tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70219726156802212952024-03-27T19:30:28.946+00:00Language, Life and LogicMark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.comBlogger117125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-71452906406579680352024-02-18T11:46:00.005+00:002024-02-19T11:56:33.826+00:00L.L. Zamenhof and Zionism<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipPLV4ntjbHof5n0wMmhigGrkoAzOvg9_MgeyqAa79Fi9fIJwz0wN9NhZQ3PF1JviF1LgQdjH5pbL3b3i5E-v5WGlXcak8F9pxcIqU1NHVHATinSHr_TaD9sQhahH0FpYAVL_I52ZJKUANwLnS0jbGv-fiwjrb2KBRXoS9e3MdwrfU0ob0s9emR-DFGtQ/s3264/IMG_2024-01-27-10-42-24-875.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="3264" data-original-width="2448" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipPLV4ntjbHof5n0wMmhigGrkoAzOvg9_MgeyqAa79Fi9fIJwz0wN9NhZQ3PF1JviF1LgQdjH5pbL3b3i5E-v5WGlXcak8F9pxcIqU1NHVHATinSHr_TaD9sQhahH0FpYAVL_I52ZJKUANwLnS0jbGv-fiwjrb2KBRXoS9e3MdwrfU0ob0s9emR-DFGtQ/s400/IMG_2024-01-27-10-42-24-875.jpg" /></a></div>
<p>The other day, walking through a small park in the district of Pietà on my way to Valletta, I was surprised to see a bust of L.L. Zamenhof, the creator of the international auxiliary language known as Esperanto. My first thought was, I didn't know he had a connection with Malta. And, as it happens, he didn't!</p><p>Zamenhof was born in what was then the Russian Empire and spent most of his life in the city of Warsaw. For reasons I have yet to fathom (but which probably relate to <a href="https://languagelifeandlogic.blogspot.com/2024/02/language-policies-in-malta.html">Malta's somewhat fraught linguistic ecology</a>) Zamenhof's ideas took root here and some five decades ago the local Esperanto Society saw fit to devote funds to the creation of a public monument.</p><p>It's not a great work of art and the awkwardly-truncated arms are a little distracting. But this memorial is not bad as such projects go, and certainly a good deal less ugly than many of the official commemorative sculptures and monuments I have seen on this island.</p><p>Despite my lack of interest in Esperanto (the very notion of a constructed international auxiliary language is ill-conceived, in my opinion), I quite like the monument. Its scale and proportions are perfect and there is no nonsense or pomposity about it.</p><p>Zamenhof was a physician by profession, specialising in ophthalmology, and not an academic linguist. His main linguistic project was inspired by the naive belief that, if the peoples of the world shared a common language, peace would reign. Basically Zamenhof was a religious rather than a political thinker; his social philosophy was based on Rabbinic Judaism, specifically on the ideas of Hillel the Elder and his school.</p><p>Responding to the rise of violence against Jews within the Russian Empire which followed the assassination of the Tsar (Alexander II) in 1881, Zamenhof became involved with proto-Zionist groups, founding the Warsaw chapter of Hibbat Zion. He soon had doubts, however, and withdrew from the movement.</p><p>Zamenhof was convinced that Zionism, as he saw it developing in the later years of the 19th century and into the 20th, was fatally flawed and would not serve the true interests of the Jewish people.</p><p>In a work published in Russian in 1901, Zamenhof gave three reasons why Zionism was unrealizable: "firstly, because the Hebrew language is not alive, and if the Jewish religion did not exist, it would have died a long time ago; secondly, Zionism is wrong in its conception of Jewish nationalistic feeling: the Jews of various countries have no common ground apart from the religious one; thirdly, Palestine is too small – it will contain approximately only two million – so the whole Jewish question will not be solved."</p><p>Note his emphasis on the Jewish religion as the key driver of Jewish identity. This makes sense to me. His views on nationalism, on the other hand, I have reservations about.</p><p>In 1914 he wrote: "I am deeply convinced that all nationalism represents only the greatest misfortune for humanity, and that the aim of all people should be: to create a harmonious humanity. It is true that the nationalism of oppressed nations – as a natural self-defense reaction – is much more forgivable than the nationalism of oppressing nations; but, if the nationalism of the strong is ignoble, the nationalism of the weak is imprudent; both give birth to and support each other, and present a vicious circle of misfortunes, from which mankind will never emerge, if each of us will not sacrifice his group self-love and will not try to stand on completely neutral ground."</p><p>There is real insight here; the logic is consistent and, within limits, compelling. The problem, as I see it, is with Zamenhof's assumptions: his Enlightenment-inspired, "blank slate" view of human nature; and his implicit conflation of nation and nation-state.</p><p>Zamenhof ignores the fact that "group self-love" is a perennial human reality. Certainly it can get out of hand and generate xenophobia and violence, but it also plays a positive – in fact an essential – role in encouraging cooperative behaviour within groups.</p><p>The Zionist movement understood this and rejected Zamenhof's dogmatic and naive internationalism. So far, so good.</p><p>What the Zionists didn't grasp, however, is that combining their views on the importance of group identity with a perspective on nationhood shaped by Romantic political myths would only lead to trouble. Given the complexities of ethnic and cultural divides, seeing the nation-state as a universal solution, as the only way to satisfy ethnically-based yearnings and feelings of group identity is both confused and dangerous.</p><p>Such an approach leads inevitably to "a vicious circle of misfortunes" (as Zamenhof put it), to an unending cycle of conflict and violence.</p>Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-72945066884591930722024-02-18T05:59:00.001+00:002024-02-18T07:45:39.847+00:00Language policies in Malta<p>I am posting here the language-related paragraphs of a short piece entitled "Maltese culture and language" which appeared earlier this month at <a href="https://conservativetendency.blogspot.com">Conservative Tendency</a> and also on my <a href="https://markenglish1.wordpress.com">WordPress site</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Maltese is a very unusual language. Its grammatical structure and morphology derive from an old form of Arabic (Siculo-Arabic) while much of its lexicon derives from Italian and other European languages (including English). Since independence in 1964, the Maltese language has been strongly promoted and supported by the government and official bodies (with a bit of help from the European Union since 2004).</p><p>In general, I am not a supporter of keeping languages alive via legislation and regulation. Language change and death is a natural process and individuals should as far as possible be free to choose what language or languages they want to speak and what language or languages their children should speak and be educated in. I recognize, however, that language policies of one kind or another are necessary in multilingual jurisdictions and decisions must be made. The way I see it, something is gained and something is lost either way when it comes to a choice between promoting a local language (or dialect) as against a more widely-spoken and professionally useful one.</p><p>As I understand it, the policy during British colonial times was to promote the use of English and standard Italian rather than Maltese. Italian is still spoken, though it is less prevalent than it was.</p><p>English remains an official language and is taught in schools but proficiency varies greatly and most locals (including young professionals) are more comfortable speaking Maltese than English. The situation is slowly changing however. Survey results indicate that Maltese under-20s are more likely to favour English and identify English as their first language than other age groups.</p></blockquote><p></p>Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-74309055601574803892024-02-04T12:14:00.004+00:002024-02-12T13:18:06.974+00:00ShorelinesThere is something universal about seas and oceans and even standing on the shore you can sense it. Last year on a beach on a Greek island I was vividly reminded of childhood holidays by the sea on the other side of the world. More recently I have been living in the district of Msida in Malta and have been spending a lot of time wandering the shorelines of Ta' Xbiex, Gżira and Sliema. Again, that sense of familiarity <span face=""LFT Etica", arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #252528; font-size: 16px;">–</span> despite the unfamiliar (primary) language and culture of the island.<div><br /></div><div>Over time inhabited lands are necessarily designated, defined and shaped by cultures of one kind or another. Seas and oceans have names and are often affected (negatively!) by human activities but generally speaking they are not marked or "owned" by particular cultures.</div><div><br /></div><div>There was once a culture of seafarers which incorporated not only practical and technical knowledge and norms of behaviour <span face=""LFT Etica", arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #252528; font-size: 16px;">–</span> as today's somewhat attenuated version still does <span face=""LFT Etica", arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #252528; font-size: 16px;">–</span> but also folk wisdom and fanciful myths. This culture was essentially reactive: it was a coping culture, not a building culture. It was also essentially universal in that <span face=""LFT Etica", arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #252528; font-size: 16px;">–</span> for the most part at any rate <span face=""LFT Etica", arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #252528; font-size: 16px;">–</span> it transcended national and local preoccupations. (The life and works of the Polish sea captain-turned-writer, Joseph Conrad, provide ample evidence to support this last claim, I think.)</div><div><br /></div><div>As I see it, then, the shoreline's fascination is enhanced by the fact that it lies between two worlds: the culturally-bounded and the culturally-unbounded (or universal).</div><div><br /></div><div>Is some kind of deep memory at work here also? It wouldn't be surprising, given the central role that seaside (and lakeside) environments played in shaping the evolutionary development of our species.</div><div><br /></div><div>Going much further back, rock pools, warmed by the sun, constituted a crucially important environment for the development of some of the earliest lifeforms on this planet. The first photosynthesizing organisms (cyanobacteria) appeared about 2.7 billion years ago in such environments.</div><div><br /></div><div>This takes us well beyond any plausible "deep memory" hypothesis, of course, but a fascination with rock pools, and intertidal zones more generally, needs no such explanation. Factors such as natural <span face=""LFT Etica", arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #252528; font-size: 16px;">–</span> and perhaps intellectual <span face=""LFT Etica", arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #252528; font-size: 16px;">–</span> curiosity are at play here.</div><div><br /></div><div>My own aesthetic preference for rocky (as distinct from sandy) shorelines is easily explained in such terms <span face=""LFT Etica", arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #252528; font-size: 16px;">–</span> in terms, that is, of general cast of mind, combined (in my case) with extensive childhood exposure to such environments and memories thereof.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ0m1TvA-WA_FqpjoeP5FiV5Q-FWn0ttncf7-Im1jDaLMy5Hv3F8rDBXr2Tmvu1rfYAm9CqGDEy85u08PjoVmPd8s3428c5zQJc7gqxX4YRKG2JQkZmWSmOEqr7zNvtUkUpuOi2fYC1C0uRGKHw7fiiXIGNsEOGYV-OBPj7QUPQTgqAChLXhIt4zlaHTM/s3264/IMG_2024-01-30-14-59-20-652.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="3264" data-original-width="2448" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ0m1TvA-WA_FqpjoeP5FiV5Q-FWn0ttncf7-Im1jDaLMy5Hv3F8rDBXr2Tmvu1rfYAm9CqGDEy85u08PjoVmPd8s3428c5zQJc7gqxX4YRKG2JQkZmWSmOEqr7zNvtUkUpuOi2fYC1C0uRGKHw7fiiXIGNsEOGYV-OBPj7QUPQTgqAChLXhIt4zlaHTM/s400/IMG_2024-01-30-14-59-20-652.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4qL48fVGTzXDmAkdjNrc-VdsO_l38gsJEMYf9afmBwxfeuFr48bd_lMjVOfOW9iO6UtFTZZuSnMquux2eB36x3dMyex0NFyH59oIpe0Mbh6JcmFaIkelbK54HPn3n4KcSMGz6oo_DPwicjK1h7M4uUfwP0I3PFwzS_xSDM_mG-F9mogjkpDDPW4IhiZA/s3264/IMG_2024-01-30-15-00-46-671.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="3264" data-original-width="2448" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4qL48fVGTzXDmAkdjNrc-VdsO_l38gsJEMYf9afmBwxfeuFr48bd_lMjVOfOW9iO6UtFTZZuSnMquux2eB36x3dMyex0NFyH59oIpe0Mbh6JcmFaIkelbK54HPn3n4KcSMGz6oo_DPwicjK1h7M4uUfwP0I3PFwzS_xSDM_mG-F9mogjkpDDPW4IhiZA/s400/IMG_2024-01-30-15-00-46-671.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIgw_EwaESVwkGWQlA_G18GszSL0BnHbE6tzTURB-XOXjGwTKA7KRFt73Ja-HFqZ3pCMyWHT_wWGP657hlY4nlZPmJI2YA13fjvJZGeTX8xzaFx5Hv3blo-ppXSKCiZM7Ww18bMUaRCzcGYVYZSRMrJaBt5QKJoUfbo-P8c0Ih51Tr1wbV9nJOQPIdNO8/s3264/IMG_2024-01-30-15-07-49-848.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="3264" data-original-width="2448" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIgw_EwaESVwkGWQlA_G18GszSL0BnHbE6tzTURB-XOXjGwTKA7KRFt73Ja-HFqZ3pCMyWHT_wWGP657hlY4nlZPmJI2YA13fjvJZGeTX8xzaFx5Hv3blo-ppXSKCiZM7Ww18bMUaRCzcGYVYZSRMrJaBt5QKJoUfbo-P8c0Ih51Tr1wbV9nJOQPIdNO8/s400/IMG_2024-01-30-15-07-49-848.jpg" /></a></div></div>Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-49753248821676652172022-12-18T23:18:00.001+00:002022-12-19T10:18:40.768+00:00AI, work and human dignity <div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4EAUxKoM45qzsau0YRkzXhyPEhHFFiUG-5IWqVFqc3jWGR91Yn7vcZGMPZEscRe_-af3RurOv4sWnygFcLAGiR7KVbLngS4ux88vPT5SI7ve6XxBNCCj72SQTr_-dRJk1h0GivwohyRiIwbPyunnWC5s8hN22H6s9KGQrv97cssooQaZwyFl-EHGN/s900/cat-animal-cat-portrait-mackerel.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="900" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4EAUxKoM45qzsau0YRkzXhyPEhHFFiUG-5IWqVFqc3jWGR91Yn7vcZGMPZEscRe_-af3RurOv4sWnygFcLAGiR7KVbLngS4ux88vPT5SI7ve6XxBNCCj72SQTr_-dRJk1h0GivwohyRiIwbPyunnWC5s8hN22H6s9KGQrv97cssooQaZwyFl-EHGN/s320/cat-animal-cat-portrait-mackerel.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p>Speculations about the impact of AI and imagined technological utopias or dystopias necessarily draw on – and reveal a lot about – our fundamental assumptions about human nature. Robert Gressis recently wrote <a href="https://cathoderayzone.com/acropolis/preparing-for-the-age-of-uselessness/" style="text-align: left;">a piece on these themes</a>.</p><p>Though his approach is open and undogmatic, his basically metaphysical (and indeed Kantian) assumptions show through. In my opinion, they are counterproductive and create unnecessary problems and confusions.</p><p>“I tell myself,” he writes, “that we are not mere playthings of nature, but are instead rational beings who can and should conduct themselves in a certain way, lest we dishonor our dignity.”</p><p>Our dignity lies, as he sees it, “in rising above nature.” This just doesn’t make sense to me.</p><p>Nor does any notion of “free will” which goes beyond the ordinary (and legal) sense of acting freely (i.e. being of sound mind and not being coerced).</p><p>What’s more, ideas like “rising above nature” – and the (originally religious) notion of free will – are quite unnecessary. In fact, I would go so far as to say that only in their absence can we maintain a robust and reasonable conception of human dignity.</p><p>The only dignity that counts – or indeed makes sense – is that which is exemplified in behaviour. It relates to how we conduct ourselves (given all the constraints etc. which inevitably apply in specific situations).</p><p>Do we behave like egomaniacs or spoilt brats? Or do we apply a modicum of intelligence to our activities, exercising appropriate restraint, self-discipline etc.? Are we sensitive to the needs of others? Are we responsible and trustworthy? These are the sorts of factors which determine whether or not human dignity is being exemplified.</p><p>And – significantly – AI does not challenge us in these sorts of matters. Morality and other value-related matters are distinctively human – and will remain so.</p><p>Gressis makes a comparison – and contrast – between between future redundant humans and pets.</p><p>“[...] I think the utopia-worriers—the people who fear that an AI-fueled paradise will be unsatisfying—are fearful because they think it <i>should</i> be unsatisfying. But should it be unsatisfying? Pets have guided my thinking on this question. I look at my cat, and I joke, “you get paid way too much.” The point of the joke is that I’m expecting more from my cat than he can give. Sure, he’s cute and I like petting him, but he doesn’t do anything useful, like killing bugs. Instead, he just lies around, gets some scritches, and licks his genitals.”</p><p>The analogy is amusing. But the crucial point here, I think, is that pets are quite different from us. They don’t have our range of freedom. They are more hard-wired than we are. And, of course, they don’t have language.</p><p>Gressis writes: “If the AI-optimists are right ([…] big if, but it doesn’t seem impossible), then there will come a time when humans will be as useful as pets. Our use-value will consist almost entirely in our ability to entertain each other.”</p><p>Not just to entertain but to communicate and interact in multiple ways. To challenge, to love, to annoy, to betray… Again, it’s the moral realm (broadly conceived) that counts – and always will count – for us. And it cannot be usurped by any technology.</p><p>AI taking over various jobs is obviously threatening from a financial and psychological point of view for those who earn their living and/or derive their self-esteem from jobs which AI threatens to replace. But this is simply an extension of a familiar pattern which is evident throughout history – at least during periods of rapid technological progress. The only difference now is that it is not just manual and low-level office workers who are being made redundant but also professionals.</p><p>I think that Gressis sees AI as being more problematic than I do partly because of his metaphysical presuppositions and partly because he sees work as being more morally and psychologically central and important than I see it to be.</p><p>For me work is just another unfortunate necessity; something one has to do to earn a living, support a family, build up savings. Most of my – rather patchy – working life was spent teaching in universities. It was (much of the time, at any rate) reasonably congenial and pleasant. But, even when things were going well, professionally speaking, my sense is that I generally only experienced happiness during idle moments and via not-directly work-related interactions rather than through my actual work or (admittedly modest) professional achievements.