Idle Chat
Let’s talk. Then again, let’s not. Because with certain kinds of talkers, there’s no point. The kind who systematically talk nonsense, and stipulate ahead of time that nonsense is what they will be talking, remove the point and replace it with – ‘play.’
What’s critical to recognize, from a humanist viewpoint, is that [the laws of thought] comprise more than a particular methodological option, for they are invoked whenever a predicate is attached to a subject; the consequences of their rejection, in humanist terms, would be absolute cognitive silence–since the decision to reject the laws could not itself sensibly be uttered except by invoking them.
This is what I was noticing about Violet a couple of weeks ago – there she was flinging scare-quotes around with wild abandon, problematizing truth, evidence, right, wrong, true, false – and yet she went right on arguing, or pretending to argue, or playing at arguing. Well you can’t do both at once. You can’t announce your suspicion of the very idea of true and false and still go on arguing a position.
In Dissémination Derrida states: “It is thus not simply false to say that Mallarmé is a Platonist or a Hegelian. But it is above all not true. And vice versa”…The postmodernist critic Barbara Johnson illustrates the danger of attempting to paraphrase Derrida’s meaning in coherent humanist terms: “Instead of a simple either/or structure, deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse that says neither ‘either/or,’ nor ‘both/and’ nor even ‘neither/nor,’ while at the same time not totally abandoning these logics either.”
And not only the danger but the pointlessness. What is the point of talking about anything as lazy as that? ‘It’s not this, it’s not that, but at the same time it’s not not. See?’ Yeah – excuse me, I have better things to do.
If Derrida attempts to dance around the law of non-contradiction, a number of his postmodernist cohorts seem determined to stomp it into the ground. Roland Barthes, for instance, opens his book The Pleasure of the Text with an invitation to imagine the ideal reader as someone “who abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions . . . by simple discard of that old specter: logical contradiction; who mixes every language, even those said to be incompatible; who silently accepts every charge of illogicality, of incongruity; who remains passive in the face of Socratic irony (leading the interlocutor to the supreme disgrace: self-contradiction) and legal terrorism (how much penal evidence is based on a psychology of consistency!)”
That’s the kind of thing that gives lit-crit a bad name (to put it mildly). Just drone on about everything and nothing, declaring everything possible and included by verbal fiat, without bothering to think about anything. Cognitive laziness.
That Barthes is untroubled by laws of thought is evident. When asked by an interviewer about inconsistencies in his writings, Barthes replies, “I explained in my preface why I didn’t wish to give a retrospective unity to texts written at different times: I do not feel the need to arrange the uncertainties or contradictions of the past”.
No, naturally not, because it’s so much easier not to.
For I believe that the postmodern rejection of the law of non-contradiction is strategic: Without the law of non-contradiction, no one can ever demonstrate that you’re wrong. In an argument on any topic between a postmodernist and a humanist, each party will attempt to discover a logical contradiction in his opponent’s case. For the humanist, the discovery of a actual contradiction is deadly; he must abandon, or at minimum clarify, his position. But for the postmodernist, a contradiction is only a contradiction – a sign, perhaps, of the depth of his thought. The postmodernist’s position, in other words, becomes unfalsifiable.
Depth of thought again. The idea that depth of thought is (at least sometimes) somehow the opposite of the more ‘pedestrian’ kind of rational, logical, testing, checking, inquiring, evidence-seeking kind of thought that scientists and rational people go in for. But when you throw logic and evidence and testing out the window and just rely on your own brilliant insight or profundity or intuitive certainty or inner wisdom – you don’t get depth of thought, you get arid, dead-end, pointless, self-regarding blather.
Indeed, the postmodern rejection of the law of non-contradiction constitutes, from a humanist standpoint, not merely a rejection of logic but of the rational element in human nature. The humanist does not view logic as a cultural construct, a pattern of thinking inculcated by years of repetition; rather, he views it as the way in which the rational mind has always worked. To operate rationally is, instinctively, to rely on logical reasoning. There is, for the humanist, no getting around the laws of thought. The claim, often advanced…that the project of postmodernism involves suspending logic in order to call it into question skims over this crucial point: Nothing can be called into question unless it can be affirmed or denied. But to affirm or deny, as we’ve seen, is to invoke logic, to invoke the laws of thought. Just as you cannot suspend the rules of arithmetic in order to do calculus, you cannot suspend the laws of thought in order to do analysis–for these laws precede every rational epistemology.
So unless you’re just in the mood for some dadaist noise-exchange, you’re stuck with the pesky old laws. Suck it up.
