cheese it, the cops!

Entanglements 5: Epistemology.

My hero G.E. Moore and his proof of the external world. Knowledge is merely true belief. Perception is ingestion. Extended mind thesis. Against Wittgenstein. Etc.

 

 

and here is the playlist so far.

 

political partisans are rational as sleep-deprived toddlers

Partisan Irrationality and the Credibility Index

By Crispin Sartwell

A true man thinks not what his listeners are feeling, but what he is saying. (Laws of Ethelred ["The Unready"], 10th century)

Some years ago, our team here at the National Institutes for Logic carried out a groundbreaking piece of research. We demonstrated beyond quibble that those who very frequently agree with the consensus of people on their own side of the political spectrum with regard to factual matters are as rational as sleep-deprived toddlers. One of the most remarkable features of this bold undertaking, which occupied some twenty-seven years and consumed tens of millions of dollars in grants and dozens of toddlers, is that we proved decisively what was completely obvious to begin with.

This is a particularly appropriate time to deploy our breakthrough, which we term the Credibility Index (CI). It is a useful tool which will enable you to assess objectively the extent to which anyone, including yourself, is connected to reality.

A few months ago, it was common for Trump supporters to question the legitimacy of the American electoral process, whereas his opponents were outraged by the very idea. In that innocent time, leftists decried and protested the terrible violence in some inner cities; now they celebrate these places as safe and fully functional communities. Then, conservatives seemed to regard it as unpatriotic to doubt our intelligence agencies; they have discovered the history of its lies and failures.

Obviously, you should doubt the sincerity or rationality of people who, in a mass, contradict their own apparently passionate beliefs for the purpose of vilifying their opponents. But there was no point in listening to anyone in the mainstream of either of these political factions - left or right, Democrat or Republican - to begin with. This can be proven.

Suppose we are conducting a poll about whether the intelligence report on the Russian electoral hack is plausible. And suppose that half the people expressing an opinion say it is, and half say it isn't. And suppose as well that the publicly available evidence on this is murky and split. The overall 50/50 split of opinion is more or less what we'd expect given the state of the evidence. So far, so rational.

However, as we pollsters dig down into the data, we discover something bizarre: all the tall people believe that the report is plausible, and all the short people believe it is not. This strikes us as unaccountable, because height has no bearing on access to the relevant information. We'd expect both groups to be split. We must conclude that at least half the people on both sides are forming their opinions irrationally, that their height, rather than the evidence, is correlated with or is determining their opinions.

Being on the left or right in this case is exactly like being over or under 5'8": evidentially irrelevant. What counts is specific sources and methods, or the real credibility of people who are in a position to know. That you celebrate free enterprise or revile inequality is neither here nor there. If all the political positions of the Democrats were true, this would tend neither to establish nor to demolish the truth of the intelligence report. Your place on the political spectrum is entirely irrelevant with regard to the evidence, on this and many other matters.

Every time tall people agree as a group on a controversial claim (that the American electoral system is illegitimate, for example), it becomes more obvious that they are not responding to the evidence and that they ought to have little credibility. That they believe it is not any sort of indication that it's true. It's just their height talking.

And that is obviously the situation with party spokespeople, political consultants on one side and the other, partisan pundits, and indeed with most Americans in this bubbly moment: every time they agree with the consensus of people on their own side, where the evidence is split and group membership irrelevant to it, their credibility is multiplied downward. If it's 50% after one such foray, their CI is .5 out of a possible 1. After two, it's .25, and so on. Let them agree with their group on seven such matters in a row, and their overall credibility is about .004. Science tells us that we'd be better off listening to untreated schizophrenics. And if you yourself agreed with your own side the last seven times out, we here at the National Institutes for Logic urge you to take some quiet time alone and reflect.

One's political position is entirely irrelevant to questions like the severity of climate change, whether gun control reduces violence, or the conditions in John Lewis's congressional district. But antecedent group affiliation largely determines people's opinions on these matters. If you're wondering whom to believe, find people whose affiliations do not at all predict their factual beliefs. Those are the only people in this situation with a decent CI, the only people with an objective claim to be regarded as credible. One wonders whether there are any such people.

Political polarization, in short, has turned Americans into idiots, with regard to the question of whom to believe, and with regard to what the world is actually like. Political partisans have replaced reality with one another, in an infinite round of epistemic backslapping in which they congratulate people who agree with them on their own sagacity. They're so busy bonding that they forget that there's an actual world.

Now that would merely be amusing or even sort of sweet if it were a matter of people coalescing like little raindrops into placid collective pools. Sadly, however, these groups are formed up as much by hatred and exclusion of the other as by their yearning for internal unity. Abandoning the world for your group turns out to be a good way to break a nation in two.

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. Follow him on Twitter @crispinsartwell.

If you don't quite get what I'm doing here, (a) I'll keep trying, (b) this might help. Also may be of assistance if you are thinking of apparently obvious objections.

partisanship and extinction

One thing is incredibly obvious if you have a political position outside the mainstream taxonomy: no one in basic left-right American politics takes any position on the basis of reasons. I mean no one, even and especially those who are continually congratulating themselves on their rationality and reality-orientation. Nothing could be more obvious. Everyone has a social commitment to a certain set of positions, and then rummages around in the world for evidence to affirm it and ways to discredit or ignore any difficulties and disagreements. Right and left or Dem and Rep or Trump and stop-Trump: these are fantastical as belief systems, just riddled with holes and contradictions. They are demographic identities strongly tied to other demographic features - region, race, gender, income, and so on. The only role of facts is finding confirmation - not of one's positions, but of one's social identity. That's why these little bubbles work so well. I'm telling you that the positions of a Barack Obama, a Frank Bruni, or an Ivy League professor are no less like this than Sarah Palin's. You've got to deal with people's power, or the fact that they're all over your TV or whatever. But pretending that they are giving reasons or making arguments is very silly.

A good example right now is what the left does with Trump: just global maximal hysteria. White supremacist coup! Any fact that backs that up is a good reason, any fact that throws it into question is ignorance or propaganda. This drifts people on both sides to accept anything uncritically from their own side and ignore everything else or attribute it to pure evil. In the course of things, it has to continually increase hyper-partisan tribalism of an incredibly irrational variety. Of course, I take myself literally to have proven this (not linking it all again).

It's great that we're social animals and all, and perhaps agreeing with whatever jive your tribe has fixated on is adaptive. Maybe cooperation in a group is a more important function than finding the truth in evolutionary terms. Here's why I doubt that. The unity of a group is largely achieved by exclusion, ostracization, war. Our solidarity is characteristically a function of our exclusions. We may kill everything down this road. Also, losing touch with reality on this level just cannot be adaptive. Your whole people will be destroyed by its fantastical prepossessions. You'll be denying there's a problem even as it kills you, etc. I think this is our formula for extinction, actually, the sort of adaptation that ends up killing your species, or which has killed most species that ever existed.

