Category Archives: Other problems

Problems other than specific logical fallacies–poor explanations, things that are false, and so forth.

Academics, General discussion, Unclassifiable

Have faith

4 Comments

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.

Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments, Things that are false

A Rare Parrot-Teacher

1 Comment

While we’re not in the business of questioning motive, The Post’s Robert D. Novak’s work in the past few weeks has had a familiar ring to it. Whispers of background plots and internecine “dilemmas,” and, most of all, an eager use of the politics of fear. Karl would be proud. But finer folks than us have already made quick work of the Rove’s puppeteering of Novak. More interesting to us are passages like this:

>Democrats want to assume a strong anti-terrorist position while deploring U.S. military action against Iran as it develops nuclear weapons. While the prospect of such an attack before Bush leaves office is reviled on the left, no Democrat can be seen as soft on an Islamist Iranian regime whose president denies the Holocaust and calls for the destruction of Israel. The trick is to condemn both Dick Cheney and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Beyond the fact that, once again, this sounds very familiar, is this fact: repetition does not cash out to truth. Just because every parrot-teacher in the Rovian cabal prattles on about Iranian nuclear weapons does not mean such things actually exist, or that the technology to produce them exists in Iran, or that the technology to produce the technology to produce them exists in Iran. In fact, Rove’s Iraq War patsy, as well as the International Institute for Strategic Studies, argue that the claim of Iran possessing, or being able to possess, a nuclear weapon within the decade is patently false. This troubles his second claim. The trick is not to “condemn” anyone; the trick is disengage ourselves from a costly, dishonestly premised, and pointless war of conquest while not engaging ourselves in yet another costly, dishonestly premised, and pointless war of conquest. But far be it from Novak, in a fit of Rovian excess and bile, to let the facts intrude.

Things that are false, V.D.Hanson

Don’t know much about history

4 Comments

Bloodthirsty historian Victor Davis Hanson might be familiar to some who read this blog. It turns out that in addition to being a rather sloppy thinker, he’s also a downright crappy historian. What makes a good historian? Mastery of facts.

For instance:

>Because this is my wrap-up essay, I must apologize for the disjointed nature of some of the material I am bringing up now. We have already noted how, when writing about his own period of specialization, the Classicist Victor Davis Hanson is both sloppy and inconsistent. (Mixing up, for example, the Eastern Roman Emperor Valens, who died at Adrianople in 378 AD, with Emperor Valerian, who was captured by the Sassanids in 260 AD. This is akin to confusing the current conflict we are in with the Spanish-American war because, you know, they’re pretty close in time.) But mistakes like these do not really annoy me as much as another problem, the lack of documentation in Carnage and Culture.

The whole thing, as well as previous installments, is well worth the read. Makes one wonder whether we ought to have a special category for Hoover Institution Scholars.

Equivocation, Jonah Goldberg, Op-Eds and other opinions, Unclassifiable

Aqua-vocation

5 Comments

It depends on what the meaning of “waterboarding” is (courtesy of Digby):

>DAVID RIVKIN, MILITARY LAW EXPERT: Incidentally, it is not a debate about whether torture is permissible, at least in my mind, it’s what things amount to torture. And with all due respect to my friend Charlie, there are several forms of waterboarding. Waterboarding is a very capricious term, it connotes a bunch of things. There are clearly some forms of waterboarding [that are] torture and off the table. They may well be some waterboarding regimens that while tough and useful in extracting information are not torture. My problem with the critics is that they don’t want to have, contrary to what Senator Edwards said, we are ought to have a debate as a serious society about what stress techniques of interrogation and what to do with it. Let me point out one thing, we actually waterboard our own people. Are we torturing our own people?

That silly and convenient relativism is matched only by an even more ridiculous sophistry:

>FOREMAN: But we’re waterboarding our own people to give them an idea of what they would encounter if they were captured by somebody else.

>RIVKIN: Well, forgive me, as a matter of law and ethics, if the given practice like slavery and prostitution is officially odious, you cannot use it no matter what our goals is, you cannot even use it to volunteers. So, if all forms of waterboarding are torture then we are torturing our own people, and the very same instructor who spoke before Congress the other day about how it’s torture, is guilty of practicing torture for decades. We as a society have to come up with the same baseline using (inaudible) in all spheres of public life instead of somehow singularizing this one thing, which is interrogation of combatants and we need to look at it in a broader way.

Um. So, in order to teach preparedness for torture, the military has used its methods on its own people, but in using these methods, by definition, they are not torture, because you cannot torture someone who is a volunteer. But if it was torture, then the instructor is guilty of torture. So it follows that these people are either guilty of torture, or since no one wants to be guilty of torture, their students learned nothing about torture, since waterboarding isn’t torture.

