Disciplinary Epistemologies 101

Since there have been universities, there has been a crisis in them. We should probably look at the more recent hand-wringing about universities teaching students relativism in the light of recurring accusations that universities corrupt youth, but I’m not going to do that analysis here (or ever, even). Instead I’m going to tell you about my Research Methods class.

1.

I had recently that article for Ethika Politika in which Margaret Blume worries that varied distribution requirements at Yale University—some humanities, some social sciences, some hard sciences, a language or two, etc.—neither give students the sense that the different disciplines could speak to each other nor provide them with a framework in which to organize themselves; with this in the back of my mind, I was listening to my Research Methods instructor talk about the positivist underpinnings of quantitative research and the constructivist underpinnings of qualitative research. Putting the two together, I thought: Hey, maybe what Yale—and UBC, and whoever—needs is a mandatory introductory Research Methods and Disciplinary Epistemologies class.

My experience in undergrad left me with the acute sense that almost none of my peers knew why their own disciplines did things the way they did them, let alone why other disciplines made different decisions. No science student, for example, could tell me why they wrote everything in passive voice, and so they were generally immune to my editorial tirades about 1) cacophonic language and 2) awful epistemology re: denying that the Observer Effect exists.* Students in the humanities weren’t much better; in English, for instance, theory courses were optional for many students, and not all those on offer were great. The only ones who seemed to know these sorts of things were grad-students-to-be or people who took Introduction to Philosophy and listened to the professor.

So if the problem, as Blume would have it, is that undergraduate students had no idea how to put the puzzle pieces together, it seems like a Research Methods and Disciplinary Epistemologies class would be a great solution. I don’t agree, actually, that quantitative research implies positivism and qualitative research implies constructivism—that’s a long discussion, but suffice to say that I’m doing mixed methods research right now—but that’s the sort of conversation that might put the pieces together. Getting a whole big picture of all the disciplines would really help.

Now, there are some problems with this course, logistically. There are really only two people who I’d trust to teach the course: myself and my first-year Philosophy professor. There are probably others here and there, but that’s still a low enough percentage of the people I know that it’s worrisome. Maybe there’d need to be a set curriculum. The issue is that I trust neither insiders nor outsiders to teach a discipline’s epistemology; you’d probably have to have one of each. Maybe there could be modules: one professor handles the etic approach, and guest lecturers handle the emic approach.

2.

This lovely daydream lasted perhaps five minutes before I remembered that I had been a Teaching Assistant for a mandatory Intro to Literature class, and I had sworn off the idea of classes mandatory for all students then and there. You can lead a horse to water, they say, but you can’t make it drink; in my experience, quite a lot of horses won’t drink precisely because you lead them to water when they didn’t want to be lead. These we’ll-make-them-learn-these-things-by-making-it-mandatory schemes rarely work.

I have heard of exceptions, where a professor and batch of TAs manage to get all or most of the students into the humanities, at least in heart if not in enrollment. But this seems to require a dream team of excellent professors, excellent TAs, and excellent students; rarely do you get two, let alone three, of those requirements. In the end, you just can’t force students to accept what they’re not willing to accept.

And it occurred to me, too, that a lot of the content I’d want to teach might be well over the heads of most first year students. As a first year student it took me years to understand existentialism and Buddhism and constructivism, letting them slowly gestate long after I’d passed my Philosophy and Religious Studies finals, and I’m the sort of person who’s good at this sort of thing and won’t leave it alone.

So I’m going to have to come out against mandatory courses in university, no matter how well intended. I don’t think they do what we want them to do. But maybe we’re just doing them wrong?

3.

Leah wrote that maybe the framework-building should be extracurricular anyway, and I’m inclined to agree. Classes might not create incentives for truth-seeking; they are good at creating incentives for skill-building and material-mastering, but I don’t know how you could grade someone on whether or not they are right, on whether their commitment to their values is authentic, on how justified their decisions are. And if you aren’t grading students on something, not many of them are going to do it. We should encourage big questions in the classroom, but we can’t expect students to find them there.

And maybe casting students into a sea of relativism for a while is good for them, as I mentioned in my last post, so long as we give them some sense that they can and should and must get themselves ashore. We can’t get the students ashore for them, more than likely, and while we should think of ways to help them do so, the best method might just be for professors to model evaluativist thinking. For the most part they already do award evaluativist thinking in assignments, since every disciplinary epistemology I’ve encountered has been thoroughly evaluativist; we needn’t make “evaluativist thinking” a formal requirement.

And the not-so-secret subtext of Blume’s article seems to be “every school should be a Catholic school,” so maybe I shouldn’t be taking it as seriously as a critique of university. For instance, Blume’s suggestion that only Catholic theology can tie together the disciplines is just silly: even if you spot her that Catholicism is true, it’s hard to deny that Islamic theology, Buddhist epistemology, and historical materialism have been able to create a coherent, if not necessarily true, framework for all disciplines.

But, anyway, it’s something to think about. I wouldn’t mind teaching a Disciplinary Epistemologies and Academic Research course; I just wonder who I’d teach it to.

* In case you too are unaware of the sciences’ use of the passive voice, I’ll explain it: sciences use the passive voice (“The results were analyzed…” rather than “We analyzed the results”) in order to mask the researchers’ presence. In theory, the researchers shouldn’t matter, the sciences say; we are removing the personality etc. from the procedures. Of course, some version of that claim is true, but not to the extent removing the researcher from consideration entirely. The observer effect is often a serious one, and this grammatical elision hides the way researchers are involved in their research. Consider Nixon’s famous remark, “Mistakes were made”; passive voice is the mechanism by which responsible agents deny responsibility.
Moreover, the science students whose papers I edited never knew why they were supposed to use the passive voice, so they also never knew when they were supposed to use it. As a result, they used it in almost every sentence, even when it was confusing and unnecessary.

My Very Own Epic: Part 1

The Lineaments of my Own Face

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.

Jorges Luis Borges, in the Afterword to his collection Museum, translated by Andrew Hurley.

Way back in distant 2013, I wrote a few posts about how to use different literary genres to help you understand someone else’s worldview. And then I made a quiz about it, but I don’t think the quiz exists any more (not my doing: maybe there’s a time limit). Leah Libresco picked all of this up and featured it on Unequally Yoked, too: it even made one year’s Turing Test. (The post to which featured it links has some interesting discussion in both the post proper and the comments, if you’re interested.)

In case you forgot about all that, or didn’t know it happened in the first place, my idea was basically this: genres with very specific conventions can be a good way of framing your understanding of a worldview you’re wondering about. The epic in particular requires its writer to incorporate a lot of elements of the writers’ own worldview: it has divine intervention, so what are the divinities in question and how do they intervene?; it has an underworld, so what would count as an underworld in this worldview?; its protagonist is supposed embody the most important virtues, so what virtues are those, and how would they appear in a narrative? So if I’m confronted with someone else’s worldview, I could try and work out what it’s epic would look like; this would force me to ask specific questions of it, and that might yield some interesting results. But there’s an important second step: you should also ask which genre would best express that worldview. The epic might distort the worldview too much: if the important parts of a worldview are interpersonal relationships, then the epic will be less useful than a romance novel (in the sense of love story) or murder mystery might be, because these two focus a lot on interpersonal stuff. I ended those posts with a second question—what would my epic look like, or what would your epic look like?—but that was secondary to the practice of figuring out what someone else’s epic looks like.

