Knowledge & Belief

Knowledge & Belief:

Here is an interesting article from the frontier between science and philosophy. A scientist from CERN is talking about knowledge versus belief.

The European: What is the difference between justified opinion and belief?
Heuer: Justified opinion or knowledge is something that you can at least partially prove. Belief or philosophical thought cannot be examined through experiments.

The European: For Aristotle, physics was the primary science that could tell us almost anything about the cosmos. But he also thought that all things had an innate capacity – the telos – to develop to their full potential.

And so it fell to philosophy to investigate the nature of things.
Heuer: At the edge of physics, it becomes linked to philosophy. But in the case of particle physics, it is really not a question of “believing” but of deducing something from a larger theoretical framework or from experimental data. Once you can prove something, it is no longer a question of philosophy.

That's not right, actually; philosophy deals as much as it can in things that can be proven. There are far fewer of those things than is commonly believed, but we'll leave that for the moment.

There are two questions here, and the scientist misses the import of the second one entirely. What he wants to say is that nothing has a telos; this is to say that there is no reason why things are what they are. To say that there is no telos behind the physics is to say that there is no metaphysics, which is what scientists usually say. What they fail to realize is that "there is no metaphysics" is itself a metaphysical claim: there is no standard by which to judge it other than metaphysics. (By that standard, I would argue, it doesn't fare well; but we'll leave that as well.)

The other problem is that he divides knowledge from belief, but the normal formula for knowledge includes belief. (An aside: can you have an opinion you don't believe?) Knowledge until Gettier raised his flag was supposed to be "justified true belief," that is, rather stronger than 'justified opinion.' Justified opinion can't be knowledge if it is not true, after all: otherwise you are saying that you could know something that is false. You could certainly believe something that was false; but if that is "knowledge," then there's no reason to distinguish between justified opinions that are true and those that are false. The only question to ask is: how good is your justification?

Some who work in epistemology (that is, the study of just what constitutes knowledge) want to include only things that are not just true, but safely true. If you made a lucky guess that the roulette wheel would turn up black this round, that shouldn't count as having known that the wheel would come up black -- no matter how strong your opinion, or whatever your justification.

Quantum physics is an area in which we end up admitting that we don't know very much; it's largely a set of gambles, where the science lies in establishing the range of possibilities as exactly as possible. It's not clear to me how you can know much of anything here. You can have an opinion; and you can have a justification. Whatever that is, it isn't knowledge.

Lenin 1917

Manifest Destiny:

Lenin in 1917... 'You know what probably won't happen soon? A Communist revolution.'

Prediction is hard work, even for those with Historic Destiny on their side!

Free Market

Your Free Market at Work:

Headline: "Is college too pricey to pay off? 57% say yes."

Percentage of Americans with a college degree: 38.74%.

The Control of Nature

The Control of Nature

If you've never read John McPhee's fine piece on the Atchafalaya River Basin's ambition to capture the Mississippi River, or even if it's just been a while, now is a good time to take advantage of The New Yorker's decision to move it out from behind the paywall:

Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand—frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go off in utterly new directions. Always it is the river’s purpose to get to the Gulf by the shortest and steepest gradient. As the mouth advances southward and the river lengthens, the gradient declines, the current slows, and sediment builds up the bed. Eventually, it builds up so much that the river spills to one side. Major shifts of that nature have tended to occur roughly once a millennium. . . . By the nineteen-fifties, the Mississippi River had advanced so far past New Orleans and out into the Gulf that it was about to shift again, and its offspring Atchafalaya was ready to receive it. By the route of the Atchafalaya, the distance across the delta plain was a hundred and forty-five miles—well under half the length of the route of the master stream.

For the Mississippi to make such a change was completely natural, but in the interval since the last shift Europeans had settled beside the river, a nation had developed, and the nation could not afford nature. The consequences of the Atchafalaya’s conquest of the Mississippi would include but not be limited to the demise of Baton Rouge and the virtual destruction of New Orleans.