Having been caught on the periphery of one or two discussions along the lines described above, narrowly escaping being sucked into the vortex, I now regard it as depth of sludge rather than depth of thought.
I’ve been in several of these conversations as well, and they seem to fall into two types. Someone is “embracing contradictions” by doing no such thing — they are merely being sloppy in the definitions, or pointing out complexities (ie Hitler was evil AND not-evil — he killed the Jews, but loved dogs.) That’s not a violation of the law of non-contradiction. They’re looking at different aspects and nuances, and pretending this is a great discovery which refutes logic.
Or else someone is trying to protect their religious views by denying that anything they say on “spirituality” means anything specific enough to be right or wrong. It’s all therapy or art or poetry and “this is the narrative which works for me” until you leave them alone long enough for them to forget they’re only supposed to be talking in metaphors — and they say something rather concrete, something which could indeed be true or false and not just a matter of taste.
Surprise them by pointing this out, and the fact that they contradicted themselves is a further sign of their spiritual depth.
But adhering to Propositional logic as a model for the way we argue about things in the real world is a mine field. “Truth”, in this context, is something that is notoriously hard to pin down, and either doesn’t apply to most of what we say, or has no definition – which is all terribly “postmodern”, if you want, but is really rather inescapable from the point of view of logic itself.
The (first) article linked to is rather too quick to sweep these sorts of serious concerns under the carpet, as well as making general statements that aren’t nearly as uncontroversial as implied. Having deep doubts about the law of the excluded middle, for instance, is in no way incoherent, or at least it doesn’t have to be. But one suspects that, ironically, as long as the dreaded pomos get a kicking, detail like this isn’t particularly important.
Armando, you’re missing the point. The abstruse sort of arguments in which philosophers call into question the law of the excluded middle (which is not exactly the same as the law of non-contradiction, by the way) are just that – ARGUMENTS! They rely on and are entirely comprised of clear definitions (or the attempt to clarify definitions as much as possible), careful reasoning, and so on and so forth. You’re right that such arguments don’t “have to be” incoherent – but in the hands of Derrida and his ilk, they are incoherent.
For this reason (see, there it goes again, that pesky “reasoning” with “premises” “supporting” “conclusions”), the pomos being criticized here deserve a good verbal kicking: They want to call basic concepts into question without any doing any of the hard intellectual work – without any serious attempts to define their terms or construct any arguments. Those who do this are not engaged in philosophy or any other sort of legitimate inquiry. At best, such people are performance artists: Once, they shocked and entertained audiences with their audacious verbal performances – or at least audiences with certain tastes. But with repetition, the performance grows ever more boring. The performers are now comprised solely of those whose livelihood depends on keeping the theater of the absurd open as long as possible, and their audience is largely each other – and their understudies, hapless students who know no better.
George, you are a Diamond – if you’ll forgive the chavese.
Yeah, G rocks. That’s US chavese.
Of course I know the difference between the law of the excluded middle and the law of non-contradiction, though both are presented as “rules” of argument whose absence leaves one with non-sensical gibberish. But this is debatable, in a way that is far from abstruse.
As in, Newton’s laws are either true or false – insisting on a strict dichotomy is rather misguided. And this is physics! Now start talking politics or aesthetics and the problems are multiplied hugely.
I can agree that some pomos go too far…but pushing back too hard in the opposite direction does damage to the very cause one wants to defend.
“As in, Newton’s laws are either true or false – insisting on a strict dichotomy is rather misguided”
Newton’s laws are wrong. There is a strict dichotomy.
Newton’s Laws are wrong? By this standard, all of science is “wrong”. Certainly General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and pretty much all of modern Physics. And again, this is Physics we are talking about, where success has been the greatest. Move to Biology, and the case for models being “right”, if one insists on the strict dichotomy, is rather weaker.
Creationists love to make the argument that an incomplete model is “wrong”, so this whole line of thought is actually quite relevant.
We have known that Newton’s mechanics are wrong since 1905: when Einstein introduced its first replacement, Special Relativity. Later he generalized his solution and introduced
General Relativity.
I think you aren’t understanding my point.
We know that all (I think all…certainly most) of our scientific laws and models have limited domain and do not provide complete accuracy in their predictive power in real world situations (even experimental siutations aren’t perfect). (Even more, we know that both General Relativity and Quantum mechanics will need to be replaced by a unifying theory, for instance.) Since this applies to all science, does this make all science wrong?
Put it another way. Would you trust your life to a scientific theory that was “wrong”? Answer, yes you would, since Newtonian mechanics is still used. Don’t you get the slightest hint that labelling scientific theories “right” and “wrong” is, or can be, innapropriate?
