Author Archives: Gary Herstein

Thinking About Thinking 1

29 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Philosophy of Logic

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The study of philosophy – whether as an academic discipline, or the individually engaged pursuit of wisdom – has often been called “thinking about thinking.” This is a fairly vacuous description, not because it is wrong, but because it is so egregiously vague as to provide nothing beyond a comfortingly information-free verbalization that does not require us to attend to even a fourth word. 2500 years of written (which is to say, disregarding the purely oral traditions) speculative inquiry merits rather less of a trivialization in my book. Nevertheless, I did think it might be nice to spend a few posts thinking about good thinking from several useful perspectives, focusing, as it were, on the “logic” part of my mantra (Logic, Principles, Evidence, Facts.) This time out the gate, I want to talk a bit about “informal logic,” or that subject which is frequently found under the title of Critical Thinking.

The “critical” in “critical thinking” sometimes throws people off. This is not about being judgmental, or “you’re ugly and your mother dresses you funny” sorts of schoolyard pettiness. No, this is the criticism of the scientist and the art critic, the careful (but merciless!) evaluation of reason, BY reason. No cheap shots, but no free passes, either.

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(E)merging Traffic

25 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by in General Philosophy, Philosophy of Logic, Philosophy of Science

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      What does it mean to say that some thing, quality, relation, or constellation of combinations of any of the above (as well as whatever I might not have mentioned) is “emergent”? What does it mean for something to be genuinely new, for the universe to be genuinely creative?

      One obvious response falls out along the lines that, “Well, something is there now that wasn’t there before.” Despite its initial plausibility, I would suggest that such an account is badly off-base. For one thing, the reliance on a difference over time is quite naïve. The evolution of eukaryotic cells on the primordial Earth took place over time, and in a sense such nucleated cells “emerged” from an earlier situation where they did not exist. But this is a kind of “weak tea” emergence that is easily accounted for within ordinary evolutionary theory. No, when philosophers speak of emergence, they mean something radically new, seemingly unaccountable within the existing scheme of things. In a very real sense, they mean something genuinely creative.

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Book Review: Thomas Nagel, “Mind and Cosmos”

19 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by in Book Review, Philosophy of Science

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Thomas Nagel: Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Oxford University Press, 2012.

      Having mentioned this book in several previous posts, I thought this would be a good opportunity to repost (and significantly expand upon) the review I gave that book at Amazon. The original review may be found HERE.

      I started out reading Nagel’s book with a considerable amount of trepidation, but discovered – to my pleasure! – that it was a much better work than I expected. Nagel’s primary thesis is that the idea of naturalism that is dominant in the physical/biological sciences is in desperate need of revision. Naturally, this means that, from its first appearance, Mind and Cosmos has been subjected to a great deal of vituperation from those who declare themselves to be on the side of science and the very naturalism Nagel is at pains to critique. Further, much of the hysteria and negativity directed against Nagel came about because he states at one point that he believes the “Intelligent Design” (“ID”) people have made a couple of good arguments. As one might expect, the above led to an astonishing amount of sharply worded condemnation from certain dogmatic atheists, who essentially accused Nagel of being a young-earth creationist and of selling the pass to religion. None of these claims is even remotely true, of course, and Nagel is very clear about this: he repeatedly and explicitly disavows any belief or interest in theological approaches. Such methods, Nagel is clear, “do not so much solve the problem as strangle it.” (This latter is Ernst Cassirer’s phrase, and neither mine nor Nagel’s. However, Cassirer uses it in an analogous situation – specifically Descartes’ appeal to the goodness of God to solve the problem of the mind/body dualism.) But Nagel is also clear that the mechanistic/materialistic approach to science faces some insuperable difficulties.

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“The” Nature of Naturalism?

16 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in General Philosophy, Philosophy of Science

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      “Naturalism” is a term that is frequently bandied about with such carefree disregard for clarity and meaning that one is left rather breathless at the speed with which so many largely meaningless labels are confidently announced to the world. Naturalism is frequently associated with (physical) science. But regardless of how justified such an association is, it frankly tells us absolutely nothing about either nature or science. Scientific results only seem to tell us what nature is, in a pure and simple way, when the metaphysical presuppositions of science are thoroughly suppressed and the large-scale interpretive commitments that exercise their unexamined domination over the particular reading of this or that scientific theory are permitted to operate not only unchallenged, but altogether without so much as a first, much less a second thought. Scientific theories – most particularly those in theoretical physics, where abstract mathematics is so profoundly important and influential – do not come with their interpretations “on their sleeve,” as it were. I will be exploring this problem in greater detail in the not-too-distant future, when I spend a few posts on the problematic issue of what I call “Model Centrism.”