</p>Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-1329520312176208362022-09-12T03:49:00.005+00:002022-09-12T08:35:06.295+00:00Against ideology<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3y8wGpVShW9oRq7lg5Pu9wyB2Ngkve2EnOZlyo5Kyi58EhCUObFoLzY06JDXEdPMbOwWWl5Zt80JXeSbU8puw7uoM6YOq2065UI9Fv59YWeaFk4-4933vEvj5Z5h21jdFxZctgK5lsJ9STIaz0yavnuJ1dzpi1b-blA9f0sceyA1z3TkTxlhxdZJn/s433/images282029.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="433" data-original-width="340" height="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3y8wGpVShW9oRq7lg5Pu9wyB2Ngkve2EnOZlyo5Kyi58EhCUObFoLzY06JDXEdPMbOwWWl5Zt80JXeSbU8puw7uoM6YOq2065UI9Fv59YWeaFk4-4933vEvj5Z5h21jdFxZctgK5lsJ9STIaz0yavnuJ1dzpi1b-blA9f0sceyA1z3TkTxlhxdZJn/s600/images282029.jpeg" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>As we watch economies fail and societies move into the more advanced stages of dysfunction and dissolution, there is a lot of political finger-pointing going on. Blame is typically assigned in such a way as not to upset one’s preferred political or economic narratives.<div><br /></div><div>Targeting ideological enemies necessarily entails a labeling process. The terms used are normally vague and abstract but loaded with emotional content – positive for terms designating “us”, strongly negative for terms designating “them”. Though the abstractness of the terms in question may confer a veneer of intellectual seriousness, the communicational dynamic remains purely rhetorical. Meaning is reduced to connotation, the various “isms” and so on merely providing convenient ways of encapsulating ill-defined sets of attachments on the one hand and aversions on the other.</div><div><br /></div><div>Political ideologies are real is the sense that they affect the way people interpret history and current events and motivate action but, incorporating as they inevitably do political myths and simplifying abstractions, they are quite useless as analytical tools. This is not to say, of course, that terms like fascism, corporatism, socialism, capitalism, etc. – qualified to distinguish different forms where necessary – cannot be a useful shorthand when they are used descriptively and in historically informed ways.</div><div><br /></div><div>The trouble is, such terms are rarely used like this. More often than not they are used rhetorically: as tribal markers, as weapons of ideological combat.</div><div><br /></div><div>I do not have a particular ideological position to which I am committed or which I am promoting. This is not for want of trying to discover or build one. After much study and thought, I have come to the conclusion that this desire to choose or construct a preferred ideology is ill-conceived.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is quite unnecessary to have some kind of explicit social blueprint in mind. Better not to, in fact (for all sorts of reasons, most of them relating to the contingent and context-dependent nature of social and cultural interactions).</div><div><br /></div><div>Part of my Ph.D. thesis was focused on the revival in the 1930s of the principles of economic liberalism and their development and application during the post-WW2 era. The broad aim of the self-styled “neoliberals” – mainly European thinkers – whose work I was writing about was to offer an alternative to totalitarianisms of the left and the right. This is a goal with which I was (and still am) sympathetic. But, as I say, I have come to believe that no abstract system or ideology is adequate to deal either with questions of ends (which involve crucial moral choices) or means. How is an abstract system supposed to mesh with the complexities of an historically evolved and evolving social structure? The old joke has the Irishman telling the stranger who asked for directions, “Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.” It matters – a lot – where you happen to be.</div><div><br /></div><div>Liberal institutions developed within – and were dependent on for their proper functioning – cultures which had certain common features. A certain kind of culture and a certain level of trust and moral attainment are prerequisites for liberal values and institutions to thrive. Those conditions no longer apply in the societies with which I am most familiar.</div>Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-75620391458284726622022-08-09T07:08:00.002+00:002022-08-10T20:17:21.439+00:00Remarks on culture and religion <div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhMEJ466MEdnMaaactuXVK0-F0H2ZQZe7h8_neH6v1X9ybTTP6oBTPacdY1Cx_x6gscNvUVZmncu4FRb9CpWdxP7mEfFIS-_u_IahV70uP_7YnO-53BX5rFbYSMKxszEHAKgBpU0M_IGpvaKNrWnUCGcSJU8Mpl9U7E43E5kDYDzIKhb_MYKfE7jkt/s1944/CropperOutput-1129600483.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1094" data-original-width="1944" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhMEJ466MEdnMaaactuXVK0-F0H2ZQZe7h8_neH6v1X9ybTTP6oBTPacdY1Cx_x6gscNvUVZmncu4FRb9CpWdxP7mEfFIS-_u_IahV70uP_7YnO-53BX5rFbYSMKxszEHAKgBpU0M_IGpvaKNrWnUCGcSJU8Mpl9U7E43E5kDYDzIKhb_MYKfE7jkt/s400/CropperOutput-1129600483.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<p>I want to recapitulate here and expand on some points I made elsewhere in partial response to a piece written by Daniel Kaufman entitled "<a href="https://theelectricagora.com/2022/07/25/remarks-on-religion/">Remarks on religion</a>".</p><p>First of all, I should explain that I am not much interested in talking about religion in religious or strictly philosophical terms. Philosophical discussions about the existence of God, free will, etc. strike me as fundamentally theological in nature even if an atheistic line is being pursued (as it often is). I have the same feeling about much of philosophical ethics. It has its roots in (moral) theology and religious disputation – and it shows!</p><p>It is worth noting that many religious people – including intelligent ones – have been hostile to theology and the ready application of philosophical methods to religious questions. Blaise Pascal, for example, distinguished between the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (<i>his</i> God) and "the God of the philosophers" (as he scornfully put it). He satirized the casuistry of the Jesuits of his day and the trivialization of morality and the hypocrisy which it entailed.</p><p>I am sympathetic to Pascal's point of view but, since I am not religious, my rejection of theology is based on different grounds from his and is more thoroughgoing. I simply do not see theology as a serious or viable area of study.</p><p>In earlier times, of course, theology (or divinity) was widely seen as a high-status discipline: the queen of the sciences, no less. And, in the Christian West, philosophy derived its scholarly status from theology of which it was seen to be an integral part, as well as from ancient Greek and Roman thinkers many of whose ideas had been incorporated into medieval and Renaissance thought. Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics were especially influential.</p><p>Two broad areas which developed within this theological matrix did become viable secular fields of study: natural philosophy (or what we now generally call science); and logic. Mathematics had regressed in Roman and medieval times and only began to flourish again in the 17th century with the rise of modern science.</p><p>I realize all this is broad-brush and oversimplified but it should help explain my general attitude to philosophy and religion and, with respect to the latter, my tendency to focus on the historical, cultural and psychological side of things.</p><p>Dan had contrasted the evangelical and Pentecostal Christians of the Bible Belt with two Jewish Hasidic sects:</p><p>"When I first moved to the Bible Belt, I was surprised by the level of confidence people had in their particular brand of evangelical or Pentecostal Christianity (some of them brands I’d never even heard of until that point) and used to think that the best thing for them would be to live in a Lubavitch or Satmar community for a few weeks, where it would become quickly evident that there were people far more religiously committed and more rigorous in their religious lifestyles than they are."</p><p>Unlike these Jewish groups, evangelicals and Pentecostals profess and proclaim (in Kaufman’s words) their own “extraordinary and intense religious faith” whilst behaving in other respects “pretty much like everyone else.”</p><p>The main criticism here is being directed at a particular group of Christians and I can't really comment on its appropriateness. I do have the sense, however, that the tenor of these passages <i>may</i> betray a lack awareness of the standard Christian view of what religious commitment is at its core and what it entails. Whatever it is, it is decidedly <i>not</i> about outward forms and observances; and it is not in the least competitive. The very notion of "religious lifestyle" is alien to the standard Christian view as I understand it.</p><p>I have no direct knowledge of "Bible Belt" Christians, nor of the Jewish groups mentioned. Regarding the latter, Chabad-Lubavitch and Satmar are rival, Brooklyn-based Hasidic sects originating in Russia and Hungary respectively. They differ, amongst other things, in terms of their attitudes to outreach and proselytizing within the wider Jewish community [Chabad is active in such activity but Satmar is not]; and in terms of their attitudes to Zionism and the state of Israel [Satmar remains staunchly anti-Zionist].</p><p>Dan talks about the “self-deception” or “psychic indolence” involved in seeing ancient religious texts as embodying eternal truths “about the nature and operation of the universe and everything and everyone in it” rather than in more realistic terms. He characterizes sacred texts as “fascinating and often lurid elements from the eclectic, messy, often ugly history of human development.” Fair comment.</p><p>I would have thought that one way US evangelical Christians differ from, say, Jewish ultra-Orthodox or extremist Islamic groups, is in their relative openness to the modern world, to <i>ordinary</i> life.</p><p>Mixing faith-based and modern views necessarily involves inconsistencies. But compartmentalization of one kind or another is a universal feature of our brains. Some of the greatest scientists bracketed out their religious beliefs in rather crude ways or aligned themselves with extreme and anti-rational ideologies or political movements. Though most of us manage to avoid such extremes, the logical aspect of our thinking is always in an awkward or ambiguous relationship with more emotional aspects of thought – including those that relate to existential anxieties, to attachments and aversions, to religion, politics, self-image and identity.</p><p>The final issue I raised was that of cultural and religious identity. In the course of his discussion, Dan explicitly acknowledged his Jewish lineage as well as the essentially secular Jewish culture in which he was raised. For his parents – and for himself, apparently – ancestral religious practices continued to be meaningful in the absence of belief.</p><p>For me there is a tension here, a potential problem. I realize that Judaism is not creed-based or doctrinal in the way many Christian groupings are, but beliefs are still important. It seems to me that if a member of a religious (or even a political) group stops believing the central doctrines of the group, he or she ceases to be, in a real and fundamental sense, a part of that group, even if there is little change in outward behaviour. What was deeply motivated is now merely "going through the motions." This phrase says it all.</p><p>I see that people brought up within a particular religious group or sect or denomination will continue to share a common cultural background but if they have left the sect or ceased believing its fundamental tenets their sense of themselves – and of their relationship to the group – changes. Their sense of identification with the group is necessarily reduced and qualified. This is why defining Jewishness largely in terms of the religious tradition (in terms, that is, of Judaism) is obviously a problem for non-religious Jews. When scriptures lose their special status and come to be seen solely in historical or literary terms, when prayers and rituals are no longer expressions of religious experience but mere nostalgic forms or reassuring customs, they gradually but inexorably lose their power to command attention and motivate religious practice. They become museum pieces. They die.</p><p>Religious Jews, of course, are committed to maintaining not just the rituals and practices but also the beliefs that shaped and motivated these practices. So the tension I speak of here does not apply to them. (The problems of inconsistency and compartmentalization alluded to above may apply, however.)</p><p>My preference is to see group affiliations in personal and individual terms, simply in terms of sets of shared and overlapping cultural elements and personal values. And, to the extent that Jewishness is seen in this way (i.e. as an evolving element within various disparate cultures rather than in terms of direct links with an ancient, Hebrew-speaking population and the religious practices and beliefs of that population), existential questions about cultural survival simply will not arise.</p><p><br /></p>Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-76810035778271106792022-07-24T05:30:00.006+00:002022-11-22T07:38:08.655+00:00The decline of literacy<div align="left"><p dir="ltr">I find myself frequently having to modify and simplify my language to avoid misunderstandings. This is partly because of traditional divergences between British and American usage and the inevitable compromises that come with globalized and inter-cultural communication. But it goes further than this and relates, I think, to declines in levels of literacy. Levels of literacy impact not only on written but also on spoken forms of language. General literacy allows for larger lexicons and more complex syntactic forms.</p><p dir="ltr">Another factor is that, as the status and role of literary models have diminished, foundations for normative grammar have been eroded. In the past, languages and dialects without a (written) literature were widely perceived as inferior to languages with an established literature. Such a view is mistaken. But it was widely held. Writers were seen not only as adding value to the culture and the language but as culture-creators and nation-builders.</p><p dir="ltr">As I say, such beliefs are problematic, but texts did provide semantic and syntactic stability. The existence of a canon of literary texts implicitly promoted a standard form of the language as well as providing cultural reference points.</p><p dir="ltr">What’s more, a standard education typically incorporated elements of historical linguistics and/or classical languages. This meant that most educated speakers had a relatively sophisticated grasp of the nature and dynamics of language which in turn affected how language was used in day-to-day life.</p><p dir="ltr">One aspect of this which is not often discussed relates to etymology and subtleties of meaning. Knowledge of the original meaning of a word-stem affects the way a word is used and understood, even if the meaning has changed significantly over time. These sorts of subtle, etymology-based connotation no longer apply for most listeners or readers, with the result that certain fine distinctions of meaning become impossible to convey.</p><p dir="ltr">We currently have a cultural elite which is ostensibly – and paradoxically – committed to anti-elitism, a situation which militates against standard, or "prestige", forms of language being supported or promoted. Political and cultural fashions will inevitably change but the sorts of literary-oriented values which were embedded until recent times in Western and some Eastern cultures are probably lost forever.</p><p dir="ltr">Technological factors (especially the digitization of information and communication) will no doubt continue to drive changes in the longer term, and these changes – especially the replacement of reading for pleasure with other easily-accessible forms of entertainment – mean that the high levels of literacy and linguistic knowledge which characterized the professional and middle classes until the later 20th century will not return any time soon.</p></div>Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-68088443297651769502022-05-10T10:54:00.000+00:002022-05-10T10:54:03.318+00:00Dreams, perceptions and delusions <div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAhgJKkjpEDiTNdt3gDnhcF9JZ1_gj8Pzc1MT-jftXClMdjzskwhOcwMoS8kyp0Cn_3twYRIE7loPs4bAW7LLGe7izyuiumYirv7gz66gN4dKMAWLjERv2mXRAJ7QvZjiRqgW8GHZGV8e9RGXTGbEvLQKXFriZbBIV4-AhEZjLqp6xZrwnl4OEtsSZ/s600/ThN-Dream-and-waking-Experiences-copy.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="280" data-original-width="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAhgJKkjpEDiTNdt3gDnhcF9JZ1_gj8Pzc1MT-jftXClMdjzskwhOcwMoS8kyp0Cn_3twYRIE7loPs4bAW7LLGe7izyuiumYirv7gz66gN4dKMAWLjERv2mXRAJ7QvZjiRqgW8GHZGV8e9RGXTGbEvLQKXFriZbBIV4-AhEZjLqp6xZrwnl4OEtsSZ/s400/ThN-Dream-and-waking-Experiences-copy.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<p>I have never considered dreams – my own or anyone else’s – worth recording or trying to analyze in any serious way, but I have always maintained an interest in the various manifestations of consciousness and the functioning – and malfunctioning – of the brain. Doing some sorting recently, I came across some scribbled notes which I made a while ago and which got me thinking again about dreams, perceptions and peculiar waking experiences.</p><p>Dreams have a special fascination, of course. Operating outside the normal imperatives of waking life, the brain takes on a (sometimes disturbing) life of its own.</p><p>Various kinds of waking experience also give us insights into the workings of our brains. Especially under stressful conditions, unexpected things happen: hallucinations, visions, so-called mystical experiences, devastating waves of fear or dread, unexplained convictions.</p><p>With respect to peculiar waking experiences, my own have been (mercifully) few and far between. One such experience was utterly terrifying and occurred in early adolescence. No drugs were involved. I may write about it another time.</p><p>A far less harrowing episode occurred a couple of years earlier. It involved a failure of visual processing. Three spatial dimensions collapsed into two. The scene before me decomposed and I could no longer distinguish form, just colour, a kaleidoscope of colour. Quite beautiful actually. Even (in the context) strangely liberating. Again, no drugs were involved.