. . .

[Just north of Baton Rouge, on the west bank of the Mississippi, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers] dug into a piece of dry ground and built what appeared for a time to be an incongruous, waterless bridge. Five hundred and sixty-six feet long, [the Morganza Spillway] stood parallel to the Mississippi and about a thousand yards back from the water. Between its abutments were ten piers, framing eleven gates that could be lifted or dropped, opened or shut, like windows. To this structure, and through it, there soon came a new Old River—an excavated channel leading in from the Mississippi and out seven miles to the Red-Atchafalaya. The Corps was not intending to accommodate nature. Its engineers were intending to control it in space and arrest it in time. In 1950, shortly before the project began, the Atchafalaya was taking thirty per cent of the water that came down from the north to Old River. This water was known as the latitude flow, and it consisted of a little in the Red, a lot in the Mississippi. The United States Congress, in its deliberations, decided that “the distribution of flow and sediment in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers is now in desirable proportions and should be so maintained.” The Corps was thereby ordered to preserve 1950. In perpetuity, at Old River, thirty per cent of the latitude flow was to pass to the Atchafalaya.

Until it doesn't. During the 1973 flood, the Morganza spillway floodgates had to open wide, sending a good part of the Mississippi floodwaters through the Old River channel across to the Atchafalaya to the west:

In mid-March,Raphael G. Kazmann, author of a book called “Modern Hydrology” and professor of civil engineering at Louisiana State University . . . got into his car, crossed the Mississippi on the high bridge at Baton Rouge, and made his way north to Old River. He parked, got out, and began to walk the [Morganza Spillway] structure. An extremely low percentage of its five hundred and sixty-six feet eradicated his curiosity. “That whole miserable structure was vibrating,” he recalled in 1986, adding that he had felt as if he were standing on a platform at a small rural train station when “a fully loaded freight goes through.” Kazmann opted not to wait for the caboose. “I thought, This thing weighs two hundred thousand tons. When two hundred thousand tons vibrates like this, this is no place for R. G. Kazmann."

It makes you wonder whether the Atchafalaya will win this time. The whole McPhee article, including an account of the levee system beginning in the early 18th century, is worth reading.

Son!

Son!

H/t: Our brothers at the BSBFBs.

No right to resist

No Right to Resist:

McQ is rather outraged over this, and with some reason.

Overturning a common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hoosiers have no right to resist unlawful police entry into their homes.

The author of the story reporting this is right – somehow the ISC managed, in one fell swoop, to overturn almost 900 years of precedent, going back to the Magna Carta.

In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer’s entry.

One might almost say: OK, as long as there's a mandatory death penalty on any policeman who attempts to enter my home without legal cause. We can sort that out in court, rather than on the occasion; but if it is proven that he forced entry to my house under arms without legal cause, thus putting my family in jeopardy of their lives for no reason, he must die. As long as we make the stakes that high, the principle could be preserved.

Almost, I say, because those rights we have from the days of the Manga Carta are rights won on the field of arms. They are the core of our rights. We may not surrender them for any cause, nor license such surrender by any procedure. It does not matter what the court says; the court is as wrong as was King John. We have the same duty that our ancestors did, if the courts do not recognize their error.

Avoiding a mugging

Avoiding a Mugging:

A philosophy major, who has also had the honor of being a victim of mugging multiple times, chimes in.

So . . . I was walking back from the home of Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman and instead of doing the normal thing and taking Q Street west to 5th and then walking south, I wanted to take a shortcut by walking south on North Capitol to then cut southwest on New York. But then lo and behold right by Catania Bakery a couple of dudes ran up from behind, punched me in the head, then kicked me a couple of times before running off. Once, years ago, in Amsterdam a guy threatened me with a knife and took my money. These guys took nothing, and just inflicted a bit of pain. All things considered the threaten/rob model of crime seems a lot more beneficial to both parties than the punch-and-run model. But I guess it takes all kinds.