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Logic, Principles, Evidence, Facts

13 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Philosophy of Logic

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      There is a hierarchy of relational structures involved in any rational inquiry. No step or stage of this hierarchy may be legitimately skipped, although in various contexts certain of them may be relatively invisible. As might be guessed by the title of this entry, that hierarchy is the one that runs between logic, principles, evidence and facts. In essence, this is a “meta-relation” between that which is universal – logic, that which is general (in the sense of genera) – principles, that which is specific (in the sense of species) – evidence, and that which is particular – facts. Now, anyone familiar with the works of Peirce and Dewey (see for example, HERE, HERE and HERE) will not find what I have to say in this post especially surprising. Nevertheless, the basic ideas presented seem like ones that deserve a broader audience than just and only scholars in American Pragmatism. And I have long found this litany – logic, principles, evidence, facts – to be a useful one, such that I am inclined to repeat it often enough that having a citable explanation will be of value.

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Exempli Gratia: Misleading Authority

11 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Philosophy of Logic, Philosophy of Science

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     The recent publication in the peer-reviewed scientific literature of research showing that 97% of Climate Scientists are convinced that, not only is global warming very real, but the principal forcings in global warming are anthropogenic[1] in nature has created quite a stir amongst the denialists. Multiple independent lines of research have shown that the 97% figure is quite robust; the scientific data may be explored in detail at the authors’ of the original research own website, The Consensus Project. On the other hand, thorough-going debunkings of the attempts to dispute the 97% claim may be found HERE and HERE. More general discussions by actual Climate Scientists (not just John Conway) can be found HERE.

     My purpose here is somewhat different. In yet another sad attempt to dispute the real science behind the 97% consensus, one now sees the “Oregon Petition” once again being trotted out by denialists. This petition purports to show some 30,000+ “scientists” who dispute the scientific findings relating to AGW and the 97% consensus regarding those findings. What I wish to show here is how trivially easy it is to refute the Oregon Petition without making any appeals to a refined understanding of climate science or legitimate statistical techniques. All one really needs is a basic grasp as to the nature of science, and a casual grasp of the precepts of critical thinking.

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What Is Science?

09 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in Philosophy of Logic, Philosophy of Science

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     Having floated the problem of legitimate authority the other day, it is worth considering some of the things that make an authority legitimate. And in that regard, few things in the world are supposed to occupy the role of legitimate authority to the extent that science does. So what is science, and what lends it the weight we justifiably give it?

     Well, the first and most important thing to recognize is that science is not a body of pronouncements nor a collection of “facts”; rather, it is a self-correcting method of inquiry. From the foregoing, we can see that, qua “method of inquiry,” science is essentially a process, not a product. And qua “self-correcting,” we can see that the process is one of constant test and re-examination where previous conclusions are themselves treated as only provisional and subjected to renewed critique and inquiry.

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!!! SOCIALISM !!!

07 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Politics

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Language is one of the primary vehicles of thought. Consequently, it is also one of the first casualties of political discourse, because thinking is inconvenient when ideology is at stake. Take for example the word “socialism.” This word has been flung about with promiscuous abandon in much recent political discourse. But the sad fact of the matter is, not one person in ten-thousand who has employed this term of late has anything like a genuine clue about what the term can or even might mean. By and large, anyone who says that “Socialism is X” or “the definition of Socialism is X,” where “X” is anything less than a multidimensional complex of ideas (all of whose boundaries are foggy, to say the least), needs to be laughed off the stage.Panic

Now, my areas of expertise do not include social/political philosophy, yet even I can recognize at least four major trends &/or primary thematic structures any one or combination of which could qualify as “socialism.” And while I am not prepared to stipulate that this list is comprehensive, I am most certainly prepared to insist that any simplistic definition of the subject is necessarily wrong.

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On Whose Authority?

06 Sunday Jul 2014

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One of the most widely recognized yet least well understood informal logical fallacies is the appeal to authority: the argumentum ad vericundiam. Most everyone understands that appealing to authority is, in some sense or other, an illegitimate move in any reasoned discussion. (If one doesn’t care a fig about reason, than any rhetorical move whatsoever becomes “legitimate,” which is to say, allowable provided you get away with it.) The problem here, though, is that if one could rigorously eschew all appeals to authority, not only would one avoid a particular fallacy, one would completely subvert the very possibility of reasoned discussion of any kind. Appeals to authority are not only constant, they are absolutely unavoidable in anything that might even barely resemble civilized existence. The problem, therefore, cannot be in the appeal to authority simply in itself, taken at face value.

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Mathematics and the Beautiful

05 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by in Philosophy of Logic

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Mathematicians are not driven by truth so much as by beauty. There is nothing exceptional about this claim, and it is only surprising to those who are not themselves mathematicians. The driving force of beauty in mathematical research has occasionally been documented; G. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology being one example, Davis and Hersch’s The Mathematical Experience being another, more contemporary one. However, I thought I would mention another aspect of the connection between beauty and mathematics, one to which I can speak more directly and personally.

You see, many years ago my father gave me his slide rule.

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