Or are you with the creationists who argue that because current theories of evolution will be refined and superseded (thats correct, btw) the theory of evolution taught in schools is “wrong”? Actually, same goes for Newton. Why are we teaching kids a theory which everyone knows is “wrong”? Maybe we should campaign against that. Or are you happy teaching science that is known to be “wrong”?
Then again, perhaps you might want to distinguish between different kinds of wrong? Which is more or less my point.
The only reasons physicists continue to use Newtonian mechanics are
1) Relativity is very difficult.
2) For a lot of applications the wrongness of Newtonian mechanics is too small to matter.
Do not confuse known error with unknown error (says he in a Rumsfeldian sort of way). We know all about the errors of Newtonian mechanics. However certain we are that evolution will be replace by a superior theory some time in the future, we cannot even begin to talk meaningfully about the replacement as we have currently no problems we think evolution cannot handle.
As for creationism, no one is going to decide that because evolution has some errorrs that it would be proper to replace it with some half-baked nonsense that is more error than anything else.
But lots of people’s minds really seem to work like that; they don’t seem to be able to see anything wrong with the statement “If you can’t answer every single question about your theory to my satisfaction, my fairy tale must be 100% true.”
Stewart:
How likely is it that a person who thinks that way ever accepted evolution?
Not very, of course. Which is why it was so ridiculous for the IDers to be in court trying to maintain the illusion that they thought ID was any version of science. The statement I wrote above was a (just barely) exaggerated version of the things they’re prepared to say to get around the laws blocking them from teaching their fairy tales as indisputable fact. If they had their way they’d never have to make such statements, because nobody else would be allowed openly to mention any theories that contradicted or cast doubt on the fairy tales.
“Do not confuse known error with unknown error (says he in a Rumsfeldian sort of way).”
Just to be clear, I’m not confusing these things. But if you insist on a strict dichotomy, *you* are. Because in a strict dichotomy, all errors are equal.
I am well aware of the status of Newtonian mechanics, as are you, and you must surely agree with me Paul, that calling it “wrong” is far too simplisitic. Rather, we have to have gradations of “right” and “wrong”, where theories have domains of application, and varying degrees of predictive power.
But this kind of approximate truth model is precisely the kind of model which resists strict the laws of logic we all know, and in which the law of contradiction, say, is a slightly more complicated and subtle beast. How much more complicated is the situation outside of physics?
All scientific laws are statements of the kind “All swans are white”. Therefore they can be shown to be wrong by finding something in reality that does not correspond to their claims – in our example, the existence of even one non-white swan shows them to be wrong.
There is nothing in Netwonian mechanics that allows for the possibility that it does not apply always and everywhere. For example, it requires time to be absolute. It is not – it is always and everywhere relative to the observer. I’ll repeat that so that it sinks in: Newtonian mechanics is completely wrong in its claim that time is absolute. Not wrong sometimes or in certain situations: it is never right.
Science does not want heuristics. It wants flawless theories that describe everything in their subject matter without exceptions. It will not settle for less. The tolerance of error you imply is inimical to scientific progress.
I see, Paul. So you *are* in favour of teaching theories which we know to be “wrong”, then? The creationists will be pleased.
That said, your description of science as flawless and without exception bears little to no resemblance to the actual practice of science. I guess I’ve repeated myself enough by now, that it is clear I won’t convince you of basic facts accepted by every scientist I’ve ever known – your flawless theories would exclude pretty much all science. By the standards you are using, all science is wrong.
You have admitted as much yourself, when you admit that revision is a fundamental part of the process. Why revise something that is flawless and without exception unless it is “wrong”? Since all science is provisional, it is all “wrong”. *Shrug*. This won’t change your mind, I realise, but largely because you aren’t really accepting the logical consequences of your own position. Which is ironic, to say the least.
Oh goddddd … I note in passing that it is also much easier to read Barthes in brief quotations in other people’s works than to read Barthes, but this is not an excuse for calling him “lazy”; vast amounts of work have clearly gone into the smallest of his articles.
I have no idea why Derrida is being castigated here for a point on which he is very obviously *right*. Quantification in an opaque context does not follow the law of the excluded middle (as anyone who has read a logic textbook knows; the classic example is “Achilles believes that Hesperus is a star – Hesperus is Phosphoros – Achilles believes that Phosphoros is not a star”), and the context of Mallarme being a Platonist is about as opaque as you can get.
Consider; I offer you a £10 bet at 50/50 odds that Mallarme was a Hegelian? do you take it or not? Now I offer you the same bet that Mallarme was not a Hegelian – is your answer definitely the opposite? The question of whether Mallarme was a Hegelian is entirely dependent on the context in which it is asked.