To offer a policy observation, higher density helps reduce street crime in an urban environment in two ways. One is that in a higher density city, any given street is less likely to be empty of passersby at any given time. The other is that if a given patch of land has more citizens, that means it can also support a larger base of police officers. And for policing efficacy both the ratio of cops to citzens and of cops to land matters. Therefore, all else being equal a denser city will be a better policed city.

Speaking as a fellow student of philosophy, allow me to suggest that police are probably not the answer. Even in the best-policed city, police will not be on every corner at every moment. I've traveled in Manila, Zamboanga, Shanghai, D.C., Iraq and Kuwait, and no one ever thought to try to mug me. I would suggest that the best defense is a clear and unmistakable potential for a good offense. There are several ways of providing yourself with that, if nature has not done so; but one way or the other, it's what you really want.

Now, as a philosophical argument -- an empirical one -- that ends up harmonizing unpleasantly with the argument that rape victims might have protected themselves by dressing more conservatively. It is worth noticing where these arguments align and where they diverge. It is true, for example, both that women should be able to dress as they like without being raped; and also that a defenseless man ought to be able to walk where he likes without being mugged.

Mr. Yglesias' argument is explicitly about countermeasures, though, not the rights of victims. However it should be, in fact rape and assault are dangers; and given the dangers (indeed, given both dangers), it is best to be able to defend yourself than to rely upon others. The best defense is personal, and clearly stated to observers: that gives you both the capacity to defend yourself, and a reduced probability of having to do so.

Ignore heathen

Ignore that Heathen, Chums. Onward to Adventure!

It's amazing how reasonable this course of action can seem, when presented in the form of a silent movie.

Cowboying Kerry

Le 'Cow-boy,' c'est moi.

Good to see everyone's favorite unilateralist buckaroo out there defending American interests.

The United States will consider all its options, including a raid inside Pakistan, if it knows the whereabouts of Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar, US Senator John Kerry said on Saturday.

The internal polling on the Bin Laden thing must be looking really good.

Life is hard. It's harder if you're stupid. Burn a US flag at LSU? Really?

He wanted to burn the flag in the name of “due process for students and suspected terrorists alike,” but either he thought better of it or, per the second clip below, he couldn’t get a safety permit from the school. So he came out to make a statement instead — and a huge crowd came out to shout him down. At first it’s simply chants of “USA,” but then it turns more aggressive; before long this guy’s being hit with water balloons, to laughs and cheers from the crowd, and by 2:42 the cops are sufficiently worried about the vibe that they have to pull him out of there for his own safety. You can see the fear in his face, too. It’s really unpleasant to watch. Why this is considered a free-speech triumph by some of the people who sent us the link, I have no idea. It’s the heckler’s veto in action. Had the shoe been on the other foot politically — and it has been, as the boss emeritus can attest from attempts to intimidate her during her public speaking engagements — it would be the blogospheric scandal du jour.

Allahpundit over at Hotair isn't really happy with the crowd's behavior, because as he points out, it's the heckler's veto--but it seems to me that people are only doing what they've seen others do elsewhere--It's easy enough to find instances where a left wing college crowd has shut up somebody they don't want to hear, as Allah also points out.

Kinda funny how that works.

But it's also comparing apples and oranges, as Michelle Malkin (and others) have been heckled at venues where they've been invited to speak, as opposed to this sorry, miserable attempt at political agitprop, the purpose of which was to outrage patriotic citizens. Which I guess it did.

So, no, it's not a free speech triumph. It's more like some clown being put in his place for trying to do something unnecessary, pointless, meaningless and stupid.

I trust

I Trust You Have Seen...

...Matty O'BlackFive's post identifying the SEAL who killed Bin Laden.

More seriously, though, see Froggy's.

Short Song

Twas a Short Song...

But a good one.





That seems like the sort of song that must be based on something. Joe, I think old popular opera songs is your department?