</p><p>As a child, I did not know much about the brain, but this experience gave me a sense of the precariousness and the general nature of the visual system. There were obviously all sorts of complex mechanisms in play, and this brief failure of the system had allowed me to look behind the curtain, as it were, to get a glimpse of the not exactly raw but non-integrated data that lay behind the finished product which the visual system normally presents us with. What was normally integrated had, for a time, disintegrated, revealing not only the precariousness of the system but something of its distributed, layered and constructive nature.</p><p>Dreams and delusions involve not only visual processing but also a more central feature of the brain, its narrative-generating function. In dreams, the narrative-generating function is given free rein, being largely detached from sensory input and the constraints and imperatives, both physical and logical, that moving around in the real world necessarily entail. In this respect dreams have parallels with hallucinations (where sensory input is overridden or is processed in anomalous ways) as well as with other kinds of delusion.</p><p>The stories we tell ourselves in our waking hours to orientate ourselves within the social world derive largely from stored information but real-time sensory input is also important. As we all know, there is a tendency for these stories to become detached from physical and social realities. Such tendencies are exacerbated by processing failures in individual brains, brought on by stress, disease, aging, etc..</p><p>Take the following example. Late one night my mother was in hospital recovering from major surgery. I got a call from the hospital asking me to come in because she was upset and they thought I might be able to calm her down. It turned out she was sleep-deprived and showing signs of paranoia. She was convinced that the nursing staff were not humans. They were aliens from another planet. But, being a very level-headed and intelligent woman, she was also aware of the silliness of this conviction and in fact embarrassed about it. So it wasn’t too hard for me to reassure her.</p><p>Capgras syndrome involves integration failures in respect of the various brain processes associated with the recognition of and responses to known individuals. The sufferer will recognize the face and body in question but, because the usual emotional responses associated with this recognition do not kick in, he or she will have a strong sense that this is not really the person normally associated with that body. In this manner, loved ones may be perceived (for brief or extended periods of time) as hostile intruders. I have had the experience of having to deal with transient episodes of this syndrome in aged relatives. It’s quite common, I believe.</p><p>As I indicated above, what got me thinking again about these topics was coming across some scribbled notes from the past. One document related to a dream which my mother had – and told me about – twelve years ago. I quote verbatim from my notes…</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>Last night’s dream involved the disruption of a church service. In the dream she was a school-aged child, though an adult friend whom she had not known in childhood appeared in the dream and spoke to her. The church in question was specified by name. It was not one she had known as a child but was the church she was married in.</i></p><p><i>In the dream she sought out and gathered together the noisiest things she could find: tin cans and “a strange kind of metallic vessel” – she wasn’t sure what it was but she was “pretty sure it would make a noise.”</i></p><p><i>“I tied all these things together and crept up towards the altar where the priest was moving to and fro. The array of objects made a very disruptive noise and the priest swung around and here’s this girl shaking [the objects] madly to make as much noise as possible. There was nothing anyone could do, it was such a surprise. I wanted to irritate him, to stop him doing all the things I hated, worshipping this God who wasn’t there.”</i></p><p><i>“I walked out [of the church via] the side aisle. People looked the other way. They would see what I was doing as wrong and I knew I was doing wrong – but I had to do it, to try and stop them. I threw the noise-making contraption onto the ground outside the church…”</i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>I am not saying that this dream has any great significance but it is amusing in its way. It also bears witness, I think, to longstanding frustrations and to an independent spirit adamantly opposed to (what was perceived as) obfuscation and mystification.</p><p><br /></p><p>[This is an abridged and revised version of <a href="https://theelectricagora.com/2022/05/07/dreams-and-peculiar-waking-experiences/">a piece which appeared recently at The Electric Agora</a>.]</p>Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-13547358178151333262022-04-03T08:01:00.001+00:002022-04-03T09:22:18.432+00:00Distorting history<p>Bharath Vallabha used to be a regular contributor to The Electric Agora. He returned recently with <a href="https://theelectricagora.com/2022/03/21/beyond-polarization/">a piece</a> about how, in his view, some of the central and most polarizing debates of post-World War 2 academic philosophy were the product of a misreading of intellectual history. Both Gilbert Ryle and Richard Rorty were extremely influential and both gave a false picture of Descartes' thought and the Cartesian tradition more generally.</p><p>Here is Bharath on Rorty and Ryle and how his own views have changed:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>[Rorty] went from being a Princeton philosophy professor and president of the APA to basically decamping to literature departments. He was right about problems with the direction of analytic philosophy, but it was a mistake to connect that criticism to Descartes et al.. <i>Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature</i> is no more a careful study of Descartes than Ryle’s <i>Concept of Mind</i> was... I think Rorty was reading a lot of what was wrong with analytic philosophy back into early modern philosophers. This kind of reading back led to Rorty being polarizing, because he was lumping together 300 years of thinkers in a way that divorced them from their historical context.</p><p>To be honest this is a new thought for me. For longest time I was on the side of Rorty and Ryle against early modern philosophy of mind and as it carried over into analytic philosophy... Rorty’s book says more about Rorty’s struggle with professional philosophy than it does about Descartes and Kant. It seems strange to me now that there is some special conception of mind common to Descartes to Nagel even given the vast differences in context of what being a philosopher is between them. My thought is if we let go of this kind of generalizing over centuries to tell who the good guys are and who the bad guys, would be easier to listen to each other – in ways for example Rorty and his Princeton colleagues couldn’t do. And in ways current traditionalists and social justice warriors now can’t, because both are wedded to historical generalizations.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>On binary thinking:</p><p></p><blockquote>Resentationalism versus Pragmatism, and fitting historical figures into those categories, forces a binary choice at every turn, in the present and in the reading of the past. There is then no way to rethink the terms of the debate. However, if one sees historical figures with new eyes and with greater openness to historical context, new, more productive conversations are possible.</blockquote><p></p><p>I agree with this entirely. Like Bharath, I favour more historically-oriented approaches. And I too have only recently come to realize the extent to which Ryle was misrepresenting Descartes. Rorty distorted history also. He was worse than Ryle, in my opinion, because he let politics intrude into his professional work, and also because of his anti-science bias.</p><p>Despite his criticisms, Bharath made it clear that he values the writings of Rorty and Ryle (if not the work of their followers). I am less positive. Though I give credit to both Ryle and Rorty for their stylistic power and the thought-provoking nature of their best work, my reservations outweigh my sympathies.</p><p>I share Ryle's secular outlook and his commitment to an apolitical approach to academic work. But, in my opinion, any attempt to carve out a sacrosanct space, distinct from the sciences, for an academic philosophy of mind is fatally flawed.</p><p>In terms of general outlook, however, I am definitely further away from Rorty than I am from Ryle. I am close to the former on one matter only, as far as I can tell. I am sympathetic to his disillusionment with and drift away from academic philosophy.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPPdOca8vc37udmK8cdqbktLahtDuG0wnKUOjAMDb8mMd3pt6Vbfx_ruDdvoDcmqwwVyysYAPO1xNVHU4AhuDtvurimmxQeipbkpTr4LTFHn7s2Zah3yIdosbKX0JCptsebFE5bx1ERwc14FHapsIg0Xa1KU_e9VIWTYefc0WnumFfqXTTjlMvJbut/s450/images%20%2810%29.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="339" data-original-width="450" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPPdOca8vc37udmK8cdqbktLahtDuG0wnKUOjAMDb8mMd3pt6Vbfx_ruDdvoDcmqwwVyysYAPO1xNVHU4AhuDtvurimmxQeipbkpTr4LTFHn7s2Zah3yIdosbKX0JCptsebFE5bx1ERwc14FHapsIg0Xa1KU_e9VIWTYefc0WnumFfqXTTjlMvJbut/s400/images%20%2810%29.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p>Rorty's roots were in literature (his father was a poet) and I understand that he took comfort in his final illness reading the likes of Swinburne rather than philosophical works. (Martin Heidegger – another master of historical distortion – followed a similar trajectory.)</p>Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-30210766259384865082022-02-23T09:04:00.003+00:002022-05-10T11:10:08.323+00:00More on culture and language <div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjiW0Brkvb93dLvW5l7u1jzlGd7dS1c2PzUyWLcyMWRSQ6fW0PJe2BfHvT-zikt2N-4Kku8ERW0yIj6KVBboORkrnnP-pUmULOejMfvvCjXobqFM-doEm5xhSuYuxYKgHdcnVfIB7BjLAPYONkNg2-yKsyTYichLqQz4N0bbVs6s8p-IINwVBtfe4xq=s620" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="296" data-original-width="620" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjiW0Brkvb93dLvW5l7u1jzlGd7dS1c2PzUyWLcyMWRSQ6fW0PJe2BfHvT-zikt2N-4Kku8ERW0yIj6KVBboORkrnnP-pUmULOejMfvvCjXobqFM-doEm5xhSuYuxYKgHdcnVfIB7BjLAPYONkNg2-yKsyTYichLqQz4N0bbVs6s8p-IINwVBtfe4xq=s400" width="400" /></a></div>
<p>I <a href="https://conservativetendency.blogspot.com/2022/02/personhood-and-cultural-embeddedness.html">recently set out</a> some of my basic beliefs and assumptions about what there is and about what makes a person.</p><p><i>"Biology and culture. Culture and biology. That’s not all there is, but – with the inorganic world within which biological organisms evolved and within which they exist – that’s enough to make a human being..."</i></p><p>And, in a recent podcast, I talked about Gottlob Frege's beliefs and assumptions about life and language, views which I endorse to a large extent. Frege saw human thought and language in fundamentally organic and holistic terms.</p><p>
<iframe class="castos-iframe-player" frameborder="0" height="150" scrolling="no" src="https://60086c85c4f722-42609047.castos.com/player/995276" width="100%"></iframe></p><p></p><p><br /></p><p>I am adding here a few general thoughts on culture and language. My sense is that these various fragments are compatible with one another and form (potentially at least) a more-or-less coherent whole.</p><p>Language is probably the most basic cultural element for two reasons: it bridges biology and culture in ways that other cultural elements do not; and it is the foundation or at least a <i>sine qua non</i> for the development of many other cultural forms and practices, from religion and politics to mathematics.</p><p>Culture is undoubtedly real but <i>a culture</i> is impossible to define in a precise way. The same applies to language and languages. Just as each of us deploys a unique linguistic system (idiolect) which is different in various ways – scope and details of lexicon, aspects of syntax, pronunciation, etc. – from the linguistic systems deployed by others within our language group, so each of us embodies a unique cultural mix.</p><p>This idea obviously relates to the idea of individualism and, I think, justifies taking individualism seriously as a potential way of dealing with social problems related to various kinds of identity politics and stereotyping.</p><p>Degrees of overlap vary between individuals but, because cultural elements are so diverse, there is no single measure of commonality. Some cultural elements are easily isolated and compared but most are not.</p><p>Take language. Though the idiolect notion is (in my opinion) central to any truly scientific approach to language, for practical purposes it is useful – necessary in fact – to distinguish between languages or dialects. This inevitably involves abstraction and simplification – but then so does most of our ordinary, day-to-day thinking.</p><p>Religion is another fairly clearly identifiable cultural element, at least in the sense that the churches and sects and religious movements of the modern world can be defined and demarcated in both social and doctrinal terms. Complications arise, however, when you start to look at how participating individuals envisage and justify their participation. Congregations may be gathered together physically, but each individual will have a unique perspective on what they are doing and why.</p><p>I am conceding that identifying and drawing cultural distinctions within certain defined areas is not only possible but inevitable and necessary. But defining and drawing these distinctions is difficult to do in a rigorous way. And, if one is talking about a culture in a general sense, that task becomes well-nigh impossible.</p><p>The notion of a <i>national culture</i> is particularly problematic. Where there can be said to be such a thing, it is of necessity imposed and artificial – in contrast to regional cultures, for example, which are shaped over long periods of time by local conditions and practices.</p><p>Generally, it makes more sense to talk of national myths and ideologies rather than national cultures, I think. Perhaps if one is looking at a fully-fledged totalitarian state in which the natural course of cultural history has been totally blocked or perverted by a central authority, leaving the population with no other culture than that which has been imposed upon them by their ideologically-driven overlords, you could talk about a national culture. But, even in such cases, pockets of resistance will inevitably arise, complicating the picture.</p><p>Ideology and political myth, I am saying, need to be distinguished from (and are always in tension with) the more spontaneous and organic forms of thought and action which derive from the activities of small groups, families and individuals pursuing their personal goals.</p><p></p>Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-30751512122229487692022-01-28T07:32:00.002+00:002022-01-28T07:35:55.698+00:00Individualism and cultural embeddedness<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhgAP6jrvlsN00RE4jaeqHtaElc7ZwrRcpYe7TcXDGHnIti_hEaX_BlMQEPxX4GM-5xJHyRVhLLQvPdrV1lvT-Ib7OKic3cqTPcbjR-0QKo9U6RQE0z7472DpbxnxeKZap9_j-BDWkl2sLVMtj7BtjAqqeOHGIDbZINQnlDGyKF38KUUOajfEG6JNSQ=s1280" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhgAP6jrvlsN00RE4jaeqHtaElc7ZwrRcpYe7TcXDGHnIti_hEaX_BlMQEPxX4GM-5xJHyRVhLLQvPdrV1lvT-Ib7OKic3cqTPcbjR-0QKo9U6RQE0z7472DpbxnxeKZap9_j-BDWkl2sLVMtj7BtjAqqeOHGIDbZINQnlDGyKF38KUUOajfEG6JNSQ=s400" width="400" /></a></div>
<p>I talk here about my general goal in this series of podcasts of presenting and defending a form of individualism which takes seriously our cultural embeddedness, noting that universal political prescriptions – to the extent that they can be applied at all – are rarely successful. Reference is made to the surprising origins of neo-liberalism in Europe in the 1930s. The European neo-liberals were keen to distance themselves from earlier, laissez-faire approaches to economics and emphasized the importance of cultural factors.</p>
Tags: neo-liberalism, laissez-faire, Chicago School, Milton Friedman, Louis Rougier, Wilhelm Röpke, groupthink, cultural embeddedness, language, Karl Vossler, close reading, science, Gottlob Frege.<div> <iframe class="castos-iframe-player" frameborder="0" height="150" scrolling="no" src="https://60086c85c4f722-42609047.castos.com/player/931591" width="100%"></iframe></div>Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-10402083618851929702022-01-07T08:56:00.001+00:002022-01-28T08:03:28.590+00:00Karl Kraus and close reading<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhkMbIlnk_lCsOEzEyXj2PW-0BJFWWuLd6bFiRBDB3Kr85QoS7LT5uZkYdzQYIuzsQsyI8WPl4Yn2YS2GYgs9HEOMtyxiA7qR-_Hdt3RatwlpIbc4pYGNHH-9lV_1i99Qmfm3cGd4X1RdMNSc9ucKT42PVfw75kuX5E9rHvIfUNv9V6EaeKP_4JINJc=s560" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="560" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhkMbIlnk_lCsOEzEyXj2PW-0BJFWWuLd6bFiRBDB3Kr85QoS7LT5uZkYdzQYIuzsQsyI8WPl4Yn2YS2GYgs9HEOMtyxiA7qR-_Hdt3RatwlpIbc4pYGNHH-9lV_1i99Qmfm3cGd4X1RdMNSc9ucKT42PVfw75kuX5E9rHvIfUNv9V6EaeKP_4JINJc=s400" width="400" /></a></div>
Young children are notoriously poor liars, but even mature and sophisticated users of language reveal themselves in ways of which they are all too often unaware.<div><br /></div><div>Listeners and readers inevitably make judgments based not so much on the literal meaning of what we say as on what they perceive to be our purpose or motivation in saying it. This is a well-known and universal phenomenon. But there are strands of thinking, in both Western and Eastern traditions, which take these ideas a bit further and see the analysis of linguistic style as potentially revealing the moral qualities of the speaker or writer.</div><div>
<iframe class="castos-iframe-player" frameborder="0" height="150" scrolling="no" src="https://60086c85c4f722-42609047.castos.com/player/861638" width="100%"></iframe></div>Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-35579660165272044682021-10-15T11:19:00.003+00:002021-11-03T06:51:55.779+00:00Why I haven't been posting<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1stFrIW2648/YWjy6vsSGDI/AAAAAAAAFS8/j6UMB11-SRUGqMmgoptZjxQt0fg6Ub1JQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1280/Culture%2Band%2BValue_v1.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1280" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1stFrIW2648/YWjy6vsSGDI/AAAAAAAAFS8/j6UMB11-SRUGqMmgoptZjxQt0fg6Ub1JQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/Culture%2Band%2BValue_v1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
