Test

20 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Inquiry, Logic

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This post can be viewed as a companion piece to my one about “proof.” Proof is a kind of test to which a certain, rigidly constrained, set of ideas can be subjected. While it is important within that limited context, proof mostly stands out as an all-but-unachievable ideal, the kind of ideal that suggests the outside limit for the types of tests that might be applied to ideas, concepts, claims, hypotheses, and so forth. There are a great variety of such tests, and they do not line up along a single unimodal, univocal spectrum. But it does seem to me that they do converge at the far ends of this lattice, this partially ordered set of possibilities, to proof as the highest ideal at one end, and vapid opinion, as the most dispensable example at the lowest (and, sadly, commonest) end.Test F

There are primarily three families of tests for ideas, and each such family breaks out in a variety of ways: logical coherence, empirical adequacy, and narrative intelligibility. Following Whitehead’s argument in the early pages of Process and Reality, I take “logical coherence” to be something that is vastly larger than just proof-theoretic completeness or model-theoretic semantic sufficiency. Both of these latter are formal ideals, part of the above, generalized concept of “proof,” that seldom realize themselves in the real world. Logical coherence is not such a desiccated abstraction; rather, it is the requirement that ideas “hang together,” at least “locally” (in metaphysics, this requirement becomes “globally.”) Continue reading →

The Least of These

19 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by in atheism, Ethics, God, Logic, Syria

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I am not a religious person, a fact I’ve never hidden from anyone. However, I’ve also made it clear that I am impatient with “lazy atheism” – cheap shot forms of willful ignorance that make no effort to grasp the differences between religious, theological, and philosophical concepts of “god,” or the many nuanced ways in which such a being might creatively interact with the world. Just because you watched five minutes of Pat Robertson on the television does not mean you are an expert on the subject – not even on the subjects of religions as these are practiced, in fact, by people, much less the full range of concepts, both actual and possible, relating to “god.”

syrian-refugee_1

But if lazy atheists are tedious, lazy theists are downright disgusting. I’ve never invested the effort to actually study the Bible, but I did read large portions of it when I was a child. So when my knowledge of this collection of texts exceeds that of persons who publicly posture themselves as devout Christians, I am disinclined to treat such people charitably.

It is my unscientific impression that these persons – willfully ignorant yet declared devout Christians – are invariably conservatives of an extreme variety.

The liberal Christians I have met (and, again, this is not a representative sample) have not only been less inclined to make public displays of their religious beliefs, they have been much more interested in learning and discovering new and different aspects of religious beliefs in others. The difference here may well be due to the fact that conservatives are much more inclined toward adopting authoritarian mind frames, to the extent that not only are they less interested in learning new things, but they are often positively opposed to permitting others to do so.

So it is that I cannot tell if it is ironic, or merely pathetic, that the noisiest opposition to the admission of a handful of Syrian refugees (a “handful” in comparison to the staggering numbers of them) to the United States, seems universally to be coming from conservative “Christians.”

44″Then they themselves also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?’ 45″Then He will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’

Mathew 25: 44 – 45

Yellow

16 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in Anti-scientific, GMO crops

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The method of liars, cowards, bullies, and hypocrites, is ever and always to block the road of inquiry. I see in the news that a Missouri State Senator wishes to obstruct the completion of a Ph.D. candidate’s dissertation, a study of the effects of how the state’s 72-hour wait period on abortions actually effects women. It of course goes without saying that the senator creating this obstruction is a Republican, which is to say, a conservative. Conservatives have never been shy about suppressing academic speech (political correctness is not an exclusively liberal problem), and others before me have written about the “Republican war on science.” This latter has been objected to on the grounds that liberals are as likely to hold anti-scientific views as conservatives. I’ll address this in a moment.Cowardly_lion2