People do have bizarre notions about evolution. Some people think they have to push it along; that is, you show some feature is adaptive or whatever, that shows it's good and desirable. They make 'evolve!' into a moral imperative, which is insane. Evolution does not care whether we live or die. Obviously, it often produces very specialized or almost hyperbolic adaptations (say the huge size of some dinosaur species) which work for a bit, or in a specific niche, or until conditions change. When they do, that adaptation extinguishes the species. For example, if human consciousness is in fact an adaptation and not a side-effect of other adaptations, for example (like an 'accidental' result of more memory or calculating ability), it might take us to the stars or it might end us entirely. That we take it as a mark of our transcendence of animal life or something is just more self-congratulation.

Obviously, we could not persist without social cooperation. But just as obviously, the adaptations that make such cooperation possibly might end up being like the gigantic size of the megasaurs: fatal. But whether or not, they leave us presently in a condition where people are apparently, or even passionately, making assertions or claiming to speak truth, but in which that is quite evidently not the point of their activities at all. People are voluntarily making themselves extremely stupid and constructing fantastic pseudo-worlds. It is not going to end well, or it is not ending well.

all i want is honesty

that's a quote, and i am still working sk's attack upon christendom.

a couple of people asked me, apropos of the entry below, whether i support trump. let me say this: that i do not support trump, think he's dangerous, etc, does not entail that i should believe that everything he says is false, monstrous, etc, or that i should pretend i do in order to help form up the like-minded, impress or comfort you with the fact that i belong to your group, etc. people actually believe that the only reason anyone would say anything is to achieve manipulation=solidarity or whatever. this is false, and all you need is a few cases where obviously the person would say anything to join their group together or make its members feel good about themselves or manipulate people into agreeing (='epistemic partisanship') to get to the point where that person ought to have been thoroughly discredited.

all i'm trying to do is say the truth, not lead or follow a movement, not work you emotionally to agree, not to congratulate myself or you because the people we oppose are so stupid. now, obviously that does not entail that what i say is actually true - not at all. but it ought to be the minimum standard of human credibility. i often feel that i am the very last american with any commitment along those lines whatever. 

all day every day, people just flamboyantly parade the fact that they don't care about truth at all; they care about group membership, and that means they care about exclusion, destroying or discrediting their opponents. i don't see how people give rush limbaugh or timothy egan any credibility whatsoever, or krugman on politics or whatever. the obvious minimum standard for human cred is that you do try to speak the truth. now, the fact that such people may think of themselves as trying to do that, when it is false on its face, might be the saddest thing of all.

k=tb and standards of theory choice

just to begin the re-defense of 'knowledge is merely true belief': say you had some commitment to economy, ockham's razor, the simplest law-like explanation for apparently disparate phenomena. (that's supposedly stephen hawking's first criterion of theory choice, e.g.) don't you think you should see how far you can get with k=tb? not going to find a simpler among the proposed theories of knowledge, i believe (truly).

 

[nuthin, i just love this song.]

Swampin with Wayne Riggs

Again, I want to say that I haven't accused anyone except Zagzebski of plagiarism. Another person mentioned by Pritchard as a source of the swamping problem is Wayne Riggs, the chair at Oklahoma who according to Zagzebski said that I sent him a threatening email, which is demonstrably false. That got me threatened with arrest and held to be insane. That Riggs shows up again here as someone who's fundamental to the swamping problem is really quite the little coincidence.

At any rate, in Reliability and the Value of Knowledge (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, January 2002), he attributes the problem to Ward Jones, who certainly got it from me, and to Zagzebski (however, to an earlier book [Virtues of the Mind] and paper ['From Reliabilism to Virtue Epistemology']), and to Kvanvig (see note, p. 80). Like everyone else, starting with me, he saw that it was a fundamental challenge to reliabilism.

But obviously Riggs could really have gotten it from Jones and Zagzebski, and I don't see any cut-and-paste, etc. Still there too it derives from me, I believe, because at a minimum it derives from Jones and Zagzebski, who got it from me. 

counter-consensus as a contribution

One thing about the swamping problem: whatever you may think of the thesis that knowledge is merely true belief, I don't think that anyone could have come up with the problem unless they had been focused very critically on the function of justification, someone who was skeptical about regarding justification as necessary for knowledge. And I think that perverse as the position was, it has turned out to be of use to the profession!

That is what I do, I feel, better than anyone working, more or less. I'm not necessarily smarter than the average analytic epistemologist, and i do make mistakes. But I focus on counter-consensus moves kind of automatically. So, if you want to remake part of a discipline or a topic, try this: what are the first few ground-clearing intuitions/assumptions that make everything else possible? These are often inadequately or not even argued for, and often I find when I think about it a little, I don't think they're obvious or even true at all.

That's how I did the swamping problem in Cargile's seminar at UVA, probably '87. I was probing for the assumption that would give a lever (and show my cleverness and profundity, etc). So we did Alvin Goldman's reliabilism, and something just seemed sort of off to me, like that's really just redundant: knowledge is a true belief that is reached by a reliable method for reaching...true belief. Well, what are we after then? What's our goal? Obviously or explicitly just true belief, so the method is merely instrumental to the real admitted telos. Then I started trying to generalize it and that's how I found all those quotes from Bonjour, Moser, Armstrong that Zagzebski and Jones recycled. Without that sort of reasoning, or to save some pet version of justification, no one would ever have generated the swamping problem.

Also I would say you better get out of a narrow frame. Actually, what was driving me was Kierkegaard; I thought that analytic epistemology just deployed definitionally a cult of reason that was really impoverishing and unrealistic. That's why I wanted to delete the justification condition in the first place. No one conducts their epistemic lives in the way the analytic trad suggests we all ought to; and anyone who did would just be gross and inhuman. So that's what made me probe for weaknesses. Ask any of these other alleged originators how and why they thought of this... 

So a more recent version of this move is that I assert that free will is not required for moral responsibility. I submitted it here and there with no luck; still getting the 'that's ridiculous' response. But it will be in the ethics chapter of Entanglements. If nothing else, it will really press people in the free will problem to think hard about the initial assumptions. I think it could make a positive difference and I think again that it will be vindicated.

in the swamp with kvanvig

Another locus classicus of the swamping problem is Jonathan Kvanvig's The Value of Knowledge and The Pursuit of Understanding (2003) (here it is on amazon). Kvanvig does much better: he sets the whole thing up as an attempt to deal with the problem I raised (i.e. the swamping problem). Man, I really should have been paying attention! But then by the time you get to Pritchard and Turri's Stanford Encyclopedia article, I've dropped out of the bibliographies. I'll have a look at some of Kvanvig's earlier papers.

When I finally get back up to speed, I'll make this sucker stick against virtue epistemology and all the other alleged answers. K=TB, baby. 

One way this happened, I think, was that everyone agreed that my position was ridiculous (and like I say many of the eminences of epistemology gathered at at APA in '92 or '93 and tried to crush it). One problem was that if I was right, the whole of analytic epistemology after Gettier was kind of a waste of time; I thought my position  was a fun and useful provocation, but I can see how people might not want that, and the book was never published (originally I submitted it to the same Cambridge series that eventually did Kvanvig).

 But then again, my argument did present one fundamental challenge: the 'swamping problem' or 'the problem of the value of knowledge.' For one thing, it just destroyed reliabilism. So people managed to absorb that, then maybe thought they'd be discredited by association with my insane conclusion? Everyone who tried to answer the problem or build on it, including Kvanvig, Jones, and Zagzebski, answered it on behalf of JTB or used it to build toward relatively fresh but not apparently bizarre conclusions (the way it drove virtue epistemology as a theory of justification). So that was a lot more palatable to everyone, and they wanted to forget where I drove it, so they wanted to forget where it came from.

