Formal Logic, Part III

Today I'm going to depart from the textbook for a moment, and work out some consequences of what you've seen in the first two parts.  There's something very significant lurking here, and students of logic usually pass over it without forcing it out into the light.

In the last part we worked on the concept of logical equivalence, which is when two forms of an argument have exactly the same truth values in every case. This has an important consequence: because the two forms preserve each other's truth, you can substitute one for the other. Just as in mathematics, you can treat equalities as interchangable. If it is helpful in getting where you need to go in algebra, for example, you can divide both sides of an equation by two, or multiply them both by two. The truth of the equation is preserved:

ab=2
2(ab)=4
0.5(ab)=1

Likewise:

J ≡ M
M ≡ J

Once we get past the foundations of formal logic, and into advanced logic, this mathematical assumption becomes more and more important. Logical deductive systems have strict rules governing substitutions that are supposed to be truth-preserving. Various operators have different rules, so it is often important to be able to substitute one set of operators for another in order to reach the final result you are seeking.

Here is an example. In modal logic, the following two propositions are thought to be readily exchangable:

◊p ("Possibly p," or proposition p is possible)
~□~p ("Not-necessarily-not p," or, p is not necessarily forbidden -- and is, therefore, possible)

You can do the same thing with "necessarily P" and "not-possibly-not p."

Why does that matter? One reason is that there are rules for handling the box of necessity (□) that differ from the not-operator (~). You can only derive possibility from possibility (◊), but if you can switch to the not-necessarily-not and eliminate the first "not," you can then derive a necessary truth using the box forms.

Because all of these forms are thought to be proven to preserve truth, this means that you can use these advanced logical forms to move from a proposition known to be true to another very different proposition that you can treat as necessarily true also.

This is why, for more than a hundred years, this kind of logical philosophy has had pride of place in the Anglo-American world. It believes it is bringing something very much like mathematical precision to the wider world of human knowledge. If you also believe that, it is a very exciting field even today.

Nothing like this is true for Aristotle's philosophy. That is not to say that he didn't see a relationship between the mathematics of his day, and the logic of his day. He also saw a relationship between the logic of his day and the practical human problems of his day. However, he explicitly rejected the idea that you could create a deductive logic that applies directly to practical human problems. As he says in Nicomachean Ethics I.3:

Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts. Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, admit of much variety and fluctuation of opinion, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention, and not by nature. And goods also give rise to a similar fluctuation because they bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage. We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statement be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.

Likewise in the Rhetoric I.1:

Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated. The orator's demonstration is an enthymeme, and this is, in general, the most effective of the modes of persuasion. The enthymeme is a sort of syllogism, and the consideration of syllogisms of all kinds, without distinction, is the business of dialectic, either of dialectic as a whole or of one of its branches. It follows plainly, therefore, that he who is best able to see how and from what elements a syllogism is produced will also be best skilled in the enthymeme, when he has further learnt what its subject-matter is and in what respects it differs from the syllogism of strict logic. The true and the approximately true are apprehended by the same faculty; it may also be noted that men have a sufficient natural instinct for what is true, and usually do arrive at the truth. Hence the man who makes a good guess at truth is likely to make a good guess at probabilities.

Aristotle preserves the idea that strict logic is closely related to practical decision-making, which is the proper subject matter of rhetoric and ethics and political science. But he explicitly rejects the idea that you can obtain a deduction, a demonstration, of the sort that contemporary analytic philosophy often seeks. His examples are on point: in general, courage is a praiseworthy quality, and most of the time it will lead you to greater success in life.

However, there are counterexamples. The poet Sydney Lanier, during his time as a Confederate officer aiding British blockade runners as a pilot, behaved courageously and honestly in refusing to disguise himself as British when overhauled by a Union naval vessel. As a result, he caught tuberculosis while interned as a prisoner of war and died before he was forty. His virtues caused him to produce some remarkable works of literature and music, but they also killed him.

Now a proper defense of contemporary logic might suggest that they have an out here. Truth-preserving forms can only preserve as much truth as was in the original proposition. Thus, if the original proposition you are starting from is -- as Aristotle says -- not necessarily true but only probably true, your conclusion can only be taken to be probably true as well.

But I think Aristotle's point is stronger than that. He's very much in favor of applying "a sort of syllogism" to the problems of everyday life, but he's also clear that there is a kind of double analogy at work. First of all, the earlier practical problem you are taking as an example is an analogy, and analogies are always a little imprecise. If we say "our current situation is like Washington at Valley Forge," we don't really mean that it's exactly like Washington's situation. There's an imprecision.

In addition, the kind of logic we can apply to these analogies isn't going to offer us truth-preservation in the same way as what Aristotle calls "strict logic." It's going to be a "sort of syllogism" we can actually bring to bear, and for a good reason: even if we should go as far as translating our problems into the mathematical language of formal logic, so we can apply a strict deduction according to rigorous forms, we will have introduced new ambiguities in the translation. That is, of course, just why Bertrand Russell and others preferred to symbolize propositions: they hoped to eliminate ambiguities of natural language. Finally, it simply cannot be done: strict logic doesn't admit of many of the elements we need to capture all the details of a real-world problem.

(A great example of this is the symbolized forms of St. Anslem's Ontological Proof for the Existence of God. It's a valid argument when symbolized... but it can't actually prove what Anslem was after, because it is necessary to formalize "best" or "better than" in a way that loses his sense of the term entirely.)

In any case, this is a major difference between the ancient and medieval understanding of logic, and the contemporary form. Whether you view the contemporary enchantment with mathematical logic a romance or a seduction depends on your view of the character of the logic itself. I believe Aristotle still has the best of this argument, even though he never got to see the development of algebra, or the subsequent similar refinements in formal logic.

Faction

At RealClearPolicy, James v. Delong writes about one of the dangers of letting government get too big: it becomes even more difficult to moderate the natural tendency of factions to use the democratic process to vote themselves public goodies.

Capture by faction has become endemic. As government has grown and budgets and regulatory empires have expanded, economic and ideological factions have carved off satrapies in the agencies and congressional subcommittees.  The true greens control EPA. Unions have Labor and the NLRB.  The banks have the Fed and Treasury.  The energy companies used to have the Department of Energy, but now it is in the hands of the green crony capitalists.  Farm policy is controlled by a coalition of agricultural interests and food-stamp advocates.  HUD serves housing industry and urban constituencies.  HHS and its state satellites are a tool of the health-care industry -- my state senator in Montana deals with 63 health-care lobbyists, all of them focused on one thing: more money from the state.  Academia, teachers' unions, and the consulting industry control the Department of Education. Public employees have become a powerful interest group in themselves.  And so on. 

Conservatives keep arguing about Obama's political philosophy, but they miss the point.  His strength is that he has none.  He has no views on environmental or labor or health or education policy; whatever the interests that have been given that part of the government want is all right with him.  His job is to assure each member of his coalition that it will indeed be given freedom of action, to mediate the occasional conflicts, and to serve as a mouthpiece when interest-group talking points are put on his teleprompter.

               *       *       *

The rise of this special-interest state was not totally without a justifying political theory.  It was accompanied by a school of analysis called "interest-group liberalism," which posited that the various interest groups elbowing each other on the way to the trough would produce in the political system the self-regulating efficiencies that free-market competition produces in the economic sphere.  This was always just a metaphor, not a real analysis, and it does not stand up as a serious philosophy.

It's that last part that most interests me. Competition in the form of a race for the spoils doesn't work.   Competition can work to increase overall prosperity if it rewards productive behavior, but scrambling for political favors doesn't reward productive behavior.  It's more like announcing a police holiday and encouraging everyone to loot.  The kind of competition we need is the kind that spurs people to offer something more valuable so that other free people will willingly enter into a trade with them, even though they have alternatives.  In theory, you might use a democratic voting process to mediate those sorts of trades, but in practice it's far too clumsy.  It can't use price signals as effectively as the fine-grained system that leaves ever producer and consumer free to bargain with equals.  The spoils that each interest faction scramble for don't belong to the people who award them, so the price signals are all broken and the supply and demand can't be brought into balance.

Whose Purpose Is To Kindle

Today's sending-forth hymn omitted one of its three verses. It is sung to the Ode to Joy.

God, who still a sword delivers rather than a placid peace,
with your sharpened sword disturb us, from complacency release!
Save us now from satisfaction, when we privately are free,
yet are undisturbed in spirit by our neighbor’s misery.

Secrets and low-hanging fruit

An interesting article, by way of Assistant Village Idiot's sidebar, about ideas that already have been discovered, but never publicized.

Formal Logic, Part II

Part I is here, along with the text we're using. We'll begin today with Section 1.10, because I want to talk about logical equivalence.