I have been preoccupied lately with developing a podcast which will be a part of the Electric Agora network. It is called Culture and Value and it is still a work in progress. For the present, at least, it will consist of brief monologues, scripted and spoken by me. It is meant for a general audience, one probably less well-educated in academic philosophy, linguistics or related disciplines than the typical reader of this blog would be.<div><br /><div>There may or may not be a focus on language-related or philosophy-related questions. General social and cultural questions will be dealt with, as well as politics and geopolitics. Obviously I want to keep the tone restrained and reasonable and (as far as possible) non-partisan.</div><div><br /></div><div>The artwork (Chinese woman in traditional dress) is meant to allude to global economic and cultural shifts and to the fact that East Asian cultures have not cut themselves off from their cultural traditions to the same extent that Western European cultures have. The neon lettering, which is part of the Electric Agora house style, adds some unexpected semiotic complexity.</div><div><br /></div><div>The show is available now via the following audio streaming services: Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Audible, Pocket Casts and <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/2qtdMKrD5C0G2CGM0igUAP" style="color: #2288bb; text-decoration-line: none;">Spotify</a>. We have been having problems getting it running on Apple Podcasts (and also Google Podcasts, it seems) but we expect these issues will be sorted out. </div><div><br /></div><div>You can subscribe (free) to Culture and Value <a href="https://culture-and-value.castos.com">here</a>. Or click on the subscribe button in the insert below.</div>
<iframe class="castos-iframe-player" height="600" src="https://60086c85c4f722-42609047.castos.com/playlist-player/29650" width="100%"></iframe></div>Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-28768528907266747572021-05-29T13:34:00.000+00:002021-05-29T13:34:13.479+00:00Conceptualizing language<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iWppKOrL2GI/YLGRSiWcAtI/AAAAAAAAFN4/gdVHv3_SHWgwPFrACheI38YoOi5D_o-rQCLcBGAsYHQ/s246/images%2B%25287%2529.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="246" data-original-width="205" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iWppKOrL2GI/YLGRSiWcAtI/AAAAAAAAFN4/gdVHv3_SHWgwPFrACheI38YoOi5D_o-rQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/images%2B%25287%2529.jpeg" /></a></div>
<div><i><br /></i></div><i>[This piece was published at The Electric Agora earlier this year. Chomsky's ideas on linguistics are very polarising and even my qualified endorsement of some of his central ideas prompted <a href="https://theelectricagora.com/2021/03/26/conceptualizing-language/#comments">some animated exchanges</a>.]</i><div><br /></div><div>
Complex language is a precondition not only for the kinds of interaction which characterize human societies but also for many kinds of thinking. It is both social and biological. A language only develops in a context of social continuity over an extended period of time, though it is typically learned very quickly by infants who are exposed to it. There is still controversy about the extent to which natural language is shaped and constrained by the structure and physiology of the human brain, but it is clear that the advent of complex human language was associated with genetic changes which impacted on various aspects of human physiology (including brain function).</div><div><br /></div><div>What, then, is language? How should we conceptualize it? The approach I am outlining (and recommending) here is strongly idiolectal.</div><div><br /></div><div>The term “idiolect” can be understood in different ways and taken more or less seriously in the study of language. Taken in a strong sense, it inclines us to see the individual rather than the language or linguistic community as the primary focus of study. As I see it, language only exists insofar as it is used (or instantiated) by individuals. A social context is a given. But speaking and writing and listening and reading and the thinking (or cognitive processing) which supports these activities or which impinges in some other way on linguistic forms or structures are all things which are done by, or (in the case of cognitive processing) occur within the brains of, individuals.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don’t deny having been greatly influenced by Noam Chomsky’s ideas in my thinking about language. I was first introduced to linguistics by a former student of Chomsky’s who followed a broadly (but by no means doctrinaire) Chomskyan approach. This general approach appealed to me. Chomsky put the focus firmly on what he originally called (linguistic) “competence” (the individual speaker’s internal intuitions about grammar etc.) rather than “performance” (as a behaviorist might). This distinction was developed over time into one between I-language and E-language. For Chomsky the focus was on the former and consequently on idiolects rather than languages.</div><div><br /></div><div>The entry for “idiolects” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (credited to Alex Barber and Eduardo Garcia Ramirez) highlights the philosophical implications of the concept and some of the confusions which surround it. Those who claim that idiolects (in any strong sense of the term) do not exist or that such a notion is useless or incoherent “are nonetheless happy to use the word ‘idiolect’ to describe a person’s partial grasp of, or their pattern of deviance from, a language that is irreducibly social in nature.”</div><div><br /></div><div>But nobody is denying the social dimension of language. Of course a language is a social product, but “partial grasp”? Of what exactly? And (as I see it) any attempt to define idiolects in terms of patterns of deviance from a norm is likely to be arbitrary or trivial unless the norm itself is defined in terms of idiolects.</div><div><br /></div><div>In what sense does a language exist as distinct from particular instances of language use? Spoken words and written texts are generally assignable to this language or that, but precise boundaries are impossible to draw. Grammars and dictionaries try to do this but they can never reflect the constantly shifting contours of actual linguistic practice which always depend on the knowledge and behavior of individual speakers. In the final analysis, then, what we have is a set of unique and (to a greater or lesser extent) overlapping idiolects. We find it convenient, however, to group sets of idiolects into what we call dialects or languages.</div><div><br /></div><div>“The substantial debate,” Barber and Ramirez explain, “is not over how to define [the word ‘idiolect’]. It turns, rather, on whether an idiolectal perspective on language is to be preferred to a non-idiolectal one. Someone taking an idiolectal perspective on language treats idiolects […] as having ontological or investigative priority and [sees languages as] nothing but more-or-less overlapping idiolects. […] At issue, then, is what we should take languages to be.”</div><div><br /></div><div>They go on to explain that Chomsky does not deny that language is at least in part a social product. But he is skeptical of E-language-based approaches. The term “E-language” is used by Chomsky to refer to those things (whatever they might be) that are the target of study for those who take languages and their properties to be external to the mind.</div><div><br /></div><div>“Chomsky’s case for introducing and using the notion of an I-language is, in the end, indistinguishable from his case for a cognitivist approach to the study of language as a natural phenomenon. And his case against E-languages is that there is no scientifically coherent project to which they belong as posits.”</div><div><br /></div><div>Chomsky does not deny the existence of some linguistic arbitrariness (emphasized by Ferdinand de Saussure and David Lewis, for example). But he sees the core aspects of language as being constrained by the specifics of our biological nature and the (undoubted) arbitrary and contingent aspects of language as operating within these constraints.</div><div><br /></div><div>The facts of first language acquisition arguably demonstrate this. It is clear that language learning in infants represents a special kind of learning. Infants are not like little scientists observing and inferring the linguistic conventions prevailing among adult users. And even if they were, even if they were masterminds, they would still be unable, on the basis of the fragmentary, flawed and often inconsistent evidence which the typical linguistic environment provides, to zero in on an appropriate grammar. Logically speaking, there would be countless possible languages which would be compatible with the data. (This is the “poverty of stimulus” argument.) What we see in fact is very rapid, and apparently effortless, linguistic progress. And it calls for an explanation.</div><div><br /></div><div>According to Chomsky, language acquisition can be thought of as a series of brain states, developing from an initial state, <i>S</i>0 [<i>S</i> zero], through intermediate states to a relatively stable mature state, <i>SM</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>From the SEP: "<i>S</i>0 is the initial state common to all humans, idealizing away from individual linguistic impairments and the like. Subsequent states arise through exposure to a particular linguistic environment. Nothing said so far requires that these states be thought of as representational states we could call “knowing a language”. […] [L]anguage acquisition can be described—usefully—as a matter of children evolving through various stages of knowledge en route to acquiring adult competence. This description is useful because the empiricist/nativist debate can now be couched as a debate over what linguistic information must already be known by someone in <i>S</i>0 if information supplied by the linguistic environment is to culminate in knowledge of the mature language <i>M</i>. Empiricists claim that nothing much is needed, that <i>S</i>0 is a “blank slate” to be filled in using environmental data. Nativists claim that plenty of information must already be provided, in the form of innate knowledge of a language dubbed Universal Grammar (UG) by Chomsky. We each come predisposed to acquire only certain languages, the humanly possible ones that can grow out of UG."</div><div><br /></div><div>Despite the controversies surrounding the notion of Universal Grammar, I tend to agree with Barber and Ramirez that nothing much is added to this account, as an account of language learning, by describing it as development towards the learning of an externalistically specified social language (as opposed to some specific mature linguistic state (<i>SM</i>) of an individual). On this view, the primary target of investigation is the human language faculty, its nature and limits. Of course, other approaches to language are possible but, to the extent that they have scientific pretensions, they will probably be in tension with an idiolectal approach.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Because there is considerable variety […] in the underlying conceptions of languages, Chomsky’s criticisms can seem sweeping, but the underlying thought is that, because E-languages are less “real” than I-languages, the concept [of an E-language] appears to play no role in the theory of language. […] Linguistic behaviour is the product of both the language faculty on the one hand and external influences—performance systems in the mind/brain of the individual and social factors—on the other. At issue is not whether anything at all can ever be said, usefully, about these “downstream” effects, but whether the notion of an E-language has any pivotal explanatory role to play in saying it (save as a useful shorthand)."</div><div><br /></div><div>This is well put.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is worth noting also that Barber and Ramirez explicitly recognize the challenges that idiolectal (or I-language-focused) approaches pose to traditional approaches in the philosophy of language.</div><div><br /></div><div>"One apparent corollary of [Chomsky’s view of language] is significant for those many philosophers of language who have agonized over how to construct a theory of meaning for English. A common thought is that such a theory ought to take the form of a statement of the referential properties of the expressions of English—a link between words and objects in the world—from which the truth conditions of all English sentences can be derived (e.g., [Donald] Davidson, [Richard] Montague). Echoing P. F. Strawson, Chomsky suggests that referring is something people do. They use words in doing so, it is true, but referring is not something that words somehow do by themselves, through some fantastical medium, English. If referential properties of expressions amount to anything, rather than being relational properties between expressions and external objects (or “word-world” relations) they should be thought of as embodying instructions to the individual’s conceptual system, one of the performance systems with which the language faculty interfaces. If Chomsky is right, a great deal of the philosophy of language is either radically off beam or needs considerable re-interpretation."</div><div><br /></div><div>I have barely scratched the surface here and don’t have a fully worked out position. But I am convinced that an idiolectal perspective has been and will continue to be extremely useful in the quest to develop a truer and more parsimonious account of human language.</div>Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-19519999905191754552021-02-14T07:32:00.001+00:002021-02-14T11:39:15.312+00:00Epistemic relativism in a digital world<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Zj2WMpN71nM/YCi6ZipTGTI/AAAAAAAAFJY/gmwimQ__xy4cTa0wGnaweL11I_-6BQSOACLcBGAsYHQ/s300/images%2B%25281%2529.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Zj2WMpN71nM/YCi6ZipTGTI/AAAAAAAAFJY/gmwimQ__xy4cTa0wGnaweL11I_-6BQSOACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/images%2B%25281%2529.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p><i style="color: #303030; font-family: "Open Sans", Tahoma, Arial; font-size: 16px;">Extracts (slightly revised) from an essay of mine which appeared earlier this year at The Electric Agora</i><i style="color: #303030; font-family: "Open Sans", Tahoma, Arial; font-size: 16px;"> under the title</i><i style="color: #303030; font-family: "Open Sans", Tahoma, Arial; font-size: 16px;"> "Thought control and cultural decline".</i></p><p><i style="color: #303030; font-family: "Open Sans", Tahoma, Arial; font-size: 16px;"><br /></i></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #303030; font-family: "Open Sans", Tahoma, Arial; font-size: 16px;">[...] One consequence of the cultural and technological changes we are seeing is that the line between political activism and research and knowledge sharing has been erased – at least in many areas. Journalistic and publishing standards have plummeted, obviously. But it is the failure of the universities and other institutions of science and scholarship which is particularly galling for me. The institutions which I most respected – and to which I devoted many years of professional life – are being compromised and debased. Whatever could be politicized has been politicized and in very boring and predictable ways. The trends have been obvious for decades, but I had no idea just how fragile the commitment to science, scholarship and truth-seeking was, both within academia and in the broader community.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #303030; font-family: "Open Sans", Tahoma, Arial; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.5em;">At the heart of the problem, as I see it, are postmodern and pragmatic views on truth and history. For whatever reason or reasons, such views have been energetically promoted by academics and school teachers, and they now pervade the broader society, contributing to the failure of political discourse. Everything is being reduced to rhetoric and the here and now.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #303030; font-family: "Open Sans", Tahoma, Arial; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.5em;">I am not saying that there are not serious flaws in traditional ways of seeing the world. There are. But, for me, it’s a baby and bathwater thing. If we abandon the path of consilience and convergence in the realm of knowledge, we are ultimately condemning ourselves to intellectual impotence and irrelevance.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #303030; font-family: "Open Sans", Tahoma, Arial; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.5em;">This is just rhetoric, you may say, and so it may be. I have not proved anything here. But my claim is a substantive one. It is a claim about the past and a prediction concerning the fate of cultures which abandon traditional epistemic values. The basic idea or intuition behind it is that epistemic relativism facilitates ideological fantasies which in turn lead to a disconnect between cultural and economic realities.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #303030; font-family: "Open Sans", Tahoma, Arial; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.5em;">With respect to our future, time will tell. The intellectual fashions of which I speak could conceivably pass as the generation that has promoted and popularized them slowly dies off. But the signs are not good. Great damage has been done.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #303030; font-family: "Open Sans", Tahoma, Arial; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.5em;">Maybe these tendencies of thought (mutating now in grotesque and seemingly crazy ways) are best seen as epiphenomena driven by economic forces or by the physics of complex systems. Maybe it doesn’t even make sense to claim that certain ways of thinking caused or contributed to this or that. Nonetheless, we can always observe and describe. Clarity and perspicacity are possible even when we cannot see into the heart of things or identify the root causes of the changes which we observe.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #303030; font-family: "Open Sans", Tahoma, Arial; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.5em;">[...]