Anyway, I am going to arm up (as it were) and reassert that (propositional) knowledge is merely true belief against all comers, virtuous, social, and whatnot. Then you can repress it again, so it might take another century or so, but finally people will capitulate to the obvious, no matter whom they attribute it to. One remark: the reason people have such strong 'intuitions' that knowledge requires more than truth and belief is because for a philosophy prof, whatever they said in intro when you were 18 is a baseline truth you remember from before birth. Guess what? There is no such intuition.

ward jones and the swamping problem

I do want to establish that I invented the swamping problem, and I really am just returning to the discourse in epistemology, so I've had to try to catch up. Meanwhile yet another revision of the charge sheet on Zagzebski; I will get this exactly right eventually. (Replaced in timeline as well.)

Duncan Pritchard, in a draft paper titled What is the Swamping Problem?, gives the following pedigree.

This difficulty is the so-called ‘swamping problem’, as defended most prominently by Jonathan Kvanvig (e.g., 2003), but also put forward in various forms by Ward Jones (1997), Richard Swinburne (1999; 2000), Wayne Riggs (2002), Linda Zagzebski (2003) and John Greco (forthcominga).

I am going to try to go at these in order, one at a time. Ward Jones' paper (American Philosophical Quarterly, October 1997), early on sets up the question with a quotation from me (page 424), and section 2 is a remarkably close recapitulation of section 3 of my journal of philosophy paper. 

He formulates the problem in just my terms, attacks reliabilism with it as I did, then actually brings the same quotations to bear as I did, and Zagzebski.

Jones p. 427:

   I have been discussing the reliabilist in particular, but I should reemphasize that I consider the relibilist to be representative of epistemic instrumentalists. Laurence Bonjour, a coherentist, writes:

If epistemic justification were not conducive to truth in this way, if finding epistemically justified beliefs did not substantially increase the likelihood of finding true ones, then epistemic justification would be irrelevant to our main cognitive goal and of dubious worth. . . . Epistemic justification is therefore in the final analysis only an instrumental value, not an intrinsic one.

And Paul Moser, a foundationalist, writes:

Epistemic justification is essentially related to the so-called cognitive goal of truth, insofar as an individual belief is epistemically justified only if it is appropriately directed toward the goal of truth.

 

And me, p. 172-73:

Indeed, proponents of all the major conceptions of justification hold this position. For example, the foundationalist Paul Moser writes:

Epistemic justification is essentially related to the so-called cognitive goal of truth, insofar as an individual belief is epistemically justified only if it is appropriately related toward the goal of truth. More specifically, on the present conception, one is epistemically justified in believing a proposition only if one has good reason to believe it is true.

The reliabilist Alvin Goldman claims, similarly, that a condition on an account of justification is that beliefs justified on the account be likely to be true; he says that a plausible conception of justification will be “truth-linked” ( op. cit. 116-21) . And the coherentist Luaurence Bonjour puts it even more strongly. p. 173 

If epistemic justification were not conducive to truth in this way, if finding epistemically justified beliefs did not substantially increase the likelihood of finding true ones, then epistemic justification would be irrelevant to our main cognitive goal and of dubious worth. It is only if we have some reason for thinking that epistemic justification constitutes a path to truth that we as cognitive beings have any motive for preferring epistemically justified beliefs to epistemically unjustified ones. Epistemic justification is therefore in the final analysis only an instrumental value, not an intrinsic one. 

 

 

The quotes are obvious, but the whole discussion is a very close recapitulation of me. And of course, both these discussions are also identical to Zagzebski's. I will say that Jones also did a cut and paste from my paper, but at least he quoted me in proximity, and he comes closer to crediting me with the argument. But we will see that by every route that this argument entered the discourse, it derived from me.

 

 

 

 

charge sheet: zagzebski

charge sheet against linda zagzebski (with date of her paper corrected and both of my papers supplied; should be much clearer now; sorry!). originally my concern was more to show that i invented the swamping problem. i won't be accusing anyone else of plagiarism, but i do intend to show that this paper (section III) and  this one (section IV) state the problem quite clearly in very much the terms in which it came to be expressed, in terms of epistemological instrumentalism, the ultimacy of knowledge as an epistemic value, and the truth-conduciveness of justification, as well as the use of it to attack reliabilism. 

the clearest appropriations are from the earlier paper in the american philosophical quarterly, 1991: "knowledge is merely true belief."

 zagzebski uses the argument to motivate virtue epistemology construed as a theory of justification, and actually i think that is a good use of it and a good argument for virtue epistemology (though i still will argue for k=tb). i was getting to be close friends with james montmarquet at that point, though i can't really remember the order of the writing and the friendship. seems like we should have realized this? or perhaps we did but never really did anything about it. but at any rate, in my taxonomy, virtue epistemology qua theory of justification would be a 'deontological' as opposed to a 'teleological' or 'intstrumental' conception of justification. i held that the swamping problem refuted instrumental conceptions of justification - first and obviously reliabilism - and that there were no plausible deontological conceptions (that is, conceptions on which justification is not criterially truth-conducive). but in that sense virtue epistemology does answer the problem.

i think it is a worthwhile or even ingenious application of the argument; in my opinion it tends to show that virtue epistemology (still on the horizon as i wrote) is the most or even only going plausible conception of justification, and hence the only known way to hold on to a justification condition against my attack. it would have been easy to credit it instead of doing what almost amounts to a cut and paste, with a paper she says she had read. i don't know why people do things like that.

to correct leiter (who may have already corrected it himself), i am not charging nehamas directly with plagiarism, but i am identifying a series of coincidences that strike me as suggestive of unseemly appropriations. but that's all i have there (scroll down). and then i think that nehamas's response, to say nothing of zagzebski's, has been damning rather than exculpating.

the general plague

i think what kills me about people annexing my ideas is that it is so easy not to, and that can just make your work cooler and better and more creative, right? these are things i would never do, because i want to know what people have said and are saying, and then i want to attack it or build on it. all zagzebski had to say was, as crispin sartwell argued (last year in the journal of philosophy), if a theory of justification must be meta-justified on the grounds that it is truth-conducive, that beliefs that are justified according to the theory are likelier to be true than beliefs that are not justified according to it (actually even that is not quite adequate as the exact statement; i am not going to hack at the weeds right here), then it is either redundant or incoherent. now, this helps me make the following argument. a lot of her work seems to depend on this one idea; that work could still be creative or innovative or important, even if it was built on my idea. nothing could be easier. let's say the nehamas situation is as i describe it. nothing could be easier than to mention my work and immunize yourself from the charge of appropriation (sartwell has developed a related view in his suck-ass book six names of beauty. even just that would be enough; i wouldn't have a problem after that. i obviously do not own sappho (no man did).)

so i say the (alleged) fact that zagzebski and nehamas were influenced by my work, and systematically attempted not to notice that they were, or pretended that they weren't, shows something terrible at their heart. they needed to present themselves as profound innovators, so they needed a new basic idea. i can quite see how i could be a source for that; i've literally had hundreds of them. but because i actually am creative, and confident of my creativity, i have to know, and i want to know, what is out there that i could build on or annihilate or turn inside out, so i can make the basic creative move at all. that they can't do that, yet want to appear in public as though they can by erasing their sources, shows that they can't in fact do very creative work, that they are aware of that fact, and are pretending to be someone (me, to be precise) who can do creative work.

so, i'd say any work produced by a person like that is bound to be mediocre and dishonest. and i don't pretend to be the only grad student or tenured prof who has good ideas. people who do that once do it all the time; that is what their scholarship is and their public persona. i very seriously would check every word these people ever wrote or spoke for charlatanry and appropriation. it's there, believe me.

