Category Archives: Academics

Academics, General discussion, Unclassifiable

Have faith

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Perhaps I should note that the letters to the editor regarding this op-ed by Paul Davies were universally negative. As many have pointed out here, the piece was far worse than my earlier post suggested. Indeed, we’re dealing with an almost D’Souzian (as in the Dartmouth-educated Dinesh) level of badness. One more comment on it, as people seem interested in it. Commenter Matt K writes:

>I believe that this debate continues to arise (and even influences scientists pretending to be bad philosophers) because no one really knows what “faith” is. There isn’t even a broad agreement about what faith is among theologians. Heck, science could be based on faith if all anyone means is something like “not fully supported presuppositions.” I doubt this is what most theologians have in mind when they speak of faith. I have argued elsewhere that the most common notions of faith conceive of it as being a type of justification for belief (or a sub-set of beliefs), and under this conception faith still fails to provide justification for religious belief (much less any other form of belief). I’m still not sure what faith is or what role it is really supposed to be playing in regards to our beliefs. So when I read an argument like Davies I am always left wondering what it is we are really talking about.

That really gets at a lot of the problem, I think. “Faith” plays a lot of different roles in discussions of this sort; despite this, few seem aware of the implications of their view. Davies, for instance, writes:

>Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from “that’s not a scientific question” to “nobody knows.” The favorite reply is, “There is no reason they are what they are — they just are.” The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality — the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science.

He’s really asking the wrong people. He probably ought to talk to philosophers of science. But the real crazy thing about this argument seems to be the notion that faith covers anything short of a complete explanation. While that’s certainly one way to understand the term “faith,” that’s not what most people mean by it. And that’s not really what Davies means by it anyway. For him, faith has a much more substantive character–he means specific claims that lack justification. That’s hardly the correlate of the scientific view. The correlate of the scientific view, on Davies’ argument, is “reasonless absurdity,” not Christian doctrine. The failure therefore of the scientific view to account for itself (something which no one could ever seriously claim), does not produce the specific, if unjustified doctrines of Christianity (whatever the hell that would mean in this case–Catholicism?)

Academics, category mistake, Weak Analogy

Faith in science

15 Comments

A grad school professor of mine once said: beware of scientists in a metaphysical mood. And lo. Yesterday’s New York Times op-ed section contains this, from Paul Davies, physicist:

>Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.

>This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.

>And just as Christians claim that the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case, so physicists declare a similar asymmetry: the universe is governed by eternal laws (or meta-laws), but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe.

By religion, Davies means his version of the Christian religion, and others that will fit those particular metaphysical presuppositions (this won’t include Mormonism, by the way). And while Physicists don’t have all of the answers about the nature of the objects of their study (which discipline does?), that’s hardly grounds to claim that it’s a lot like religion. The evidence for the basic elements of religious faith (not to mention the truth of various intricate Christian doctrines, among others) is completely like evidence for the physical laws that characterize matter. Just because physics doesn’t tell the whole story (why should it and who claims it does?) does not mean the whole thing is accepted without evidence. Others, I’m certain, can say more.

But the Times ought to be beyond these tales of faith found among microscopes: it’s so washingtonposty.

Academics, Begging the Question, General discussion

The original

Many people invoke the “plain text” (or some close variant) of the constitution in order to resolve questions about its meaning. Those people, insofar as they insist on that principle, are originalists. For a more edifying discussion of that topic than one can find here, see Brian Leiter’s law blog. Here’s an excerpt of his argument:

>. . . [O]nce we acknowledge (as Barnett rightly does) that a theory of constitutional interpretation must answer to a theory of constitutional legitimacy, then the constitution (as a written document, or as a document about which framers had some original intention, or as a document which had an original “public” meaning, and so on) drops almost entirely out of the picture: the theory of constitutional legitimacy tells judges how they should decide cases, and the written constitution is, at best, a proxy for what is constitutionally legitimate or is relevant because of its effect on the reasonable expectations of citizens (the latter being a factor bearing on constitutional legitimacy). In other words, Barnett’s theory of constitutional interpretation, because it (unlike most theories–Ackerman’s, Amar’s, etc.) has the correct moral structure is not really a defense of originalism, but a defense of whatever method of interpretation produces “legitimate” (i.e., morally authoritative) outcomes. The writtenness of the constitution, and its original meaing, might, indeed, figure at this point, but only in the way that Raz (who, in an odd way, echoes Posner) suggests: namely, because some moral value (some moral value that bears on authority) attaches to the fact that some understanding of the constitution (original or otherwise) has been stable, relied upon, figures in the public understanding of the society in which people plan their lives, etc.