I have no idea what principle is being appealed to here; there is no philosopher on earth who has passed a formal logic exam and who would try to claim that predicate calculus could be applied to literary criticism. There’s nothing “humanist” about trying to pretend that opaque contexts are referentially transparent – it’s just a mistake. Wittgenstein, Austin and all of that crowd weren’t blowing smoke when they said that ordinary language had more structure to it than formal logic.
(For what it’s worth, LEJ Brouwer didn’t believe in the excluded middle for some statements of mathematics)
armando:
Perhaps you would like to tell me what is wrong with Special Relativity? So that I can nominate you for the Nobel Prize.
Scientists are not in the habit of abandoning theories which have no known errors, unless the alternative also has no known errors and is in some other way superior – such as greater conceptual simplicity.
Ever heard of General Relativity, Paul? Can I have my Nobel prize now?
OK, a cheap shot (though it does show how out of your depth you really are)…but you really aren’t arguing well here. There is no scientific theory that applies everywhere and without exception. And you keep evading my questions.
I’m flogging a dead horse here, I realise, but if you took the time to look at the Wikipedia entry for General Relativity, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity
you might note the part at the bottom which says:
“It is often said that general relativity is incompatible with quantum mechanics. This means that if one attempts to treat the gravitational field using the ordinary rules of quantum field theory, one finds that physical quantities are divergent.”
You need to read the whole entry to get the picture. But this is, of course, far too technical to make what is a very basic point: no theory in science is flawless and without exception. Seriously, you can’t just ignore things like experimental error and the need to control variables which arise in real world situations.
And “wrong” theories like Newtonian mechanics are taught and used all the time. (You keep ignoring my points here…I can see why, but it isn’t due to the strength of your own points.)
You might have noticed I asked about Special Relativity – I did so for a reason.
I’d like to know what is wrong with it. And while you’re at it, if creationists bother you so much, then kindly tell us what is wrong with evolution.
I explained why Newtonian mechanics is still taught and used – it’s simpler than the alternatives and for a lot of applications its inherent errors are too small to matter. Which is not the same thing as saying it is correct.
Paul Power B.Sc (Honours in Experimental Physics), M.Sc (by thesis, in fundamental particle physics). Obviously “out of my depth”.
[Perhaps you would like to tell me what is wrong with Special Relativity?]
It can’t describe motion in a varying gravitational field.
dsquared:
It was not designed to. Its two precepts refer to “inertial frames of reference”, in other words situations where no net force is in operation on the observer. Your objection is akin to complaining that automobiles are not transport mechanisms because they cannot fly, go into space or under water.
I’d like to read about an error in Special Relativity.
You keep ignoring experimental error, Paul, since admitting it exists would presumably force you to label all science as wrong. Also, in binary truth, there aren’t different degrees of wrong. So when you say Newtonian mechanics is only a little bit wrong at times, you are implicitly conceding that you don’t believe in the strict dichotomy.
But your comment on special relativity is rather interesting, since you are being very careful to distinguish stated domains of application. If one is strict about this (as you are being), one would have to face the question of which physical situations are completely free of a net gravitational force. Any? How would you know? Certainly, any instrument can only tell you to within some accuracy, but since you are insisting on flawless theories, that seems a bit vague. Were you to be consistent, I think you might have to conclude that Special Relativity has no supporting experimental evidence….which is an extremely odd position, for sure. By the way, according to you General Relativity is wrong, yes?
Also interesting is this “show me a mistake, otherwise it is True!” model. Presumably either Newtonian mechanics used to be true, or there was no one producing scientific Physics before the 20th Century or so. The first option leads to non-binary truth fairly quickly, the second is a little bizzarre.
Finally, Evolution. To show it is wrong, I simply have to demonstrate it does not provide a flawless, complete and without exception model to the origin of species. Right? Ands it clearly does, which is why no one researches evolution anymore.
But anyway, the fact that creationism is wrong can be no obstruction to its being taught, since we already teach many scientific theories we know to be wrong.
armando:
I have nowhere ignored experimental error. Perhaps you can show me exactly where you think I have. It refers to variations in the results of measuring processes, not in the value of whatever is being measured. A related issue is the precision of the measuring process, so we can only ever say that a prediction is in accordance with experiment to the limit of possible measurement precision. We keep aiming for and achieving greater precision and look for differences to theoretical predictions.
I take every scientific theory on its own terms. There is a basic difference between Special Relativity – which restricts its own domain of application in its two basic precepts from which the whole theory is derived – and Newtonian Mechanics which claims that it applies to everything and that space and time are absolute. The latter claims are wrong. Whether space and time are absolute or not is a simple dichotomy.