Last time we talked about validity, and the difference between Aristotle's ideas of validity and modern ones. But there's another way of talking about validity in logic, which is this: an argument can be said to be valid if it is truth-preserving. That doesn't mean that it guarantees truth (see the section on "soundness"), but that a valid form will preserve whatever truth is there. If your propositions are true, a valid form will ensure that your conclusion is also true.

Truth-preservation is also why we can say that two apparently very different arguments are logically equivalent. What it means for two arguments to be logically equivalent is that the two arguments are true or false together, 100% of the time. If you go through the exercises of building truth tables, you'll see that the truth tables for the two arguments will be exactly, precisely the same in every case.

Consider one of his examples:

1) Either it is raining, or it is snowing but not raining.

2) Either it is raining or it is snowing.

Since this is the inclusive "or," if it is both raining and snowing both of these sentences are considered true (because the "either it is raining" part is true). Symbolically, (1) would be rendered (R v (S & ~R)), and (2) would be (R v S). If the "R" is satisfied, the sentence is true; if the S is satisfied, both sentences are true if it is not raining. Both sentences are false if it is neither raining nor snowing.

There's a shorthand way of saying that two logical sentences are equivalent, which is called the biconditional. It is rendered in natural language "if and only if," or in philosophical shortcut, "iff." It has several logical symbols, but where I come from we use the triple bar: ≡.

Note, though, that this kind of equivalence goes both ways. 1≡2 means 2≡1. That is not the case for every sort of sentence we would render in natural language with "only if." "He is a bachelor if and only if he is an unmarried male human" is a biconditional (as well, in this case, as a tautology) because wherever one set of things will be true, the other will, and vice versa.

The other kind of 'only if' is a material conditional. You could say "If John gets hired, then Mary will get hired." But that does not mean that the truth of John's hiring is equivalent to the truth of Mary's hiring. It means that "John will get hired only if Mary gets hired."

That's properly:

3) J -> M

Not:

4) J ≡ M

We can see they are not equivalent by building the truth table.

J M | (3) | (4)
---------------
T T | T | T
T F | F | F
F T | T | F
F F | T | T

Because the truth values of the claims do not hold together, the material conditional form of the statement is not logically equivalent to the biconditional. And while (J ≡ M) is the same as (M ≡ J), (J -> M) is not the same as (M -> J). The table for (M -> J) I will leave you to work out on your own as an exercise, if you choose, but you will see it comes apart from (J -> M).

Preserving the truth is what this is all about.

Snakebit

September 11, 2001, was a really bad day to get a lethal snakebite in Myanmar and need an air evacuation.  Now there's a new first-aid treatment for neurotoxin-type snake venom that was inspired in part by one unfortunate scientist's experience.  The treatment doesn't break down the venom directly, but it helps you live with it a bit longer while you get to  a hospital or your body breaks down the venom naturally:

Most neurotoxins work by attacking the neuromuscular junction – the regions between the nerves and the muscles that trigger the muscles to move when the brain signals them. They do this by blocking an essential neurotransmitter – acetylcholine – from passing from the nerve to the muscle, telling it to move. The result is paralysis, even in the crucial lung muscles. . . . 

A patient in this predicament needs antivenom, a molecule that deactivates the venom directly. Neostigmine cannot do this, but can allow what little acetylcholine is able to get past the venom to move freely. And in an emergency, you need every second.

Rattlesnake vaccine is good, too, though it's available only for dogs and horses, not people.  It's not expensive, and most of the time it converts a real medical nightmare into a minor inconvenience.

Satellite view of global shipping

Here.

What we know

From Maggie's Farm, this Reason article about seven common misperceptions, including the idea that markets make people mean (or poor).

Salve Nos

This Latin song has a lovely opening line: "Save us, star of the sea."

"15 Minutes Prior"

Boy does this seem familiar.

H/t Mr. Sparkle, who introduced me to one of the British military humor sites.

...And Shove It

Taranto reports that a Tennessee news editor lost his job over a headline borrowed from an old Johnny Paycheck song.

Don't feel bad. Authority figures of a certain cut have always found that song offensive to their heightened sense of dignity.

Good News!

The Executive branch has graciously granted Congress a waiver from Obamacare. There was some real concern there that the people who passed this law might have to abide by it.

Or, as the first comment says, "Whew! You don't know what a relief it is, knowing our rulers won't have to pay some of their own personal expenses."

Some Help on NSA Programs

The MSM occasionally still produces helpful journalism. Here are two pieces on the NSA question that are useful in following the issue.

First, General Alexander speaks to the Black Hat hacker conference. This is what the best defense of NSA looks like, constructed for a conference of people whom the NSA knows will see through any obfuscations. So this is the upside.

Second, an analysis of similar testimony presented to Congress. This is part of what the downside looks like.

Could have been worse

I guess the folks in my previous post should be grateful they had only been Googling "wildlife refuges for rescued deer" instead of "pressure cooker" on one computer and "backpack" on the other.  Of course, when the family in this link did the latter, it's anyone's guess exactly who those guys were who showed up to investigate.  For all they can tell now, they may have been from Parks & Wildlife, too.

Too much time on their hands

Sounds like a government division in need of a force reduction.  How many SWAT team members does it take to kill one contraband fawn?

Poor little fellow should have been left where he was found.  Someone meant kindly, but he probably was just in hiding waiting for his mom to come back.  Still, aerial surveillance and a 9-member attack force seem a bit like overkill.  I hope the local community goes berserk.

What Chivalry Is

Chivalry is the quality of a man who can tame a horse and ride it to war.

That's all it is. Everything else associated with it is either a precondition for developing this quality, or a consequence of it. The core of the thing is the man and the beast.

What does it take to tame a horse? It takes courage, not recklessness, but that kind of disciplined and developed courage that comes from learning to fear being thrown, and getting on horses again. It takes self-mastery, because the horse is a prey animal that will amplify your fear. You must learn to ride through it, until even you don't really feel the fear in the same way anymore.

It takes gentleness. A horse responds to the slightest touch. You must be sensitive to its movements, its breathing, the language of its body.

What does it take to ride a horse to war? It takes trustworthiness. The horse must believe in you to charge into the smell of blood.

It takes honor. You can't ride alone. You must build relationships with other men like you, who know they can count on you while there is blood in your body. There is your self-sacrifice, even to death.

What does it build in you to do these things? Some of the things have been said. You get the virtues you practice, as Aristotle teaches in the Nicomachean Ethics. You must have some courage to begin, but you will build courage as you do. You must have some self-mastery, but you will become the master of yourself. You must be gentle, and able to understand another very different kind of living being through touch alone. You will become moreso.

The habit of keeping your word is like any other habit. After a while, it becomes part of you. The habit of honor likewise.

Can you do without chivalry? I don't know. Can you do without men like this?


--

That's what chivalry is, and that's the root of what people come to call an 'ethos' or a 'system.' But it's easy to be fooled by the accidents. What US Special Forces were doing in Afghanistan a decade ago was not different from what Charlemagne's riders were doing in this core way. It is different in other ways, accidental ways, but this is the essence of the thing.

You can see, with a little thought, how the thing we call courtesy grows naturally out of this combination of gentleness and trustworthiness, a habit of honor and a character that masters itself.

The question to ask is not whether you need chivalry, nor even whether or how to revive it where it is lost. The question you should worry about is whether you can do it without the horse. I think you can, but only if you can recapture that essence in other ways. Wherever possible, it is best to start with the horse.

"Too 'rah-rah, America' . . ."

. . . for the 9/11 Museum?  Seriously?

What Chivalry Is Not

The New York Times has engaged the services of a number of writers to pontificate on the question of whether chivalry can or should be "resuscitated." It would have helped if they had agreed just what it is, this chivalry, that they might want to revive.

In a way it is amusing to see the Times, which has been mocking and undermining chivalry since the mid-19th Century, concerned about the question at all. But you can understand why, seeing the way that leading political figures in New York from the party allegedly on the side of women treat the women in their lives. They can see the ugliness around them, and can dimly remember a fading time when at least some men behaved better. But weren't those men the enemy of all progress?

First, then, let us examine what their various experts think chivalry might be, and why it is not in fact those things. Once we understand what it isn't, I will post separately a definition to explain what it is. Then, perhaps, we can usefully discuss whether it can -- or should -- be revived in Manhattan. It needs no revival here, though of course like every valuable part of civilization it must be constantly replanted and renewed in the young.

