volume).

The tenor of Beiser’s review is that the history presented in Nineteenth-century philosophy (the preceding volume, if you set aside a chapter on French utopians, is a Kant to Hegel volume) omits significant developments, dragoons the philosophers it does treat under the catchall rubric of “revolutionary response”, and even then omits a number of philosophers with equal claim to fall under that rubric.

Since I haven’t read the volume in question, I don’t intend to evaluate Beiser’s criticisms. I want instead to draw attention to the end of his review:

There is an important methodological lesson to be learned here. Any historian of philosophy who wants to provide a survey and introduction to a broad historical phenomenon like the nineteenth century must learn to think outside and beyond the standard curriculum. Who and what is intellectually important in that century is not something given for the scholar; it cannot be the starting point of his investigation; rather, it is precisely the goal and object of all his research, the final fruits and ultimate result. To get there, the scholar must go beyond contemporary interests and concerns, delve into the past in all its breadth, depth and strangeness, reading unheard of texts and studying strange and forgotten controversies. It is only after a thorough study of the past for its own sake that the scholar is in a position to know who and what in the past is still of importance for us today.

Let me put the point this way. There are two kinds of philosophical historians: derivative and original. While the derivative follow the standard curriculum, the original have the powers to reform and create a new curriculum. It is the ideal and obligation of every genuine philosophical historian to be original, to get beyond the standard curriculum, to resist the pressure of pedagogical interests and intellectual fashions, so that he can give an accurate account of the depth and breadth of an historical period. No period of the philosophical past stands in more need of an original historian than nineteenth century philosophy. The standard tropes and figures do no justice to its depths, riches and powers. The ultimate purpose of this review is to give the reader some indication of how we must strive to get beyond them.

What Beiser says may hold more forcefully of the nineteenth century than of other periods (I suppose we historians all tend to think of our own periods as in especially dire need of a reformed history…), but the point holds generally.

Anticipations

Jeffrey Zacks, in Psychology here at Washington University, and his collaborators have been studying human event perception for the last ten years. A recent paper, in press at the Journal of cognitive neuroscience, and available at his website (pdf) argues that perceptual event boundaries occur in experience at points where prediction becomes difficult.

[…] working memory representations of the current event guide perceptual predictions about the immediate future [less than 10 sec]. These predictions are checked against what happens next in the perceptual stream; most of the time perceptual predictions about what happens next are accurate. From time to time, however, activity becomes less predictable, causing a spike in prediction errors. These spikes in prediction error are fed back to update working memory and reorient the organism to salient new features in the environment. According to this model, the increase in prediction error and consequent updating results in the subjective experience of an event boundary in perceptual experience.

The tenets of Zacks’s view are (i) that current experience consists in representations actively maintained in working memory; (ii) present experience consists partly in anticipations of future experiences. Memory, insofar as it enters the stream of experience, would be on this account proleptic, forward-looking; mere recall has no place.

Aristotle says that animals don’t recollect: they don’t search their memories for information about the past (De memoria ii, 453a8, Hist. anim. 488b26; see Grote, Aristotle 476). On what grounds he said that I don’t know, but whether it was a shrewd surmise or a lucky guess he seems to have been right. Aristotle also put forward a version of what became the predominant philosophical picture of memory—that it consists in the registering of an “impression” which is subsequently to be recalled, as if the mind had a filing-card drawer or a mental museum (such as figured in Ancient and Renaissance arts memoriæ). That picture, attractive though it is, may well be fundamentally misleading. Modelling biological memory on the specifically human capacity that consists in voluntary recall of items subject to intersubjective standards of accuracy (e.g., the procedures of memorization employed by the reciters of epic poetry, to take an example Aristotle would have known) may turn out to be yet another case where intuition has led us astray.

A predominantly proleptic function for working memory, moreover, fits nicely with theories according to which perception requires activity on the part of the perceiver, so that the perception of red, for example, to use Mohan’s example (taken from Justin Broackes) is effectively the perception of a pattern of sensations that arises from the perceiver’s having regarded the red thing from several perspectives—a feat normally made posssible only by moving. Event perception too may be governed, if not by activity itself, then by anticipations of activity.

Odd measures #2: the Entourage Depth Index

This Odd Measure was inspired by a quote from Mariah Carey:

I had my team with me but the pups had a mini entourage of their own, of course! And why wouldn’t they? It was a big shoot and even my entourage had an entourage—my stylist had an assistant, my security had extra security [for another version, see this].