I will repeat again why Newtonian mechanics is still taught and used:
1) The alternatives are too difficult
2) Its predictions are sometimes close enough to the correct values that the difference makes no difference.
Here is the thing:
1) if the alternatives were simpler it would no longer be either taught or used
2) if its predictions were always very wrong then it would no longer be either taught or used
I do not believe you have grasped these points.
As for the truth status of Newtonian mechanics before the 20th century, it was believed to be totally correct. There seemed to be no phenomena it could not be applied to. We then learned otherwise. It was always false. But there is no point throwing away a theory with no known flaws just because from experience we suspect that someday we will have to replace it with a superior theory required to explain the results of experiments or observations at present inconceivable. Note the word “suspect”. We cannot be certain that replacements for existing theories with no known flaws will be required.
As for General Relativity and Quantum gravity, we are in an anomalous situation. We know General Relativity does not apply on the tiniest scales. On the other hand we have no working theory of Quantum Gravity. It would appear that most physicists think – in a hazy way IMHO – that we will get a unified theory of all forces, including gravity, in a time scale not much different to that required to get a working theory of Quantum Gravity or that the search for a unified theory will be more fruitful. So they would rather work on some variant of a unified theory, such as string theory. In short the situation is that we have a theory – General Relativity – that does not do what it claims to do but which works quite well in circumstances where we have no alternative. We have to live with the mess until a new Einstein leads us out of darkness.
Now to creationism. You wrote: “the fact that creationism is wrong can be no obstruction to its being taught, since we already teach many scientific theories we know to be wrong”. I’ve given two different scenarios where theories we now to be wrong are taught (Newtonian mechanics and general Relativity). None of the reasons that apply in those cases hold for creationism, because we have evolution.
You also wrote “no one researches evolution anymore”. Ironically this is close to a claim of one particular strand of creationists, although they say the lack of research is because biologists have rejected evolution. The opposite is the case. A more accurate picture is in the very title of an essay by the great biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky: “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense_Except_in_the_Light_of_Evolution).
Fair enough, Paul, essentially you want to insist on a strict dichotomy where there are various different types of right and wrong….we simply have to recognise one of the 100 possibilities of our strict dichotomy. We agree on this in principle, that Newtonian mechanics isnt wrong in the same way creationism is…but then, I’d say that calling them both wrong tends to obscure that.
Apart from the fact that you missed the sarcasm in my evolution comment, I’m not sure I have much more to say. Your view of science isn’t one that is shared by scientists, and your terminology is really odd – essentially, you would classify all science as “wrong”, unless it explictly states that it only holds when it holds. It is perverse to say a more general theory which gives more accurate predictions is wrong, whereas a special limiting case of that theory is right…but, whatever. I won’t convince you, I realise, so I’ll just leave it now.
Armando and Paul Power:
Fascinating discussion! You both seem to be quite brilliant, but I think that armando has a more cogent argument. IMHO, what seems to be lacking here in what is evidently a vast pool of knowledge, is familiarity with dialectical logic, which doesn’t reject formal logic, but demonstrates its limits. The idea is that formal logic applies to reality at any given moment, but that dialectical logic applies more to the processes of development. Instead of “A is B or A is not B,” which is true as a snapshot, so to speak, dialectical logic says that every component of A is becoming non-A, so that “A is A and also non-A,” which is true as a motion picture.
At every stage of development, our knowledge is conditioned by the level achieved by science. As knowledge develops, our conception of reality deepens, becoming more exact. Scientific truths are, therefore, relative in the sense that they don’t give complete knowledge of the objects of study, and contain elements that will be changed, made more exact and profound, and replaced by new ones as knowledge develops. At the same time, every relative truth is a step forward in the cognition of absolute truth, and will contain elements of it.
As science develops, it reveals the properties of objects and the relations between them more profoundly, coming gradually closer to the cognition of absolute truth. The earlier theories are constantly being made more precise and developed. Some hypotheses are refuted, others are confirmed.
So there’s no need for relativist pomo claptrap.
armando wrote:
“you would classify all science as “wrong”, unless it explictly states that it only holds when it holds. It is perverse to say a more general theory which gives more accurate predictions is wrong, whereas a special limiting case of that theory is right”
You are not taking on board that Special Relativity (SR) has inbuilt limits on its applicability whereas Newtonian mechanics (NM) does not. And that SR could still suffer the fate of NM if we find some circumstances where it applies but is not in accord with experiment or observation.