1) Emily Esfahani Smith doesn't seem to know just what kind of thing she thinks chivalry is, but she knows that she misses it. Her examples are clear enough, but the remedy is not. She variously says that it has 'kindness at its heart,' but also that 'being good -- being noble -- is at its heart' and that its 'essence is self-sacrifice,' 'whether we name that self-sacrifice chivalry or not.' She gives a nod to Dr. Mansfield's claim that chivalry is a 'manly' virtue, but says women can do it too.

So is chivalry self-sacrifice, in the spirit of kindness and nobility, in a manly way that women can do just as well? No, of course not. For one thing self-sacrifice is practiced by many who are not at all chivalrous: there is nothing of chivalry in the Buddhist monk who begs every day for his supper, yielding everything for enlightenment. Furthermore, there are things a chivalrous man ought not to sacrifice, even in the service of others, such as principles of honor and valor.

2) Brett McKay writes of chivalry as a kind of manliness, but he is writing defensively so he never defines its value. He points out that the Violence Against Women Act is an example of a similar recognition of differences between men and women; he says it need not be about the 'inferiority or lofty superiority' of women; and that one 'need not fail to appreciate strides toward equality' to recognize things like the facts of the Aurora shooting.

Bizarrely, he goes on directly from that example -- Aurora -- to say, "in a gender-neutral modern world, chivalric acts are non-onerous rituals that faintly echo our relationship to each other when all the layers of civilization are stripped away." But if Aurora is an example of chivalrous acts, it was a set of acts of the most onerous kind. They were not ritual acts, either, acts that intended to symbolize something else in a correct way. They were not symbols, but actions.

3) Abigail Collazo would like chivalry to die, because she thinks it is about "it's about viewing women as fragile, delicate creatures who require special treatment." What she wants instead is a standard of courtesy, as well as for men to recognize that women are strong and worthy of respect.

But! "This isn’t to say that women should never be granted special considerations. In a world of vast inequalities between the sexes, women are uniquely affected by..."

Yes, well.

One might be tempted to say that a genuinely strong woman ought not to need for men to think of her in the way she prefers, whether she thinks she prefers being treated as a delicate creature or an indelicate one. But let us meet one of the delicate flowers of whom the men of chivalry dreamed. This is from Norris J. Lacy's translation of the Prose Lancelot, scroll 125. The story is from the 1200s. Lancelot is traveling to a judicial duel he must fight in, when he comes across a tournament in progress. He watches for a while, but takes no part as he soon must fight for his life.

...soon a maiden appeared before Lancelot, and said, "Lord knight, lend me your shield."

"Why, my lady?"

"Because I need it. It is not doing you any good, and I could use it well."

"How would you use it?"

"I would tie it to my horse's tail and have him led inside my stables whenever I wanted, for the love of good knights who watch tournaments and dare not fight in them."

I imagine Ms. Collazo would have liked her ancestors better than she thinks. Her shaming of Lancelot is as effective in driving him to do her will as any feminist writer has ever been in shaming men into some alteration of conduct.

In any case, chivalry is not chiefly or principally about relations between men and women at all. Those ideas fall out of it, but are not the core of it. If you think of it chiefly in those terms, you are mistaken about it and its value.

4) A man named Keith Bernard, whose qualification to write on the question is apparently that he is 'a DJ and music producer,' appears to view chivalry as mere hypocrisy. The only thing wrong with his opinion is his complete ignorance of the subject.

5) Dr. Richard Abels, formerly of the US Naval Academy, is of the opinion that "Medieval chivalry was an aristocratic ethos designed to distinguish the military nobility of Western Europe from those whom they deemed to be their social inferiors." Well, if that is all it was, of course we don't need it any more; we no longer have that social structure to defend.

His opinion strikes me as a strange one for a man who long served an institution at which he might have met some men of chivalry. It is the opinion of a historian from the school that divides humanity into classes and explains history in terms of the struggles between them. He doesn't seem to connect the men he must have known with the ethic, which he says "promotes violence" and "has faded" as a matter of course given changes in social structures. Given what he thinks he's talking about, it's hard to argue the point. Naturally we don't need a system for propping up an aristocracy or some other category of privilege.

But that isn't what, say, Ms. Smith was talking about at all. The quality she was longing for was not one that propped up men in their privilege, but one that kept them from marching around behaving like apes. Reducing chivalry to something like the fashion of wearing powdered wigs -- to show that you could afford one -- is to miss the core of it.

6) Scott Farrell, a man who really does know something about the subject, wants to explain it chiefly in terms of service to others. In this he captures correctly one of the values of chivalry, the value of honor. He goes on to say, "Of course, there’s more to it than this. Chivalry is a complex ethical and philosophical code that includes ideals like honesty, justice, courtesy and enterprise — all of which the world could use a bit more of."

Well, yes, that's true. But it also makes it hard to see just what it is that is wanted. Do we just want the virtues? If we get honesty, justice, courtesy, self-sacrifice and perhaps one or two others like courage, do we also need chivalry? Is it nothing more than the unity of other, independent virtues?

What is it?

Freedom of work and speech

FireDogLake is unhappy about a new federal-rights lawsuit that could accomplish what Proposition 32 did not in California, which is the elimination of a union's right to extract fees from unwilling workers and use them to promote political causes inimical to the worker:

Over the years the U.S. Supreme Court has generally upheld union practices that require public-sector employees to first pay dues and then opt out if they don’t support a union’s political activities.  The practice was upheld in a two-decade old case known as Abood v. Detroit Board of Education.  But in an unrelated 2012 case, the Supreme Court suggested that the high court’s earlier Abood decision may have been a mistake. 

“Justice [Samuel Alito], writing for five justices, went out of his way to raise doubts about the Abood decision and, in effect, to invite a test case to overturn it,” wrote Peter Scheer in the Huffington Post.  “The Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association lawsuit is an RSVP to that invitation.”

Miss Manners assures us that RSVPs are always correct.  The lawsuit's polite sponsor, the Center for Individual Rights, is a suitable invitee.   It was behind the 1996 Hopwood v. Texas case, which succerssfully challenged affirmative action in the University of Texas's selection process, and LaRoque v. Holder, which challenged the same pre-clearance requirements under the Voting Rights Act that were overturned last month in Shelby County v. Holder.   It was also behind California's Proposition 209, a successful 1996 anti-affirmative-action ballot initiative.  CIR has defended James O’Keefe in disputes over California’s anti-tape recording statute, as well as Anita MonCrief, an ex-ACORN executive who was sued by her old group.

Supporters of California's mandatory union dues are worried that a Supreme Court precedent in this case could spell doom for mandatory union dues nationwide.  The CIR link above takes you straight to a donation page.

Shadow government

Andrew McCarthy recently wrote that he wished the supporters of government surveillance programs would do a better job of defending what he thinks are essential programs.  Today, Mark Steyn explains why he thinks the "national-security right" is shrinking:

But the real reason why there are fewer defenders of their programs than Andy would like is the subject he tackles in his excellent books:  the ideological faintheartedness of the United States.  In this struggle, our enemies hide in plain sight, but Western governments will not confront them in plain sight.  As I wrote here last month:

Because the formal, visible state has been neutered by political correctness, the dark, furtive shadow state has to expand massively to make, in secret, the judgment calls that can no longer be made in public.

Operational secrecy probably makes sense to most Americans, but we'd like to think that they still have a voice in policy.

Is Civilization A Bad Idea?

...asks the publicly-funded news organization broadcasting on publicly-funded airwaves.

Schlepping

I enjoyed this article about the adaptation of transport to the lack of paved roads, especially this photograph of windbarrows, which could move large loads on a narrow path:

Formal Logic, Part I

I told Tom I would accompany his early posts on Aristotle's logic with a companion series on formal logic as it is practiced today. It will be very introductory, and will take as its textbook Richard C. Jeffrey's Formal Logic: Its Scope and Limits.



I'm going to be attempting no more than to introduce the basic concepts, with an eye toward showing how modern logic and Aristotle's logic differ. It's mostly for Tom, because he said he was interested, but perhaps some of you may find it interesting as well. Formal logic is not my chief area of interest in philosophy, of course, so if any of you are well-versed you will probably find points of disagreement which you are free and welcome to argue. For those of you who haven't studied it, I hope I can provide a solid enough introduction to make it worth your while.

The online text is the Fourth Edition, and it has lost what I think is a helpful explanation from earlier editions -- I suppose he thought on reflection that it was too basic. The earlier piece talks about truth, and it points out two things very helpful to keep in mind when doing formal logic:

It is the job of pure logic to point out that if it is true to say

Tom stole it,

then it is equally true to say

Tom stole it or Dick stole it.