 

science and poe-sy

like a lot of folks, i have always been fascinated by edgar allan poe. i kept returning to his criticism, though it's a mixed bag. but he forms a good withering realist (!) foil for some of the woolly happy excesses of the transcedentalists. he thought the fads for spiritualism, water cures, and the sprawling 19th c. new age universe was amusing horseshit, notwithstanding his association with 'the uncanny'. i want him to be a devastating precursor of my three stooges of the apocalypse: twain, bierce, and mencken. all of those guys had poe on board, though i'm sure they had their reservations. what i always wanted to find in poe, and always half-assedly missed - was some sort of statement of how he saw his own intellectual orientation, what he was trying to do or show. i wanted something philosophical, in short. somehow until i read the marilynne robinson piece below, i missed eureka, possibly because of its subtitle: "a prose poem". ok ok i tend to steer clear of poetry, especially poetry of the 19th century.

honestly, the thing is a fairly straightforward philosophical essay, and i think the 'prose poem' thing is ironic. it's playful and triply ironic and such; i might compare its tone (and also a number of its positions) provisionally to kierkegaard's, emerging at the same moment (though i am not putting it on a par with sk). for philosophy, it's pretty literary. also its withering and almost self-ridiculing tone very much reminds me of bierce. he's aware of his own pretentiousness as he writes; he's sorry that he's doing philosophy, but here it is. there are many jokes.

but it is dedicated to von humboldt. he contrasts the positions of aristotle, bacon, hume, kant, bentham, and mill, for example. he quotes them. it is a defense of imagination, intuition, and improvisation in all the paths of human inquiry, including the sciences, and it is a reasoned defense by a cosmopolitan intellectual who read everything. i am still grappling with the overall positions and structure of the argument, and i'll have more to say about these after i've read the whole twice.

but what i want to say at the moment about poe, robinson, and epistemology is this: we do wrong (i did wrong below) to contrast science and (say) aesthetic or poetic or intuitive paths toward the truth. look poe was a literary person and he struggled toward these ideas out of that sort of material. einstein was a mathematician, or whatever it may be, and he moved toward a (somewhat similar) set of ideas from that direction. but poe's technique actually has rigorous applications of reason all over it, while einstein - this is a commonplace - is engaged in acts of imagination, intuition: an aesthetic of beauty. these things are integrated on the ground at the most fertile moments. like a lot of people for a couple of hundred years, poe's quite working on lucretian-newtonian lines. and i think lucretius lurks in the background not only as having the right sort of universe, but as doing poetic science. and if we viewed einstein as emerging in that same history, we'd have a point. 

one reason to delete the justification condition on knowledge is that it's always trying to foreclose on the paths to truth a priori. i don't think we can tell now what all the paths may be, and i don't think we're sufficiently appreciative of the many different ways that people have found the truth, or the fact that these are always working in combination.

in general, we need to destroy this obsessive contrast between reason and its others, which gets stamped in everything from star trek to brain science (where your executive regions are contrasted to your amygdala or whatever). this really is a theme of poe's fiction and poetry. we'll be doing a lot better science and a lot better prose poetry once we throw these distinctions into chaos.

the figure of poe is a symbol of the reason-beast dualism: he has become a mere study in pathology, an interesting addict, as also an arch-romantic, an american baudelaire. it's all supposed to be darkside, a spiralling tumble into hallcination. but it takes about a second with poe's criticism to realize that's wrong, and as robinson points out, the stories often resolve morally or are emblems of a moral crisis and emblems of its resolution. or really, it's an oscillation in poe that at its best shows a resolution if not a harmony. 

poe, marilynne robinson, and k=tb

marilynne robinson's essay on edgar allan poe in this month's nyrb is profound. here's an example of the motivations underlying my view that knowledge is merely believing the truth, and does not require any particular sorts of reasons or justifications:

Poe’s mind was by no means commonplace. In the last year of his life he wrote a prose poem, Eureka, which would have established this fact beyond doubt—if it had not been so full of intuitive insight that neither his contemporaries nor subsequent generations, at least until the late twentieth century, could make any sense of it. Its very brilliance made it an object of ridicule, an instance of affectation and delusion, and so it is regarded to this day among readers and critics who are not at all abreast of contemporary physics. Eureka describes the origins of the universe in a single particle, from which “radiated” the atoms of which all matter is made. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter, forming the physical universe.

This by itself would be a startling anticipation of modern cosmology, if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it, for example that space and “duration” are one thing, that there might be stars that emit no light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree counteracts the force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes with different laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to its original state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have become, that our present universe may be one in a series.

All this is perfectly sound as observation, hypothesis, or speculation by the lights of science in the twenty-first century. And of course Poe had neither evidence nor authority for any of it. It was the product, he said, of a kind of aesthetic reasoning—therefore, he insisted, a poem. He was absolutely sincere about the truth of the account he had made of cosmic origins, and he was ridiculed for his sincerity. Eureka is important because it indicates the scale and the seriousness of Poe’s thinking, and its remarkable integrity. It demonstrates his use of his aesthetic sense as a particularly rigorous method of inquiry.

right: aesthetic reasoning. might lead you very wrong. but it might lead you very right. and if you think that aesthetics isn't central to science or reason or practices of inquiry or justification, i don't think you've been watching!

k=tb

suddenly i have very much warmed to experimental philosophy. once, i was skeptical or even dismissive, for one of the things that very much attracted me to philosophy was that, unlike in many less rigorous disciplines, you could do your research lying in bed, maybe with a bunch of books lying around, maybe not. but however, experimental philosophers are vindicating my theory of knowledge, which, if i'm recalling correctly, is profoundly radical yet mind-humpingly simple. i conclude from this that their research methods are unassailable. k=tb, baby.

one thing i'll say for 'knowledge is merely true belief' that perhaps i didn't say back in the day: it's pretty darn economical, oh, elegant really. i think knowledge is a richer notion than is captured in analytic epistemology. but let's restrict ourselves to an account of 'S (a person) knows that p (a proposition [or something that can be true or false])'. i actually am not quite sure how to value simplicity as a quality of theories; i am not sure that a simpler theory is likelier to be true than a complex one. but S knows that p iff S believes p and p is true (or 'S knows that p iff p and S believes that p') is an extraordinarily simple theory (iff is 'if and only if'), and i assert that it does a surprisingly good job of covering 'the phenomena', which i make out to be the ways the term is centrally or paradigmatically used in ordinary language. that it can do that is what i was arguing in my early papers, and the survey materials lend at least some support to that notion. the simplicity might be compelling at this point because of the baroque refinements to jtb-style approaches post-gettier.