</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #303030; font-family: "Open Sans", Tahoma, Arial; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.5em;">The advent of digital technologies has compounded the problem and given added traction to relativistic and ahistorical modes of thought. Traditional scholarship was developed within the context of linguistically sophisticated cultures and centered around paper documents which persisted over time. A sense of history was built in. You held firm evidence of the past in your hand, and many of the most important and influential fields of scholarly research dealt with historical (and historico-linguistic) questions. Objective evidence was painstakingly marshalled and deployed. And, over all and over time, epistemic progress occurred. There was a convergence of views on central questions.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #303030; font-family: "Open Sans", Tahoma, Arial; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.5em;">The savagery with which scholars were treated during Mao’s Cultural Revolution or by the Khmer Rouge can be seen in this context. It showed how seriously scholars were still taken in the Far East less than fifty years ago. They were perceived as a real threat to forcibly imposed radical ideas.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #303030; font-family: "Open Sans", Tahoma, Arial; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.5em;">We are now in an utterly different world, of course. Today’s all-enveloping digital environment makes it relatively easy for history to be rewritten, for minds to be molded at will and at scale. What could be more insidious – and more destructive of individual autonomy – than opaque, monopolistic systems skewing searches for information in order to promote particular views and agendas, and using AI to monitor personal communications and manipulate what people will and won’t see on their screens?</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #303030; font-family: "Open Sans", Tahoma, Arial; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.5em;">I would like to resist, but don’t see how I could do so effectively. Institutions of learning have been hijacked by ideologues and self-serving bureaucrats. More generally, the common ground which makes effective discourse possible has all but disappeared.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #303030; font-family: "Open Sans", Tahoma, Arial; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.5em;">What, then, can one do? Join a rhetorical battle which by its very nature will never result in a clear or decisive outcome? Or withdraw, watch and wait – while cultivating one’s garden?</p><div><br /></div><div class="sharedaddy sd-sharing-enabled" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; color: #303030; font-family: "Open Sans", Tahoma, Arial; font-size: 16px;"></div>Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-35805373978686420862020-08-06T00:11:00.000+00:002020-08-06T08:45:06.113+00:00Literature, cinema and truth<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bFIgQMJxRUQ/XytKqFrAeCI/AAAAAAAAE3I/6cyIILja7dIjwaGUwgyLuE06V3U7V3MzACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/images%2B%252860%2529.jpeg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bFIgQMJxRUQ/XytKqFrAeCI/AAAAAAAAE3I/6cyIILja7dIjwaGUwgyLuE06V3U7V3MzACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/images%2B%252860%2529.jpeg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="260" data-original-height="195" /></a><br />
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Is there any point in trying to set out one's personal criteria for judging fiction, plays and films? I think there is. For me good writing etc. represents human realities without undue simplification, sentimentality or ideological distortion.<br />
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Let me explain what led me to address this question in the first place. Prompted by what I see as an ongoing crisis in the education sector and beyond, I have been trying to articulate (on this site and elsewhere) a knowledge-based approach to education and culture. Formal education, I argued, needs to be firmly knowledge-based if it is to resist the tendency to become a vehicle for various kinds of propaganda. But my concerns are with the broader culture, not just with education.<br />
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Knowledge and truth are concepts which can be applied to the propositions and theories of the various sciences, to claims made in ordinary life, and also – in a sense – to artistic representations.<br />
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Most forms of knowledge are practical. But knowledge doesn’t necessarily have to have a use to be worthwhile. Science, scholarship and general knowledge add to our understanding of the world and ourselves and so have intrinsic value even when there are no practical applications.<br />
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Those activities generally seen as constituting “the arts” have an unusual status. They are practices but (apart from traditional crafts) they are detached from mundane reality and are not “useful” in the normal sense of the word. In a general sense, the arts could be seen to involve an extension into the adult world of aspects of the childhood practice of play.<br />
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There are definitional problems with the concept of art: the term has a positive connotation but is intrinsically vague. But we can still talk sensibly about particular art forms and make reasoned assertions about particular kinds of object or product (novels or films, say) or individual works.<br />
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Serious imaginative literature and cinema can be seen as making claims about the world and human experience along the lines that life and human experience <i>is like this</i>. These claims are necessarily implicit and indirect and typically engage the emotions as much as or more than the intellect.<br />
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Even apparently explicit claims within artistic works are not direct claims. For example, explicit statements in the dialogue or narration of a novel or film are embedded within an imaginative construction and cannot be taken solely at face value. The statements are actions within a world which is not our world – at least not in a literal sense.<br />
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Literary and cinematic works seek to engage us in imagined worlds. These worlds may or may not be plausible representations of recognizable aspects of the world we know, or of our own subjective personal and social lives.<br />
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Truth in literature or cinema, then, means something like <i>true to some aspect of life as we experience it</i>. We respond: Yes, that rings true; that’s how it works, that’s how it feels.<br />
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Or not, as the case may be. All too often the representation in question is false in one way or another. It may be simplistic or sentimentalized or ideologized. In such cases we are being presented with a distorted or impoverished version of reality.<br />
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Some distortions and simplifications are worse than others. Simple escapism is harmless enough. To the extent that distortions and simplifications are understood and accepted as such, no harm is done. But we should, I think, be particularly wary of sentimentality and ideological bias.<br />
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In a sentimental novel or film, cheap tricks are used to manipulate the emotions. Sentimentality is the antithesis of art and the antithesis of truth. Does it matter if people enjoy this sort of thing? Perhaps not. But sentimental thinking is very insidious and can distort the way we think and see the world in serious ways.<br />
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To the extent that a writer exploits sentimentality, he or she is less of a writer. Charles Dickens, for example, had great rhetorical energy and inventive powers. But his personal and social understanding (as it is reflected in his novels) was marked by a strong tendency to sentimentality.<br />
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I won’t talk here about ideology except to say that art is not about propagandizing which is, of course, a form of manipulation. Though propaganda often exploits artistic forms, it does so to the detriment of the artistic integrity of the work in question.Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-27065732808161642992020-05-23T09:34:00.000+00:002020-05-23T09:34:48.568+00:00When is a discipline not a discipline?<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8C14Z5MVvUc/XsjoQMgkyuI/AAAAAAAAEyQ/a-6ykirhIpUnMiXGtGq8yMNGtMcDxJZTgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/images%2B%252855%2529.jpeg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8C14Z5MVvUc/XsjoQMgkyuI/AAAAAAAAEyQ/a-6ykirhIpUnMiXGtGq8yMNGtMcDxJZTgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/images%2B%252855%2529.jpeg" width="400" height="312" data-original-width="254" data-original-height="198" /></a><br />
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Disruptions to business as usual, such as we have been experiencing in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, inevitably raise questions regarding which activities or institutions are essential or important for a good or fulfilling life, and which may be happily dispensed with. Answers to such questions are often very personal, of course.<br />
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My focus here is on activities associated with education and research. A strong case can be made that – especially within the arts and humanities, but also within the social sciences – skepticusm about the possibility of objective knowledge has been taken to extremes and, in fact, weaponized to protect entrenched interests. In view of this, I thought it useful to articulate a firmly knowledge-based perspective on education and research.<br />
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I am always a bit uneasy talking about academic disciplines and discipline boundaries. For one thing, it feels a bit redundant. Disciplines are what they are, and practitioners and observers make their own judgments about where to draw boundaries and about the worth or value of particular fields. Nonetheless, judgments must be made. And their significance is all the greater in times of change, in times of crisis: in times like these, in fact, when the future is in the balance and business as usual is just no longer an option.<br />
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I see our educational and cultural infrastructure as having lost its legitimacy and being in desperate need of reshaping and radical reform. The early years of education are particularly crucial but universities find themselves having to do remedial work and teach basic skills. I won't go into detail. Most people know the situation and everyone has their own ideas about possible solutions.<br />
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What is clear is that much more needs to be done in the earlier years, both in terms of imparting practical skills and knowledge, and in terms of broader goals associated with education’s socializing – or civilizing – function. It is beyond dispute that the K-12 system in America and many equivalent systems elsewhere have been failing badly for years.<br />
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Universities are also struggling and the value of higher education is increasingly being called into question. College enrolments in America have declined by more than 10 percent over the last eight years. Last month <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/04/20/833254570/college-brace-for-financial-trouble-and-a-big-question-will-they-reopen-in-fall">NPR reported</a> that the current crisis may be an existential one for many colleges. But what is being taught in many of these colleges may be part of the problem.<br />
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All intellectual disciplines – be they scientific or scholarly – can be seen as adding to a shared knowledge base and having knowledge as their reason for being. Many other possible <em>raisons d'être</em> for academic and intellectual disciplines could be given, of course. And are. My point is just that I don't find other justifications for classing activities as serious intellectual disciplines particularly convincing. The fields in question may well be intellectual, but where is the theoretical rigor, where is the discipline, if anything goes on the knowledge front? What is the point of theory if it is not a means of building or articulating or facilitating the acquisition of knowledge?<br />
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Of course, high levels of rigor and discipline are often in evidence in activities which involve various kinds of practical knowledge. Such activities may or may not be associated with a body of theory. To the extent that they are, they will depend on formal educational structures.<br />
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Explicit claims about the world always need to be assessed regarding their plausibility. This need not be – and normally isn't – done in a rigorous or systematic way. In day-to-day life and politics, all kinds of claims are made and assessed on the run within dynamic social contexts. I am not complaining about this.<br />
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What's more, in ordinary life the truth of a claim is often less important than its social function, its role in modifying behavior for example. Or think of politeness phenomena like white lies which are primarily designed to spare the feelings of others. Courtesy and truth don't go together well!<br />
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Within the strict confines of intellectual and technical disciplines, however, the truth or otherwise of the claims being made or assessed is (or should be) quite central. Unfortunately many academic disciplines – especially within the humanities – have lost sight of this simple and obvious fact and have become, wholly or in part, self-perpetuating talking shops, jargon-ridden and superfluous extensions of the jousting and jostling of ordinary social and professional life.<br />
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[<em>This is a slightly edited and abridged version of a piece which first appeared at The Electric Agora.</em>]<br />
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Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-79674203525334206212020-04-15T08:51:00.001+00:002020-04-15T08:54:27.601+00:00Time and physics<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-sAj34BpMylQ/XpZt_EAFq_I/AAAAAAAAEs0/8GniiHBKiU03_Kf0wUhid6uT_KxHeV6KQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/download%2B%252818%2529.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="224" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-sAj34BpMylQ/XpZt_EAFq_I/AAAAAAAAEs0/8GniiHBKiU03_Kf0wUhid6uT_KxHeV6KQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/download%2B%252818%2529.jpeg" width="400" /></a><br />
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Einstein's rejection of the notion of time as we know and experience it was squarely based in classical physics and classical mathematics. One problem with such a view is that it assumes the existence of infinite information (e.g. infinite decimal expansions).<br />
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Nicolas Gisin, a physicist at the University of Geneva, wants to reformulate standard physics in terms of intuitionistic mathematics. This approach holds the promise of resolving some of the paradoxes and confusions which have bedevilled theoretical physics for over a century.<br />
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Information is physical. We now know that there are strict limits on how much information can exist within any specific volume of space.<br />
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<a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-time-really-flow-new-clues-come-from-a-century-old-approach-to-math-20200407/">Nathalie Wolchover writes</a>: "The universe’s initial conditions would, Gisin realized, require far too much information crammed into too little space. “A real number with infinite digits can’t be physically relevant,” he said. The block universe, which implicitly assumes the existence of infinite information, must fall apart."<br />
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Wolchover's non-technical article on Gisin's ideas and reactions to them by fellow physicists is well worth reading. This is how it begins:<br />
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<blockquote>Strangely, although we feel as if we sweep through time on the knife-edge between the fixed past and the open future, that edge — the present — appears nowhere in the existing laws of physics.<br />
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In Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, for example, time is woven together with the three dimensions of space, forming a bendy, four-dimensional space-time continuum — a “block universe” encompassing the entire past, present and future. Einstein’s equations portray everything in the block universe as decided from the beginning; the initial conditions of the cosmos determine what comes later, and surprises do not occur — they only seem to. “For us believing physicists,” Einstein wrote in 1955, weeks before his death, “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”<br />
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The timeless, pre-determined view of reality held by Einstein remains popular today. “The majority of physicists believe in the block-universe view, because it is predicted by general relativity,” said Marina Cortês, a cosmologist at the University of Lisbon.<br />
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However, she said, “if somebody is called on to reflect a bit more deeply about what the block universe means, they start to question and waver on the implications.”<br />
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Physicists who think carefully about time point to troubles posed by quantum mechanics, the laws describing the probabilistic behavior of particles. At the quantum scale, irreversible changes occur that distinguish the past from the future: A particle maintains simultaneous quantum states until you measure it, at which point the particle adopts one of the states. Mysteriously, individual measurement outcomes are random and unpredictable, even as particle behavior collectively follows statistical patterns. This apparent inconsistency between the nature of time in quantum mechanics and the way it functions in relativity has created uncertainty and confusion.<br />