Empire

Use the Force:

The comments are the best part of this parody. It has its moments, though, even in the main text:

When the end came for Kenobi, he was found not in the remote uncharted areas of Wild Space and the Unknown Regions, where he has long been presumed to be sheltered, but in a massive compound about an hour’s drive west from the Tatooine capital of Bestine. He had been living under the alias "Ben" Kenobi for some time.

The compound, only about 50 miles from the base of operations for the Imperial Storm Squadron, is at the end of a narrow dirt road and is roughly eight times larger than other homes in the area, which were largely occupied by Tusken Raiders. When Imperial operatives converged on the planet on Saturday, following up on recent intelligence, two local moisture farmers “resisted the assault force” and were killed in the middle of an intense gun battle, a senior Stormtrooper said, but details were still sketchy early Monday morning.

Continuing Education

Continuing Education

My neighbor, who lurks here, referred me to a website with short education videos on a variety of subjects. They're all free. When the author discovered that he had a knack for explaining technical subjects, it occurred to him that he could reach more people with his skill by publishing his lectures online than by teaching small classes in person. You don't see the lecturer at a podium but instead a blackboard with his live scribbles. I tried out a few series -- one on the use of commutators in electric motors, and one on differential equations -- and found his style engaging and helpful. It's a remarkable list of lectures, several hundred at least, covering everything from math to economics to hard sciences, from basic to college level. I'm going to recommend these to my friend who home-schools her son.

On the same note, because my sister has persuaded me to take a trip with her to France this fall, I thought I should brush up on my rudimentary French. I found some excellent free websites with phrasebooks, including audio clips.

All these lectures are an especially pleasant find because I've been engaged in recent weeks in a number of arguments over what has gone so wrong in public schools. It's nice to know that access to the Internet, which most Americans have, is enough to permit a motivated student to overcome a failed public education in a core math and science curriculum, and cheap, too.

Mother's Day

The Decline and Fall of Motherhood:

The New York Times has an interesting article on motherhood that I find, having read it, to fit in better with my understanding of 19th and 20th century history than the standard reading that we often hear.

ONE of the most enduring myths about feminism is that 50 years ago women who stayed home full time with their children enjoyed higher social status and more satisfying lives than they do today.... That myth — repeated in Suzanne Venker and Phyllis Schlafly’s new book, “The Flipside of Feminism” — reflects a misreading of American history.

There was indeed a time when full-time mothers were held in great esteem. But it was not the 1950s or early 1960s. It was 150 years ago. In the 19th century, women had even fewer rights than in the 1950s, but society at least put them on a pedestal, and popular culture was filled with paeans to their self-sacrifice and virtue.

When you compare the diaries and letters of 19th-century women with those of women in the 1950s and early 1960s, you can see the greater confidence of the earlier mothers about their value to society. Many felt they occupied a “nobler sphere” than men’s “bank-note” world.

The wife of the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sophia, told her mother that she did not share her concerns about improving the rights of women, because wives already exerted “a power which no king or conqueror can cope with.” Americans of the era believed in “the empire of the mother,” and grown sons were not embarrassed about rhapsodizing over their “darling mama,” carrying her picture with them to work or war.

This is quite right, at least in the English-speaking world. The reign of Queen Victoria sparked a revival of interest in the ideals of chivalry, as we have discussed here before at length. Eric reminds us, rightly, that 19th century reconstructions of chivalry were different from the original in many respects; but they aimed at reconstituting the core of the thing, part of which was an ethic of mutual service between knight and lady, man and woman, husband and wife.

What went wrong? Frankly, the next part of the article is so heavily pointed in the direction of my own thoughts that I have to be suspicious of my ability to judge it. (Confirmation bias, and all that.)

In the early 20th century, under the influence of Freudianism, Americans began to view public avowals of “Mother Love” as unmanly and redefine what used to be called “uplifting encouragement” as nagging. By the 1940s, educators, psychiatrists and popular opinion-makers were assailing the idealization of mothers; in their view, women should stop seeing themselves as guardians of societal and familial morality[.]