He goes on to point out that in natural language we would find the second statement to be much LESS true, assuming we know for a fact that Tom stole whatever it was. Pure logic doesn't deal in greater or lesser degrees of truth. It is purely binary: a statement is true, or it is not true. Since it is true that "Tom stole it or Dick stole it," the statement evaluates as true.

He has a second example on the other side. There exist albino crows, which means that the following statement is false:

All crows are black.

But of course the next statement is true:

Nearly all crows are black.

That means we'd be inclined to say that "All crows are black" is NEARLY true. But there is no 'nearly true' in pure logic, any more than there is 'less true.' It is true, or it is false. So "All crows are black" is false. (Examples are from the 1967 edition, pages 3-4.)

The Fourth Edition begins with validity. That gives us a good early point of contrast with Aristotle, who had a notion of validity that I think is actually better than the one in use in modern logic. See section 3.2 of this article, and contrast with what Jeffrey says. What is the difference, exactly? Do you agree with me that Aristotle is on stronger ground, or do you disagree? What are the strengths of each approach?

It's Exactly Alike, Except For Being The Opposite

Now here's a title guaranteed to grab the attention: "The John Kerry Republicans."

During the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry was widely ridiculed when, in discussing Iraq and Afghanistan war funding, he declared, “I actually did vote for [it] before I voted against it.”

Well, now 50 House Republicans can say the same thing about their votes on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) terrorist surveillance program.

The author, Marc Thiessen, goes on to claim that this represents a kind of hypocrisy. However, he misunderstands the force of the problem Kerry had in 2004.

The problem wasn't that Kerry had changed his mind. People change their minds on the basis of new evidence.

The problem is that Kerry was trying to convince a crowd who favored "it" that he was their guy, because he had supported their cause before he voted against it. That argument -- "I was on your side before I voted against you" -- is really worthy of the ridicule it received.

House Republicans now are talking to voters who are increasingly, and rightly given recent revelations, suspicious that the NSA program really does have adequate oversight and limits. They're telling the voters, "We once thought this seemed reasonable, but as we have learned more we, like you, have developed concerns."

It's true that both situations involve mind-changing, but otherwise they are precise opposites.

Aristotle’s Categories

My first reading was Paul Studtmann’s article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), “Aristotle’s Categories.” The Categories basically lays out Aristotle's ontology — what exists and what you can say about what exists. Studtmann falls prey to a very common malady in academics, an inability to write for true beginners. I supplemented my reading with a much more amenable SEP article by Robin Smith, “Aristotle’s Logic,” which, along with Grim's explanations in email, helped me understand some unexplained terms and concepts in Studtmann.

There were a couple of interesting things to me about the Categories. The lesser interesting thing is Aristotle’s ontology itself. In essence, he claims there are substances and accidents. Substances exist independently while accidents only exist in substances. For example, a human being is a substance while skin color and height are accidents. You can’t have color by itself; color only exists as a property of a substance.

Substances and accidents are further categorized into universal and particular. Sadly, I discovered that universal accidents are not what happens when God goes on vacation and forgets to turn the gravity off. Instead, universal accidents are the concepts of accidents, such as redness. Universal substances are similarly concepts of particular substances. Humanity would be a universal substance, while Steve Earle would be a particular substance.

Aristotle prioritizes particular substances, calling them first substances; all the rest depend on them for existence: humanity doesn’t exist without individual humans, redness doesn’t exist without apples and other particular things that have that color. Here, he firmly disagrees with Plato, and I agree with him.

Although they use different and somewhat less precise terms, the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation is easily explained with this set of categories. The bread and wine maintain their accidents, but their substances are transformed into the body and blood of Christ.

But that’s old news. More interestingly on this occasion, Aristotle uses the term ‘said of’ for something that only exists in something else, an interesting use of grammar to describe reality. Studtmann informs us that some philosophers have tried to argue that Aristotle was really laying out a theory of language, but too much of the Philosopher’s work treats words as referring to actual things and most philosophers take the Categories as an ontological work, not a linguistic one. Even so, the Categories basically come down to substances and things you can say about substances. The Latin for the title is even the Predicamenta, The Predicates.

Language is a fascinating and important part of philosophy, and I’ll come back to it again.

Second look at Detroit?

Maybe the Democrats who've been pointing to Detroit lately as the poster child for libertarian principles are onto something, after all.  If so, there's hope even for Somalia.

In my old neighborhood in Houston, we all chipped in and bought private security to beef up our patrols.  It was entirely voluntary at $100/year--well within almost anyone's budget.  The ones who opted out were understood to be getting a free-rider benefit to some extent, but as long as they didn't mind forgoing perks like a special vacation watch, no one minded all that much.

Much more can be done privately that we often assume.

Conversion stories

Re AGW.  They're all in one direction, of course, since they come from Watts up with That.  On the other hand, have you ever heard of anyone who converted from deep skepticism to firm AGW belief?

Birth of a party

My eyes popped at the three-year swing in these poll results on NSA surveillance and the proper balance between security and privacy.

As the author notes, every faction swung wildly except for moderates in both parties.  A huge majority overall believe the government will use NSA surveillance data for purposes other than to fight terrorism.  The author wonders whether a third party will coalesce out of the libertarians on the left and right.

Origins of other life, and more on negative capability

From the NYT book review of "What Darwin Got Wrong," which was linked in the Dyson interview that was linked in my prior post:

How does one detect life on Mars?  One suggestion was to send up a sort of microscope, collect some dust from the Martian surface, and see if anything wiggled.  If it wiggles it is alive.  This seemed too unsophisticated for the space scientists. 

Instead they sent up a sort of vacuum cleaner filled with a nutrient solution containing a radioactively labeled simple sugar.  If the dust sucked up from the surface contained living cells, they would start to grow and divide, metabolize the sugar, and release radioactive carbon dioxide, which would be detected by a counter.  The Mars lander never detected any life activity although it was determined to be in perfect working order.  But that does not mean that there is no life on Mars.  It means that there is no life in Martian dust that grows on the sort of sugar provided.  This device certainly would not have detected a science-fiction Martian.  What the space scientists had done was to provide an ecological niche for a specific kind of life that they knew from earth, a niche that does not match a vast variety of earthly organisms.  If you do not specify the kind of organism you are looking for you cannot specify its ecological niche.  Perhaps the space program should look again for wiggly things.

This quotation is a casual aside in the review, but I liked it even more than the main body.  It's so difficult for us to think about the development of life in any way but our own, as if the development of DNA itself were not something of a long shot, and something we have no reason at all to suppose might develop spontaneously in parallel on another planet.

On the subject of the book itself, the reviewer notes the extraordinary hostility that has greeted its authors, who are viewed suspiciously as catering to religious extremists.  In fact, they mostly are complaining of a tendency to take literally Darwin's "metaphor" of natural selection and talk as if nature willed a new creature into being.  As evolutionary biologists often note with exasperation, evolution has no foresight.  The reviewer suggests that instead of “natural selection” we should talk about differential rates of survival and reproduction.  That's not very pithy, though, does it?  At least "natural selection" deftly gets across the idea that a few successful individuals are plucked out of the group in the sense of thriving where others fail, such that their descendants come to dominate the population.  The whole idea of calling it "natural" selection surely was to contrast this unintentional mechanical process with deliberate design of the sort that produced poodles from wolves.  But it's true that a lot of anthropomorphic nonsense is talked by supposedly secular biologists who would faint dead away if that tendency were equated with the worldview of the intelligent-design community.  As the reviewer observes:

The other source of anxiety and anger is that the argument made by Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini strikes at the way in which evolutionary biologists provide adaptive natural historical explanations for a vast array of phenomena, as well as the use by a wider scholarly community of the metaphor of natural selection to provide theories of history, social structure, human psychological phenomena, and culture. If you make a living by inventing scenarios of how natural selection produced, say, xenophobia and racism or the love of music, you will not take kindly to the book. 

Even biologists who have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of what the actual genetic changes are in the evolution of species cannot resist the temptation to defend evolution against its know-nothing enemies by appealing to the fact that biologists are always able to provide plausible scenarios for evolution by natural selection. But plausibility is not science.  True and sufficient explanations of particular examples of evolution are extremely hard to arrive at because we do not have world enough and time.  The cytogeneticist Jakov Krivshenko used to dismiss merely plausible explanations, in a strong Russian accent that lent it greater derisive force, as “idel specoolations.”

Even at the expense of having to say “I don’t know how it evolved” most of the time, biologists should not engage in idle speculations.