On a similar theme, Glenn Greenwald discusses Jonah Goldberg’s agony over the definition of torture.

Bad Explanations, David Brooks

Dawn of time

2 Comments

David Brooks writes a piece entitled: “The Outsourced Brain.” Finally, one might think, a confession.

Nope.

Instead:

>Since the dawn of humanity, people have had to worry about how to get from here to there. Precious brainpower has been used storing directions, and memorizing turns. I myself have been trapped at dinner parties at which conversation was devoted exclusively to the topic of commuter routes.

Later:

>Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.

Right. “Losing.”

For the rest of us, the availability of information seems to suggest that we are responsible for knowing more, not less–with great knowledge, after all, comes great responsibility.

Michael Gerson, Things that are false

Blind them with values

1 Comment

Michael Gerson, former Presidential wordsmith, delights readers of the Washington Post’s editorial page twice a week. Why the Post or anyone would hire a former administration official (of the current administration) to hold forth on its op-ed page is an ever deepening mystery, especially since, though a speech writer, or perhaps propter hoc, Gerson so frequently doesn’t rise above the intellectual level of Jonah Goldberg-style “liberals are fascists” name calling. Today Gerson writes:

>This creates an inevitable tension within liberalism. The left in America positions itself as both the defender of egalitarianism and of unrestricted science. In the last presidential election, Sen. John Kerry pledged to “tear down every wall” that inhibited medical research. But what happens when certain scientific views lead to an erosion of the ideal of equality? Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a rising academic analyst of these trends, argues: “Watson is anti-egalitarian in the extreme. Science looks at human beings in their animal aspects. As animals, we are not always equal. It is precisely in the ways we are not simply animals that we are equal. So science, left to itself, poses a serious challenge to egalitarianism.”

The tension between the factual or factual-type assertions of scientists and the values of fraternity, sorority, liberty and equality follow from the very nature of the two different enterprises, as any twelve-year old knows. Anyone who has ever noticed the difference between an “is” and an “ought” knows that this is the case. It’s not peculiar to “liberalism,” unless (and perhaps this is the case), Gerson’s conservatism is ludditism.

Stanley Fish, Unclassifiable

. . . like the pilot of a ship

1 Comment

Another puzzling piece from the nearly always puzzling Stanley Fish. He takes the usual line that “everyone advocates a point of view,” so everyone is a partisan, but then fails to understand the difference between principle and strategy. He writes:

>But the report gets off to a bad start when its authors allow the charge by conservative critics that left-wing instructors indoctrinate rather than teach to dictate their strategy. By taking it as their task to respond to what they consider a partisan attack, they set themselves up to perform as partisans in return, and that is exactly what they end up doing.

He then goes on to criticize the strategy of the American Association of University Professors. They set themselves up as “partisans” in the minds of those who can’t read very well. A few paragraphs later, Fish writes:

>My point is made for me by the subcommittee when it proposes a hypothetical as a counterexample to the stricture laid down by the Students for Academic Freedom: “Might not a teacher of nineteenth-century American literature, taking up ‘Moby Dick,’ a subject having nothing to do with the presidency, ask the class to consider whether any parallel between President George W. Bush and Captain Ahab could be pursued for insight into Melville’s novel?”

>But with what motive would the teacher initiate such a discussion? If you look at commentaries on “Moby Dick,” you will find Ahab characterized as inflexible, monomaniacal, demonic, rigid, obsessed and dictatorial. What you don’t find are words like generous, kind, caring, cosmopolitan, tolerant, far-seeing and wise. Thus the invitation to consider parallels between Ahab and Bush is really an invitation to introduce into the classroom (and by the back door) the negative views of George Bush held by many academics.

>If the intention were, as claimed, to produce insight into Melville’s character, there are plenty of candidates in literature for possible parallels – Milton’s Satan, Marlowe’s Faust, Byron’s Cain, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Shakespeare’s Iago, Jack London’s Wolf Larsen, to name a few. Nor would it have been any better if an instructor had invited students to find parallels between George Bush and Aeneas, or Henry the Fifth, or Atticus Finch, for then the effect would have been to politicize teaching from the other (pro-Bush) direction.

>By offering this example, the report’s authors validate the very accusation they are trying to fend off, the accusation that the academy’s leftward tilt spills over into the classroom. No longer writing for the American Association of University Professors, the subcommittee is instead writing for the American Association of University Professors Who Hate George Bush (admittedly a large group). Why do its members not see that? Because once again they reason from an abstract theoretical formulation to a conclusion about what instructors can properly do.