How bad did it get?

In 1942, in his best-selling “Generation of Vipers,” Philip Wylie coined the term “momism” to describe what he claimed was an epidemic of mothers who kept their sons tied to their apron strings, boasted incessantly of their worth and demanded that politicians heed their moralizing.

Momism became seen as a threat to the moral fiber of America on a par with communism. In 1945, the psychiatrist Edward Strecher argued that the 2.5 million men rejected or discharged from the Army as unfit during World War II were the product of overly protective mothers.

In the same year, an information education officer in the Army Air Forces conjectured that the insidious dependency of the American man on “ ‘Mom’ and her pies” had “killed as many men as a thousand German machine guns.”

The ethic of chivalry -- or, if you like, both the medieval chivalry and the 19th-century chivalry -- was one that encouraged men to be guided by ladies. The era of Queen Victoria had heroic gentlemen whose highest aspiration was to be of service to the Queen; to be influenced by the lady herself was the highest praise. To be of service to any lady was great praise. As the biographer of Chretien de Troyes describes the work of his patron:

[She was] the Countess Marie de
Champagne. She was the daughter of Louis VII, and of that famous Eleanor
of Aquitaine, as she is called in English histories, who, coming from
the South of France in 1137, first to Paris and later to England, may
have had some share in the introduction of those ideals of courtesy and
woman service which were soon to become the cult of European society.

Those hours -- renewed in the 19th century, and not abandoned yet by some -- were the height in all human history of the relationship between the sexes. However we came to the place where men were despised for being influenced by the women in their lives, it is a poorer place. This is Mother's Day, so I will simply close with a story that happened to me recently.

I stopped at a service station and, when I arrived at the door, I noticed that on the inside of that door was a woman confined to a walker trying to get out. I opened the door for her, and held it while standing aside as any gentleman would. As she passed me, she said: "Thank you, young man. Tell your mother that she did a blessed job."

I did just that, this morning. This, though, is the finest of things: it is what being a man is all about. To defend and to protect, to uphold those who find themselves struggling with a fate that has made them weak, these are the things for which strength was made. We are fortunate to enjoy it, for an hour. Strength will pass from us, and we to the grave, all too soon. To use our strength in a fitting way, while we are granted that extraordinary boon, is a great honor and a great joy.

On David Stokes' Thoughts on George W. Bush -

On David Stokes' Thoughts on George W. Bush:

I ran into this article recently - about George W. Bush in the aftermath of Bin Laden's capture. The author rightly gives President Obama some credit for inviting Bush to a ceremony at Ground Zero. He then discusses Bush's post-Presidential attitude, and includes this line:

Most people aspire to office because they want to “be” something. A few, in contrast, seek leadership roles in order to “do” something—and when that job is done, they move on with their lives.

I don't know if he's right to put Bush in the latter category, but I would love it to be true. The historical parallels are obvious. It's an attitude I try to cultivate towards my own rank - to remember that I don't have it because I am something special (it's not as if lawyers are rare), but rather as a tool to get things done. (For me - to open doors that need opening.) Should everyone? I doubt it.

Beowulf & C

On Noam Chomsky's Thoughts on Bin Laden:

Nor shall lilt of harp
those warriors wake; but the wan-hued raven,
fain o'er the fallen, his feast shall praise
and boast to the eagle how bravely he ate
when he and the wolf were wasting the slain.

The famously anti-war thinker Noam Chomsky asks some questions that are, he says rightly, the sort of questions that ought to provoke thought. His thoughts and mine are rather different.

However, he is quite right to point out that the Taliban made an offer regarding Bin Laden in the event that we could show evidence of his guilt. As I recall, however, the Taliban standard governing guilt was the traditional sharia standard, that is, three eye-witnesses who would testify. We could probably meet that standard now, but it would have been hard to meet at the time. In any event, I do remember the offer, and I also regretted that we didn't try to take them up on it.