Negative capability

A commenter over at Sarah Hoyt's place mentioned that Freeman Dyson used to run simulations of systems that might result in a decrease in the world's human population, and that the only factor that consistently worked was the introduction of reliable electricity to fast-breeding cultures.  I spent some time this morning trying to track down more information about that interesting line of inquiry, but failed.  Instead, I came across this refreshing interview with Mr. Dyson on the subject of the origin of life, in which he time and again declines the interviewer's invitation to express a view on a controversy about which he is either not fully up to speed, or about which any answer must be the rankest sort of individual speculation.

Keats famously endorsed "negative capability," the willingness to endure ambiguity.  It may not always be such a terrific idea in moral matters, where it often seems to take the form of choosing not to be aware of what we already know perfectly well, such as that it's not possible to excuse systematic lechery with the phrase "I'm a hugga."  Nor have I ever been convinced by his idea that poetic aesthetics trumps all other considerations.  Nevertheless, the capacity to remain "content with half-knowledge" is a fine thing for a scientist.  Dyson candidly refuses to pretend that he knows what he doesn't.

I particularly enjoyed this exchange:

Suzan Mazur:  You draw an analogy in your book between origin of life and the origin of body plans half a billion years ago, a "sudden efflorescence of elaborate body plans," during the Cambrian explosion.  Have you had further thoughts about this in light of the "evo-devo revolution"?  Did form come first or did form arise from genetic programs? . . . 

Freeman Dyson:  By the time of the Cambrian explosion is very late in the history of life and genetics had become very powerful.  But, of course, we have no idea what happened in detail. 

Suzan Mazur:  How soon do you think we'll get to the bottom of things regarding origin of life, i.e., make the breakthrough? 

Freeman Dyson:  Give it a hundred years, perhaps, but I don't think my prediction is worth anything.  It all depends on what nature says, because nature is always surprising us. And probably in this case too. 

Suzan Mazur:  A hundred years.  You think it's going to take that long? 

Freeman Dyson:  Well I would call that short.

The origin of life is one of my favorite scientific mysteries.  Where I always get brought up short is the explanation for how replication started in the first place.  Once you have both a metabolism ("defined in a general way as the evolution of a population in which some of the molecules catalyze the synthesis of others") and a replicating system, it's easy enough to see how the ones with a successful metabolism will out-replicate the others and glom onto more metabolic resources.  But how do you get started on this pairing?  How do clumps of chemical reactions start to replicate and compete?  Dyson thinks that a profitable area of study would be how pre-biotic chemical reactions spontaneously form a rudimentary metabolism, which they clearly do in the lab; advances in nano-technology are opening the door for better experiments in this area.  Next, he thinks that some kind of primitive self-replicating mechanism formed (rather as crystals automatically replicate) and made its living for a while as a parasite on the metabolic system.  Eventually host and parasite merged and became the earliest precursors to cells, in the form of lipid walls enclosing little globs of water with a lot of stuff dissolved in it.  Later, the replicating mechanism developed into the advanced form of RNA, setting the stage for the "RNA world" that's captured so much attention in recent years.

If he turns out someday to be right, that would make us mongrels at least twice over:  once from the mating of metabolisms and replicators, and next from the capture of mitochondria by their host cells.

A fitting memorial

Nothing argues more eloquently against the racist tendency to treat young black men on the street with suspicious caution than yelling "This is for Trayvon Martin" while you beat up and rob a citizen.  Dr. King would be proud.

Molon labe

More from the Daily Caller, complaints from the Children's Defense Fund in favor of the "common sense" gun-control legislation that they favor:

The U.S. has as many guns as people.  The U.S. accounts for less than 5 percent of the global population, but owns an estimated 35 to 50 percent of all civilian-owned guns in the world. . . . America’s military and law enforcement agencies have four million guns.  Our citizens have 310 million.  Has this made our children safer?

Yes.  Of course, it depends somewhat on from whom you think they need to be protected.

That explains it

Jamie Weinstein at the Daily Caller reports:

In 1988, Mahmoud Salam Saliman Abu Harabish and Adam Ibrahim Juma’a-Juma’a decided to firebomb a bus of Israeli civilians. 

The result was gruesome.  A 26-year old school teacher, Rachel Weiss, was incinerated, along with her three young children, who ranged from three years old to 9-months. An Israeli soldier who came to their rescue also died as result of the attack. 

Thanks to Secretary of State John Kerry’s nimble negotiating skills, Harabish and Juma’a-Juma’a will reportedly be among the 104 violent Palestinian terrorists released from Israeli prisons in stages as a goodwill gesture by the Jewish state in advance of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that are set to begin Monday in Washington, D.C.

My email feed adds:

TheDC Morning is starting to suspect that making John Kerry Secretary of State was a political ploy to make Hillary Clinton look competent by comparison.

Beginning Aristotle: A Disclaimer, a Request, a Plan

I am not a trained philosopher, nor do I play one on TV. The length of time from my first post until this post can be explained by two things: I don’t know how to write interestingly about Aristotle’s philosophy in a blog post, and I’m just exploring that philosophy, so I can’t be terribly informative except in the most mundane, “This is what I learned today” way.

For now, I’ve decided my posts on Aristotle will be a student’s thoughts rather than a synopsis or attempt to be profound (although the humor value of an attempt to be profound cannot be discounted, the prepositions would be all wrong (laughing at, vs. with)). Naturally, I welcome any discussion in the comments, but my request is that you would let me know either here or as we go what you might find interesting in a study of Aristotle. Maybe then I can tailor my writing to my audience a bit better.

Grim’s suggested plan of study:

Roughly, the medieval approach for students is:

1) Start by understanding his logical system. Getting a grasp on just what he means by "substance" and "attribute," and just what his categories are and how they work together, is very helpful.

2) Then read the Physics; the relevant article is here. This is a quite difficult work, and almost no one reads it today, but it's fundamental -- and, in fact, asks some very good questions about the nature of reality that our modern physics often elide past rather than engage.

3) Then read De Anima (see here (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-soul/) and here (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-psychology/)). Once you've understood how he thinks the world has to work, from the earlier pieces, this work will help you understand how he thinks human beings relate to the world and understand it.

4) Then read the Metaphysics ... This will explain what Aristotle thinks about the ultimate ends behind reality. If the Physics explains how things are, this work explains why things are as they are.

5) Finally, engage the Ethics and Politics. These should be read together, because the purpose of politics is to provide a state that supports an ethical life -- a life, in Aristotle's terms, in which the pursuit of happiness is most possible.

That's the plan.

An Acceptable Excuse

A friend of mine is writing a Young Adult novel based in ancient Greek mythology. She asked me to review it for comments. I told her that, unlike other Greek gods who were portrayed as teenagers who spoke in ordinary speech, her male hero Prometheus was portrayed as an adult who spoke with great formality, especially when he addressed the female lead. "He doesn't speak like a teenager, which may make him seem strange to your audience," I said. "He sounds like me."

Her response was, "Well of course he does. He's not a man. He's a god."

Well that's... very flattering, really.

Coercion and persuasion

Or, as I like to call the alternatives, tyranny and liberty.   I have just finished reading Kevin D. Williamson's very interesting book, "The End Is New and It's Going to Be Awesome."  Though I'm not entirely persuaded of one of his central premises, which is that politics' flaw is its inability to learn from mistakes (more on that later), he's got a very appealing thought experiment in the Epilogue about an alternative to coercion in dealing with the inevitable bad actors among us:

Short of your Hitlers and psychopathic killers, there are some very good alternatives to coercion.  In a world of instantaneous information exchanges and complex social relationships, reputation is extraordinarily important.  We should be looking at ways to use technology to build on that -- something a little more sophisticated than Yelp reviews.

Williamson describes a hypothetical car purchase. You hand the salesman your card, only to see his face fall when he runs it.

YOU:  "My card has been declined?"   SALESMAN:  "No, your card has . . . declined us."  A second later your iPhone buzzes with a text message.

You have signed up for an account alert from BeCool Card Services, which warns you when you are about to conduct a business transaction with a company that has violated one of the principles you hold dear.   Perhaps your car is offered for sale by a company that mistreats workers on Liberian rubber plantations.  Shortly thereafter, the car company's head of marketing gets a similar text message.   Does the company immediately mend its ways in Liberia?  Probably not, but what does the board think when the VP of marketing reports 100 or 1,000 such messages in a single year?

It's an essentially democratic approach, but without the need for a uniform decision binding on any minority.  It's not winner-take-all uniformity.  The winning political party doesn't get to say how the car company treats Liberian workers and ignore what the losing party thinks.  But then, there are very, very few social dilemmas that require a uniform approach, and those arguably are limited to circumstances of outright theft and violence.  Other disputes over who should marry whom, how long the workweek should be, and whether the workplace is hospitable enough to someone of your gender, age, race, or religion might be better handled by the kind of ongoing collective decision-making process that's often called "voting with your feet" or ostracization.   In fact, Williamson argues that the "right of exit" is essential to any form of ordered liberty.  Nothing but the power of another person to say "that won't suit me; I won't combine with you in this enterprise" can ever really keep well-meaning nanny-bullies in check.