The question to ask right here is: if truth is on your side, why would you demand that research be terminated before it is even published? The liars, the cowards, the bullies, and the hypocrites, will all proclaim that the results are nothing more than mere propaganda. But how would they know that? Where is their research to show as much? The answer, of course, is that they have no research; their conclusions are nothing more than vicious ideology which they have imposed upon the world by force, rejecting out of hand any form of inquiry. Perhaps the dissertation, once finished, will be flawed in some respects. Such flaws, by the bye, need not in any way undermine that dissertation’s qualities as a piece of research. All research is, in some very real sense, flawed, because no line of inquiry – insofar as it is rational – can ever be the final word on a subject. Inquiry advances our state of knowledge by enabling us to ask better questions. And herein lies the objection of the liars, cowards, bullies, and hypocrites: they don’t want better questions, because they refuse to permit any questions at all. Continue reading →

People “Needing” People

15 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in Logic

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Terrorist attacks are not intended to make us stop what we are doing; they are intended to make us do the worst that we are doing and do it more.

The aim of terrorism is not to bring the “other” to surrender, but to bring the “other” to become the thing it despises the most: to become indistinguishable from the terrorists.

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

This is why 9/11 was an unqualified success for al Qaeda. Not because of the people it killed — we slaughter far more on an annual basis with our own guns than died the one time in those towers.

9/11 was an unqualified success for the terrorists because it convinced us to become even worse than they were.

I suspect — though I can offer no other evidence than such grasp of human psychology as I possess — that the ultimate purpose of the Paris attacks was to create exactly the hysteria toward refugees that it created.

ISIL’s primary resource is NOT the oil it sells on the black market, but the people it controls, enslaves, and terrorizes. The flood of refugees was hemorrhaging that primary resource. They may now have effectively stopped that.

Proof

12 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by in Logic, Philosophy of Logic

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Nine times out of ten (probably closer to ninety-nine times out of one hundred) when someone starts talking about, much less demanding, “proof” – proof of anything – unless they are discussing whiskey[1], they almost certainly have no idea what they are talking about. This is especially true in the empirical sciences, where various anti- or pseudo-scientific quacks, climate change denialists, creationist ideologues, and others like them, will insist that the fatuous twaddle they are spewing is perfectly reasonable since, after all, they (the quacks) have not been “proven” wrong, while the actual scientific literature has failed to absolutely “prove” its case. These claims are so childish that one must almost wonder if the denialists and others like them might actually know that what they are saying is not just bullshit (that last being a technical, philosophical term), but an outright lie. I am myself, however, disinclined to assign a level of intelligence to people to pull off such a clever conspiracy when nothing else in their lives gives any evidence of such nuanced and incisive reasoning. As a very loose and general rule, people are far for likely to have no idea what they are talking about, as opposed to talking about it very cleverly.Rum Gone

The idea of proof in mathematics (the only venue where non-liquor related uses have any meaning) had become so vexed by the end of the 19th Century, that the field of mathematical logic was, in essence, invented with the purpose of sorting matters out. Matters kept resisting being sorted, and along the way the nose of the mathematical camel got into the philosophical tent, and ended up swallowing philosophical logic whole for some decades that followed. Even today, the issue of how to teach logic, and what logic to teach, has not been particularly well sorted out in philosophy. So what might be said about the nature of proof, such that we do not have to become facile with mathematics, yet can still avoid being gulled by credulously accepting demands for, or putative statements of, proof? Continue reading →

Savant?

10 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Authoritarians, Carson, Inquiry, Intelligence

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Specifically, “idiot savant.”

I’ve no idea whether the term “idiot savant” retains any currency – it might be considered too pejorative to be acceptable. But it is the term I originally learned, and so I will continue to use it here. (I originally encountered the concept over four decades ago, in a science fiction short story, that I’ve since failed to track down, titled “Idiot Solvent.”) An idiot savant is generally someone who scores very poorly on ordinary measures of intelligence, but is then exceptionally gifted in one particular performative area. Often times, this area is music. Other areas of performance are evidently possible, whether or not we’ve documented them. There might be a great deal of overlap between what is (or, at least used to be) called “idiot savant” and certain types of intense Asperger’s syndrome. (Perhaps it is more than an overlap, but something closer to an identity?)crates14