But what I never did, at any point, was actually perform this exercise where anyone could see me do it. I took a lot of examples from existing epics to talk about their worldviews, but that’s backwards to the exercise. I never did actually say what a Marxist’s katabasis would look like or how a libertarian might use the in media res beginning. And of course this exercise is a lot easier to me than it might be to most, since I created it out of my own strengths: a pretty strong sense of the epic conventions, and how the early modern writers used them; an obsession with understanding other people’s worldviews (and I hope some skill at it). So other people—that is, you, my readers—might find it helpful if I actually walk you through the process.

However, I plan on cheating. I’m going to describe to you what my epic would look like. This means I can talk about it all a lot more extensively, but it loses something for it: the actual work of figuring stuff out. There are two reasons I’ve chosen to do this: 1) I asked Leah at UY to do the same in the comments of her blog (long story: I was asking earnestly, but I was also kinda maybe mostly lampooning the other commenters a little?), and it’s not at all fair to ask her to do that if I’m not willing to do it myself, and 2) the question has been bothering me for a good while now and I felt compelled to get it out of my system.

But there’s something else, too: it seems rather presumptuous to plan someone else’s epic. Of course I talked about this in the original posts, but I found I was balking when it came to trying the exercise. I have no issue doing it in private, for my own purposes, but to come out and try to tell another person’s story on my blog, just as an exercise? It seemed too much. True, I have no problem explicitly trying to work through someone’s worldview in public; and true, I could preface the epic the way I try always to preface those attempts, saying, “This is how I understand what this person is saying, and please correct me if I’m misrepresenting anything.” Maybe I’m being over-scrupulous. I could also try it for an abstraction—postmodernism, American libertarianism, nerdfighter-ism, transhumanism—which would hopefully not try to speak for anyone in particular. Or, I suppose, most people for whom I might attempt this are far more famous and secure than I am anyway, so it probably doesn’t matter to them if I do this: Richard Beck, or Judith Butler, or David Deutsche, or John Green. Anyway, reasonably or not, I felt uncomfortable, and it seems easier and better to put my own ideas out in this form than someone else’s when I might misrepresent them. Watch this space, I suppose; I may yet show my attempt to do this for someone else’s worldview, which is really the point.

Of course, you are quite free to do it yourself; in fact, I suggest you give it a shot before reading the next three posts, so that my own responses don't bias you. Also, in future, I might attempt any or all of the following: exploitation flick, YA dystopia novel/film, zombie apocalypse film, murder mystery novel, supernatural horror novel, western film, romantic comedy; I might even try computer games, like a first-person shooter, a role playing game (maybe massively multiplayer, maybe not), or a strategy game (either turn-based or real-time). But for now, the epic.

A few notes before we get any further: some of these posts will discuss depression, and one will discuss suicide. I’ll give content warnings for those posts, but I want to give you a chance to turn back now. Second and far less important, I should give credit to Rich Burlew’s articles on worldbuilding for tabletop rpgs; a lot of my approach here is based on his approach there.

I’ll end this introduction with the epic conventions I’ll be considering; I mentioned them all in my first post about epic conventions, but this presentation might be easier for you to follow. Bear in mind that these are related to early modern epics and their descendants; I'm sure classicists won't quite recognize this list.

Epic conventions I will discuss:

• katabasis, meaning a descent to the underworld; for instance, in Paradise Lost Satan is thrown into Hell, and in Lord of the Rings the Fellowship go into the Mines of Moria, and then Gandalf falls from the Bridge of Khazad-Dûm
• divine intervention (of some kind); for instance, in Homer’s Odyssey Poseidon and Athena perpetually interfere, while in the Lord of the Rings Gandalf himself is technically a minor angel
• references to new discoveries and inventions, usually scientific or geographic in nature; for instance, in Paradise Lost there are many mentions of Copernican astronomy and the “invention” of gunpowder, while Wade Davis’s One River is actually just about scientific discovery
• references to history; for instance, The Faerie Queene has ample reference to English history, and there’s a strange case in Paradise Lost, because when an angel gives Adam a vision of the future, all of that future is history for the reader and author
• a vast scope, often in terms of space and time but not necessarily; for instance, Paradise Lost is literally about the history of the universe, while The Faerie Queene is a comprehensive guide to virtue and not, say, geography
• an “aristocratic” protagonist, by an ancient and early modern sense of aristocratic; for the Greek’s, this literally means an aristocrat, but the anarchist and egalitarian Tolkien had hobbits
• a protagonist who embodies, or comes to embody, virtues valued by the writer/writer’s society; this is literally the point of The Faerie Queene, but even in the Iliad we have the brave Achilles and in the Odyssey with have the crafty Odysseus
• the central event is of great historical or mythical importance; Paradise Lost, obviously, involves the creation of both the world and sin, but One River has the formation of a field of science; this qualification becomes a bit strange or strained in more contemporary fantasy works, though I’d note that as the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise became more and more like an epic, it also put the fate of piracy itself in jeopardy
• several digressions, either narrative (flashbacks) or literal (getting lost); in the Faerie Queene the knights are always straying from the path of virtue, which gets them into trouble, while in the Greek epics digressions tend to be the point of the story, such as Odysseus trying to get home but consistently being forced into unwanted adventures
• the use of epithets; Achilles is “lion-hearted” in the Iliad, while in The Faerie Queene St. George is almost always called the Red-Cross Knight instead of his real name
• beginning in media res, that is, in the middle of the action, with flashbacks periodically filling in the narrative; Paradise Lost opens with Satan being cast into Hell, with the war in heaven and the creation of the universe described later, and One River begins with the latest generation of ethnobotanists, alternating chapters between the author’s own adventures and those of his precursors
• catalogues of objects; lists of trees, or of demons, or of dogs, or of food, or of weapons, or of warriors… in The Faerie Queene Spenser lists trees native to England so the reader knows where the story takes place, but it’s hard to tell why Ovid decided to name of each of Acteon’s hounds
• ekphrasis, meaning the description of pieces of art; in the early modern period particularly, literature was very self-reflective and had a high view of art, so it tended to include descriptions of it constantly
• a description of the dawn; Ovid and Virgil did it, so everyone else does; however, it notably appears in both The Lord of the Rings and The Pirates of the Caribbean
• a half-woman half-snake being, usually with the woman part above the waist and the snake part below; often evil and a boundary guardian; in The Faerie Queene, she is the monster Errour, representing a straying from the path (and the Catholic Church), while in Paradise Lost, she is Sin itself, and also guardian of the gates of Hell; the Narniad includes the Lady of the Green Girtle, who becomes a giant snake
• a talking tree, or a person that had been transformed into a tree; in The Faerie Queene this is a man who had been seduced by the witch Duessa (also the Catholic Church) and turned into a tree for his mistake, but in Lord of the Rings these are Ents, reflecting Tolkien’s love for trees, environmental leanings, and (possibly) friendship with C. S. Lewis (as I read somewhere that Treebeard is a surrogate for Lewis in the novel, while Professor Kirke is a surrogate for Tolkien in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe)

Epic conventions I won’t discuss:

• twelve books; because Virgil wrote the Aenead in twelve books, so all the early modernists decided they should, too, though as far as I know most of them failed to do so
• verse; epics are traditionally written in verse, but no one wants to read a verse epic these days and so even those few people who do write epics don’t write them in verse
• heroic couplets; see above
• invocation of the muse; most epics, in the traditional sense, start with an invocation of the muse; this can be very interesting, and can reveal a lot about the poet, but it sounds stilted to us now, so I don’t plan to include it

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*Wade Davis probably did not mean to write a conventional epic when he wrote One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest, but it meets pretty much all of the criteria. I say he probably didn't because a lot of the criteria seem entirely accidental, and because almost no one intends to write a conventional epic any more, because almost no one even knows what that is. But the specific tropes do seem to crop up a lot: even the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has a lot of them, especially in the second and third movies (especially if you're willing to include Will's father, when he becomes part of the ship, as a talking tree). I'll include both as examples because a rigid definition is unnecessary, but for the purposes of the exercise I'm going to be stricter on myself.