Williamson's example is deliberately commercial and impersonal.  We already have traditional social mechanisms for policing behavior by damage to reputation in more intimate settings.  And it's still possible to rely on the police for help with crime -- without dragging them into disputes over gay marriage or the minimum wage.

This "crowd-sourcing" of approval and disapproval certainly has its downside.  Social ostracism can be very costly, and there's no guarantee that what society collectively decides will not marginalize people we think should be heroes.  But that danger is hardly unique to free crowd-sourcing.  At present, a more and more intrusive government takes a vote and then cheerfully imposes the majority view on everyone -- and the government has more than a tarnishing of reputation in its arsenal to enforce the universally binding result.

How will everyone know how to judge all the myriad social evils out there that we now rely on Congress to regulate?  Well, how do they know how to vote at present?  And how to Congressmen know?  They mostly don't.  In practice, they'll vote on the issues they know and care most about and keep their noses out of the rest.

It's not an all-purpose system, obviously.  Williamson approves of voluntary arrangements under which people locked in close proximity with each other agree to adopt community standards for matters that would be unworkable otherwise.  In a city, for instance, the local garbage pickup and potable water systems are likely to be mandatory; if you don't like it, don't live there.  Out where I live, we're free to arrange for our own water and garbage services:  rainwater, wellwater, truck the water in, or support the development of a local MUD; burn your garbage, bury it, or pay for a weekly or monthly pickup of one, two, or three large containers by a private company.  But even in a city, close-huddled citizens probably can figure out a way to address the staggering problem of sugary drinks in oversize containers without calling in the awesome power of the state and demanding a unanimity of practice.

Too good to source

I can't tell where this originated, so I give up on giving CWCID:  George Zimmerman is reportedly changing his name, to ensure that neither the Obama administration nor the press will ever again pay him a moment's attention.  His choice?  "Ben Ghazi."

Which of course reminds me of this:

No, he didn't

Ace recently joked on Twitter that he wasn't even making jokes about Candidate Weiner; he was just taking his information straight from the press conferences.  So when he posted today that Weiner responded to his campaign manager's decision to quit by assuring the public that "We have an amazing staff," I figured he had made it up.   No, no.  As Ace mused,

Meh. I don't know about "amazing." Let's just say "famous" or "well-traveled."

Phony scandals

“If Gov. Christie believes the constitutional rights and the privacy of all Americans are ‘esoteric,’ he either needs a new dictionary or he needs to talk to more Americans, because a great number of them are concerned about the dramatic overreach of our government in recent times,” Paul senior advisor Doug Stafford said.

Washington Times.

Law schmaw

I don't find the President's answer to this interview answer comforting.

Yikes

Hacker stories that come a little closer to home:

“When you lose faith that a car will do what you tell it to do,” he adds after we jump out of the SUV, “it really changes your whole view of how the thing works.”

H/t Bookworm Room (guest host Earl).

Between the lines

I don't feel this brief account gives us the necessary insight into all aspects of this fascinating couple's lives.  It's the old story:  they met in something called a "hacky-sack" circle, agreed to marry, then quarreled.

Hall took his few possessions and moved out of his fiancée’s home and into a tree at McLaren Park.

Soon, matters took a squalid turn.  After the fellow got cold and decided to return home, he was disappointed to see his fiancée returning from a date with a Marine, who found it necessary to assist his date's ex-betrothed in regaining his composure.  Bear-spray ensued, and it all ended up in criminal court, but everyone decided there was no real harm done.

Can't we at least get a reality show out of this?

H/t Rocket Science.

The Delian Ship

Douglas is interested today in an old discussion we had, in which Bthun spoke of his father's ax.

I think I've mentioned dad's axe here once or twice before. The one on which my bro replaced the head and a decade or two later, when it came into my possession, I replaced the handle...

Yup , I surely cherish 'dad's axe.

This raises a puzzle that has been spoken of since ancient Greece, at least. The Athenians who used to debate it used as their example a ship that they had in the harbor, supposedly the same one that Theseus himself used on his voyage to defeat the Minotaur and save the Athenian youths from being sacrificed. Every part of the ship had been replaced over the centuries (as with our own USS Constitution), but had been done so in such a way as to recreate the old piece as faithfully as before. Annually this ship sailed to the island of Delos for a ritual festival celebrating, among other things, Theseus' salvation of Athens.

The ship plays an important role in the history of philosophy for another reason. It was because the garlands for this annual voyage had been put on the ship before the conclusion of Socrates' trial that he was not executed until the entire voyage was completed. The laws of Athens did not permit executions during this sacred festival, which began when the garlands were displayed on the ship, and did not conclude until the ship had returned from Delos. For that reason, Socrates was kept in prison for quite some time. If Plato is right, it was a very fertile time for Socrates' discourse with his students; or possibly, it was the point at which Plato realized he needed to start writing some of this stuff down.

Socrates himself wrote nothing down. He doesn't seem to have cared for the written word, apparently because he thought of the written word as dead. What he wanted (as professor Gregory Nagy of Harvard puts it) was the life of the living word: he wanted the arguments to live in the minds and speech of his students, who would carry them forth and continue to debate these high questions of the soul, the nature of the world, the nature of mathematical objects, of virtues, and other good things. Plato met him halfway by writing them down, but in a form that preserves the structure of a dialogue between people trying to figure it out. This is why Plato reads so differently from Aristotle, who gives you the old arguments but then explains his position on them clearly. Most of the time Socrates in Plato's works ends with an admission that he hasn't quite got the whole answer, but wouldn't it be nice to start fresh there again some time?

One of the last questions he takes up is the question of the nature of the soul, and he proposes an idea very similar to my own -- it occurs to me now that the chief difference between them is accidental, because my idea of it was available to me because we have different technologies to use as analogues for how it might work. His model is a lyre -- which produces a harmony -- and mine is a technology like a radio or television, which can be tuned differently so as to receive different signals. I think that may even answer at least some of the problems he raises for the harmonic model, though it leaves open the question of what is producing the signal that can be received by a properly tuned body.

Is that an answer to the problem of the ax or the ship? It seems to me it is. In fact, it happens all the time to us: every day, we eat food, from which our body takes elements and makes itself new again. Over time every part of you is replaced. We have no problem saying that it is the same you, do we? We do this with animate rather than inanimate objects because they have a soul: an organizing activity, I mean, which itself is doing the constant work of rebuilding and maintaining itself. The ship doesn't have a soul, but it has an organizing activity, which is found in its maker and maintainers. As long as we continue to remake the ship, it is the same ship.

But what if we stop? Can we rebuild the Constitution once it is gone? To say that is to say that if we should die, but some future being should remake our body in such a way that it was again tuned to receive our soul, then we would live again. That happens to be the orthodox position on the resurrection of the body, as a matter of fact, but is it true? Or would we necessarily be different, and not the same, in the way that a new Constitution would be a different ship?

In Which Monty Python Proves That Washington Irving Was Responsible For The Idea That Medievals Belived The World Was Flat

No, really. He has trouble getting started, but Terry Jones knows his stuff.

"The Blip"

You probably saw the hook for this on InstaPundit yesterday, but I finally had a little time this morning to read past it to the responses and counterarguments later in the piece. That's the part that's worth reading, because the optimist case is almost as bleak as the hook. The problem is one we often have discussed here: technology continues to improve, and we are learning to do amazing new things, but they aren't likely to produce jobs for people. They're likely to produce jobs for robots. Yet if they are going to provide goods and services that are economically viable, people have to be able to afford to buy the goods and the services.

They don't talk about biotech, which is what I would have thought the optimist's case would revolve around. People will pay for biotech if they can, because it is literally about life and death. So there's a potential for very robust, strong economic growth even with an aging society -- provided that the aging (and, ideally, everyone else) can afford to pay for the evolving goods and services. Standards of living may rise more in terms of health and longevity than in moving from ice boxes to refrigerators, but that still represents a huge potential for improvement.

If, that is, the market will bear the cost of the innovations at an adequate rate. It will, if it can, because the people in the market will absolutely want the good. The question is whether, or rather just how, we make sure that they can themselves be wealthy enough to afford to constitute a market that will bear the costs.

The Bee Plague

Alas, it may not be a simple thing to fix.