Bush is the President. The president is kind of a like a captain of a ship, insofar as he is a leader of people. Leaders of people can lead well or badly. Is Bush like the one who leads badly, or not.

The more obviously silly point of Fish’s argument is that he seems to think literature can only refer to other literature. So, if it’s parallels you’re looking for, don’t look at real people. Literature has nothing to say about that. Besides, easily offended Bush lovers might be offended.

Michael Gerson, Straw Man, Things that are false

So cool it’s uncool

Michael Gerson, protege of the great David Brooks, visits a coffee shop near his home in Northern Virginia. He sees pictures of radicals, makes some remarks about how they were Stalinists, or something, and draws the conclusion that the left suffers from radical chic. Not only that, but the right is so cool its uncool: it’ll never be popular man. That’s right, you’d never be cool enough to wear a Reagan shirt.

But only late in the piece does he notice the obvious:

>Some on the left are suspicious of this trend, which social critic Thomas Frank calls “commercialized dissent.” “It is,” he told me, “symbolic of the eternal revolution of the market” and its “constant search for the new.” “The ideology expressed is generally not liberalism; it is the ideology of the market, libertarianism.” Political trendiness of the Body Shop and Whole Foods variety, in short, has little serious emphasis on economic or social justice.

A t-shirt with Che Guevera is not the same as membership in the Democrat(ic) party or the affirmation of its non-work camp or internment policies. No matter, the right has branding problems of it’s own:

>But there also should be concerns on the right. On its current track, the emotional branding of the Republican Party among the young will soon be similar to Metamucil. The party’s emphasis on spending restraint and limited government may be substantively important, but these themes are hardly morally inspiring. And the Iraq war is a serious drawback among younger voters — except, of course, among those 20-somethings with buzz cuts who actually fight the war. Appealing to cause-oriented consumers will require addressing issues such as global poverty and disease, global warming, and economic and racial justice. This reality of the market is also a reality of American politics.

“Spending restraint and limited government” is about as true as saying the democrats are the party of “big government.” But the weirder thing is the claim that those fighting the Iraq war do not find it a drawback, as if they (and not the belligerent scribes at NRO and elsewhere) were the real cheerleaders for the cause of being in Iraq (and later Iran and Syria).

category mistake, Equivocation, George Will, Unqualified Authority

Traduction

George Will loves to use the word “traduce.” It’s one of those words that sounds real smart, but in the end just conceals the absence of actual reasoning:

>In 1943, the Supreme Court, affirming the right of Jehovah’s Witnesses children to refuse to pledge allegiance to the U.S. flag in schools, declared: “No official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” Today that principle is routinely traduced, coast to coast, by officials who are petty in several senses.

>They are teachers at public universities, in schools of social work. A study prepared by the National Association of Scholars, a group that combats political correctness on campuses, reviews social work education programs at 10 major public universities and comes to this conclusion: Such programs mandate an ideological orthodoxy to which students must subscribe concerning “social justice” and “oppression.”

Teachers at public universities are not “officials” in the same sense as those enforcing the saying of the “Pledge of Allegiance.” At best, they are officials enforcing “orthodoxy” in a very extended and analogous sense.

The real presumption of this piece, however, consists in Will’s sneering (always sneering he is) and ironic dismissal of social work. He doesn’t think, so it appears, that social work rises above the level of shallow opinion-mongering–the kind that gets protected by the First Amendment. He writes:

>In 1997, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) adopted a surreptitious political agenda in the form of a new code of ethics, enjoining social workers to advocate for social justice “from local to global levels.” A widely used textbook — “Direct Social Work Practice: Theory and Skill” — declares that promoting “social and economic justice” is especially imperative as a response to “the conservative trends of the past three decades.” Clearly, in the social work profession’s catechism, whatever social and economic justice are, they are the opposite of conservatism.

If it’s so clear, then he wouldn’t need to say clearly. It isn’t clear. And it’s only a textbook. A textbook, as a professor who employs them can attest, isn’t some kind of set of beliefs to which one must subscribe and whose contents one must slavishly and mindlessly repeat. The study of any discipline, as Will seems to think, doesn’t consist in the inculcation of doctrinal maxims–anecdotal evidence (as Will goes on to offer) doesn’t establish that fact.

Besides, social work, on account of its “social” work, stands in marked contrast in its orientation and objective from every single one of George Will’s conservative ideological principles. But that fact alone does not, as Will seems to think, mean its equally unjustified and ideological.