On Pilgrims and Aliens

I wrote a bit before about Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking, arguing that in rejecting scholarship it rejects community. After I finished the book, I had quite a few more complaints about it, some of which I addressed in this post I wrote for one of my tumblrs. Here's an excerpt:

As previously discussed, H. P. Lovecraft saw the world as radically Other, and he reacted with horror; he also saw non-white people and uneducated people as radically Other, and he reacted to them with horror. His cosmicism—the view that we are insignificant in the strange Otherness of the world—is inseparable from his racism. Northrop Frye, whose high view of literature and society comes from a deep fear of the natural world and its apparent indifference to us, had little attention for non-Western literature; I suspect that he suffers from the same sense of the Other, but he reacts by ignoring or delegitimizing, rather than despising, those people whose experiences are too different than his own. In rejecting the Other, both reject people. I wonder—but no more than wonder—whether Gros suffers a fate much like this; he rejects the Other, but misidentifies the natural world as his, owned by the mere fact that he walks into the forest, strains against the wind, drinks from a stream with his hands; in his book he frequently writes that the one who walks owns all that he sees. When Gros does recognize the Other in people he doesn’t quite understand, he rejects them, dismisses them, pities them, at times despises them. And in so doing these men make themselves more alone than they could otherwise be: if they are alienated from society, they seem to alienate themselves.

You'll see that I've written about Lovecraft and Frye over there already. I guess I've started blogging a little bit on my tumblr; I changed the name recently, and discussed why I changed the name, and that become a thing. I've been thinking about how Otherness influences my thinking and engagement with the world--yes, yes, Christian has attached himself to yet another construct--and since I needed to point that out to explain why I was doing what I was doing, that's become a theme over there.

As a bonus, I'll give you an excerpt from an article that I read yesterday, which I thought was related. It's from Hiromi Goto's "A Bending Light: Thoughts of Story, Diversity, and Social Responsibility," in the Winter 2014 issue of Ricepaper, which is itself an excerpt from her Guest of Honour Speech at the WisCon28 Conference. The piece convinced me to go ahead and publish the tumblr post. Here's the excerpt:

When writers try to imagine different ways of engaging, humans to other humans, humans with aliens, humans with animals, all these different relationships, we can make possible new kinds of engagements. To bring stories alive in this way is to try to make change in the workings and fabric of our world. If something is not of this world already, it first needs to be imagined. After it is imagined, it needs to be shaped by the parameters of language. And in writing, in the utterance, the story can begin its life. It can become.

You can read the rest at Goto's blog.

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Also: I've been reading from Gordon Marino's Basic Writings of Existentialism, which contain a number of excerpts I haven't read before, or associated with existentialism, or even heard of; so far I've read the excerpts from Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death, and Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche is more persuasive than I remembered, until he pulls outside terrible bit of psychology or really bad biology; there are parts I pretty much whole-heartedly agree with, and then other parts that seem plausible enough but definitely subject to empirical falsification, and others that are just nonsense. I appreciated what I read of The Sickness Unto Death, though it took me a long time to figure out how to read it; reading Fear and Trembling convinced me that I'm less intelligent and less informed than I thought, because I understood maybe half of it. I guess I'm a philosophical baby.

Must the Philosopher Walk Alone?

or, Families that Cite Together Stick Together

One of my favourite places to walk; copyright mine.

[EDIT: Just a few hours after posting this, I have realized one way in which I was unfair to Gros, because his discussion does reflect some of my own views on the world, and one very serious error that Gros committed and I forgot to bring up; I'll maybe need to write a second post, but until then read this thing I wrote for one of my tumbrls, which will suggest where I was unfair.]

I am trying to read Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking. I found it in a Chapters, reading the blurb:

In A Philosophy of Walking, a bestseller in France, leading thinker Frédéric Gros charts the many different ways we get from A to B—the pilgrimage, the promenade, the protest march, the nature ramble—and reveals what they say about us. 

Gros draws attention to other thinkers who also saw walking as something central to their practice. On his travels he ponders Thoreau’s eager seclusion in Walden Woods; the reason Rimbaud walked in a fury, while Nerval rambled to cure his melancholy. He shows us how Rousseau walked in order to think, while Nietzsche wandered the mountainside to write. In contrast, Kant marched through his hometown every day, exactly at the same hour, to escape the compulsion of thought.

I had thought this would be a creative and intellectually rigourous account of the way these different philosophers thought about walking, and I looked forward to it. Instead, A Philosophy of Walking has turned out to be a litany of generalizations and unfounded claims in praise of walking.

I’m only about halfway through, but I think I’m starting to understand where Gros is going wrong. Consider this passage:

Many others have written their books solely from their reading of other books, so that many books exude the stuffy odour of libraries. By what does one judge a book? By its smell (and even more, as we shall see, by its cadence). Its smell: far too many books have the fusty odour of reading rooms or desks. Lightless rooms, poorly ventilated. The air circulates badly between the shelves and becomes saturated with the scent of mildew, the slow decomposition of paper, ink undergoing chemical change. […] Other books breathe a livelier air; the bracing air of outdoors, the wind of high mountains […]. These books breathe. They are not overloaded, saturated, with dead, vain erudition.

He is parroting Nietzsche here, but these ideas are not Nietzsche’s alone. In a later chapter, he describes the sorts of book which he likes, to which I’m sure he aspires:

Writing ought to be this: testimony to a wordless, living experience. Not the commentary on another book, not the exegesis of another text. The book as witness … but witness in the sense of the baton in a relay race.* Thus does the book, born out of experience, refer to that experience. Books are not to teach us how to live (that is the sad task of lesson-givers), but to make us want to live, to live differently: to find in ourselves the possibility of life, its principle.

A book that makes us want to live differently sounds great, but it is strange to think such a book could only come out of one’s own direct experience of life. I would argue that there’s something more troubling behind his dislike of scholarly books and argument; Gros also seems hostile to community. Let’s go back to the bit about books written in response to other books: “They are born of a compilation of the other books on the table. They are like fattened geese: crammed with citations, stuffed with references, weighed down with annotations. […] They verify, specify, rectify; a phrase becomes a paragraph, a whole chapter.” The jeremiad against verification, specification, and citation do not just discount careful thought, but also exhibit a skepticism toward conversation, toward engaging with other people’s thought. This appears in a directly stated preference for walking with no more than four people; “with no more than that, you can still walk without talking.” And this is the logic of those philosophers he esteems: Nietzsche, who sought solitude for the sake of his “freedom: no explanations to give, no compromises to stand in his way,” and who stands on the mountain, above the other people, from which vantage he can see through their vain moralities and conventional pieties; Rousseau, whose lonely walks through peaceful, domesticated woods taught him what both humans and nature are like; Thoreau, for whom authentic living is solitary and for whom society consists of three people.