The ewww factor

From Jim Geraghty:

I suppose I should give some credit where it's due; some prominent women Democrats in California have finally awoken and recognized that A) the number of accusations against Filner is reaching critical mass, as are his increasingly lame and implausible excuses ("I'm just a big hugger!") and B) their double standard was getting glaring enough for even low-information voters to notice.  Had Filner been a Republican, he would already be at least as well-known as Todd Akin, with his face on the cover of Time magazine under the headline: "PARTY OF CREEPS:  WHY THE GOP'S PROBLEMS WITH WOMEN KEEP GETTING WORSE."

Dianne Feinstein adds, "[Weiner and Filner] have both admitted they need therapy. I think maybe that therapy could better be accomplished in private."  Geraghty "marvel[s] at how Weiner can make even the most basic statements exponentially creepier":

"I don't believe I had any more than three," he said when asked at a press conference how many relationships since his resignation were sexual in nature.

Standing Your Ground and Manhood

For the last couple of weeks, some of my liberal friends have been on a tirade against Stand Your Ground (SYG) laws. They are following the lead of the liberal press, about which more in a moment, and although my friends are thoughtful people the press normally is not. Thus we've seen some stunningly bad arguments fielded, which can be supported in the sense that you can send me a link to an article that makes the claim. It is only that the claims don't hold up.

Of course the leading wrong claim is the idea that the Zimmerman verdict had something to do with Florida's SYG law, when in fact the defense didn't reference the law and explicitly waived the pre-trial SYG hearing to which they were entitled if they'd care to make a claim under the law.

Equally wrong is the idea that the law is "new," a pure innovation of conservative gun rights advocates. Nothing could be farther from the truth. When friends suggest to me that Georgia should "repeal" the SYG law, I point out that this would accomplish exactly nothing, because our SYG statute merely codified what has always been the law in Georgia, as determined in over two hundred years of case law precedent (also known as common law). Even the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has to admit to this tradition since the Georgia State Supreme Court decided in its favor in 1898, three years after the US Supreme Court did likewise in an unrelated case (Beard v. the United States, which we will come back to momentarily, but for now note that this was not the last time SCOTUS endorsed it). The only thing that repealing the 2006 statute would accomplish would be to make the law harder to understand, as citizens would have to learn how to read case law instead of just looking up the legal standard in the Official Code of Georgia, Annotated.

All these laws about self defense are very old, as should not be surprising, and they all have roots in English law. The roots of those states that impose a duty to retreat are in the laws relating to the English peasantry, whose members were not allowed to defend themselves lawfully if they had other options.

The real root of "Stand Your Ground" isn't in self defense at all, but in the right of the citizen -- like that of the feudal English nobility -- to uphold the common peace and lawful order. It is related to the power to make a citizen's arrest. The real idea here is that you don't have to retreat from unlawful violence, but may meet it and stop it. You can't stop crime if you have to run from it. You can't protect a woman being raped, or a man being robbed, if you are required to retreat as soon as the criminal turns the force against you. You have the right to stop the crime that is hurting them. You likewise have the right to do so if you are the one being raped or robbed. A citizen has that power to confront the wicked and defend the law, as a knight had it. It is your duty as much as it is your right to do what you can to uphold the common peace and lawful order.

You may not be punished at law for doing your duty. That's what really underlies all of this, the same ascent of rights from the feudal bargain that also underlies almost all of the rest of the rights that the Founders secured for us, which were first secured to the knighthood at Runnymede and have since been extended to all free men.

Those of you who have been reading Cassandra's site for a very long time may remember this early conversation, eight years ago this month.

Q: What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate?

A: That a free man must give more attention to his duty than his rights; and that the most important duty, and the most important right, is to uphold the common peace. We must unlearn the notion that enforcing the law is the goverment's job, or that it is first and foremost "police work." The opposite is true, and has always been true in the West: it is the duty of the free citizen. The police are hired to assist us by being easy to call to our aid, and by patrolling to keep an eye on areas not often traveled by honest citizens. But it is our duty first.

The law is actually quite clear on this point: the police have what is called a "general" duty to provide protection for the community, but are never liable for a failure to render aid to a citizen in a specific case. There was a USSC case about that this week, which simply reasserted the old principle. The individual, however, certainly can be brought before the court if he simply ignored a crime or tragedy in progress. The case could be civil, or it could be criminal under several statutes: failure to render aid is an offense in cases of traffic accidents, for example; one could be charged as an accessory after the fact in some cases, and there are other ways in which you are liable as well.

The more citizens who take seriously the notion of being part of the law, themselves, the smaller the area in which criminals can operate. The more of us who become engaged in the performance of that duty, the more capable we will be of restraining the goverment's liberty-threatening expansion, which is always at its most dangerous when it claims to be protecting us. If we would be free men, we must protect ourselves.

By coincidence, this is also a national security issue. I've been talking a lot about 4th Generation Warfare at 4th Rail and elsewhere. One of the key problems of 4gen war is that the enemy blurs the line between civilian and military to the point that it can even vanish -- as in Iraq, where the citizens are now the primary target of the enemy, and must therefore become capable of recognizing and responding to the enemy because they will be the only force in readiness available to protect the common peace. This was true on 9/11, too, when the citizens on the one airplane realized that they alone could rise up to smite the terrorists. Because terrorists choose to strike when police and soldiers are not around, all of us must be ready to do our duty to the common peace at a moment's notice, to the best of our ability. The more we are able to do so, the stronger our nation will be against 4gen threats of any kind -- and the less we'll need Patriot! Acts, intrusive counterintelligence agencies, FBI spies in our own society, and the like.

Q: What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat?

Grim: Obviously, the converse: the notion that only government officials should be armed or trained in arms. A common argument against that is that this road has so often led to genocide or democide, and that is true. But even in cases when it does not, it leads to an unfree citizenry -- either because they end up surrendering their privacy to the point of surrendering liberty (see Mark Steyn's recent article on Britain considering a ban on the wearing of hoods or hats in public, because it interferes with government cameras ability to spy out criminals), or because they become incapable of defending their liberty even when they would.

If decent people can and will stand up and fight, each and every one, neither criminal organizations nor terrorists nor enemy armies pose any threat to our liberty -- and our government poses much less of one. If we can't, or won't, all of these threats magnify out of measure.

I might answer those questions differently now, but not because I've changed my mind on these points. It's only that I pay more attention to metaphysics than I used to, and less to political philosophy. Nevertheless, it remains a critical field. There are a thousand years of gains here to be defended. Stand your ground.

--

Having said all of that, Cassandra sends me this article from Dr. Stanley Fish, writing in the New York Times. Dr. Fish is actually on to something, which is that he recognizes the view of manhood and duty in play. The problem is simply that he thinks it is a construct of Westerns like Shane. What he doesn't realize is how much Shane was an outgrowth of an earlier heroic tradition: except for a few accidents of weaponry and costume, it reads exactly like large swathes of the Prose Lancelot or Le Morte Darthur.

But that there is at play a view of manhood and its duties is exactly correct. In the ruling Beard v. the United States, the Supreme Court ruled that "no true man" could be obligated by law to retreat when his wife was under attack by armed intruders on his own property. That's exactly right. No true man can be obligated to retreat from a criminal who is raping a woman, should the criminal turn a weapon on him instead. The law should not be constructed so that any conscientious and dutiful man must violate it. That is not a reasonable or a rational standard for the law, even if you are hotly opposed to the idea of men as heroes.

Why aren't banks lending?

Why, that is, apart from the puzzling fact that they don't act as though they were in business to help people realize the power of their dreams?  Noahpinion dismantles the conventional wisdom that quantitative easement should be inducing banks to lend, spurring inflation, and driving down the unemployment rate.

I always assumed that the purpose of QE was to permit everyone to continue lying to themselves so we wouldn't have to confront the impact of deficit spending and entitlements.  I can't say I'm surprised it's not whittling away at unemployment.

For QE and Krugman fans, though, here's a thoughtful piece on why Pittsburgh is recovering while Detroit is rotting.  It turns out the problem in Detroit is sprawl.  I think "sprawl" here means the incomprehensible flight of job-creators from a rotting city.  If only there were some way to force them to stay.

H/t RWCG.

Ghost towns

What is the purpose of a city?  The Sultan of Knish's analysis of Detroit is interesting, but in some ways I prefer the take of his most recent commenter:

Cities fundamentally exist, and always have, to facilitate exchange among groups and individuals.  Geography plays an important part to where a city exists. 

Among other reasons, cities go away when either their geographical location loses its importance or when some important part of what was previously exchanged goes away or becomes much less important. 

Once established, city government exists primarily to improve the possibility of secure exchange.  That would include public safety and transport (roads and streets, wharves, warehousing, etc).  Anything beyond that is gravy. 