Merely having an entourage, of course, is already indicative of fame. I’ve never had even the smallest entourage, and I would guess that most philosophers are below the threshold. Susan Sontag, who I sat next to on a panel once, had a small entourage to sweep her away to the next event. But intellectuals by and large just don’t seem to need them.

Divas, on the other hand, do. Likewise Presidents—the Secret Service is an entourage all by itself. Or Roger Ailes, head of Fox news, who in public is constantly “buffered” by an “elaborate private security detail” paid for by News Corp. I’ll bet that like Mariah Carey’s, his security too has security of its own.

A better measure of your fame and (self-)importance will take account not merely of the size of your entourage, but of its depth. On this basis we would expect the little people—those who have no entourage—to be assigned an index of 0. If you’re like Paula Abdul and all you can muster is a first-order entourage, your index ought to be 1. Mariah Carey’s index, on the occasion mentioned above, will have been in the neighborhood of 2.

One complication emerges as we consider the elaborate arrangements around Presidents, Queens, Miss America, Dr. Evil and the like. The collection of entourages surrounding a celebrity, ordered by the “belongs to the immediate entourage of” relation, will be, in favorable cases, a directed rooted tree, that is a directed graph with a designated node such that between that node and any other node there is exactly one path (loops would indicate problems with the command stucture). In the tree of entourages all paths lead to the Star at its root (which in the drawing below is at the top, not the bottom, in keeping with the power relations being represented).

In the tree above (all edges are understood to be directed upwards), the longest paths contain three entourages, but there are also paths containing only two. How, then, should the ENTOURAGE DEPTH INDEX be defined?

An important person has a large entourage, of course, but also, one would think, a deep one. Largeness corresponds to breadth, to the average number of nodes at each level (a “level” is the collection of nodes at a given distance from the root); overall depth to some measure where we give greater weight to nodes that are farther away from the top. (If you set the EDI simply to the length of the longest path, then you’re ignoring breadth altogether.) I’m not sure there is a universal measure: after all, in some contexts, breadth would indicate importance better than depth, and in others vice versa. Criminal organizations tend toward flatness, armies and administrations toward depth.

The examples of Mariah Carey and Roger Ailes suggest another index, the SDI or Security Depth Index. But I suspect that, as the story about Roger Ailes implies, the SDI would not be a measure of importance so much as of paranoia.

The late George Carlin has observed that some of our stuff has stuff of its own. So in addition to the EDI and the SDI, there may also be occasion to use, in an advanced civilization like our own, an SSI or Stuff’s Stuff Index. My computer has accessories, some of which, like the printer, have accessories of their own. If you count bare stuff as 1, that would yield an SSI of 3. Has anyone got an example of fourth-order stuff?

Higgitt’s historical heifer

I want to recommend and to comment on a post by Rebekah Higgitt at her new venue Teleskopos.

She starts with a wonderful quotation from Augustus de Morgan (yes, that de Morgan), on the difficulty that ordinary readers may have in understanding the “merit of any new step in the advancement of a system”. In his biography of Newton (see also Essays on Newton p51), he writes:

Unless he be acquainted with the history of preceding efforts, he comes to the consideration of that merit from the wrong direction; for he reads the history from the end. He goes to the mail-coach, back from the railroad instead of forward from the old strings of pack-horses: from a macadamized road lighted with gas to the rough stones and the oil-lamps, instead of beginning with the mud and the link-boys.

Source: Good roads 3(1893):100

We all come in at the wrong end; the difficulty is that of having a beginning, of not being there all along. The ranks of the famous, for example, appear differently to each cohort. For anyone under thirty-five, John Lennon has always been dead; he is dead, of course, but for me he is also—not just by hearsay but in experience—the twenty-something Beatle who told the rich folks in Albert Hall to rattle their jewelry, the promoter of peace, the artist felled by bullets in 1980. So too the student of physics approaches its great discoveries from the wrong end, when they are completed, established, no longer at the quickening edge of science.

As Higgitt says, the ordinary reader lacks context (other than what is part of “general knowledge”): the “small guys surrounding the big ones”, the textbooks we no longer read, the decor taken for granted as de Morgan takes for granted lamps lighted with gas (rather new in the 1840s!), as Einstein took for granted synchronized clocks (his father designed them: see Peter Galison, Einstein’s clocks). To the mathematician Hamilton in 1853 De Morgan writes:

In reading an old mathematician you will not read his riddle unless you plough with his heifer;* you must see with his light if you want to know how much he saw [quoted by Higgitt].