Aside from the fact that nothing about the Constitution says it should be interpreted one way rather than another, once one adopts an interpretative theory, as Leiter suggests, one has left the text behind. All of this makes the following response mystifying:

>Notice that, while “justice” is the ultimate normative justification for originalism, the intermediate steps are crucial. If a written constitution is valuable for the reasons identified–to define and police the principal-agent relationship–then one cannot simply dispense with it in pursuit of greater justice. More precisely, agent-judges cannot on their own authorize agent-legislatures to exceed their proper powers as defined by the written Constitution in pursuit of greater “justice” than that document provides.

“Simply dispense” and “on their own” beg the question against Leiter, at least it seems so to me. The argument concerns how one ought to read the Constitution, part of that argument involves denying “an original” meaning in isolation from a more basic legal theory. Asserting that one ought to read the Constitution literally just ignores that point.

It turns out that point was made here by Larry Solum:

>Once we have the distinction between semantic and normative originalism in place, it is easy to see that semantic claims are at the heart of the New Originalism or original-meaning originalism. If the semantic claim were false, and the conventional semantic meaning of the text in context at the time of framing and ratification were not the “meaning” of the constitution, then it would be difficult for New Originalists to argue that there are good normative reasons to give this meaning authority. The difficulty is obvious: why should we have a normative commitment to something the Constitution doesn’t mean? If the original meaning is not the actual semantic content of the constitution, but is instead a construction or invention of originalist judges, then many of the normative arguments produced by originalists could be turned against originalism itself.

Academics, Inexplicable

He or she blinded me with science

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The New York Times reports on another crazy academic feud driven by politically correct orthodoxy.

>In academic feuds, as in war, there is no telling how far people will go once the shooting starts.

>Earlier this month, members of the International Academy of Sex Research, gathering for their annual meeting in Vancouver, informally discussed one of the most contentious and personal social science controversies in recent memory.

Note the phrase “social science controversies.” Here’s the story, more or less, in outline. J.Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology up the road here at Northwestern University, writes a book,The Man Who Would Be Queen, that challenges the way scientists think about the “biology of sexual orientation.” As the Times tells it, there began his troubles, because he dared to challenge some kind of p.c. orthodoxy:

>To many of Dr. Bailey’s peers, his story is a morality play about the corrosive effects of political correctness on academic freedom. Some scientists say that it has become increasingly treacherous to discuss politically sensitive issues. They point to several recent cases, like that of Helmuth Nyborg, a Danish researcher who was fired in 2006 after he caused a furor in the press by reporting a slight difference in average I.Q. test scores between the sexes.

>“What happened to Bailey is important, because the harassment was so extraordinarily bad and because it could happen to any researcher in the field,” said Alice Dreger, an ethics scholar and patients’ rights advocate at Northwestern who, after conducting a lengthy investigation of Dr. Bailey’s actions, has concluded that he is essentially blameless. “If we’re going to have research at all, then we’re going to have people saying unpopular things, and if this is what happens to them, then we’ve got problems not only for science but free expression itself.”

Odd that Dr.Dreger would claim that Dr. Bailey is blameless:

>Moreover, based on her own reading of federal regulations, Dr. Dreger, whose report can be viewed at www.bioethics.northwestern.edu, argued that the book did not qualify as scientific research. The federal definition describes “a systematic investigation, including research development, testing and evaluation.”

>Dr. Bailey used the people in his book as anecdotes, not as the subjects of a systematic investigation, she reported.

>“The bottom line is that they tried to ruin this guy, and they almost succeeded,” Dr. Dreger said.

Dr.Dreger seems deeply confused about the nature of the controversy. The controversy concerns (in part) whether what Dr.Bailey said was supported by the evidence. But on Dr.Dreger’s account, it doesn’t even qualify as scientific research. And she’s defending him. It’s hard to see, therefore, what sense it makes to call this a dispute about scientific research and political correctness. There’s no scientific research.

Academics, Straw Man, Things that are false

Culpa istorum

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**Quick update below I've noticed several mea-culpae about Iraq floating around lately. We talked about one of them (Ignatieff) the other day. Being wrong about such a thing as monumental as war ought probably to carry serious consequences for the credibility of the person who was wrong. In light of that obvious but completely ignored imperative, it's entertaining to watch the ones who were wrong explain themselves:

We might test judgment by asking, on the issue of Iraq, who best anticipated how events turned out. But many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.

So Ignatieff was wrong, but some of those who were right were right for the wrong reasons (so he claims). We might then say that they're wrong too. Because after all it's just as bad to have a true belief which is unjustified as it is to have a unjustified false belief (like Ignatieff had). Any mature person can see that Ignatieff has picked on the college socialist again–a slogan chanting and capitalistically challenged representative of the anti war left. Everyone ought to know by this point–especially a former Harvard Professor of political science–that such a lefty exists in Rush Limbaugh's mind. Pointing out that someone might have had stupid reasons for being right doesn't have anything to do with your stupid reasons for being wrong. Now to his stupid reasons:

The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us. They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq's fissured sectarian history. What they didn�t do was take wishes for reality. They didn't suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn't suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn't suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little. They didn't believe that because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq. They avoided all these mistakes.