And, indeed, there are glimpses of the book I wanted to read in this one; if Gros is right that Rousseau walked into the woods, away from all people, to learn what people are like, then that gives us some good insight into Rousseau’s failed project. The woods are not pre-civilized nature, and you can’t learn what humans in nature are like by visiting them. It becomes possible to see how Rousseau’s approach to the project went wrong from the start. But Gros is not interested in critiquing Rousseau; the books he critiques are always generalized, shown in the abstract. The ones he mentions directly, he always agrees with. And this is also strange, since Nietzsche, Rousseau, and Kant are hardly good playmates. Critique would likely seem too like the citations and specifications Gros despises, however.

All of this means that Gros gives the impression that he would be indifferent to this critique I am writing, not just because I am no one, just some blogger, but also because my critique is of the order of citation, of libraries, “overloaded with quotations, references, footnotes, explicatory prudence, indefinite refutations.” (The irony, of course, is that Gros’s refutations are the indefinite ones, since he will not quote those he disagrees with.) Perhaps he did not mean to, but Gros immunes himself from criticism at the same time that he cuts himself off from community.

I do like walking, though I do it less than I ought to; I understand Gros’s joy in leg muscles and trails and trees and rocks and scents carried on the fresh air. And I think while walking, to be sure; but, as everyone does—as Gros must do to—I carry conversations, culture, society with me when I walk, and when I get back it is to take part in the conversation again. Sometimes I find a walk necessary to free myself from the terms another person has set on the discussion, but that is in the service of coming back to the discussion. And, indeed, life experience can improve walking, can enrich the literary and philosophical traditions one has learned. But there is not the split that Gros suggests: without a personal engagement in the world, indeed citation and reference might be vain parroting, but that engagement need not be solitary, and without community you cannot open yourself to correction, to further learning, to others' experiences. And so I found A Philosophy of Walking a disappointment.

Again, I have not yet finished the book. If I find more worth discussing, I’ll come back.

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*The footnote given reads thus: “The French word témoin, meaning witness, has the subsidiary meaning of baton passed between runners in a relay race [translator’s note].”

The Singular Flavor of Souls

While I’m recording things I’ve read recently that do a far better job of articulating, and expanding, what I was trying to say last summer, I have two more things to mention that touch on what I was trying to get at with my posts on difference and the acknowledgement thereof. I assume there are many people for whom these ideas are well-trod ground, but they were new to me and it might be worth something to record my nascent reactions here.

In “From Allegories to Novels,” in which Borges tries to explain why the allegory once seemed a respectable genre but now seems in poor taste, he writes the following:

Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The Platonists sense intuitively that ideas are realities; the Aristotelians, that they are generalizations; for the former, language is nothing but a system of arbitrary symbols; for the latter, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is in some way a cosmos, an order; this order, for the Aristotelian, may be an error or fiction resulting from our perfect understanding. Across latitudes and epochs, the two immortal antagonists change languages and names: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James. In the arduous schools of the Middle Ages, everyone invokes Aristotle, master of human reason (Convivio IV, 2), but the nominalists are Aristotle; the realists, Plato. […] 

As one would suppose, the intermediate positions and nuances multiplied ad infinitum over those many years; yet it can be stated that, for realism, universals (Plato would call them ideas, forms; we would call them abstract concepts) were the essential; for nominalism, individuals. The history of philosophy is not a useless museum of distractions and wordplay; the two hypotheses correspond, in all likelihood, to two ways of intuiting reality.[*]

But the distinction between nominalism and realism is not so keen as that, commentaries on Borges—Eco’s The Name of the Rose is notable—have noted, maybe missing that Borges might already have understood that.

I read Borges' essay months ago; Saturday, I read/skimmed the first chapter, written by Marcia J. Bates, of Theories of Information Behavior, edited by Karen E. Fisher, Sandra Erdelez, and Lynne (E. F.) McKechnie. In that chapter, I read this:

First, we need to make a distinction between what are known as nomethetic and idiographic approaches to research. These two are the most fundamental orienting strategies of all.

• Nomothetic – “Relating to or concerned with the study or discovery of the general laws underlying something” (Oxford English Dictionary).

• Idiographic – “Concerned with the individual, pertaining to or descriptive of single or unique facts and processes” (Oxford English Dictionary).

The first approach is the one that is fundamental to the sciences. Science research is always looking to establish the general law, principle, or theory. The fundamental assumption in the sciences is that behind all the blooming, buzzing confusion of the real world, there are patterns or processes of a more general sort, an understanding of which enables prediction and explanation of particulars.  

The idiographic approach, on the other hand, cherishes the particulars, and insist that true understanding can be reached only by assembling and assessing those particulars. The end result is a nuanced description and assessment of the unique facts of a situation or historical event, in which themes and tendencies may be discovered, but rarely any general laws. This approach is fundamental to the humanities. […]

Bates goes on to describe the social sciences as being between the two, the contested ground; at times, social sciences tend to favour one approach and then switch to the other. It is in the context of the social sciences that she talks about library and information science:

LIS has not been immune to these struggles, and it would not be hard to identify departments or journals where this conflict is being carried out. My position is that both of these orienting strategies are enormously productive for human understanding. Any LIS department that definitively rejects one of the other approach makes a foolish choice. It is more difficult to maintain openness to these two positions, rather than insisting on selecting one or the other, but it is also ultimately more productive and rewarding for the progress of the field.

I don’t think it’s difficult to see the realism/nominalism distinction played out here again, though it’s important to note that realism v. nominalism is a debate about the nature of reality, while the nomothetic v. idiographic debate concerns merely method (if method can ever be merely method).

Statistics, I think, is a useful way forward, though not sufficient. The idea of emergence, of patterns emerging at different levels of complexity, might also be helpful. Of course, my bias is showing clearly when I say this: Coleridge would say that I am a born Aristotelian, in that it is the individual that exists, not the concept. And yet it is clear that patterns exist and must be accounted for, and we probably can’t even do idiography without having ideas of general patterns, and it’s better to have good supportable patterns than mere intuitions and stereotypes. So we need nomothety! (I don’t even know if those are real nouns.) Statistics, probability, and emergence, put together, are a way of insisting that it's the individuals that are real while still seeking to understand those patterns the cosmos won't do without.

(And morality has to be at least somewhat nomethetic/realist, even if the idiographic/nominalist informs each particular decision, or else it literally cannot be morality, right?)

-----

As you can tell from the deplorable spelling of flavour, the title is a quotation, in this case taken from a translation of Borges' essay "Personality and the Buddha;" the original was published at around the same time as "From Allegories to Novels." The context reads like this:

From Chaucer to Marcel Proust, the novel's substance is the unrepeatable, the singular flavor of souls; for Buddhism there is no such flavor, or it is one of the many varieties of the cosmic simulacrum. Christ preached so that men would have life, and have it in abundance (John 10:10); the Buddha, to proclaim that this world, infinite in time and in space, is a dwindling fire. [...]

But Borges writes in "From Allegories to Novels" that allegories have traces of the novel and novels, traces of the allegory:

Allegory is a fable of abstractions, as the novel is a fable of individuals. The abstractions are personified; there is something of the novel in every allegory. The individuals that novelists present aspire to be generic (Dupin is Reason, Don Segundo Sombra is the Gaucho); there is an element of allegory in novels. 