Higgitt goes on to quote De Morgan’s review of Whewell’s History of the inductive sciences (1847; the review was published in 1849). Whewell, says De Morgan, “appears to have considered foreign to his purpose” inquiries into the when and even the by whom of scientific discovery. But

it is of great importance in the history of philosophy to show, that the germs of brilliant discoveries have often been long in the hands of mankind, unappreciated and little thought of, till some accidental association with a fertile principle or abstract truth, developed their nature, and gave them new value. The more we apply ourselves, with antiquarian industry, to examine the history of the human mind, the more apparent it will be, that the present accumulation of science, however massive, has grown particle by particle, and has never really experienced any sudden increase.

Is this, Higgitt asks, a plea for the cultural history of science avant la lettre?

Odd measures #1: Shelf encumbrance index

You can never be too thin or too rich, they say. But perhaps you can have too many books. How many is too many?

Several factors are relevant. First of all, of course, how many books you have. But whether you have too many depends also on how much space you have. Some people have enough space for all their books; each one sits neatly on its shelf with selected others, and nothing hinders the eager reader from contemplating the titles on an orderly row of spines, and plucking from amongst them the desired tome.

Low SEI.

Unfortunately, unless you are fabulously wealthy or else a “man of one book”, your books are probably not in this edenic condition. Not only may some books be shelfless, or placed ad-hockily on surfaces other than shelves, but quite possibly those that are shelved may not be entirely accessible. Some may be encumbered by others.

It is not my purpose to prescribe limits on the possession of books. Instead I aim only to provide a handy measure by which readers may decide for themselves whether their acquisitive instincts have exceeded the bounds of prudence.

To this end I offer the SHELF ENCUMBRANCE INDEX.

Pundit makes stuff up, is refuted

Stanley Fish has recently asserted that “the conclusions reached in philosophical disquisitions do not travel. They do not travel into contexts that are not explicitly philosophical […], and they do not even make their way into the non-philosophical lives of those who hold them”. This is at best a gross overgeneralization; it can be refuted by five minutes’ research online.*

No doubt lots of people will step up to defend the relevance of philosophical conclusions. I want to consider a different issue. Once upon a time when a poobah like Fish issued pronouncements like this, it would have taken time to gather the evidence to refute him. Now it takes almost no time or expense. It seems that by and large the poobahs have yet to catch on, perhaps because for poobahs research is optional. When they pontificate on the day’s events, they mostly rely on their general knowledge. This is owing no doubt to deadline pressures; but it is also characteristic of the role. A well-furnished mind has been, since the days of Cicero at least, a prerequisite of the orator; but even the most well-furnished have lacunæ and lapses, and one suspects that some of our poobahs’ furnishings are sparse.

When I lecture I sometimes find myself veering into topics I haven’t prepared and don’t know much about. I too have to fall back on my general knowledge. I used to be able to count on knowing more than my students about most of the subjects I was likely to veer into. But now they have computers and iPads. If I don’t get a date or name right they can catch it almost immediately. They sometimes do, and sometimes they tell me. I’ve learned two things: one is not to fake it, the other is to take advantage of those computers and iPads—have them do some fact-checking for me. It’s instructive for both of us.

The issue I want to raise is: what becomes of “general knowledge”, or rather the social value of having lots of it, now that anyone with a phone or tablet can simulate the possession of a well-furnished mind? Is the orator’s storehouse obsolete? And if poobah discourse, like the extemporaneous public oratory of Chautauqua days, depends for its effect partly on the impressive marshalling of general knowledge, will it now gradually fade away?

*The issue Fish raises is real enough, and has a long history: for one case, see Miles Burnyeat, “Can the Sceptic Live his Scepticism?”, in Richard Rorty et al (eds.), Philosophy in History (1980) and the subsequent literature.

Added note: In case you’re wondering, ‘poobah’ is usually traced back to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado (1885), but I found one citation from a letter written in 1857 that mentions a Poobah in Ambah, India.

The Classical Model of Science II

Subtitle: “The Axiomatic Method, the Order of Concepts and the Hierarchy of Sciences from Leibniz to Tarski”. Since no-one has posted on this yet, I’ll throw up a quick notice of this conference, which starts today in Amsterdam, with a diverse all-star line-up. The Axioms website includes a word-cloud and a Twitter feed, so you know it has to be good. The program and abstracts are here (pdf). You may recognize some of the names on the program…

Saving Pell grants, but at whose expense?