First off, I think a good number had some knowledge of Iraq's "fissured sectarian history." It was no secret to experts in Middle East history. But the more perplexing thing (aside from its self-serving comparisons) about this mea culpa is that it puts the entire matter in terms of gambling about an uncertain future–where no one could possibly predict the outcome. And this is just the point that Ignatieff and others fail to get. A person with even a casual knowledge of the history of the region (say the recent war between Iraq and Iran) could have predicted the outcome of this war with a good deal of precision. It's not a question, as Ignatieff frames it, of being unduly critical of the motives of the administration (which one always should be in any case), it's rather a more straightforward matter of good judgment. And so this underscores the shallowness of Ignatieff's thinking about matters of life and death (which is what it was to think about invading Iraq in case that wasn't obvious). The experts he trusts don't have any knowledge of the very public and relevant facts about the history of Iraq (and the entire region). So it's not only a case of taking wishes for reality. It's simpler than that.

**Update: Here's Crooked Timber, always a worthwhile read. I'd be interested in seeing more apologiae pro errore meo if anyone knows where to find them.

Academics, Things that are false

Errare

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Books ought to be written about how otherwise smart looking people got Iraq wrong. But not by them. Too many people who were wrong about Iraq have only profited from it. Some of them (Bill Kristol, O’Hanlon and Pollack, the Kagans, Bush, Cheney, Rice, Republicans) continue in their error; others have had a change of heart, but have not had their credibility questioned (Friedman, Beinart, Yglesias, Josh Marshall, Ivo Daadler). Many of them were not just factually wrong, but morally wrong to have been so absolutely callous and shallow with the awful and uncontrollable violence of war.

Another person who got the war wrong (but who has since come to repent) is Michael Ignatieff (formerly of Harvard University). In a New York Times Sunday magazine article he explains why he got it wrong. One reason has to do with academia:

>The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a president. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in their own country. How distant a dream that now seems.

>Having left an academic post at Harvard in 2005 and returned home to Canada to enter political life, I keep revisiting the Iraq debacle, trying to understand exactly how the judgments I now have to make in the political arena need to improve on the ones I used to offer from the sidelines. I’ve learned that acquiring good judgment in politics starts with knowing when to admit your mistakes.

>The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life. In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.

Funny thing about that “condemnation”: it hasn’t convinced Ignatieff or any of the commentators who got it wrong to exclude themselves from continuing to comment. Ignatieff doesn’t even think it excludes him from running for office (in Canada). It’s a big deal to get something like that wrong (I think at least). For many (even or especially on the left), getting it wrong has been a kind ticket for pundit advancement.

That’s probably because of what Berlin said. But Berlin would probably be better understood to be talking about the endless yapfest of American punditry. For apparently it doesn’t matter whether what anyone says is true. So long as its interesting.

Academics, General discussion, Plain Bad Arguments

Partisans

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One almost never sees any op-ed of any kind anywhere respond to criticism. For some reason unknown to me, the Post’s Outlook section features another article by Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

In the first article, she argued that partisanship is separating our nation into separate parties. Here are the two parties: on the one hand, you have the virulent Rovians of the Bush administration–dedicated to party at almost any cost–on the other you have some bloggers, some guy who wrote an op-ed, and maybe some think-tankers. These people–these bloggers (and some anonymous commenters nutpicked from bloggers’ sites) on the left are the proper partisan complement to Bolton, Rove and Cheney. Notice a problem anyone? Well. Many did. And so they criticized her for such a silly comparison. It should be government figure versus government figure (or if not available, then national party leader). But it’s Dick Cheney versus op-ed guy.

Aside from that, Slaughter advances the idea that people are devoted to “the characteristic of being devoted to a view” rather than to a view. It might be more proper to say that people hold views in a more entrenched fashion–they’re less willing to compromise and so forth, because their views have grown so incompatible. That way the problem remains where it should be, with the content of peoples’ views (not with the way they hold them). Bipartisanship, for its own sake, is a silly goal. And even Slaughter knows this:

>I was not condemning passionate criticism of the Bush administration on issues like supporting torture, the conduct of the war in Iraq, or illegal wiretapping. On the contrary, I share it. In my new book, “The Idea That Is America,” I call for a critical patriotism that is honest about our failings and insists on holding our government and ourselves to the values we proclaim as a nation. If we are going to pledge allegiance to “liberty and justice for all,” it is incumbent on all of us to stand up and denounce what is currently being done in our name at Guantanamo and at various secret CIA prisons.