[or, to review: the usual account of knowledge is jtb: justified true belief. obviously, tb is more economical. also, that little j thing or whatever we may call a similar condition, or multiplying conditions, begins to become truly rococo: dude it leads into endless labyrinths, worlds full of barn replicas.]

i generated k=tb in jim cargile's graduate seminar in epistemology at uva in the late 80s. it was explicitly an attempt to display the philosophical power of sheer perversity, a not entirely atypical bit of playful grandstanding: alright, what position is no one taking? i literally built a grid of theories and saw a big hole, and one thing about finding a fissure in the taxonomy like that is that if you jump in, you see a bunch of assumptions other people are making, which you then can try to undermine. but there could have been other perverse approaches and here's why i went for this one: it leans on truth like a mofo. as david sackris and james beebe put it, "bringing about the truth of p is (except in exceptional circumstances) not a task that falls to S. Rather, that 'task' falls to reality" (9). everyone at the time was willing to delete the truth condition; i had a lot of more or less rortyan gard contemporaries. my approach was designed to fit into a reality program. (cargile thought it was ridiculous, but in a great way or just the way i'd hoped: blasphemy! he cried, with a big old smile. also he always called me 'jean-paul'. he gave the final version for the class/first version for the world a 'B+', if i recall.)

another motivation at that moment, however, was that (almost secretly) i was reading kierkegaard, and really, as people sensed when the stuff angered them, i was going to try to derationalize knowledge; i was going to let your faith count as knowledge if its propositional content was true, i was going to encourage you to intuit, i was going to claim that even reason rested on faith, and so on. i was going to argue that there were many sources of knowledge, reason/science being only some, anarchizing epistemology. the main purpose of the papers was to take the sting out of the actual results, to show that it wasn't irrationalist at all. well, maybe it wasn't, necessarily, without some ancillary arguments. i was going to sneak all that up on you after i pulled the rational part out of the conceptual analysis of knowledge.

i did get more convinced of it as time went by; also it was my hobby to go here and there to defend it against various onslaughts, so it provided amusement if nothing else; i did delight in its perversity, or even in the fact that everyone thought it was ridiculous. some people - including some eminent epistemologists - became genuinely angry, which is also not the worst thing in the world necessarily. it was a bit of a performance piece, but people did sincerely think it was absurd. i started touring it to little conferences and stuff as a grad student and had worked it through a million counter-examples before the first version came out in american philosophical quarterly. i certainly had a notion that it would be my little reputation-maker, that i'd be associated with that idea primarily. i'm glad it didn't quite turn out that way, i suppose.

there was a little sensation at the time when the second paper came out in the journal of philosophy, i guess, and i do remember defending the whole thing in front of an angry auditorium at an apa; i remember robert audi getting pretty hostile, e.g. but really, the thing blew over. i think one problem is this: if k=tb, too many problems on which people have spent too much time do not arise. if it were true, it really would mean a lot of the epistemology of the last x decades (again, gettier and after) was barking up the wrong tree. it just had no place in the line of the discourse at that time, is another way to put it. it was one of a number of times i mistakenly thought that people would find it delightful to be provoked.

 no one would publish my book on the topic, which must have been profoundly frustrating at the time. they sent it out specifically to be refereed by people who had already attacked the argument in one venue or another. for awhile, they were assigning my papers to grad students at arizona - a big center of analytic epistemology - as an exercise, like a take-home final: what has gone so terribly wrong with this argument? an object-lesson in sophism. i used to get some emails every year or two with refutations from grad students (always on the same predictable lines). i actually didn't hate that; i've always thought the whole thing was a fun little thing to play with, and it came from a grad seminar in the first place, for god's sake.

there has been a trickle of references to it, but really it just dissolved. in a way, that was ok; it let me go on to other things, like the political stuff; otherwise i might have spent a career on it. after some years i got profoundly tired of the same objections and replies, and really wanted to go write about art or something. sriously, for a very long time if i was walking the halls somewhere with a name tag, philosophers would snap their fingers, like 'aren't you that guy?' it got to where i'd be: have you read my stuff on race?  i started pretending not to remember my own argument, and then i really started not remembering my own argument.

but i definitely also still feel that this sucker has legs. people are going to keep circling back to it, i think. there are problems, but there are strategies for dealing with them. i think beebe and sackris show some of these better than i did. if i myself were going to return to a defense, i'd need to bone up on my own arguments! also rethink some. also it would need to be put into relation to developments in epistemology since the early '90s, like the 'truth-makers' stuff and timothy williamson's work in epistemology, to which it is interestingly related. 

i feel very distant from the person who generated this idea, so maybe if i could be permitted to comment on its strengths? it is still out there as a fundamental challenge. no one has dispensed with it. (people were relieved to regard lycan's attack as decisive. not even close, i say, as beebe and sackris point out. but lycan reviewed the manuscript for one publisher or another.) the fact that many important epistemological problems do not arise if k=tb is right is not necessarily, all things considered, a strike against it. i still endorse it as a theory within limits (man it's going to be a little hard to deal with 'propositions' in my later ontology), but there should at least be a longer line of debate about it.

american philosophical quarterly, knowledge is merely true belief

journal of philosophy, why knowledge is merely true belief

(sorry about paywalls etc; maybe you can get them through jstor if you have a library connection).

knowledge without justification and the kindle version

epistemic minimalism, the stub

frank hofmann, in defense of some sartwellian insights

ken morris, concerning sartwell's minimalist thesis

the world's clearest principle

so far as is possible, believe all that is true and only what is true. 

first of all, i urge all of us to try to conduct ourselves by that standard. and second, i propose that it is something like tautological, that it follows from our status as creatures that believe things. to believe something is to take it to be true. if you take it to be false, you do not believe it, by definition, correct? so that the goal of truth is intrinsic to the nature of belief. so that takes care of the 'only what is true'. as to the all: i think there's an important pleasure and usefulness in knowing as much as possible! we're going to have to acknolwedge our extreme constraints in this regard, of course: that itself is part of trying to believe what's true.

 

 

 

go, johnny, go

true i am enjoying johnny weir as a skating commentator, and it's cool that that fabulous of a queen can be on tv all day. however, i have one reservation: he very much preaches the gospel of "if you believe in yourself, you can do anything." honestly i don't know how that idea ever occurred to anyone, much less became a cliche we teach to our children, etc. it attributes actual omnipotence to any given high school schlumph. or it really creates for each of us a special religion of our self. i used to believe in god, or like, trying to do right or whatever, now i believe in myself. hence i can do anything. look, if there is anything i know by foundational, incorrigible, privileged-access introspection it is this: i am an extremely implausible candidate for godhead. if you don't know that about yourself, you are dangerously demented.

this morning johnny was saying that the skater on the ice had told him how much she had learned to believe in herself and that she could do anything. he said that just as she was going into the triple loop or whatever on which she wiped out. dude, whatever! believe insofar as possible all that is and only what is true - or at least try not to say with the utmost simulated commitment anything that you yourself know to be false and insane - and get to work!

but how about this from just now: "i love the beginning of this long program; she's just letting us all know she owns us". or he had a pretty hilarious rap on the limitations on sexual expression in a brother-sister pair, etc. he's very sexy and fun. 

