Category: General

Words to Write By

A goodly proportion of current philosophical work is highly technical, and its results accessible only to sibling practitioners or to some who operate in closely related areas (as results in logic are available to mathematicians.) To some degree this is inevitable; philosophy as a discipline involves a commitment to theorizing and this commitment necessitates some involvement in technical terminology and internal debates. Values like precision and rigour are well served by this tendency. None the less, precision and rigour are instrumental values, and when they develop a life of their own, they can become detached from truth, importance, and wisdom. I have some sympathy with those who think that contemporary analytical philosophy has become too scholastic (though I think the point applies even more to much contemporary French and German philosophy.) If philosophical concerns are not, at certain points, turned outwards to the broader community and its intellectual condition, they lose focus and nourishment, and if the community has no access to the reflections of philosophers, it is deprived of valuable insights and self-understanding.

Coady, C. A. J. ‘Testimony: A Philosophical Study,’ OUP, 1994

04/25/2007

Quotable Torture

‘A first example is the practice of torture in medieval European legal procedure. To enlightened modern eyes, torture is such a ridiculous method of truth determination that it is hard to imagine it might seriously have been so conceived. However, a brief review of its history, based on a treatment by John Langbein (1980), suggests precisely this. In 1215 the Roman Church effectively destroyed the older modes of legal proof such as trial by battle or by ordeal. The new law of proof, however, aspired to achieve the same level of certainty as had been accorded to the earlier methods. The Italian Glossators who designed the system entrenched the rule that conviction for serious crimes had to be based upon the testimony of two unimpeachable eyewitnesses. Alternatively, an accused could be convicted if he voluntarily confessed to the offense. The trouble with the early thirteenth-century proof system, however, was that the standard of proof was so high that it was difficult to obtain convictions of the guilty. That is one way to “miss” the truth. Bound by the weight of tradition, how could the standard be adjusted? The confession rule invited a subterfuge. When there was already strong evidence against a suspect, although less than two eyewitnesses, torture was authorized in order to obtain a confession. Torture was permitted when a so-called “half proof” was established against the suspect, meaning either one eyewitness or circumstantial evidence of substantial gravity. If a suspect was caught with a bloody dagger and stolen loot from a murdered man’s house, each of those “indicia” would be a quarter proof, which together constituted half proof, and this was sufficient for torture. Confession under torture was not grounds for conviction since it was considered involuntary. The suspect was convicted only if he (“voluntarily”) repeated the confession at a hearing held a day or so later. In this fashion the prohibition against circumstantial evidence was overcome, and the authorities found a way which, by their lights, did a better job at obtaining accurate judgments. Bizarre as we now find it, the method of torture seems to have been motivated by a concern for truth, constrained by the requirement that new procedures comply with tradition.’

Goldman, Alvin, ‘Knowledge in a Social World,’ OUP, 1999, p. 31 

04/19/2007

Professor Strangelove

A few years ago it would have depressed me completely to admit that I read Philosophy for fun as well as profit; now I’m so innured to it that it just makes my start heart missing a beat and then I move on. I say this because I’m somewhat tempted to expand the blog to cover more than just Conspiracy Theories for the time being. I’m currently reading up on a whole host of subjects, most of which will get turned into Conspiracy Theory fodder, but it does mean that, unless I rehash old topics, I don’t have much to blog about (which could be seen as a good or a bad thing).

So, anyway, reductionism. It should be no great surprise to learn that I am a great fan of the Natural Science (points to those who can spot that partial quote) and of all the Natural Sciences I have to say that Physics is the one I would miss most if we had to give it up. The glorious part of Physics is that we can subsume Chemistry into it; Chemistry is the interaction of particles and the particles are described by Physics. Therefore Chemistry is a sub-domain of Physics (sorry Chemists; I realise I’ve just oversimplified that but bare with me). We would like to think that we could do the same with Biology; Biology deals with a special set of chemical compounds and we’ve already admitted that Physics covers Chemistry so surely Biology can be reduced down to Physics. For the first part of the Twentieth Century everyone believed that and things were looking good, until people started asking what the laws of Biology were. We knew about laws in Physics; Newton had a go at them, Einstein provided better ones and the String Theorists were generating all kinds of crazy. We knew about laws in Chemistry (and they all seemed to be laws about particle interaction, which sort of confirmed our previous assumptions) but Biology… Well, the laws looked statistical rather than general and they seemed to relate to very specific contexts, unlike the other scientific laws that we thought applied at all times and in all places (excepting just before and just after the Big Bang). In fact, we couldn’t even be sure that the things we thought true of Biology would be true anywhere else in the Universe other than the Earth.