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Over the past year [...] Nicolas Gisin, has published four papers that attempt to dispel the fog surrounding time in physics. As Gisin sees it, the problem all along has been mathematical. Gisin argues that time in general and the time we call the present are easily expressed in a century-old mathematical language called intuitionist mathematics, which rejects the existence of numbers with infinitely many digits. When intuitionist math is used to describe the evolution of physical systems, it makes clear, according to Gisin, that “time really passes and new information is created.” Moreover, with this formalism, the strict determinism implied by Einstein’s equations gives way to a quantum-like unpredictability. If numbers are finite and limited in their precision, then nature itself is inherently imprecise, and thus unpredictable. [...]</blockquote><br />
On this view the future is open (rather than closed or predetermined), and time is closer to how we experience it – and so intuitively envisage it to be – than most physicists have supposed.Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-59143983890574638572020-04-08T08:27:00.000+00:002020-04-08T08:27:07.998+00:00Is art a useful concept?<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uE6Bbef5fw8/Xo1O8ZN56ZI/AAAAAAAAEqQ/cpNeXYfSfyUx_YlK67JC2eOCtrFOuB2sACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/download%2B%252814%2529.jpeg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uE6Bbef5fw8/Xo1O8ZN56ZI/AAAAAAAAEqQ/cpNeXYfSfyUx_YlK67JC2eOCtrFOuB2sACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/download%2B%252814%2529.jpeg" width="319" height="400" data-original-width="200" data-original-height="251" /></a><br />
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<a href="https://theelectricagora.com/2020/04/06/interpretation-and-the-investigative-concept-of-criticism/">Daniel Kaufman recently talked about art and art criticism.</a> His concerns were basically with what certain philosophers have said about these things. He explains that he used to accept Arthur Danto’s views but was persuaded (in part by reading Susan Sontag's essay, 'Against interpretation') that they were mistaken. He notes other philosophers' views which he also thinks are mistaken. And he suggests the outlines of an alternative view of art and criticism: “The idea, then, is that our critical engagements with works of art bring into existence extended, collaborative works, of which the initial artwork is only a first move; something for subsequent artists, audiences, and critics to “riff” off of…”<br />
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This, of course, leaves open the question of what counts as ‘art’ and who gets to say so. Does this matter?<br />
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Obviously, the word ‘art’ and its cognates are used in different ways. But basically it is a term which conveniently (or inconveniently) groups together and implicitly assigns a “special” status to a wide range of disparate activities/objects, contemporary and historical. That is, the term is extremely vague but generally carries a positive connotation.<br />
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I am not saying the word 'art' is meaningless or should not be used. But it cannot bear the weight that intellectuals often put on it. For one thing, it carries a lot of implicit (and dubious) metaphysical baggage and strong links to various kinds of philosophical idealism as well as to certain Romantic ideas. If (like me) you are uncomfortable with many of these historical associations and assumptions, this poses problems.<br />
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So also do institutional changes which have created a bureaucratized and self-perpetuating arts or culture "industry", significant parts of which are integrated into, or are directly or indirectly dependent upon, various levels and branches of government.<br />
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For me at least, the interesting questions are not about identifying "art" or about its promotion or support but rather about how we respond to and assess the aesthetic qualities of various specific products of human activity. The perceived value and worth of the activities involved will naturally depend, in many cases, upon such assessments.Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-71900543723859638562020-01-15T07:05:00.000+00:002020-04-15T11:48:25.953+00:00Speaking of time<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Fh9HJu3plas/Xh5wycbJblI/AAAAAAAAEis/e2KN_Lu7nx0mKeK9y82qtz7dkqGsc-kIgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/images%2B%252845%2529.jpeg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Fh9HJu3plas/Xh5wycbJblI/AAAAAAAAEis/e2KN_Lu7nx0mKeK9y82qtz7dkqGsc-kIgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/images%2B%252845%2529.jpeg" width="400" height="265" data-original-width="276" data-original-height="183" /></a><br />
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A confusing and (arguably) confused <a href="https://theelectricagora.com/2019/12/12/the-fallacy-of-time-travel/">article</a> about time which appeared late last year at The Electric Agora prompted me to set out a few of my own thoughts on perceptions of time and time and language.<br />
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There is the physics of time (that is, time as it is dealt with and understood in the context of physics) and time as we experience it. Natural languages provide subtle means for dealing with the latter.<br />
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There is no absolute dichotomy here, however. The physics of time cannot be totally divorced from our experience of time, though the connections may be convoluted. All our experiences of time involve the mechanisms of memory and various systems within the body which keep track of time at various scales.<br />
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Physics is an empirical discipline, one among many. I am committed to a consilient view of the sciences and intellectual inquiry more generally. Discipline boundaries should not be seen as rigid. They are largely matters of convenience, practicality and organization and a process or phenomenon can often be approached from various directions and dealt with in different – and complementary – ways.<br />
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We experience periods when time seems to pass more quickly or slowly than normal. The former tends to be associated with pleasant or absorbing activities and the latter with pain or boredom. And we have the sense that time in general and, especially, longer periods of time pass more quickly as we age. These are, and are clearly understood to be, subjective phenomena.<br />
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Moreover, fast and slow are intrinsically relational ideas. If last year seemed to rush by, it is only by comparison with how we remember previous years. And a slow motion or time-lapse photography-based film can only be identified as such by contrast to the pace of events in the real world with which we are familiar.<br />
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There is another sense in which time can be said to go faster or slower. Different kinds of nervous and perceptual systems run on different time scales. For example, we find flies and many small animals very hard to catch. Their perceptual and motor systems run faster than ours. It is as if to them we are lumbering giants living in a slow-motion world.<br />
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There are some important facts about time which were discovered in the 20th century which are very puzzling but which can be known and accepted by anyone, including those without any training in theoretical physics. For example, we know by experiment that synchronized clocks do not stay synchronized under certain circumstances (relating to motion and exposure to gravitational fields). If two clocks are synchronized at a given place and one of them is sent off on a journey in space and then brought back, the space-travelling clock will register significantly less time having passed than the other clock. And a clock exposed to a stronger gravitational field than another clock with which it has been synchronized will register less time having passed than the other clock when the clocks are reunited.<br />
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These facts have important implications for how we think about time. This becomes clear if you substitute living human bodies for mechanical clocks. An astronaut who travels on a long space journey and returns to earth will be younger than his twin who remained at home.<br />
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A natural interpretation of the end result is that time (from the point of view of the stay-at-home) has passed more slowly for the astronaut, and (from the point of view of the astronaut) has passed more quickly for his twin. Such claims need to be clearly distinguished from claims about the other person’s experience. Quite obviously, the claims do not relate to the experience of time passing or the experience of aging. They represent perspectival views and constitute a natural gloss or commentary on the basic facts.<br />
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Has the astronaut travelled to the future? In a real sense, he has. But, again, there is scope for confusion and misunderstanding here.<br />
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Of course, there is often a tension between scientific and commonsense perspectives. The latter are inevitably shaped by language as well as by other inherited modes of thought. Applying a language which evolved to deal with certain limited sets of possibilities to situations which involve contingencies which transcend these limits inevitably poses problems. And these problems are all the greater if we are dealing not just with incremental technological developments but with ideas, circumstances and possibilities which are radically new and which lack analogues in the world within which language originally evolved.<br />
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I am not questioning the adequacy of ordinary language for ordinary communication nor its adaptability and flexibility in the face of technological change and development. When it comes to the physical and social world as we normally encounter it – and to our perceptions of time – language works just fine.<br />
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There is great variation in the way different languages deal with time. Some languages are tenseless (e.g. Burmese, Vietnamese, Thai, Malay and most varieties of Chinese) and have other ways of dealing with time but, in most languages, the grammatical category of tense plays a central role. The category of tense interacts with aspect and mood in complex ways which vary from language to language, allowing precise, time-related distinctions to be made. The complexity and sophistication of the grammatical structures involved testify to the importance that a command of the subtleties of time (and perspectives on time) have played in human thought and interaction over many millennia.<br />
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Tense is relational. The time of the event or state denoted by the verb is indicated in relation to some other temporal reference point or points. In the case of absolute tense, the temporal reference point is the “now” of the speaker, the moment of utterance. (“It was raining.” “It has been raining.” “It is raining.” “It will rain.”)<br />
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More complicated cases involve absolute-relative tense. This involves reference to a time which is related to a temporal reference point which is not the moment of utterance; this temporal reference point is, in turn, related to the moment of utterance. So you are in effect juggling three points or periods in time. The main kinds of absolute-relative tense are future perfect, past perfect, future-in-future and future-in-past.<br />
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The future perfect, for example, involves reference to a time located before a contextually determined temporal reference point that must be located in the future relative to the moment of utterance. (“He will no doubt have forgotten about it by the morning.”)<br />
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And the past perfect involves a time in the past relative to a reference point which is itself in the past relative to the moment of utterance. (“I had hoped to find her at home but she wasn't there.”)<br />
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The inferences involved in conditional sentences are often time based. Past perfect tense is often involved. (“Had he been here when you passed, you would have seen him.”) Or the future perfect. (“If she completes the task by tomorrow afternoon, she will have proven herself.”) Note that a particular view or “map” of the structure of past, present and future is implicit in these forms of expression, and the logic of the sentences rests upon a shared understanding of this time “map”.<br />
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In addition to these and similar grammatical structures, there are also many common idiomatic expressions which pertain to how we experience time. Such expressions are almost invariably metaphorical. Crucially, they are generally taken as such, and are not seen as literal or metaphysical or proto-scientific claims. The same can be said for many common expressions about the natural world which, taken literally, are in conflict with a scientific understanding but which, used in the normal way, are perfectly acceptable. (Sun rising, wind blowing, etc..)<br />
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Time may not literally “pass” or “flow”, but these and similar expressions capture something of our experience of inexorable change.Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-48222978489269232542019-12-24T07:50:00.000+00:002019-12-24T08:57:36.914+00:00Language and thought: some metaphysically skeptical reflections<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ifoChbMiCpU/XgHS2OVS_xI/AAAAAAAAEhk/XgCXCGN7cKY4W68r8yjd9-xbGmoLHZaWgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/images%2B%252844%2529.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" data-original-height="144" data-original-width="257" height="224" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ifoChbMiCpU/XgHS2OVS_xI/AAAAAAAAEhk/XgCXCGN7cKY4W68r8yjd9-xbGmoLHZaWgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/images%2B%252844%2529.jpeg" width="400" /></a><br />
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<b>Conceptual frameworks are always provisional</b><br />
<br />
The logical positivists took a very hard anti-metaphysical line. They were right, in my view, to see traditional metaphysics as being futile and pointless. The essential problem with metaphysics is epistemic. How (given a basically scientific view of the world) can purely metaphysical statements be justified? Rudolf Carnap and most of his Vienna Circle colleagues didn’t think they could and consequently saw no place for metaphysics as a serious discipline.<br />
<br />
There is no denying that fundamental, foundational and relational questions arise naturally in the course of scientific and other forms of rigorous inquiry. These kinds of questions are not only worthwhile, they are necessary and inescapable, and to call them philosophical or (in certain cases) metaphysical is not out of line with common usage. Problems arise, however, when philosophical or metaphysical thinking becomes detached from empirical reality and begins to feed on itself.<br />
<br />
In the 1940s and ’50s, Carnap articulated a nuanced account of ontological claims in the context of mathematical and scientific inquiry. He saw such claims as being either trivially true or false (if considered within the theoretical framework in question) or nonsensical (if not). The former were associated with “internal” questions, the latter with “external” questions. Internal questions are asked with a particular framework in mind. Do numbers exist? Within the framework of arithmetic, (trivially) yes. But do numbers really exist in some absolute sense? The question, arguably, is meaningless.<br />
<br />
This approach works for formal disciplines and strictly scientific theoretical concepts but the sciences are not entirely formal. They have their origin in our interactions with, and natural curiosity about, the world. It is a mistake to imagine that we are ever entirely locked into specific and rigid linguistic or theoretical frameworks. Frameworks are fluid and necessarily provisional.<br />
<br />
Ordinary thinking is an element of our engagement with the world and is never entirely mechanical or formal. It is not formal because interpretation of one kind or another is always involved, in the sciences and elsewhere. And it is holistic in the sense of not being comprised of discrete levels or completely self-contained modules.<br />
<br />
Not only are various parts of the brain interconnected in complex ways, the broader physical (somatic and extra-somatic), social and cultural matrix within which neural processing occurs and upon which it depends is also holistic and massively interconnected. Our thinking cannot be separated from this broader physical and cultural context. This fact has important implications for how we think about thinking.<br />
<br />
An ability to conceptualize and deal in a practical way with a wide range of contingencies involves various forms of thinking and meta-thinking. My focus here is on aspects of thinking and meta-thinking which relate respectively to language and number.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Metalinguistic awareness</b><br />
<br />
Alfred Tarski developed the notion of metalanguage, though he was concerned mainly with formal rather than natural languages. Karl Popper explicitly drew on Tarski’s concept of metalanguage to defend a form of the correspondence theory of truth. The linguist Roman Jakobson appealed to the same basic idea when, late in his career, he outlined what he saw as the functions of language. One of these was the metalingual (or metalinguistic) function. It applies when a language is used to talk about itself.<br />
<br />
The notion of metalinguistic awareness is often employed in discussing such phenomena as code-switching and language alternation. But metalinguistic awareness also applies to phenomena which occur in strictly monolingual environments. As noted above, languages are routinely used in a reflexive way (i.e. to refer to themselves). What's more, a speaker’s awareness of implied as distinct from literal meaning and the use and understanding of various figures of speech also require a certain level of metalinguistic awareness.<br />