constitutional cred

here's an example of the credibility index in action. actually on liberty-type grounds i oppose the individual mandate in obama's health insurance bill. also i think it's unconsitutional. but if i assert that it is unconstitutional, given that i think it's wrong on other, more general grounds, you should suspect that i twisted the evidence on the constitutionality. not that i necessarily have, but i had a motivation to. now before you try to grapple with the arguments, you should regard someone who opposes the mandate but thinks it's probably constitutional as particularly credible; you should eyeball their constitutional interpretation as a sincere attempt to deal with the available info. likewise someone who supports the mandate with all the fervor of a great and generous soul, but who doesn't find any authority in the constitution to do it. now, are there any such people?

social construction of ignorance

you're probably not going to be too sympathetic to the example i'm going to use, but i want to say that the pragmatic theory of truth, and also the idea that truth is a social artifact produced by convention or agreement (rorty: 'truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying') is just wrong. their negations would be nearer the mark. ok sexual orientation is not a matter of choice. now note: i am not declaring that to be false. i am declaring that the enforced social consensus about it should make you suspect that it is. the proponents of such a view believe that its acceptance would have excellent political results. here's a very clear way to see what's wrong with pragmatism: the political results are irrelevant to the truth of claim, and they yield a motivation for purveying the view that is disconnected from its truth. this is obvious. whether sexual orientation is imprinted on your genes: the evidence on that has to do with genes etc: a happy polity is neither here nor there. believing it might help you toward self-acceptance; well that's obviously completely irrelevant to the truth of the claim.

if a factual claim is being insisted on by people for whom the truth of the claim would produce desired political results, you should immediately provisionally assume that the way the opinion was generated had to do with those desired results and not with the evidence for the claim. for example: paul krugman says that austerity has demonstrably failed. and science is a social world as well as a quest for truth, and as the matter linked above shows, one that is fully capable of pressuring people into expressing agreement about factual matters for completely irrelevant political reasons.

i think along these lines you should suspect scientists just like anyone else; they too are immensely subject to the social enforcement of ignorance. think seriously for a second about the actual social consequences spitzer faced for his position. after the gantlet of beatings and ostracisms, anything he says should be viewed as likely to be mere capitulation.

one reason this is a good illustration is that the whole politics and self-esteem-enhancing aspects of the position could easily reverse valence. so once we get some tiny way beyond the stigma, perhaps people would like to regard their selves as things that they had themselves a hand in creating. 'it's not my fault!' might give way to a pride that could happily take some responsibility. whatshisname on glee: "i'm gay; i create culture." but only because you absolutely can't help yourself? once the choice would not be regarded as evil or defective, you might be happy to have made it. after awhile, "i'm sorry, i can't help being black,' would itself be regarded as a projection of racism, as this thing is of homophobia.

i actually think that the way people arrive at a sexual identity is immensely complex: a course of genetic elements, social situations, contingent events, individual decisions and so on. but the point here is: whatever evidence there is for the present consensus position, it is thoroughly socially and pragmatically useful or essential according to its proponents. that's why the evidence is very likely to be distorted. the social situation is such that an honest attempt to find the truth is unlikely for anyone.

truth is what your contemporaries will hang you for saying. truth is what does not work in the way of belief. ok those are not adequate theories of truth. but they're better than rorty's.

Because Garage Door Openers are worth dying for...

One of the things that binds Crispin and me and my loose collective of malcontented malevolent dissidents, anarchists and engineers is our general aversion to the impact of the totalitarian mind on life, language and discourse. Particularly when afraid -- when they're afraid, they come unglued with weird explanations of events...Orwell could have had fun with that realization because it is when under pressure from the unknown that the basic spiritual bankruptcy and ontological void that is the totalitarian way becomes most obvious. Case in point, China.

Now, China has the potential to explode at any time. It's fairly obvious to anyone with a basic knowledge of Marxist thought that the victory of the Communist Party in 1948 preceded the rise of the industrial proletariat. Pretty much the way that Communism has spread everywhere, by the way, except for the countries in eastern Europe that were conquered by the Soviet Union. So, since the Party still rules the country as a vicious oligarchy, it should not be surprising that the government is terrified of anything that might blow it all up. Tibet, Western China, displaced living lives of misery in Guangzhou and Shanghai...labor unrest, the incredible imbalance between rich and middle class and middle class and poor...disease, famine, water impossible to drink, etc. etc. The place is an economic dynamo sputtering away on top of a volcano. 

Which presents a fair amount of hilarity masquerading as WTF? Not unlike Rush Limbaugh confusing contraception with the adult film industry and Israeli fellow-travellers eagerly sounding the drums for a war with Iran because our last religio-WMD-"Make the world safe"-enterprises have gone so well, the Chinese government is definitely after the root cause of problems at all levels. Jezebel picked up a story from The People's Daily that really makes it obvious that fantastic explanations for things is not just a Republican plutocratic art but one shared by totalitarians univerally. 

Ok, girl one loses a "remote control" to a rolling door for her home. Girl one is obviously fairly rich for China since this looks like a really bad translation of "Garage Door Opener..." although I suppose it could have been a rolling steel shutter door to a patio or perhaps a French Door with a remote to the patio but, WHAT THE HELL?  The silly damn Khardasians don't have remote controlled French doors; Trump doesn't have remote controlled French doors. That makes no sense...even in China, which at some levels, times and places is really like Batman's Gotham City, on meth...So, the kid lost a garage door opener. She decides to kill herself, so she hides in a closet -- another sign that we're dealing with some level of wealth here, there's actually a closet that is not so much in use that hiding in it is possible -- until her little friend comes over. She says she's going to commit suicide, the little friend says, OK, me too and Girl 1 writes down a note saying that she's killing herself over the garage door opener and Girl 2 is doing it because, well, they're friends and it's Tuesday and there's nothing on TV and...they are planning on visiting the Qing dynansty to make a movie of the emperor -- any emperor -- and then going to outer space. Girl 1 tells her sister to "Take Care of the Parents" because it's all about the parents, and they jump in a pool and drown. 

Sister? The Chinese still have their one child rule. Only the very well to do and party elites get to have multiple children. WHAT THE HELL? This passes no reality test...but, the inspiration for the suicide is ...TV shows about people travelling in time and marrying royalty. 

Yeah, and comic books caused juvenile delinquency and rock and roll and teenage pregnancy and communism. Ask your great, great senile grandmother!

Imagine the dialogue in the TV movie...if you've ever listened to the dialogue in a Chinese TV show, as I did by reading subtitles while there -- you'll recognize it. 

Chechette: I lost the garage door remote and have brought dishonor on myself and my family. I must kill myself! 

Chongette: I am your best friend. I will also kill myself. 

Cheechette:Well, if we kill ourselves, we can go back in time and make a movie of the emperor in the Qing dynasty!

Chongette:Oh, good. Then we can travel in space.

 

Cheechette: My parents will be so proud...let's go drown ourselves in the pool!

Both: All hail the Glorious People's Liberation Army and Chairman Mao!"

Yeah. Now, they could have blamed this on Falung Gong because everybody knows that weird calestenics and such make you crazy. They could have blamed this on the influences of capitalism. They could have blamed it on a lot of things. Hell, blame it on Guy Clark ...Time travel on the Chinese equivalent to The Gilmore Girls? Jezebel has an excellent point, by the way.  