* What is strange about Aristotle and Plato is that Plato was Aristotelian when it comes to people and Aristotle, Platonic. Plato admitted that a woman might be born with the traits of a soldier or a philosopher-king, though it was unusual, and if such a woman were born it would be just to put her in that position for which she was suited. Aristotle, however, spoke of all slaves having the same traits, and all women the same traits, and all citizens the same traits, and thus slaves must always be slaves and women subject to male citizens. I want to hypothesize, subject to empirical study, that racists and sexists are more likely to be realists and use nomothetic thinking, while people with a more correct view of people (at least as far as sex and race are concerned) are more likely to be nominalists and use idiographic thinking... but the examples of Aristotle and Plato give me pause. Besides, is not such a hypothesis itself realist and nomothetic?

A Mature Philosophy

Is Personal Epistemology What I’ve Been Looking For?

Through the research I’m doing as an RA, I encountered the idea of personal epistemology; the Cole’s Notes version is that different people have different measurable attitudes towards how people gain knowledge, what knowledge is like, and so forth. In general, research into personal epistemology fit into two streams: 1) research into epistemic beliefs addresses the particular individual beliefs a person might have, while 2) developmental models of personal epistemology chart how personal epistemology changes over a person’s life. Personal epistemology and its developmental focus are the invention of William G. Perry with his 1970 Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years, but these days Barbara Hofer and Paul Pintrich are the major proponents and experts.

Perry studied college students for all four years of undergraduate school, asking them questions designed to elicit their views on knowledge. What he determined is that they gradually changed their views over time in a somewhat predictable pattern. Of course, not all students were at the same stage when they entered university, so the early stages had fewer examples, but there were still some. Generally, he found that students began in an dualist stage, where they believe that things are either true or false, and have little patience for ambiguity or what Perry calls relativism.* In this stage they believe that knowledge is gained from authorities (ie. professors)—or, if they reject the authority, as sometimes happens, they do so without the skills of the later stages and still tend to view things as black and white. As the stages progress, they start to recognize that different professors want different answers and that there are good arguments for mutually exclusive positions. By the fifth stage, they adopt Perry’s relativism: knowledge is something for which one makes arguments, and authorities might know more than you but they’re just as fallible, and there’s no real sure answer for anything anywhere. After this stage, they start to realize they can make commitments within relativism, up until the ninth stage, where they have made those commitments within a relativist framework. Not all students (or people) progress through all of the stages, however; each stage contains tensions (both internally and against the world/classroom) which can only be resolved in the next stage, but the unpleasant experience of these tensions might cause a student to retreat into a previous stage and get stuck there. Furthermore, with the exception of the first stage, there are always two ways to do a stage: one is in adherence to the authority (or the perceived authority), and the other is in rebellion against it.** It’s all quite complicated and interesting.

The 50s, 60s, and 70s show clearly in Perry, both in his writing style, his sense of psychology, and his understanding of the final stage as still being within a relativist frame. His theory foundered for a while but was picked up Hofer and Pintrich in the early 2000s. They, and other researchers, have revised the stages according to more robust research among more demographics. Their results are fairly well corroborated by multiple empirical studies.

According to contemporary developmental models of personal epistemology, people progress through the following stages:

Naïve realism: The individual assumes that any statement is true. Only toddlers are in this stage: most children move beyond it quite early. Naïve realism is the extreme gullibility of children.

Dualism: The individual believes statements are either right or wrong. A statement’s truth value is usually determined by an authority; all an individual must do is receive this information from the authority. While most people start moving out of this stage by the end of elementary school or beginning of high school, some people never move past it.

Relativism: The individual has realized that there are multiple competing authorities and multiple reasonable positions to take. The individual tends to think in terms of opinions rather than truths, and often believes that all opinions are equally valid. Most people get here in high school; some people proceed past it, but others do not.

Evaluism: The individual still recognizes that there are multiple competing positions and does not believe that there is perfect knowledge available, but rather gathers evidence. Some opinions are better than others, according to their evidence and arguments. Knowledge is not received but made. Also called multiplism. Those people who get here usually do so in university, towards the end of the undergraduate degree or during graduate school. (I’m not sure what research indicates about people who don’t go to university; I suspect there’s just less research about them.)

This link leads to a decent summary I found (with Calvin & Hobbes strips to illustrate!), but note that whoever made this slideshow has kept Perry’s Commitments as a stage after evaluism (which they called multiplism), which isn’t conventional. As with Perry’s model, there are more ways not to proceed that there are to proceed. Often people retreat from the next stage because it requires new skills from them and introduces them to new tensions and uncertainties; it feels safer in a previous stage. Something that’s been discovered more recently is that people have different epistemic beliefs for different knowledge domains: someone can hold an evaluist position in politics, a relativist position in religion, and a dualist position in science, for instance.

All of this pertains to our research in a particular way which I’m not going to get into much here. What I wanted to note, however, is that I am strongly reminded of Anderson’s pre-modern, modern, post-modern trajectory, I outlined just over a year ago. It’s much better than Anderson’s trajectory, however, for two reasons: 1) it’s empirically based, and 2) in evaluism it charts the way past relativism, the Hegelian synthesis I had been babbling about, the way I’d been trying to find in tentativism (or beyond tentativism). Perry’s model may or may not do this (without understanding better what he means by relativism, I can’t tell what his commitment-within-relativism is), but Hofer, Pintrich, et al.’s model does. Evaluism is a terrible word; I regret how awkward tentativism is, but I like evaluism even less. However, in it there seems to be the thing I’ve been looking for.

Or maybe not. It reminds me of David Deutsch’s Popper-inspired epistemology in The Beginning of Infinity, but it also reminds me literary interpretation as I’m used to practicing it, and so I can see a lot of people rallying under its banner and saying it’s theirs. That doesn’t mean it is theirs, but it often might be, and what I suspect is that evaluism might be a pretty broad tent. It was an exciting discovery for me, but for the last few months I’ve started to consider that it’s at best a genus, and I’m still looking for a species.

But this leads to a particular question: which comes first, philosophy or psychology? Brains, of course, come before both, but I’ve always been inclined to say that philosophy comes first. When, in high school, I first learned of Kohlberg’s moral development scheme, I reacted with something between indignation and horror: I was distressed at the idea that people would—that I would—inexorably change from real morality, which relies on adherence to laws, to something that seemed at the time like relativism. Just because people tended to develop in a particular way did not mean they should. What I told myself was that adults did not become more correct about morality but rather became better at rationalizing their misdeeds using fancy (but incorrect) relativistic logic. Of course I was likely right about that, but still I grew up just as Kohlberg predicted. However, I still believed that questions of how we tended to think about morality were different questions from how we should think about morality.

And yet it is tempting to see personal epistemology as the course of development we should take. Confirmation bias would lead me to think of it this way, so I must be careful. And yet the idea that there are mature and immature epistemologies, and that mature ones are better than immature ones, makes a certain intuitive sense to me. I can think of three possible justifications for this. An individual rational explanation would imagine this development less as biological and more as cognitive; as we try to understand the world, our epistemologies fail us and we use our reason to determine why they failed and update them. Since this process of failure and correction is guided by reason and interaction with the real world, it tends towards improvement. An evolutionary pragmatic explanation is also empirical and corrective: during the process of human evolution, those people with better epistemologies tended to survive, so humans evolved better epistemologies; however, given their complexity, they developed later in life (as prefrontal cortices do). A teleological explanation would suggest that humans are directed, in some way, toward the truth, and so these typical developments would indicate the direction in which we ought to head. I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced by of any of these justifications, but the first one seems promising.

So what comes first: psychology or philosophy? And should we be looking less for the right epistemology or a mature one?