The White House boasts that the budget deal “provides specific protection in the discretionary budget to ensure that the there will be sufficient funding for the President’s historic investment in Pell Grants without undermining other critical investments” (the “historic investment” is a roughly 14% increase to $5519 per year).

What the Fact Sheet doesn’t say is that subsidized loans to graduate students will be cut as of 1 July 2012. Under this program, the interest on up to $8500 per year in loans from the government to graduate students is paid by the government while a student is in school and for six months after. The monthly interest on the maximum amount eligible for subsidy—$65,500—is $207. So some portion of that will henceforth have to be paid by students while they are still in school, living on graduate student incomes. In sum,

This change would shift some $125 billion in loan volume over to unsubsidized loans and would cost students $18.1 billion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office,

according to Jennifer Liberto at CNN.

Somehow that didn’t make it into the Fact Sheet…

False flags

Dennis Des Chene

Eric Schliesser has recently responded in no uncertain terms to a post by Justin Smith at Early Modern Experimental Philosophy. Evidently a red flag was raised. On the face of it, their conversation goes like this:

JEHS: The history of philosophy need have no more relation to philosophers’ present concerns than Egyptology to the present concerns of Egyptians.

ES: [—I omit terms of abuse, like “positivist”—] History of philosophy can be used to address our present concerns; “immersing” a past thinker in his or her context prevents our doing so; ergo immersion is to be avoided.

Each of them sounds like, and perhaps wants to sound like, he’s saying something stronger—so that Eric’s reply would in fact be contrary to what Justin proposes. But on close reading, Justin is not denying all relevance to history of philosophy, nor is Eric opposed to bringing context to bear on the understanding of old texts.

Justin, in making a connection between past and present experimental philosophy (that is, the currently trendy X-Phi and the long-ago trendy “experimental Philosophy” of Boyle & co.), argues that the upshot of X-Phi is that the range of evidence that can be brought into philosophical argument has no effective limit. That is quite far from denying relevance to the study of history (as Mark Lance notes in his comment on Eric’s post). The point of invoking Egyptology is rather one of priority, as I said earlier (and even earlier).

Got physical

Benny Goldberg asked me when the phrase “physical sciences” first started being used. At first I went with “intuition”, which suggested that it was a recent invention. But then I looked at Google Books, and was surprised to find (never having thought about this before) that the phrase in English goes back at least to the 1790s. One prominent occurrence is in Mary Somerville’s Connexion of the physical sciences (1835). Her work, which is organized around astronomy and geology, includes also celestial mechanics, acoustics, optics (including color theory), heat theory, electricity, magnetism (these are not yet one topic), gravitation, and a little bit on the influence of climate on living things.

Occurrences in English before 1790 seem to be borrowings from the Continent. The French phrase “sciences physiques” is found as early as 1753 (Encyclopédie, s.v. Chymie, p410)—I doubt that that is the first occurrence. The Latin scientia physica is very common from the beginning of Medieval philosophy onward; it is supposed to denote knowledge of natural things (“physical” in the Aristotelian sense) in general, so that biology or rather the scientia de anima insofar as it deals with the soul as a principle of rest and motion in living things is a scientia physica. The sense of the phrase is thus not quite the same as that of “physical science”.

The question then is: does anyone know the history of this phrase? Or of the term ‘physical’ (and its relatives in French, etc.)? It would seem that the restriction of the physical to the topics treated by Mary Somerville occurred sometime after the decline of Scholasticism, and that our notion of the physical rests on that restriction. Which is to say, that if you call yourself a physicalist then to any philosopher before 1600 you would probably have some explaining to do.

Philologist! Doxographer!

The recent exchange between Dreyfus & Kelly and Garry Wills in the NYRB has a depressingly familiar ring. In brief, the conversation goes like this:

Philosopher: Homer had this really interesting idea that I can use.

Historian: No, he didn’t.

Philos: You’re no fun!

Rorty thought that Descartes invented the mind. The historians said no. (In Philosophy and the mirror of nature Rorty even quotes John Yolton on the “act” interpretation of ‘idea’, which he recognizes to be bad news for his historical claim. He replies, offhandedly, that if Descartes didn’t invent the mind, then Kant certainly did…)

Does it matter? Rorty might well have said that what counts is that we have the concept. And yet it does seem that the history has a role: it sets up a contrast between bad Cartesian cogito-fixation and good Aristotelian (and post-Cartesian) no-big-deal-ism. Similarly, Dreyfus and Kelly use old texts (and slightly less aged athletes) to set up a contrast between bad out-of-this-worldly-individualism and good being-there-whooshism, and they do so by examining what they take to be instances of the types.