This sounds like a cautionary tale about parenting — if your kid thinks killing herself is a good response to losing the remote control, you might not be sending the right message about the value of everyday objects. But Sun Yunxiao, deputy director of China Youth and Children Research Center, has a different moral in mind:

Schoolchildren are rich in curiosity but poor in judgment, so this kind of tragedy happens in every era. I have heard of children jumping from high buildings after watching an actor flying in a magic show. This kind of imitative behavior is in the nature of young children, but it's very dangerous. So we should give some sort of warning for children on TV programs.

I'm actually not sure that killing yourself so you can travel back in time and film an emperor (where do you get the camera?) is a tragedy that "happens in every era."...

Being not so sure about the impact of TV on suicides -- childish deaths from imitating superheroes, pro- wrestlers and such in the west aside -- and being slightly alert to conspiracies and coverups, I gotta say, this looks more like a cover-up of something else. There are lots of possibilities -- a spree of mass murder of children with or without child rape, a problem with some powerful "Big Bucks" in the local or regional Party-Wealthy Complex, drug-crazed People's Liberation Army veterans of the unpleasantness in Western China which dwarfs what we are seeing in Afghanistan or saw in Iraq -- but TV is a convenient scapegoat. Always has been and always will be...Dr. Who, in Mandarin drag, seducing the young with opium and time travel. 

My money is probably on some sort of Child 44 coverup  but who the hell knows about these things? Totalitarian countries are weirder than weird and China's internal dissension, cultural dissonance, and Commie-Confucian-Oligarchic messiness kind of makes it all seem possible, and that's funny in a weird way...and sad. 

Another possibility is that this is just some Politboro thug having a shit fit at time travel TV. Again, the oddities of totalitarianism...

 

 

absurd

if mitt romney gets elected president this year, i propose that that is a reductio ad absurdum of our political culture and procedures. he will be elected as a servant of the wealthy, and he will be elected by means of their wealth, at a moment when the hierarchy of wealth has grown excruciating. he is a person of no visible convictions whose whole procedure is to purchase the presidency by means of an infinite barrage of mindless attack ads. the idea at that point would be to move from occupy to destroy. but let me say again: a television commercial does not actually constrain anyone to do anything, and we'd need not only resistance, but some kind of universal self-examination. an american people who can be manipulated this thoroughly by money needs some kind of intellectual or spiritual awakening; folks with so little epistemic autonomy need to change their minds. an endless repetition of the same message ought to have the effect of making people loathe and reject it, not agree or vote for it. the last thing you want to do is prove professors of communication right.

a priori economics

krugman and others have been arguing that we're all keynesians now, in among other respects that we all see that government (deficit) spending is the only way to avert disaster, etc. here is a nice response, by robert samuelson. one sort of vibes that excessive keynesianism may just lead to a horrendous world financial meltdown and subsequent depression. of course, one would vibe that, and one could be wrong. krugman has struck back, and pointed out last week that the fed's 'printing money' to the tune of $ten trillion or whatever it is hasn't actually led to hyper-inflation, as your more miltonfriedmanian economists would predict. that's true, but we're still in the process of seeing what happens.

however, if there is a financial meltdown and/or an inflation nightmare, i predict that krugman will blame something else entirely, possibly even 'austerity.' then again, if it doesn't happen, your laissez-faire economists will have an explanation of that in line with their own theories. now, this might get you just a wee bit worried about whether anyone's position has anything to do with the empirical facts. the problem is that economics is very very closely bound up with ethics and politics; you nobelists can keep crunching numbers, but ultimately that's not where your commitment is. you already know how it has to turn out, unless you are terribly self-deceived: if you're a leftish economist, it will turn out that insufficient state activism is the prob. if right, excessive state action will be the culprit. really we might say that it's a very raw combat between pro- and anti-statists, whose commitments come way before evidence: in other words, a mirror of the left-right political spectrum in one of its nodes or permutations.

now, when you hear a friedman-type say that the situation shows that keynes had a point after all, or when, during the next extreme depression, krugman goes, oops i guess maybe keynes was wrong, then (and not until then) it might be rational to conclude that they're responsive to something in the world, that their economics is not purely a priori: a political ideology. if that doesn't happen, the numbers are actually neither here nor there for these people, however they may appeal to them in their arguments. guess what? that is obvious!

pleasure center

you can see that this light-up-the-x-region-of-the-brain sort of approach makes people happy; it keeps giving nyt op-ed columnists the sense that they're talking about Science. i just want to make one remark about the 'pleasure center': obviously, pleasure (for example) is a hyper-primitive psychological term, and it is the psychology you bring into the experiment that determines the sort of result you're looking for, or what would count as a result, or what sorts of things we test. same with 'addiction,' and the idea that every problematic behavior or every habit of a human being is an addiction (kristof's position here, more or less) was an utter stampede before and completely outside the brainscan fad, which here is more or less an attempt to freeze a momentary paradigm or cultural formation as an eternal truth. as you may know, i would myself resist as extremely wrong the idea that addiction is a matter of pleasure. you'd be better off regarding it as a pursuit of pain, and i think the idea that addiction is the pursuit of pleasure is a view developed by non-addicts. but in any case the idea that, for example, you run marathons for the pleasure is extremely counter-intuitive, and it would occur to someone who was already in the grip of a 'theory' of human motivation (one which turns out non-explanatory, or is very dormitive-virtuey).  'pleasure' is the worst sort of psychological butchery or philistinism: there just is no such thing, really, and it stands in for anything that motivates anyone or anything that anyone pursues. we get it as a universal explanation from, you know, british utilitarianism, where it is the acme of all value etc. it was going to make human motivation comprehensible - or even, quantifiable - on a single principle. well now 'scientists' can pay off on bentham's hedonic calculus with their little light-ups. that a warm bath, kinky sex, a good burrito, cocaine, the sistine ceiling, money, and a five-mile run all cause the same sort of feeling is just false, and if you didn't already suppose that they must, somehow (because there is one thing in common to everything we pursue, and it's in the head of the pursuer), you wouldn't have 'found' these alleged structural similarities. that all these things must somehow be the same is something you brought to, not something you discovered in, the observations. indeed, none of these things are actually located (only) in the brain, and the whole thing presupposes an internalist theory of mind: what is real for you is what happens in your own little brain, which i want to to say is a bizarre picture. but don't worry. there will be a next paradigm.

a priori economics

let's try framing the economic debate like this: (right) sovereign debt, and its accompanying spending, are a or even the basic problem; it's become untenable in greece, for example, and soon european economies will fall like dominoes for this reason. you're unlikely at this point to borrow or print your way to growth, and if you try (even with some positive effect on employment short-term, increased unemployment benefits/meeting all pension obligations(=increased demand) etc). you'll wake up with a completely unsustainable level of debt, and a calamitous world financial collapse. (left) the last thing you want at this moment is austerity; you directly reduce employment (state employees) and demand, causing further contraction. the problem is precisely that the right parties in england and us etc will lead their economies into a death spiral.