Regardless, while I am clearly unqualified to offer anything that might be viewed as even remotely “diagnostic,” I continue to struggle to find what seem to be workable analogies for the very public delamination of Ben Carson and his constructed story of self. At the very least, Carson does appear to be a profligate confabulator – in point of fact, Carson is a consummate bullshitter (which might, indeed, be something of a synonym for “profligate confabulator”) – as well as someone with an astoundingly ill-formed grasp of basic history and science. Carson is supposed to be a “brilliant” man; however, I will argue here that that is precisely what he is not. Rather, I wish to use Carson to exemplify how right-wing authoritarians (RWA) and their habits of compartmentalization, completely undermine anything that might genuinely qualify as intelligence. My characterization of intelligence, however, is not the one you’ll find in the dictionary. Continue reading →

Regardless Whose Bull

08 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Frankfurt, On Bullshit

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I am not a patient person, even under the best of circumstances. I am frequently astounded, even overwhelmed, by the patience persons of my acquaintance will show as others around them are spouting the most unbelievably ignorant and fatuous nonsense imaginable. “No, no, Fred. You can actually go outside and see for yourself that, on a clear, sunny day, the sky is actually blue, not red. However, we can continue to discuss this, if you’d like.” To my way of thinking, once someone has demonstrated that their ignorance is not only beyond measure, but thoroughly willful, I am done investing my time and effort in that person. I make no pretensions that this is illustrative of any, much less a superior, virtue on my part.

In this photo taken Sunday, Sept. 27, 2009, a sculpture by Chinese artist Chen Wenling entitled

Issues become more complicated when it is a group that is variously “gone over the falls,” as it were, especially when that group is one that you are inclined to identify with. So, for example, when Republicans and political conservatives demonstrate that they’ve abandoned even the pretense of reason, or even sanity, I’ll often just order a pizza, pour myself another glass of wine, sit back and watch the Klown Kar drive off the cliff. Some issues are obviously of great importance: conservative disregard of basic economic facts and/or climate change denialism, stand out as especially egregious examples. Other issues are merely outrageous. For example, as a veteran I am especially offended by Ben Carson’s blatant lie about having, as a young man, been offered a “scholarship” to the Military Academy at West Point. (Little of any consequence turns on this last, especially in light of the other sorts of twaddle Carson regularly spouts.) But there is something especially galling when bullshit comes from the political left, which then not only refuses to correct the error, but digs its heals in on the original nonsense. Continue reading →

Philosophical Explanation

04 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Critical Thinking, General Philosophy, Logic

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It strikes me that I’ve said very little about the nature of philosophical explanation, even as I write from a specifically philosophical perspective and intent. This might qualify as ironic, but I’m never confident that I’m using the word “irony” (or its variants) properly. Which, for a man with my education, might also be ironic …Because Philosophy

I’ve written a number of posts variously exploring the nature, the expectations, and a few of the pitfalls surrounding scientific explanations. I’ve probed a few ethical/moral issues, and even discussed some fairly generic questions around the large scale issue of the “logic of inquiry” itself. But beyond a few scattered comments, I’ve not really posed the question (along with a tentative answer) about the nature and value of specifically philosophical inquiry itself. This post will be my first concerted stab in that direction. Continue reading →

The Seeds of the Corporate Funded Climate Disinformation Campaign, the 1971 Lewis Powell Memo

02 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in Climate Change, Denialism History

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Dan Brown provides a detailed summary of the background to the concerted disinformation campaign against climate change science that I think is worth sharing:

dabrown57's avatarEthics and Climate

Lewis-Powell

Although numerous articles on this website have acknowledged that responsible scientific skepticism is a positive force in the advancement of science, as we have explained in numerous articles under the category of  “disinformation campaign” there has been a well-funded climate change disinformation campaign that since the 1980s has been engaged in the following ethically dubious tactics including:

  • Lying or reckless disregard for the truth about climate science,
  • Cherry picking the science by focusing on unkowns while ignoring what is well-settled in climate science,
  • Cyber-bullying and ad hominem attacks on scientists and journalists,
  • Manufacturing bogus, non-peer-reviewed climate science through the creation of  ideologically motivated conferences and publications,
  • The use of ideological think tanks to promote the views of climate change deniers through their media outreach, speakers bureaus, publications, and conferences,
  • The use of front-groups and fake grass-roots organizations, known as Astroturf groups, to promote the views of climate change deniers that…

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