His remarks on the Iraq war are without merit; it was not an act of aggression ('the supreme crime,' etc.), but a legitimate and just response to humanitarian crisis. (As to which, Arts & Letters Daily has an interesting piece on the subject of how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky debated the subject of humanitarian intervention in their own day: you may not have realized that it was a concern in imperial Russia. The Tolstoy piece being cited also contains one of the most poignant descriptions of the fate of a philosopher who becomes unmoored from God; and of the necessity, and means, of bringing that ship back to harbor.)

How to respond, though, to this line?

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.

I expect we might have invaded their country and overthrown its government, seen to a democratically elected replacement, and then turned the old leadership over for trial and execution. That seems like a reasonable surmise, all things considered.

I knew one of those Iraqi commandos, by the way; one of the tribal leaders I used to deal with fairly regularly in Iraq had been in the Special Republican Guard. I always liked him. He and I saw eye to eye, because his perspective was that of a tribal member of of an honor culture -- remember that "tribal" does not mean anything like "primitive," but in Iraq as in many other places is entirely integrated into the modern world. He has tribal duties as well as duties to the state, just as you may have family duties as well as duties to the state; and, like him, you may take the personal duties at times as being the more compelling.

He surely understands that the function of the Bin Laden raid is to deter violence. Honor cultures get this in a way that 'international law' types often do not. In the Beowulf, after the death of the dragon and the king, a warrior laments that the Swedes will now be on their way to pillage and plunder the Geats. With the strong defender gone -- and given the standing feud, and given especially the cowardly behavior of Beowulf's war band in the face of the dragon, with the noble exception of Wiglaf -- the coming of the Swedish raids is taken as a certainty. At the funeral that takes up the final verses of the poem, an old woman laments the coming doom and shame that will befall the Geats.

This killing of Bin Laden was an obligation of honor. We have fulfilled it, but it was he himself who required it of us. There was never any choice. Any man should know that.

Avoid Iran

Note to Self: Remove Iran from Vacation Itinerary

Not a good week to be in the service of the President of Iran. Or me, if I were there!

Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as "a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds".

Special skills in metaphysics! Who knew that was a crime?

Busy Week

Busy Week:

Here at the undisclosed location, it's been a very busy week. I apologize for not being around more, but certain events have kept me engaged.

I trust you are all well. How about a little doom and gloom to take your mind off it?

Their methods are scientific and philosophical, and they all come down to trying to understand what all those zeroes in numbers like “6 billion” really mean. Scientists now have firmly grounded hypotheses about how Earth and the solar system will be different in 50 million years, for example, as distinct from 500 million or 50 billion, and can rule out some possibilities for what will happen at each point. Armed with data from history, they can use rough computer models to simulate how human populations might rise and fall, how their technology might accelerate, and how thousands or millions of years of human activity might or might not change the planet.

Most important, they’re systematically analyzing for the first time the worryingly numerous ways in which humanity might fail to survive to see that long future.

Isn't that what the girl says in the Terminator? "Look on the bright side -- in a hundred years, who's going to care?"

National Offend a Feminist Week 2011

National Offend a Feminist Week 2011

As anyone who's ever had fleeting contact with me probably already knows, I'm a feminist. But this is funny:

If happiness is the problem, feminism is the solution.

Feminism views all women as victims of patriarchal oppression, and any woman who is happy is therefore suffering from “false consciousness.” As soon as a woman becomes enlightened — once she is made aware of her victimhood — she will be miserable and angry. Which is to say, she’ll be a feminist.

Q. How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. That’s not funny.

Feminism is a philosophy of militant misery. The humorlessness of feminists is therefore not accidental. And so feminists must be mocked, and often, and by someone who knows how.

Now run along, sweetheart. And bring me a cup of coffee.

H/t Little Miss Attila.