A Janus-faced discipline

[Previous posts on this topic: Pasnau, Novaes, Smith I, Smith II, Lance.]

If the history of philosophy needs defending, the posts listed above ought to persuade anyone persuasible. Rather than add another log to the palisade, I thought it would be useful to try to understand why the question keeps coming up. (There’s ample evidence that it does come up every so often. You’ll find earlier stages of the discussion in Margaret Wilson’s Descartes (which was published, significantly enough, in a series called “Arguments of the Philosophers”), in Bernard Williams’ introduction to his Descartes (and the afterthoughts in A Sense of the past), in Alan Gabbey’s “Arguing with the ungrateful dead”—I can’t find a reference to it, but it circulated in samizdat in the late 1980s—, and Dan Garber’s introduction to Descartes embodied.)

The question keeps coming up, I think, because the history of philosophy has two faces. One looks toward intellectual history, itself a branch of cultural history, and the other toward contemporary philosophy. Call these the East Face and the West Face (that gives me room for two more if I need them…). The East Face thinks of philosophical texts in the manner of a historian: they are remains of the past which happen to be available to us in the Archive (see Foucault’s Archeology), and which we take as indices of past events, notably the acts of thought we take to be evidenced by the texts we study. The task of the intellectual historian (once the basic work of putting together the Archive is done) is to describe accurately and to explain those events. (Putting together the Archive is itself a very difficult and challenging task, I might add—see Thomas Tanselle’s work on editing and textual criticism; or take a look at André Robinet’s edition of Leibniz’s Principes de la nature et de la grâce.) That’s a rather atmospheric way of saying that we look at texts, try to determine the intentions behind the speech acts of their authors, and—having thus understood the phenomena—try to understand why the authors did what they did. The process goes on at the level of phrases (e.g. Descartes’ semel in vita), arguments, whole texts, œuvres, schools. (I should add that in my view every responsible reader does history, at least occasionally. Only in those situations in which everyone understands everyone else so well that “hitches” in understanding—do you mean by ‘essence’ what I mean?—never get in the way will we not be engaged in tasks resembling those of the historian properly speaking. Consider the giants of the 50s—Quine, Carnap—: for today’s graduate student, I suspect, a great deal more needs to be motivated and explicated than when I first encountered them; in the 70s there were plenty of native Quineans and Carnapians from whom one could absorb the requisite understandings without having to crack a book.)

Maybe the truth isn’t out there after all (with update)

One of the latest stories coming from the Wikileaks cables has it that Michael Moore’s Sicko was banned in Cuba. It was banned, so the story goes, because it depicted the Cuban healthcare system so favorably that authorities feared showing the movie would provoke a backlash among a public well aware of the actual state of the system.

This is strange. All the references in Google news to the supposed banning of Sicko can be traced to a single piece, dated 6 or 8 Aug 2007, by a Cuban dissident, Dr. Darsi Ferrer. The piece does not in fact say that Sicko was banned. It says instead that “There is no doubt that the Cuban authorities will not allow the Cuban people the possibility of watching this documentary”. The relevant paragraph in the cable, which is dated 31 Jan 2008, looks like a paraphrase of Ferrer’s opening paragraph. So it is not independent testimony to the banning of the movie.

After trying to track down the truth in this matter, I am stymied. It’s worth remembering that the cables are no more trustworthy than the people who wrote them, and that those people have axes to grind too. That’s pretty clear in this case (remember that the FHSP who wrote this was hired or appointed by the Bush State Department).

That’s not to say that Moore didn’t misrepresent the condition of the Cuban health system, or that the cable doesn’t state the truth, but only that in this domain everything needs independent verification. Journalists generally are treating the cables as if they presented a behind-the-scenes unvarnished truth. We historians ought to know better. All our documents are merely evidence, sometimes good, sometimes not so good, for what happened. 

Update 19 December:

The Guardian has a followup story, still mostly in steno mode, in which Michael Moore’s response to the Wikileaks cable is paraphrased. The story casts as a he-said-she-said matter what is really a question of fact. It continues to report as fact statements from the cable even though the cable has been shown to be retailing propaganda on the question of the banning of Moore’s film.