She’s “partisan” about these things. But that’s what people are partisan about–CIA prisons, preemptive war, and so forth:

>This reaction should not be partisan. It should be, and is beginning to be, the reaction of decent people across the political spectrum who are standing up not for their party but for their country.

After all, one party thinks those things–preemptive war, and so on–are good things. That’s their party’s position. Objecting to it–as Slaughter does–is bound to be “partisan.”

Academics, Plain Bad Arguments, Things that are false

Deliver us from evil

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What might the author of this (Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering and Oakland University) be saying:

>Still, the Virginia Tech shootings have already led to calls for all sorts of changes: gun control, more mental health coverage, stricter behavior rules on campuses. Yes, in a perfect world, there would be no guns, no mental illness and no Cho Seung-Huis. But the world is very imperfect. Consider that Britain’s national experiment with gun-free living is proving to be a disaster, with violent and gun crime rates soaring.

Hate to get into a factual dispute, but:

>The Home Office says that despite the temptation to assume that things are always getting worse, crime in England and Wales actually peaked in 1995 and has now fallen by 44% in the last 10 years.

Even if the crime rate were going up, it probably wouldn’t be “soaring.” But even if it were soaring, I think it would compare favorably with ours. And furthermore, and more fundamentally, whether less gun control would change things for the better is a distinct–a very distinct–question.

On this shaky basis the author moves toward the conclusion:

>In other words, most of the broad social “lessons” we are being told we must learn from the Virginia Tech shootings have little to do with what allowed the horrors to occur. This is about evil, and about how our universities are able to deal with it as a literary subject but not as a fact of life. Can administrators and deans really continue to leave professors and other college personnel to deal with deeply disturbed students on their own, with only pencils in their defense?

She might as well say “some say. . .”. That at least would be more honest about the straw man to follow. But, like Richard Cohen, she doesn’t need to wait for any fancy diagnosis or police investigation: it’s about evil. That’s even less helpful and insightful than her original suggestion. I don’t know of the psychological category for evil. My father, when he was alive, used to commit people like Cho to mental institutions as a danger to themselves or others. There was, and as far as I know, there still is no category called “evil” which is grounds for commitment. But while we were talking about all of this, several psychologically disturbed people just bought guns (legally) to deliver themselves and perhaps some of us from evil.

Academics, Contradictions, Plain Bad Arguments, Stanley Fish

Fish on religion and liberalism

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I think Stanley Fish doesn’t understand either liberalism or religion. He writes (behind the Times firewall):

>First of all, I stipulate to the usefulness of teaching the bible as an aid to the study of literature and history. I’m just saying that when you do that you are teaching religion as a pedagogical resource, not as a distinctive discourse the truth or falsehood of which is a matter of salvation for its adherents. One can of course teach that too; one can, that is, get students to understand that at least some believers hold to their faith in a way that is absolute and exclusionary; in their view nonbelievers have not merely made a mistake – as one might be mistaken about the causes of global warming – they have condemned themselves to eternal perdition. (“I am the way.”) What one cannot do – at least under the liberal democratic dispensation – is teach that assertion of an exclusive and absolute truth as anything but someone’s opinion; and in many classes that opinion will be rehearsed with at best a sympathetic condescension (“let’s hope they grow out of it”) and at worst a condemning ridicule (“even in this day and age, there are benighted people”).

In the first place (as we noted in an earlier post), there’s nothing incoherent about studying the body of propositions that compose any particular religious doctrine without embracing their truth. For instance, Fish has made the doctrine and the seriousness with which its adherents believe it without making us affirm it. If what he said about religion were true–you cannot teach it–then he couldn’t talk about why you can’t. Since you can–he has–then what he says is false.

Second, the Rawlsian liberal will point out that there is no absolute truth when it comes to matters of foundational questions of justice and political structure. This is quite a different claim from that which says there is no absolute truth at all. Liberals are not relativists, as Fish seems to think. There is of course plenty of absolute truth possible in matters empirical. These may inform, but do not form the basis of, our conception of justice. So in the end, no controversial system of value can serve as the basis of a political structure.

Academics, Stanley Fish, Weak Analogy

Religious life

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Arguing that one cannot study religion academically, Stanley Fish writes:

>The difference between the truth claims of religion and the truth claims of other academic topics lies in the penalty for getting it wrong. A student or a teacher who comes up with the wrong answer to a crucial question in sociology or chemistry might get a bad grade or, at the worst, fail to be promoted. Those are real risks, but they are nothing to the risk of being mistaken about the identity of the one true God and the appropriate ways to worship him (or her). Get that wrong, and you don’t lose your grade or your job, you lose your salvation and get condemned to an eternity in hell.

But Professor Fish has a comparison problem. The penalty for getting questions wrong about religion on a test is a failing grade; the penalty for getting a chemistry question wrong in real life is death.