-/-/-

*I’m still struggling to understand what Perry means by relativism, exactly, because it doesn’t seem to quite be what I think of relativism as being: it has much more to do with the mere recognition that other people can legitimately hold other positions than oneself, and yet it seems to be overwhelmed by this acknowledgement. It seems more like a condition than a philosophy. I'm still working it out.
**Perry writes about a strange irony in the fairly relativistic (or seemingly relativistic) university today.
Here’s the quotation:

In a modern liberal arts college, […] The majority of the faculty has gone beyond differences of absolutist opinion into teachings which are deliberately founded in a relativistic epistemology […]. In this current situation, if a student revolts against “the Establishment” before he has familiarized himself with the analytical and integrative skills of relativistic thinking, the only place he can take his stand is in a simplistic absolutism. He revolts, then, not against a homogeneous lower-level orthodoxy but against heterogeneity. In doing so he not only narrows the range of his materials, he rejects the second-level tools of his critical analysis, reflection, and comparative thinking—the tools through which the successful rebel of a previous generation moved forward to productive dissent.

Postlude: Eternal Consequences

or, What Kind of Harm?

I see that I had planned to write another Moral Foundations post and had forgotten to do so! This is my attempt at recovering that fumbled intention. 

In the previous post of my Moral Foundations Series, I wrote, "If moral intuitions can be wrong (which is a truism these days), should we even be talking about Moral Foundations Theory? Shouldn't we be talking instead about deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, moral nihilism, immoralism, divine command theory, or other logical bases for morality?" My proposed answer was that, on the one hand, there's an argument to be made that Moral Foundations make bad philosophy, but on the other hand, we cannot act morally without investments, and our Moral Foundations provide those investments.

 Ethical philosophy's role, then, might be to manage those investments. I wrote in "What Kind of Character is a Virtue Ethicist?", in my Good People and Going Wrong series, that telling me your moral philosophy (I discuss deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics) doesn't help me figure out what matters to you. If you say, "I am a deontologist," I don't know what you think your duties are. If you say, "I am a consequentialist," I don't know what goods you are trying to maximize and what harms you are trying to minimize (and for whom). If you say, "I am a virtue ethicist," I do not know what virtues you are trying to cultivate. Your moral structure might be clear, but I still don't know what your values are. What I wonder, then, is if the Moral Foundations provide those missing values.

That sounds great, but there's a problem. Some of the Moral Foundations lend themselves to certain moral philosophies better than others. Harm/care, for instance, seems to work much better with consequentialism than with deontology or virtue ethics. I suppose you could say, "I have a duty to provide care," or "I have a duty to do no harm," a sort of layman's Hippocratic Oath, but these are pretty heavily skewed towards consequentialism. Meanwhile, it seems very difficult to articulate loyalty or authority/respect in consequentialist terms: how would you maximize loyalty in a system? These lend themselves much more to deontology or, perhaps especially, virtue ethics. One of the reasons I've never declared for a particular moral philosophy is that none of them deal especially well with all three of harm/care, fairness, and freedom/oppression.

 The difficulty of expressing certain values in certain moral systems might explain why the deontologists I've known have often been social conservatives while the consequentialists have often been social progressives. But I actually wonder whether those social conservatives really are so deontological after all. A lot of Christians seem to be consequentialists in one respect: they care very much about the consequences their actions will have on the fate of their soul. So they might be divine-command flavoured deontologists or they might be virtue ethicists of Christlikeness, but for a lot of them, the eternal consequences matter; a long-game consequentialism is powering a short-game deontology (or virtue ethics). I must not lie, despite the consequences on this side of the grave (deontology), because to stray from God will have consequences on the far side of the grave (consequentialism). And the drive to proselytize is all about this! We have to save those souls from the fire (harm/care)! (Now certainly not all Christians are driven by afterlife concerns--I'm not, for example--but there is such a stereotype for a reason.)

This shows up particularly well in the purity/sanctity Foundation, I think. Purity binds together all three of consequentialism, virtue ethics, and deontology. Normally the moral or ritual laws which protect purity are deontological ones--pre-marital sex is defiling (for women and not for men, but that's another matter), and it does not matter whether the consequences of not having pre-marital sex are, let's say, the death of every living thing in a the neighbouring village. But, at the same time, the loss of purity is a consequence and constitutes damage to a person's virtue. (Indeed, I'm reading virtue ethics now as a very specialized kind of consequentialism, in that it has to do with the consequences actions have on your soul/identity/character.)

I don't think we're doomed to failure if we use moral philosophy as a structure which the Moral Foundations fill out, just because the results are sometimes difficult or make the structure look different; indeed, I've said over and over again that the content you plug into structures changes how those structures operate, and the structures into which you plug the content changes what that content means. The fact that some combinations will be clunky or will require retro-fitting is unsurprising if you look at it in the way I've discussed genres. What I think the exercise shows us is that consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, divine command theory, et al aren't so nicely separable after all. Oh, there are probably people who do distill their moral philosophies down (Kantain deontologists who eschew concerns about salvation, total utilitarians who do not care about how their hedons are distributed), but most of us aren't purebreeds. Most of us are left with the hard work of kludging together a mutt moral system which does justice to our values as best we can make it.

This is the last Moral Foundations Series post. The index is here: link.

An Apology to Certainty

In the time since I've written these posts advocating for less emphasis on certainty and more acceptance of uncertainty (link and link), I've moved on my position a little. I have not moved a lot, and I wouldn't feel any more comfortable formulating some kind of Statement of Personal Philosophy on this topic right now, but I feel like it's worth noting that I have encountered particular oppositions to my way of thinking and they are having an effect. A slow effect, but still an effect.

I thought I would round up a few of the things which have made me re-think my position on the subject in lieu of trying to articulate anything coherent. My purpose is so that, if anyone really wants to change my mind, they'll be able to see what kinds of things have traction on my thinking.

1. The conversation I had with Iota in the comments of this blog post. (link)
Iota has convinced me that, however useful I find postmodernism for my own thinking, it's probably not useful to expect other people to find it useful. Moreover, Iota pointed something out that it took me far too long to acknowledge: I need to reconsider my suspicion or anxiety that reducing certainty is the best method of reducing the general unpleasantness of society. Specifically, I am committing an error that I find appalling when others commit it; in the same comments section as my conversation with Iota, a number of people made claims about necessary (or at least overwhelmingly likely) progressions from one kind of belief-state to another. So, for instance, someone argued that Protestantism leads by necessity to postmodernism, and then on to relativism. But this is obviously untrue; you cannot posit necessary psychological progressions like this, particularly not when there is a lot of counter-evidence. You need to take other people's experiences seriously, and positing such progressions fails to take other people's experiences seriously.
Anyway, Iota did not make a parallel between my idea that certainty-->lack of hospitality-->jerk-ness and the grouchy Chestertonian Catholic's idea that Protestantism-->postmodernism-->relativism-->moral degeneracy, but by pointing out that my progression is faulty, Iota put me in a position where I could notice that parallel myself.

2. Real people
Following up Iota's comments, I noticed that I have friends who are certain (about some things, anyway), and manage not to be jerks. In fact, their very certainty makes them even more accepting of uncertainty in others, or so it seems. (It is also possible that they are just nice people, irrespective of how they hold beliefs. But it doesn't seem that way.)