<br />
Using and understanding irony requires a relatively high level of metalinguistic awareness. Sarcasm is less subtle than irony but provides a clearer illustration that what is literally being said is not always what is actually being said, the intended sense being (in the case of sarcasm) the converse of the literal sense.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Gödel's incompleteness theorems</b><br />
<br />
The general idea that a broader context always obtrudes applies not just to ordinary life and language use but also to specialized scientific and scholarly work. No significant area of study is self-contained. Not even formal disciplines, such as arithmetic.<br />
<br />
Gödel’s work demonstrated the limitations of formal axiomatic systems. He showed that no such system is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. He also demonstrated that no formal system which is complex enough to model basic arithmetic can prove its own consistency.<br />
<br />
Formal systems then (at least those beyond a certain level of complexity) are not self-contained, not sufficient unto themselves. They are necessarily situated in – and in a real sense are dependent on – a broader context. And any expanded system is dependent on a yet broader context in the same way.<br />
<br />
Gödel was a Platonist and saw his incompleteness theorems as vindicating his position on the power of the human mind. The main lesson I take from his work, however, is that productive thinking is necessarily contingent rather than self-contained; that it necessarily engages with a wider world.<br />
<br />
What this wider world consists in or of is open to debate. It comprises seemingly very different kinds of things and/or processes: the processes studied by mathematicians; the physical processes studied by physicists and biologists; social and cultural processes; etc..<br />
<br />
But on what basis – other than practicality or convenience – do we draw dividing lines between these different kinds of process (and, by extension, between disciplines)?<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Mundane concepts</b><br />
<br />
Because of the problems of justifying metaphysical statements I prefer to remain metaphysically agnostic and to avoid making claims about the world which go beyond common sense, common usage and the findings of science and scholarship. Neither ordinary thinking nor rigorous intellectual inquiry requires an explicit metaphysical foundation. Effective thinking, speaking and research do have prerequisites, but such a foundation is not one of them.<br />
<br />
Sure, our natural habits of thought involve implicit assumptions and commitments which are often reflected in the grammar of language. This is something to be aware and wary of, however, not something which should form a basis or foundation for serious metaphysical claims or systematizing.<br />
<br />
In respect of the existence or non-existence of entities postulated by scientific theories, Carnap’s approach works well because the theories in question are identifiable and distinguishable one from another. If you move beyond particular theories, however, and focus on mundane concepts which we can approach from many directions and in many ways, there is no single language or system or theory to which we can appeal (and so no clear way of distinguishing internal from external questions). Such mundane concepts include concrete things that we might touch or eat or bump into, as well as more abstract notions and social phenomena. <br />
<br />
Even something like the concept of number can be approached and conceptualized in very different ways: via formal arithmetic or via psychology and the social sciences, for example.<br />
<br />
And what are we to make of birds that keep track of the comings and goings of their potential prey by counting and remembering how many entered or exited the burrow they are spying on? These predators would not be much interested in questions about the concept of number, but their counting abilities derive from a pattern of neural processing which necessarily represents or instantiates the concept in some form. Arguably, some such primitive, pre-linguistic and pre-theoretical notion of number underlies even our most sophisticated mathematical ideas and capacities.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[This is a revised and abridged version of a piece which was published a few weeks ago at <a href="https://theelectricagora.com/2019/11/30/metaphysics-metacognition-language-and-number/">The Electric Agora</a>.]Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-15361688063702187542019-11-16T13:11:00.000+00:002019-11-16T13:17:10.565+00:00A few thoughts on intellectual history, abstraction and values<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Vya8AVoiTqg/Xc_kfERzjKI/AAAAAAAAEf4/99B8hYr7RJwEbAIEOSXsIKn1yLoGbpYmQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/images%2B%252839%2529.jpeg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Vya8AVoiTqg/Xc_kfERzjKI/AAAAAAAAEf4/99B8hYr7RJwEbAIEOSXsIKn1yLoGbpYmQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/images%2B%252839%2529.jpeg" width="400" height="210" data-original-width="310" data-original-height="163" /></a><br />
<br />
Terms like “pragmatism” as it applies to philosophy and the history of ideas – most isms really – are intrinsically vague and useful only to the (necessarily limited) extent that they help to bring out persistent or more fleeting strands or commonalities in thinking within or across populations.<br />
<br />
Even the views of individuals are often difficult to fathom and characterize accurately. That these views generally change over time, from book to book, from article to article, from diary entry to diary entry, makes the task even harder.<br />
<br />
Nor is any one thinker’s work privileged over another’s. Judgments on the intrinsic merits of individual works or of the merits of particular thinkers are very difficult to make in an objective manner.<br />
<br />
But individual thinkers can be readily assessed according to the compatibility of their views with the findings of contemporary and subsequent scientific and scholarly investigation. Certain thinkers can also be shown to have been more influential than other thinkers. Unfortunately there is very little correlation between these two vectors. Sometimes it seems that an inverse correlation between compatibility with science and personal influence applies.<br />
<br />
In my view, there is no grand narrative and no abiding canon. We find ourselves with respect to the history of ideas – just as we do with respect to any and every aspect of this relentlessly evolving world – in the midst of complexities which can only be satisfactorily “simulated” or modeled by the reality that is generating them. The best we can do is make marginal notes.<br />
<br />
One of Louis Rougier’s early books was called <em>En marge de Curie, de Carnot et d’Einstein: études de philosophie scientifique</em>. Marginal notes, you could say, by a marginal figure.<br />
<br />
Rougier’s works are not on anybody’s essential reading list today. He made some bad career moves and got pushed aside, but he was a rising star in the 1920s and a very influential figure in the 1930s. You want to pigeonhole him? Not possible, I’m afraid.<br />
<br />
Rougier was aware early on of the thought of William James (whom he read in translation). It was James’s version of pragmatism that he singled out for attack as a young man, but which arguably was not all that far from his own developing views. As Rougier himself often pointed out, intellectual history can be seen as a dense network of ironies and contingencies.<br />
____________<br />
<br />
There is another angle to this. It relates to the nature of language. I see natural language as something that evolved for specific reasons and which is well suited to certain uses (e.g. storytelling and facilitating and coordinating social interactions of various kinds) and not so well suited to other uses. In particular, I am wary of the dangers of using abstract concepts in a relatively unconstrained way as often happens in theology and philosophy.<br />
<br />
Common concrete nouns involve abstraction. There is no instance of a dog that is not also a particular animal of a particular breed or mix of breeds; or of a table that is not of a particular type and size and shape and color etc.. Such words, however, are clearly both semantically constrained and useful. Common abstract nouns are also useful as a sort of linguistic shorthand.<br />
<br />
The trouble is that we have a natural tendency to hypostatize concepts and this has led, variously, to myth, ideology, philosophical puzzles and the elaboration of metaphysical systems.<br />
<br />
Mythic elements in our thinking are unavoidable. Likewise ideology to an extent. Our brains just naturally generate value-laden narratives. Beyond this we are, as language users, committed to certain rudimentary metaphysical assumptions associated with grammatical structures that can lead to philosophical puzzles or pseudo-problems. But the deliberate construction of free standing or self-contained metaphysical systems is something else again.<br />
<br />
Arguably myths, ideologies and metaphysical systems (unless the latter are closely tied to science) lack any real connection to non-human reality. Many metaphysical systems fail even to connect to human reality in any significant way.<br />
<br />
Within science, abstractions are necessarily constrained. They play their assigned roles within, and take their meaning from, theories. The abstractions are constrained by the theories, and the theories are constrained by the rules and protocols of the discipline in question and ultimately by empirical evidence.<br />
<br />
The formal sciences take us further from natural language than empirical science generally does. Abstractions in mathematics and logic take their meaning from, and so are constrained by, the rules of the systems involved. They are, as it were, contained within the system. What Rudolf Carnap referred to as “external” questions about these concepts are misguided and ultimately meaningless.<br />
<br />
I would not want to commit too strongly, however, to a distinction between the formal and the empirical. Many developments point to a blurring of the distinction. For example, pure mathematical structures have long been known to play important roles in modeling physical reality. And, of course, the rapid development of computers and artificial intelligence is changing the nature of mathematics, arguably moving it closer to empirical or applied science. Algorithmic information theory is a case in point, focused as it is both on practical problems and on deep questions concerning the fundamental nature and limitations of computation and mathematical thinking (i.e. on metamathematics).<br />
____________<br />
<br />
Moral, social, political and aesthetic values and convictions can be described but ultimately cannot be derived or justified scientifically. Moreover, discursive reason cannot be applied in any really comprehensive or extensive way to normative questions without creating drastic distortions and oversimplifications. Discursive reason operates on one level; values on another.<br />
<br />
Whenever I read a philosophical text on normative questions which is framed in terms of arguments mounted in standard philosophical style I rarely get beyond a couple of paragraphs before a move is made which appears unmotivated or to which I object for one reason or another. Historical approaches make more sense to me, especially when they are (or aspire to be) purely descriptive.<br />
<br />
<br />
[<em>This piece is an extract (slightly modified) from an essay of mine which was published at <a href="https://theelectricagora.com/2019/10/10/random-reflections-on-intellectual-history-abstraction-and-social-and-political-values/" style="background-color: transparent; color: #0087be; text-decoration-line: none;">The Electric Agora</a></em>.]</div>Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-12361300245668016092019-08-23T08:06:00.000+00:002019-08-24T12:13:11.151+00:00Scholarship and activism<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-B-gCipuj2Zc/XWD5Vifh_QI/AAAAAAAAEUk/snWGm_hAzzot5aEuSEZ7yHwiLGswOZtjgCKgBGAs/s1600/download%2B%25281%2529.jpeg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-B-gCipuj2Zc/XWD5Vifh_QI/AAAAAAAAEUk/snWGm_hAzzot5aEuSEZ7yHwiLGswOZtjgCKgBGAs/s640/download%2B%25281%2529.jpeg" width="445" height="640" data-original-width="187" data-original-height="269" /></a><br />
<br />
David Ottlinger has (as I see it) sound intuitions about the nature of postmodernism and other unfortunate intellectual fads and fashions but, as a committed Kantian, he inhabits a very different intellectual world from the one I inhabit. Given his Kantian assumptions, it is no surprise that he has very different views from mine concerning what philosophy and serious scholarship more generally is or should be. He recently wrote <a href="https://theelectricagora.com/2019/08/14/all-philosophy-is-activist-philosophy/">a piece</a> claiming that "all philosophy is activist philosophy."<br />
<br />
He mentions, amongst others, the Utilitarians: "Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were not just writing about prison reform. They wanted to reform actual prisons. English prisons. On Fleet Street. Will anyone raise their hands and say that their works are unphilosophical? Or unscholarly?"<br />
<br />
Certainly much of the writing of Bentham and Mill is philosophical (encompassing social philosophy, philosophy of law, etc., etc.). This work may plausibly be deemed "scholarly". But there are different senses of the term "scholarship" and its cognates.<br />
<br />
This definition of scholarship (Collins English Dictionary) picks out what I see as essential: "Serious academic study and the knowledge that is obtained from it." Unlike science, scholarship is text based. But, like science, it is all about research, <i>about building a body of soundly-based knowledge</i>. It is not (primarily) about changing the world. This distinction (between knowledge and understanding on the one hand and social action on the other) matters.<br />
<br />
Ottlinger writes:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Even at their most abstract, most philosophers want to change the world. I have always assumed that Christine Korsgaard actually wants to build the kingdom of ends. Axel Honneth actually wants us to recognize one another.</blockquote><br />
Philosophers are indeed often most concerned with normative questions, and often this is associated with a desire to change the world in particular ways.<br />
<br />
My point is simply that there is a tension between such approaches and traditional, secular notions of scholarship. What scholars (as people) value or want is irrelevant to judging the value of their work <i>as scholarship</i>.<br />
<br />
Much writing – old and new <br />
– which is classed today as philosophy is decidedly <i>not</i> scholarship (at least in certain well-accepted senses of the term). This does not necessarily mean that it has no value, of course.<br />
<br />
Without his scholarly training, Nietzsche would not have been Nietzsche, and you could say that he was a "scholarly" writer. But the work for which he is known is not <i>scholarship</i>.<br />
<br />
Here Ottlinger sets out his views concerning what ("in part") philosophy is:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Even when they don’t have consequences that would dictate changes in our material circumstances or our politics, philosophical ideas matter. They shape our attitudes and values. Two people can be sitting staring at a book, occasionally turning the page, yet only one of them is reading. In the same way two people can be going through the same lives, working the same jobs, having the same sort of families but yet have deeply different inner experiences. They might be leading totally different interior lives. One might be rich and fulfilling, the other barren and empty. Philosophy deals, in part, with these kinds of differences.</blockquote><br />
The emphasis – as with religion – is on the "inner life". This aspect complements the previously-discussed activist aspect, presumably.<br />
<br />
Like David Ottlinger, I am interested in values, but I don't see them as being accessible or amenable to reason (and, by extension, scholarship) in quite the way he does.Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-66777923980296827472019-07-12T02:41:00.001+00:002019-07-20T04:21:15.242+00:00Lee Smolin's realism<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VibHWn5T_E4/XRGIhgv-bQI/AAAAAAAAEPA/r_WPKxiJzy04f5Irl0rdoPFXZKSAije-QCKgBGAs/s1600/images%2B%252829%2529.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" data-original-height="306" data-original-width="459" height="267" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VibHWn5T_E4/XRGIhgv-bQI/AAAAAAAAEPA/r_WPKxiJzy04f5Irl0rdoPFXZKSAije-QCKgBGAs/s400/images%2B%252829%2529.jpeg" width="400" /></a><br />
<br />
Lee Smolin is a respected physicist who has always had strong philosophical interests and convictions. <a href="https://youtu.be/r-L690pQhuo">He recently articulated his realist views in a public lecture.</a> What follows are my notes on his lecture mixed in with a few comments and observations.<br />
<br />
Smolin is strongly opposed to postmodernists who reject the notion of objective truth and who see reality as a social or historical construct. He draws parallels between the anti-realism of postmodernists and the anti-realism of certain physicists associated with the development of quantum mechanics (QM) and the so-called Copenhagen interpretation.<br />
<br />
Smolin claims (as Einstein did) that QM is an incomplete theory and so, in a real sense, wrong. The key problem with QM as Smolin sees it is the so-called “measurement problem”. It relates to the notion of wave–particle duality and the two laws or rules that QM provides to describe how things change over time. Rule 1 or law 1 says, in effect, that (except during a measurement) the wave evolves smoothly and deterministically (somewhat like a wave on water). This allows the system to simultaneously explore alternative histories which lead to different outcomes all of which are represented by the smooth flow of the wave. Rule 1 applies when you are not making a measurement. Rule 2 applies only when you make a measurement.<br />
<br />
Smolin argues that the 2nd rule means that QM is not a realist theory. If we (or other observers) were not around, only rule 1 would apply.<br />
<br />