Once there is a reasonable service base of security and transport those who make regular, routine exchanges tend to move their families in, provided that the city is seen as "a good place to live." 

. . . Ancient trade cities have vanished, the American West is full of ghost towns based originally on mining, and the upper plains are emptying out due to having fewer farmers. 

When an important part of the echange goes away, the city had better find something to replace or go away, too.

Instead, Detroit seems to think it can survive as a P.O. box for the receipt of welfare checks.

We're not smart enough

The NSA would love to comply with FOIA requests, but it's embarrassed to admit it doesn't have the technical expertise to search its own files.

I'll bet there are 14-year-olds who could figure it out if it were, you know, important to succeed.

Is it safe?

Kevin D. Williamson explains why he thinks conservative rhetoric falls flat with many voters:

Democrats are not buying black votes with welfare benefits.  Democrats appeal to blacks, to other minority groups, and — most significant — to women with rhetoric and policies that promise the mitigation of risk.  (Never mind that these policies don’t work — voters never sort that out.)  Conservatives routinely generalize our own economic confidence, assuming that it is shared by the general public, with catastrophic political consequences.  The health-care debate represented the most notable instance of this faulty assumption in recent years; every Republican politician who could get near a microphone was harrumphing about how we had the greatest health-care system in the world, but they all failed to appreciate the anxiety inherent in being tied to an employer-based insurance plan during times of economic uncertainty.  (In the 21st century, all times are times of economic uncertainty.)

Security and Hope

This is a great story all the way around. I've often wondered if we really need the security levels for high-level leaders that we invoke for them. It's true that there's a danger in rolling down your window, or getting out with the crowd, but there's also a very great good to be had from remaining one of the people. Perhaps sometimes it's worth running the hazard, in order to have the good.

Duty to retreat

From a commenter on Rich Lowry's article about Detroit:

About time somebody just laid it out about Detroit. I've seen Lefties try to blame it on conservatives, free trade, and "white flight".  Of these, only white flight comes the closest, but they wrongly attribute it to racism.  White Detroit didn't leave because of skin color differences, it left because of riots.  Crime.  As you say, a murder rate that went from 13 per 100k to 51 per 100k in just 9 years.  I guess that in instances like this, where white people are needed to fund the spoils system and corruption of a Coleman Young, said white people do not have a "duty to retreat" to someplace where they are less likely to be mugged, burgled, vandalized, raped, assaulted or murdered.  Far from having a duty to retreat, in the liberal mind they have an obligation to stay, out of guilt or penance.  Detroit marks one of those rare instances where an entire area was racially gerrymandered in favor of black voters by white voters leaving, and they are despised for it. 

Well, when you lose 60 percent of your population, it behooves you to adjust your spending, services, and pensions to reflect the new reality.  If you continue to spend as if that 60% is still there, eventually you're going to resemble Pyongyang.

Riding the Black Motorcycle

You know I was out riding tonight, and when I stopped and looked at my motorcycle I saw I'd worn the rear tire all the way down to the cloth. I guess I need another new tire. But I find I can't mind it. It's not just that I save the cost of a tire on gasoline, long before the tire is gone.

Maybe five things in life still matter to me. One of them is the free road.

God Save the King to Be

I can't forget the good the Queen has done for us in hour of mourning, nor the brother who walked like a warrior. So of course I must wish the newborn well, all things considered. It turns out he comes from a good family.

Redemption

What does it take to go into a fiery car and save a family? More, if your life is in danger if anyone recognizes you.

But sometimes a man just has to. We won't delve into why he had to do it. It's enough that he did it.

Resistance

Detroit has me thinking about the Weimar Republic.  A recommendation from David Foster:   Defying Hitler.

A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions. . . .  Now that these deliveries suddently ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed.  They had never learned how to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful and worth while, how to enjoy it and make it interesting.  So they regarded the end of political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation.  They were bored, their minds strayed to silly thoughts, and they began to sulk.

                  *   *   *

To be precise (the occasion demands precision, because in my opinion it provides the key to the contemporary period of history): it was not the entire generation of young Germans. Not every single individual reacted in this fashion.  There were some who learned during this period, belatedly and a little clumsily, as it were, how to live.  They began to enjoy their own lives, weaned themselves from the cheap intoxication of the sports of war and revolution, and started to develop their own personalities.  It was at this time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis.

A couple of Mr. Foster's commenters prefer Diary of a Man in Despair.  Both on order now.  I'm looking to learn from these books how people try, and fail, to prevent the decay of a society into tyranny.

Summer Is A Great Time To Study A New Language

...but choose carefully!

The iKnife

Since Apple doesn't seem to be coming up with anything exciting lately, it's nice to know that others are at work on the next new iThing.  Someone has noticed that the cauterization devices that surgeons use put out a little puff of what only be described as smoke from burning tissue.  That little puff can be run through a mass spectrometer and analyzed; it may permit surgeons to use real-time analysis to guide their scalpels during cancer surgery.

H/t Rocket Science.

Job Creators, Two Arguments

These arguments are rather unlike one another, both in form and content. The first is easy to appreciate, brief and visual; the second takes longer, and although it's quite interesting, it deals with brushstroke versions of higher mathematics. They are both pointed in the same direction. They want a society of flourishing wealth.

The video piece is by a successful entrepreneur named Nick Hanauer, who argues that rich men (like himself) are not the real job creators at all. The last thing a business-owner wants to do is create a job, he says: he does it only when consumer demand forces him to hire on another worker. The real thing that makes for flourishing wealth is consumers, which means that you have to have enough distributed wealth to enable the flourishing.



The second article looks at the same problem -- creating a flourishing of economic activity -- from the perspective of the businesses themselves. How much are we able to understand, with our limited algorithms and processing capacity? Where we see real successes in economic flourishing comes from places where we've had leaps in the math:

ORION’s promise was and is clear: For each mile saved, per driver, per year, UPS saves $30 million. The mathematics required to arrive at some solution to the traveling salesman problem, even if approximate, is also clear. But in trying to apply this mathematics to the real world of deliveries and drivers, UPS managers needed to learn that transportation is as much about people and the unique constraints they impose, as it is about negotiating intersections and time zones. As Jeff Winters put it to me, “on the surface, it should be very easy to come up with an optimized route and give it to the driver, and you’re done. We thought that would take a year.” That was a decade ago....

For one thing, humans are irrational and prone to habit. When those habits are interrupted, interesting things happen.... People are also emotional, and it turns out an unhappy truck driver can be trouble. Modern routing models incorporate whether a truck driver is happy or not—something he may not know about himself. For example, one major trucking company that declined to be named does “predictive analysis” on when drivers are at greater risk of being involved in a crash. Not only does the company have information on how the truck is being driven—speeding, hard-braking events, rapid lane changes—but on the life of the driver. “We actually have built into the model a number of indicators that could be surrogates for dissatisfaction,” said one employee familiar with the program.

The two arguments aren't quite opposed to each other, but there's real tension between them. The first argument suggests that UPS' improvements in efficiency are in some sense harmful: they cut into the wealth of middle-class workers like the drivers and mechanics, in order to maximize concentration of wealth in the corporation. The corporation is of course turning around and re-investing much of that wealth (in projects like ORION), but that kind of investment does little for people outside the highly-educated classes.

A compromise position would be to raise taxes on the stockholders of UPS, but not on the corporation itself. That would leave the corporation with money to invest in its information improvements, while still ensuring consumers with enough wealth to buy whatever products are being efficiently distributed from factories to stores.

But a compromise is probably not wanted, because there are moral principles underlying -- and overriding -- the economic arguments. The unspoken moral principle underlying the first argument is that it's OK to take from the rich and give to the less-rich; some kind of ideal of fairness or common-good makes this something other than theft. The second argument has the unspoken moral principle that the people at UPS are working very hard to earn that $30M savings. It's their hard work that is making this possible, and it is very hard work involving the best minds and the fastest computers we know how to make. Naturally they are entitled to keep what they earn by the sweat of their brow, aren't they?

We have a fundamental disagreement on the moral principles, which means we cannot even begin to agree about what to do with the practical questions. There's some sense in which it is obviously true that you need consumers to have a consumer economy, and the first author's talk of a feedback loop between consumers and business is really right. It's likewise true that UPS is making new jobs, and better ones, in part out of the destruction of old jobs. But their efficiency is reflected in part in lower prices, which could drive job creation among small businesses that couldn't afford higher structural prices.

Could we come to a compromise? Yes; the two positions are not logically incompatible. Ought we to? People on both sides of the debate are nearly certain to answer, "No." Whether that preference for morality over wealth is praiseworthy or blameworthy, it is in fact the only point of agreement that unites us.