3. Richard Beck's "Doubt and Universalism: Being Hopeful and Dogmatic"  (link)
This post is a short one, so I suggest you read it if you want a sense of what I'm talking about. The gist is that Beck is not so much a dogmatic universalist, absolutely believing that all people will go to Heaven eventually; rather, Beck calls himself a polemical universalist, because he'll argue for universalism without being sure of it. He says that if the Christian God exists, then universalism is the only position which is coherent. But Beck isn't entirely sure God exists. His certainty is in the validity of the if-then statement. It's an argument I find convincing, but I was more struck by Beck's ability to claim he's a polemical [insert position], and I think this way of constructing a belief is helpful, however religious or irreligious that position is.

This might not seem like something designed to inch me toward certainty, but it is. Being fairly confident in an if-then statement is at least a kind of confidence, and I ought to admit that. At the same time, it allows for action despite uncertainty; I may not know whether proposition A is true or false, but I sure do know that if proposition A is true, then result B will happen, while if proposition A is false, then result C will happen. That gives me something to work with, to plan for. So it makes me feel more comfortable with certainty, while giving me a way of articulating what it is I want out of uncertainty. If Beck's post hadn't done the second thing, I maybe wouldn't have accepted the first so readily.

4. Kathleen Mulhern's "Trinitarian Spirituality, 18: Believing in the Right Direction"
 (link)
If you aren't Christian, this entry won't do much for you. But it has done something for me.

What K. Mulhern's posts in the middle of her series on the Trinity has indicated is that Trinitarian Christianity is invested in a God that is self-revealing. Specifically, if Christ is God incarnated on Earth, then there is something self-revealing about God. Oh, certainly there's a lot about God that remains mysterious, but it does seem that God would like us to know at least some of God's qualities. If God wants us to know at least some minimum of religious knowledge, then I presume it must be possible. This disrupts my tendencies to via negativa and analogous non-religious ways of thinking about knowledge.

5. Black holes
If the last post was rather religious, this one is rather nerdy. In the Philosophy of Mathematics course I took during my undergraduate degree, we were introduced to quite a few theories, including what's called realism or Platonism (numbers are real things that exist either in the Realm of Forms or as extensions of mathematical principles), nominalism (mathematics is an abstraction or approximation of reality relationships; this has an Aristotelian history), or fictionalism (mathematics is a fiction/metaphor we have found useful). My response was pretty much that fictionalism > nominalism > realism. I knew from the outset, though, that the big hurdle which fictionalism had to handle was the fact that math had predictive powers (most attempts to explain this with fictionalism turn fictionalism into nominalism). Most people describe the predictive powers by saying that bridges don't fall (because engineers use math and math works), but I always thought of Stephen Hawking's work on black holes.

The story generally goes that Stephen Hawking took some physical laws, crunched the numbers rather a lot, and then predicted that black holes must exist. Until this time, no one had the slightest idea about black holes, but when astronomers checked, they found evidence which suggested that they exist. It turns out this story might not be accurate, but the general lesson remains the same: physical laws are consistent and therefore predictable, and this predictability scales pretty well. We'd live in a pretty weird world if all this predictability was just a fluke.

So, black holes remind me that a lot of stuff is knowable, and I try to remember them when I start getting too skeptical.

6. Richard Beck's "Gracious Doubt" (link)
You know those times when you encounter something--maybe something a friend says, or a passage in a book, or what-have-you--which shows you, clearly and without compromise, a way you've gone wrong? That's what this post was to me. It is, yet again, a short post, so feel free to go read it.

I suppose what I managed to mess up was this: in feeling demeaned by those who were certain, I (sometimes) became antagonistic against certainty itself. In trying to make space for uncertainty, for doubt, I wasn't at all interested in making space for certainty. I recognize this now as uncharitable. I suppose this post did not really move me on this issue, so much as remind me that I needed to adjust my emotional response. And, possibly, offer an apology if I ever demeaned anyone myself. In which case, I'm sorry.

Which isn't to say I'm OK with people getting on their high horse against doubt, which is still a big issue.

The Postmodernism-Tapeworm Analogy

EDIT 31/10/2013: I made a silly mistake; it's hookworms, not tapeworms, that are beneficial to humans. That being said, tapeworms are still not detrimental to humans.

I just saw an article at Patheos entitled "Many Post-Moderns Have the Intellectual Equivalent of a Tapeworm in their Minds," which was pretty much certain to get my click-through. Here's why: I'm sure the author means that postmodernism is an intellectual parasite, some kind of malefic being which devours cognitive sustenance before the thinker in question can digest it, so I was primed to disagree with the author's intent, but NOT with the title, because tapeworms aren't actually detrimental to human hosts. They're actively beneficial!

First, they don't consume enough of our nutrients to harm us; only anemic or severely malnourished individuals would suffer any harm from a tapeworm. Second, for reasons not yet fully known to science, people with tapeworms have no allergies. There's evidence to suggest that deliberately infecting oneself with tapeworms will cure you of allergies. This is because they aren't parasites but symbiotes; just as we've evolved to have a special relationship with dogs, we've also evolved to have a special relationship with tapeworms. Third, you'll have a permanent friend. About the only downside to hosting a tapeworm is that it's pretty gross when the tapeworm tries to leave your body (something it will only do if it is starving, and that will only happen if you are starving), and this can be easily avoided by encouraging it to remain in your body.

(Thanks to my brother for informing me of this; he's told people that they shouldn't accept food from him if they've complained of allergies, because he'll likely try to cure them with tapeworms.)

So! Yes, I agree. Postmodernism is a tapeworm in your brain! It makes you less allergic to things you'd otherwise react badly toward, and it does not prevent you from ingesting ideas whatsoever.

Disclaimer: I do not consider myself a postmodernist and I do not encourage others to be postmodernists. I do strongly encourage people to learn about postmodernism, to recognize its achievements and respect it for those achievements (eg. its role in anti-racist activism, cf bell hooks), and to adopt the better of the tools which postmodernism has given us (eg. deconstruction, the idea of culture). In a sense, house a little postmodernist!you in your mind to be one of the many philosophical angels on your shoulders.

And actually engaging with the article at all: I don't know what Mark Shea is talking about. Pretty much every postmodernist I know or have heard of is extremely well-educated, in both the senses of "erudite" and "good at thinking."

A Perfectly Viable Story, of a Minor Kind

A Review of J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year

Coetzee is one of those excellent novelists of whom I have not read nearly enough. I bought Diary of a Bad Year as a present for myself after my undergraduate degree and hadn't gotten around to it until now. I'm glad I finally did read it, though I think I'm better equipped to read it now rather than after my undergrad.

If unconventional novels aren't your cup of tea, then you might not enjoy Diary quite so much as I did. It has three sections that run parallel to one another: the base of the book is a set of essays, called Strong Opinions, by the protagonist, an elderly author and professor who may or may not be a fictionalized version of Coetzee himself; the next section is a set of reflections by the protagonist on his relationship with his typist, Anya, a shockingly attractive Filipina woman who lives in his apartment complex; the third section is Anya's account of the essays, her relationship with the author, who she calls Senior C, and her live-in partner Alan, a ruthless businessman. The trick is that each page is literally divided between these three sections; the essays run along the top, the author's reflections run along the middle, and Anya's reflections run along the bottom.

Plot is minimal. Anya and Senior C gradually figure out their working relationship, but still fail to understand one another; Alan becomes jealous of the time Anya spends with Senior C; it slowly becomes clear that Alan has hatched some kind of scheme regarding Senior C. That's about all that happens. The main interest in the novel (for me) comes from two things.