what's funny is that all the data can be smoothly incorporated into each view. did the stimulus not work because it was too small? or has the idea been refuted by its trillion-dollar tryout and with it another disastrous debt balloon? honestly, who knows? or what information would count? one thing i do know: everybody's position depends not on information, but on whether they were leftists or rightists to begin with. that all the pre-slump rightists hold one opinion on what the data now show, and all the pre-slump leftists the other, demonstrates that no one's position is responsive to information. i write this watching paul krugman and steve forbes on fareed zakaria.

so let's say that, with regard to the population of economists, we can predict anyone's assessment of the effects of a 2 trillion dollar stimulus in 2012 by his political affiliation circa 1999 with 90% accuracy. (i'm betting it's at least that high.) then that population is obviously impervious to any evidence bearing on the present situation. only the outliers should not be assumed to operating with a strictly non-empirical method. well, or consider the question of any given economist's diagnosis of what went wriong in the great depression, a question of some urgency at the moment because of the analogy to the current situation. what if we found that one interpretation of the data correlated with one position on (say) gay marriage, and the other with the other? at that point, it's time to find you some new economists.

i'm against it

here's the fullbore academic presentation of against consensus. oops i kicked your ass!

update: i guess i didn't understand google docs. you'll have to send a request to get access, or just email me.

bent

one thing i don't understand about these executions: why the family of the victim and also the law enforcement people are entirely immune from evidence of innocence: free of doubt even when serious doubts have been raised. how can you just want someone, anyone to pay? surely to take any satisfaction in justice/vengeance, it is all-important that you actually get the right person. i can understand wanting the person who killed your son or whatever to die. and i think that some people deserve death. what i can't understand is manifesting along with these attitudes an indifference to the evidence: if troy davis was innocent, well then the person who killed you son is still running around. why work on producing in yourself total certainty in the face of good reasons not to be certain? i guess there must be some psychological mechanism involved because you see this all the time: whomever is the suspect, however flimsy the evidence, the family of the victim just wants a conviction/maximal punishment.

awww forget it.

it can be fun to argue politics. but it is futile. reasons have nothing to do with anyone's positions, and if one set of reasons for your position that x gets blown up, you of course don't ditch x, you invent or (more likely) mimic some new layer of arguments. the opinions are emotional commitments or are pathological, always. they have to do with your childhood, or what social groups you associate with or identify against. i include my own opinions here, of course. but i definitely include yours. this goes for presidents, secretaries of this and that, philosophy professors, nobel-prize winning economists, and karl marx, exactly as much as it goes for sarah palin or frank my barber. it goes for anarchists and totalitarians, capitalists and communists, leftists and rightists, al qaeda and homeland security. the differences have to do with how many defensive layers you can deploy, how thick the accreted patina is over the massive, evidence-independent commitment.  

deal with it

this thing of presidential candidates signing pledges on this and that seems wacky to me. be that as it may, the trad marriage pledge signed by bachmann and santorum said this: "a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President." i've seen a bunch of talking heads (as also salon, etc) summarizing this passage as saying that african-american families were better off in slavery than they are in freedom. how insanely offensive! but of course that's not what this says exactly.

it's a factual assertion, and your moral repugnance for it is neither here nor there as regards its truth. it might be false. it might be extremely hard actually to evaluate the evidence for it. there might be true things that no one should ever say, though that would be disturbing. there might be some obscurities around important terms - such as 'household' or 'african-american' - which could use some clarification. it might not matter whether it's true or not. but it does not endorse slavery, and the question of whether or not it's true does not depend on your anti-racist, anti-slavery, or anti-marriage-is-between-one-man-and-one-woman opinions.

this is a good example of credibility-index-type problems. through their ideological spectacles, people don't seem even to be able to see what that sentence says - they cannot paraphrase or summarize it accurately - and they do not regard evidence as relevant to its evaluation, though it is a flat factual assertion and only actual statistical evidence bears on its truth.

against the law

no one has a lower credibility index than the inhabitants of the upper regions of the legal profession: professors of constitutional law, supreme court justices, and so on, because no one short of scholastic theologians has as elaborate a machinery for making things come out however they want. no one has more intentionality about rationalizing their way to whatever factual claims prop up their ideologies: infinite equipment of quibbling hermeneutics. and no one is less honest about what they are actually doing, less self-reflective, less sincere even as they throw out a volcano of passion about how they are constrained by rules and documents and precedents and filter out their own opinions. really it's the least wholesome thing one can imagine: a thousand layers of self-delusion.

ronald dworkin is a beautiful example (sorry about the pay wall at nyrb). give him a liberal court and he'll give you back a living constitution. he'll be impressed by the quality of the reasoning almost no matter what, if he agrees with the conclusion. give him a conservative court and he goes fundamentalist: he's outraged by every slight departure from precedent.  but here all he does is attack the reasoning for every decision whose result he rejects: that is, every decision not in keeping with a left-liberal ideology, while describing the dissents as 'devastating' or whatever.

there would be a simple way for him - or for any of us - to establish a provisional credibility: show the fallacies or weaknesses in arguments for positions he agrees with, or the strengths of the arguments for positions he disagrees with, in a serious way. people need to understand this; it is so entirely clear. in its absence, just realize that there's no commitment to the truth. you know what ronald dworkin thinks about the quality of a judge's reasoning by knowing ronald dworkin's political orientation, but that political orientation is irrelevant to the question of the quality of the reasoning. the right response - obviously, i tell you - is just to dismiss the whole huge body of work on such matters.

on the other hand what the conservative justices are doing is exactly the same thing. in the context of american jurisprudence there is always a way to get wherever you want to go: there are thousands of precedents and a hundred different approaches to precedents; a thousand interpretations of the constitution, and a hundred different approaches to constitutional interpretation. 

so what you end up with is one of the most pathetic spectacles imaginable: all these apparently sort of intelligent people engaged in a series of arguments that are just at their heart virtually demonstrably either breathtakingly disingenuous or disturbingly self-deluded. in no area of human life does people's account of what they're doing have less to do with what they're actually doing. a waste of brain-power and paper: something amusing or disgusting, but with a palpably inverted relation to the truth.

yet more knowing what you don't know

eugene robinson has written many passionate, convincing anti-torture columns, and i agreed with all of them. but this one, flatly declaring that we didn't catch bin laden through 'enhanced interrogation,' is simply premature, or a priori. the facts can't be read off your moral principles. indeed, that they are your moral principles makes your factual conclusion suspect. it just can't turn out that way, for robinson. (alright, no facts can prove that they couldn't have gotten the info without the torture; but no facts can prove that they could have, if they actually did get it under torture.) but that doesn't mean it can't turn out that way. so: did they actually get information necessary to find bin laden through torture? i don't think we have enough information to make that assessment. the robinson a priori approach to empirical knowledge is also a way of failing to face up to the actual moral dilemma that might emerge: is torture wrong even if it works in some key or fundamental cases? well, robinson and many others don't want to square up on that, so they don't. 

knowing what you don't know, contd.

one thing i would take as an example of trying not to declare you know what you don't; it's going to take a lot more info to assess whether we found bin laden by 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' or what role torture actually played in the killing. i'm completely opposed to it; i think it's shameful. but whether it yielded key information is not a question to which my moral repugnance is relevant, and i'm going to try to admit that this is what happened if it looks like there's convincing info that it did.