One of the main developers of the theory, Erwin Schrödinger, was uncomfortable with the theory and its implications. He crystallized his doubts in the form of the famous live/dead cat-in-the-box thought experiment (which is explained by Smolin in his talk (starting at 39.54)).<br />
<br />
Niels Bohr, in contrast to Schrödinger, embraced the paradoxical nature of QM, partly because it fitted in with ideas which he had developed previously. Bohr’s notion (or philosophy) of complementarity was shaped by these ideas and by the observed behavior of elementary particles. Sometimes such particles seem to behave as if they are waves, sometimes as if they are particles and, crucially, how they are observed to behave depends on the details of how we go about observing them.<br />
<br />
Smolin takes an unequivocally negative view of Bohr’s metaphysical views as well as of the views of Bohr’s protégé, Werner Heisenberg. Here he is on the former:<br />
<br />
“Now, of course, Bohr had a lot to say about things being complementary and in tension all the time and you always have to have two or more incompatible viewpoints at the same time to understand anything, and that especially goes […] for knowledge and truth and beauty. And he got off on the Kabbalah, of course. Anyway [long pause] … it doesn’t cut it with me.”<br />
<br />
For Smolin, QM's incompleteness is intimately bound up with its incompatibility with realism.* QM is not consistent with realism because the properties it uses to describe atoms depend on us to prepare and measure them.<br />
<br />
“A complete theory,” insists Smolin, “should describe what is happening in each individual process, independent of our knowledge or beliefs or interventions or interactions with the system.” He is interested in understanding “how nature is in our absence.” After all, we were not around for most of the history of the universe.<br />
<br />
Smolin defines realism as the view that nature exists independently of our knowledge and beliefs about it; and that the properties of systems in nature can be characterized and understood independently of our existence and manipulation. Our measuring etc. “should not play a role in what the atoms and elementary particles are doing.” What he means, I think, is that our interventions should not play an essential or crucial role in the descriptions and explanations which our theories provide.<br />
<br />
“A theory can be called realist,” Smolin explains, “if it speaks in terms of properties whose values do not require us to interact with the system. We call such properties “beables”.”<br />
<br />
By contrast, a theory whose properties depend on us interacting with a system is called operational. Such properties are called “observables”.<br />
<br />
Observables are defined as a response to our intervention. Beables, by contrast, are not defined as a response to our intervention. They are just there, it seems.<br />
<br />
But how do we get to know the values of these properties unless we interact with the system? Also, there is the framework question. Properties and values arguably only exist within the context of a particular perspective or theory. In order for properties and values to be properties and values, we need to conceptualize them as such. I will ignore this broader question, however, and focus on what Smolin means by interaction.<br />
<br />
Even ordinary observations (like seeing or hearing or recording something electronically) involve us or our measuring devices interacting in some way with the system we/they are observing/recording. Smolin appears not to be concerned with such interactions here because, although the nature of the observer’s perceptual apparatus and/or the nature and settings of the equipment being employed determine or pick out what is and what is not being observed or recorded, the results are otherwise quite independent. The <i>type</i> of datum is determined by the nature of the observer or the observing or recording process, but not the data themselves.<br />
<br />
In the case of experiments with elementary particles, however, the situation is subtly – and sometimes dramatically – different. Interactions are such that they determine, or play an active role in determining, the values in question.<br />
<br />
Arguably, ordinary cases of measurement and observation do not pose problems for the commonsense realist. But if our observations alter in a material way whatever it is which is being observed – as appears to be the case in respect of the quantum realm – problems arise.<br />
<br />
Operationalism was first defined by the physicist Percy Bridgman (1882–1961). The book in which he elaborated his views, <i>The Logic of Modern Physics</i>, was published in 1927, the same year QM was put into definitive form. Bridgman’s philosophical approach has much in common with the instrumentalism which characterized the views of the majority of thinkers (physicists, logicians, philosophers) associated with logical positivism. Bridgman was in fact personally involved in the activities of the Vienna Circle.<br />
<br />
It was the physicist John Bell who introduced the concept of beables. According to Bell – and according to Smolin – it should be possible to say what is rather than merely what is observed. This is all very well but – quite apart from philosophical arguments questioning the notion of a noumenal world – experimental results continue to come out against the realists. Experiments with entangled particles, for example, seem to exclude the possibility of any form of local realism. Some form of nonlocal realism is still very possible however.<br />
<br />
Smolin is at his weakest when he talks history. The story he tells about the generation of physicists who grew up during the Great War is hard to swallow. It seems that they were predisposed to anti-realism by virtue of the unusual circumstances of their early lives. They had witnessed at an impressionable age the destruction of the social optimism of the 19th century, and so were skeptical of rationality and optimism and progress. They had lost older brothers and cousins and fathers and uncles and had “nobody above them ...” No wonder they didn’t believe that elementary particles etc. have properties which are independent of our interactions with them!<br />
<br />
You would think that the fact that Niels Bohr, the father of the Copenhagen interpretation, was not a part of this generation would sink Smolin’s generational explanation from the outset. As would even a cursory knowledge of the history of 19th century thought which is shot through with various forms of idealism, anti-realism and radical empiricism. The phenomenalist philosophy of science of Ernst Mach (1838–1916) is a case in point. At the end of the 19th century, Mach articulated ideas which were later picked up by the thinkers Smolin is criticizing.<br />
<br />
Smolin explicitly recognizes that Bohr’s main ideas were formed well before the development of quantum mechanics and that he was influenced by 19th century thinkers – including by Kierkegaard (whom Smolin clearly does not hold in high esteem).<br />
<br />
Smolin quotes some of Bohr’s claims:<br />
<br />
“Nothing exists until it is measured.”<br />
<br />
“When we measure something we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We are not measuring the world, we are creating it.”<br />
<br />
“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.”<br />
<br />
Heisenberg followed the same general approach:<br />
<br />
“The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real: they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”<br />
<br />
“What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”<br />
<br />
Bohr said: “We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet […] is not nearly so concerned [with] describing facts as [with] creating images and establishing mental connections.” What he meant, presumably, is that the normal referential function of natural language cannot be used in relation to the quantum world, and anything we say about that world (using natural language) will necessarily be a creative construct shot through with metaphor and paradox.<br />
<br />
Maybe so. Or maybe not. It is not something we can know <i>a priori</i>. It all depends on how our models develop and on the results of experiments. But, until QM is subsumed into some (hypothetical) broader theory which allows us to envisage quantum processes in more intuitive or realism-friendly ways, Bohr's general views regarding the radical inapplicability of natural language and ordinary logic to quantum events or processes will remain plausible.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
* There is also the question of gravity. Quantum field theory brings together QM and special relativity. QM and general relativity have yet to be satisfactorily reconciled, though a line of research associated with the so-called AdS/CFT correspondence – a string theory-based approach – has made considerable progress towards this goal.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>This is a revised version of <a href="https://theelectricagora.com/2019/06/04/lee-smolins-realism/">an essay published at The Electric Agora on June 4.</a></i>Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021972615680221295.post-63598393856647252592019-05-30T01:45:00.000+00:002019-05-30T04:32:24.463+00:00Knowledge of the past, knowledge of the world<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bJ8wumxcfvk/XO82ws_tGDI/AAAAAAAAEMU/I_YUJBsvqXI5axvxlEi8gxwF0Q92nSQQwCKgBGAs/s1600/_89046968_89046967.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bJ8wumxcfvk/XO82ws_tGDI/AAAAAAAAEMU/I_YUJBsvqXI5axvxlEi8gxwF0Q92nSQQwCKgBGAs/s400/_89046968_89046967.jpg" width="400" height="224" data-original-width="485" data-original-height="272" /></a><br />
Is it acceptable to distinguish between, on the one hand, an account of the past (whatever kind of account it may be) and whatever it is which such an account is, or purports to be, about? I ask this question because I was challenged for using this form of words in a recent discussion with Daniel Kaufman. Not only would I argue that it is acceptable, I would say that such a distinction (or something very like it) is necessary to make sense of the very concept of truth-telling versus lying, or to make sense of the distinction between history and fiction, or between scholarship and polemics, or between science and pseudo-science (in the context of those sciences which deal with the past).<br />
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My point is that using the form of words I did does not necessarily commit me to a particular metaphysical view. One can, I think, use and understand such language and employ such a distinction whilst remaining completely agnostic about the nature of the past: it might be a meaningless concept; it might be a figment of our imaginations; it might be in some sense actual but created and determined, in part or <em>in toto</em>, by us; it might be stable, or it might be shifting and unstable (i.e. dreamlike). Or it might be more or less how the vast majority of humans probably think of it: that is, as existing or having existed quite independently of us and our thoughts and desires; as stable and unalterable; as knowable only imperfectly and in part. Most of the listed options are quite silly, of course, but my point is that you can make the statement I made without necessarily committing to any particular view.<br />
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There was a second claim of mine to which Dan took exception, calling it “flat out false… [a]nd obviously so." He elaborated on his objections in <a href="https://theelectricagora.com/2019/04/18/the-past-is-not-what-it-is-or-what-it-was/">an essay</a> and, given that the essay prompted further extensive discussion (more than 160 comments), some may feel that the topic has been done to death. My view, however, is that, some recapitulation and clarification may be useful and help to allay confusion and misunderstanding.<br />
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The claim in question [made in the course of <a href="https://theelectricagora.com/2019/04/12/history-and-knowledge/#comments" style="background-color: transparent; color: #0087be; text-decoration-line: none;">online discussion of an essay of mine</a>] was that “the past is what it is (or was what it was).” I could elaborate on what I meant by this but perhaps the best way to unpack the intended meaning without inadvertently bringing in new complications is simply to look at the context in which the claim was made.<br />
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A commenter, reacting against my skeptical attitude to the stories historians tell and to my suggestion that we should focus instead on reading for ourselves texts from the past, had queried my use of certain words (‘external’, ‘alien’, ‘arbitrary’) in describing how historians often project their own (political, moral, etc.) preoccupations and values into the stories they tell about the past, preoccupations and values which are often quite alien (as I put it) to the people and societies being described.<br />
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“All of these words,” he said, “are puzzling to me: ‘external’, ‘imposing’, ‘alien’, ‘arbitrary’. Consider me unpersuaded.”<br />
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“The past is what it is (or was what it was),” I replied. “Our present, from the point of view of the past, does not exist. I am using words like ‘alien’ and ‘external’ to make this point. I assume that we both want to understand the past in its own terms; as it was; distorted as little as possible by present-day preoccupations and perspectives. Thus my concerns (overdone in your estimation) about historians wittingly or unwittingly inserting their own values or the values of their time into the stories they tell."<br />
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I said that we want to understand the past “in its own terms” and “as it was.” Taken in isolation I concede that this latter phrase especially could be seen to imply the naive view which Dan ascribes to me. But I explained my meaning in the words which immediately followed: [we want our view to be] “distorted as little as possible by present-day preoccupations and perspectives.”<br />
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This is why I recommended focusing on primary sources, reading the actual texts from the past in the languages in which they were written. Will we be able to understand them in exactly the same way their authors understood them? No. Our experiences are very different. But scholars who immerse themselves in the writings of a particular period are able to achieve a very good sense of the perspectives of the original authors.<br />
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So when I spoke of the past “as it was” I was not talking about a perspectiveless, abstract or noumenal past at all. <em>I was talking about the actual perspectives of actual people who lived and spoke and wrote and some of whose writings we have access to and are able to read.</em><br />
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There was also some discussion of the very distant past, before the advent of observers. Obviously, envisaging this poses greater problems because you cannot talk about the perspectives of the time, and compare or contrast them with our own. There were no perspectives then.<br />
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I want to turn now, albeit briefly, to some broader issues and specifically to a piece written some years ago by Daniel Kaufman entitled “Knowledge and Reality” which came up in the discussions described above. It begins as follows:<br />
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“If you were to go to the trouble of asking ordinary people about their views on knowledge and reality – accosting them, at random, on street corners, perhaps – and succeeded in getting honest answers, you would likely discover that they hold something like the following view: What it is to know something is to possess some body of information – to have a “picture” of thing – that squares with or is true to reality. If you were to push further, regarding ‘reality’, they would likely characterize it along the lines of “everything that actually exists” (the ‘actually’ intended to preclude imaginary and fictional things like unicorns and Sherlock Holmes).”<br />
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Plausibly, this is what people would indeed say. You could see it as a form of naive realism. But, if my view is (as Dan has suggested) a form of naive realism, it is not <em>this</em> form of naive realism.<br />
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The crucial issue here for me is a matter of underlying assumptions and perspective. I see my body as an intrinsic part of the physical world and my “self” as the creation of a (physically instantiated) culture. This culture is just as much a part of reality as anything else.<br />
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Cultural products – languages, artworks, nursery rhymes, fiction, music, etc. – undeniably constitute a part of reality; and Sherlock Holmes stories and unicorn legends are part of this reality. Obviously the characters and creatures featured in these stories are not real in the sense that real people or real animals are real (though small infants are unable to grasp this). But, as imagined characters and creatures, they are components of the real (and physically instantiated) cultural matrix in which we happen to exist. A cultural matrix <em>of some kind</em> is, of course, a necessary condition for our existence as persons and for our functioning as human beings.<br />
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The world is a single world. (At least I see no reason to think otherwise.) It includes myself and others and language and culture as well as all the fundamental processes upon which physics and other sciences are focused.<br />
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Though all worthwhile discourse will (in my opinion) be consistent with the findings of science, it will not necessarily be scientific, even in a broad sense of the word. The trick (as I see it) is to feel the pulse and appreciate the potency of language and other mechanisms of cultural expression without metaphysicalizing these processes in any way. (Without falling for Romantic myths about art and artists, for example.)<br />
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[This is an abridged version of <a href="https://theelectricagora.com/2019/05/11/knowledge-of-the-past-and-knowledge-of-the-world/" style="background-color: transparent; color: #0087be; text-decoration-line: none;">an article</a> originally published at The Electric Agora.]Mark Englishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506844097173520312noreply@blogger.com0