Biology was beginning to look a bit peculiar.

Explanations in Physics and Chemistry are why-necessary explanations; they tell us why the event under consideration had to occur. Explanations in Biology are (usually) construed as being how-possibly explanations; they tell us a story (usually thought to be the best story according to the evidence) as to why the event under consideration might have occurred. Physics tells us what process produced the result we are looking at; Biology tells us that Natural Selection might well have worked in this way to produce that result. Why does a particular moth have Owl-like eye patterns on its wings? Because, over time, such markings were conducive to its fitness. The molecular biological why-necessary explanation that says ‘The spots are produced by the production of pigments A, B and C (which were caused by gene expression X, Y and Z)’ just doesn’t seem explanatory in the way that the how-possibly explanation of functional Biology does.

In the Philosophy of Science this suggests a problem. Either our account of reductionism (the ability to reduce theories down to their most elementary parts) is wrong or our construal of explanations in Biology is flawed. Most writers in the field (both in the Philosophy of Science and in Biology) suggest that the reductionist account needs modification; if our notion of theory reduction can’t accomodate what we take to be good practice in Biology then something is wrong with the (current) reductionist programme. Alex Rosenberg, in his book ‘Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology’ goes the other way; the reductionist programme is a-okay and if we properly characterise Biology in molecular terms we get the right kind of explanations and, surprisingly, a new natural law.

Which is all the pre-history I hope you’ll need for the following review of the book. I’m about half-way through the text of the book myself and it seems like an admirable attempt to solve what is, in truth, a very sticky problem in the Philosophy of Science. If he can solve it then I might have to rethink my forthcoming article in ‘The Skeptic.’

John Dupré, in American Scientist, reviewing Alex Rosenberg’s ‘Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology,’ University of Chicago Press, 2006

04/16/2007

So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut is dead.I’ll just let that seep in for a few seconds.Dead. So it goes.Vonnegut was my favourite American author; he probably was my favourite author overall but I’m compartmentalising at the moment so I won’t get too mired in the realisation that it’s going to take a while to find a new writer to savour and enjoy in the way I did Kurt. Of all the books he wrote ‘Mother Night’ is the one that resonates the most with me. It deals with personal responsibility and the notion that it really does matter that you say what you mean. It was also made into a beautiful film starring Nick Nolte (with a cameo by Vonnegut towards the end) and I may well sit myself down tonight and rewatch it.’Mother Night’ is about an American, Howard W. Campbell, Jr. (who makes a cameo in ‘Slaughterhouse Five’) who, somewhat by design, becomes the spokesperson for Nazi racism, despite the fact that he doesn’t hold to those tenets. I originally write a plot summary here, but, frankly, you should just go read the book. It’s short, easy to read and should stay with you for the rest of your life. A friend of mine would recommend ‘Bluebeard.’ This is also good, but ‘Mother Night’ wins through, on this blog at least, because it’s vaguely related to Conspiracy Theories.Vaguely. I just wanted to join in the chorus of people who can’t believe Kurt Vonnegut is dead.Dead.So it goes.

04/13/2007

Apparently Kurt Vonnegut is dead…

…so how long will it be before America realises that the best writer of the twentieth century is also one of the least celebrated?

The Era of Literature is now ended. You can start with the book burnings and the luddite rioting.

04/12/2007

Life after Life on Mars?

So it turns out that I’m not having as much fun with the new series of ‘Life on Mars’ as I did, say, at this time last year. The problem is easily identifiable; Gene Hunt is no longer a sympathetic character; he is, in fact, now a cunt (a word that will soon become acceptable profanity because the BBC, the last bastion of hope for the English language, are easing up the restrictions (Oh, sorry, I should have noted that this blog entry should only be read after the watershed)).

This is a problem for two related reasons. (more…)

04/07/2007