First, I enjoyed the essays themselves--mainly political, occasionally aesthetic or mathematico-philosophical--and the place they held in the novel. At first, anyway, they are clever and acute (if sometimes tremendously wrong) but still seem a bit oblivious; since the reader also encounters Anya's commentary on the essays, there's something undefended, exposed, unawares about them. Toward the end of the novel, the character of the essays change; they become more reflective, less bold, more...human, perhaps? Perhaps I enjoyed them because I am (or at any rate was) an academic; even in their error, I feel a sort of affinity with their project, and I enjoyed seeing them soften, seeing them shaped by the characters' lives, seeing their concerns shape the characters' lives.

Second, I enjoyed the degree to which the characters failed to understand one another. All three principle characters had different ideas about what their relationships with one another were; all three characters also failed to understand the other characters ideas. This was ultimately enjoyable, but at times horribly frustrating, because as much as Senior C might be wrong about some things (he is usually wrong when he talks about mathematics), Alan's critiques of Senior C's essays are even worse; he badly misunderstands philosophy, making category errors all of the place. To an extent, this is an academic's nightmare and dream: the reader proves the necessity of the academic's work by failing to understand these ideas, but at the same time and by the same token proves the futility of the academic's work, as well. The character who, by the end, became perhaps Senior C's best reader, to my surprise and joy, was Anya, the pragmatic under-educated typist who proved to be smarter than she seemed (or, very possibly, became smarter in her time with Senior C).
And it's unclear whether Anya or Alan understood Senior C's personal motives at all; Alan seemed to think that there was a love-triangle going on, which is possible but so incredibly boring, while Anya thought that there was something sexual but much more innocent going on, which is also possible, but we don't get many clues from Senior C regarding his attitude toward Anya by the end of the novel.

I don't want to say much more because I'm afraid of spoiling--this isn't a novel that can easily be spoiled, since none of its effects rely much on surprise, but there are a few things which maybe ought to be discovered alone. However, I'll note that there some ideas in his essays that might stand to be discussed, and I may do that on this blog. He certainly has produced some interesting ideas. In the meantime, I'll drop two quotations from the essays for your consideration:

So Nietzsche's dictum needs to be amended: While it may be so that only the higher animals are capable of boredom, man proves himself highest of all by domesticating boredom, giving it a home.

and,

These are pages I have read innumerable times before, yet instead of becoming inured to their force I find myself more and more vulnerable before them.

Alas, I don't think Diary of a Bad Year will be quite pass that last test.

EDIT: I should note that the title of this post is a quotation from the novel, describing a story Senior C contemplates writing but ultimately doesn't write.

Are You Taking the Right Test?

or, The Non-Participating Participant; How I Did the Ideological Turing Test All Wrong

Note: I wrote this a while ago, sometime in August. On the 19th I touched it up a bit but made no substantial changes, and scheduled it to post on the 20th.

I participated in this year's Ideological Turing Test at Unequally Yoked, or at any rate I made a submission. I am not so sure now that I truly participated.

As usual, the ideological positions were Christian and atheist (though activity in the comments made it seem as though the real lines were between Christian and non-Christian rather than atheist and non-atheist), but the topics were euthanasia and polygamy. In comments someone said that he did not think Christians and atheists would differ on the issue of polygamy: both groups would oppose it. As a Christian who supports at least the legalization of polygamy, if not its unqualified practice, I was a bit amused and intended to disagree with him, but because I wanted to write a submission I thought I should disguise the grounds for my disagreement so I wouldn't give myself away. Thus I replied that even if Christians and atheists wound up on the same side of the issue, what would be interesting is the reasons they gave for their conclusion. Indeed, it might be even harder to argue for the same conclusion with different reasons because your own reasons for that opinion would cloud your judgement. Even though this was a disguise for my actual reasons for disagreeing, I did think it was true. (Update 19 September 2013: Most atheist entries have supported polygamy while most Christian entries have opposed it.)

I'm no longer so sure it is true after all.

In writing my entries, I did what I did last year: I wrote a Christian entry that I largely agreed with, but I was conscious of adding more Christian-culture stuff than I normally would (in other words, I pretended it was something I wrote for fellowship and added more Bible stuff); and I wrote an atheist entry that was mostly what I think I would believe if I were an atheist. This last means that I write mainly my own opinion with all of the Jesus stuff excised and some stuff I stole from my atheist friends to paper over the gaps. I'm sufficiently used to doing something like the latter anyway when writing academic papers. Most of the influence Christianity has on my thinking is what I would call a deep Gospel mentality: I don't really back things up with Scripture and theology, at least aloud, so much as try to inhabit Gospel-based values enough that my reasoning and actions will be consistent with Christ's teachings. You can disagree with this method on whatever grounds, but at any rate it's where I am and that's all that matters for this post, because it means that I can generally converse on an abstract or practical level with non-Christians and the difference between my Christianity and their non-Christianity only shows rarely.

If this is what I'm doing--fiddling what I think anyway around so that it sounds atheist, or anyway doesn't sound Christian--am I really participating in a Turing Test? Whether or not it is a sound strategy for winning this particular game is something time alone can tell (I suspect it isn't, because I know perfectly well that the kind of atheist I would be does not look much like the kinds of atheists that populate Leah's blog any more than the kind of Christian I am does not resemble the kinds of Christians that populate Leah's blog) but I still wonder whether my tactics achieve the ends that the Turing Test is supposed to promote. The goal, as I understand it, is to prove that you really do understand your ideological opposition's reasoning. That's all well and good...but are atheists really my ideological opposition? I don't think reality is anything so tidy. I agree with many of my atheist friends on a lot of matters, and I disagree with many of my Christian friends on the same matters. I might also say that social conservatives are the ideological opposition to my progressive beliefs more than any religious distinction, but I don't really think "conservative" and "progressive" are coherent groups. Other, idiosyncratic distinctions are even more important to me: tentativeness/certainty, for instance, or altruism/self-interest, or capitalism/anti-capitalism.

So if I were to really participate in this Turing Test, I might be forced to write an atheist entry that opposes at least polyamory, and maybe euthanasia. That exercise would force me to really understand both social conservatism and atheisms other than the one with which I'm familiar. However, since neither winning nor discovering whether I can fake atheism is motivating me to participate, I'm not going to change my entry now. (Reasons they don't motivate me: I'm not very competitive and I don't think this test is a terribly good indicator of whether I understand atheism. What is motivating me: I think writing games are fun, and I want to make sure there are some interesting entries in the Turing Test. There always are interesting entries, but I feel like I can contribute something that many of the entrants can't/won't contribute, namely a humanities-educated leftist Protestant Christianity.)

Or perhaps I would have to write an entry that still supported euthanasia and polygamy but from strongly rational materialist and maybe probablistic grounds; I would want to use arguments from Less Wrong and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. I could participate in a Turing Test by pretending to be the kind of atheist I wouldn't be were I an atheist.

And this makes me wonder what other kinds of Ideological Turing Test could be run. In the context of Leah's blog, Catholic Christian/non-Catholic Christian comes to mind (but would that be Protestant or Orthodox?), as does conservative Christian/progressive Christian and transhumanist/non-transhumanist. Other lines that might interest me would be, say, liturgical Protestant/non-liturgical Protestant, or anti-capitalist/capitalist, or environmentalist/industrialist, or what have you. I guess I just don't think that the existence or non-existence of God or the divinity of Christ or what have you is really the place where the most publicly salient differences lie, and I'm using that to cheat my way through Leah's Turing Test (to whatever degree of success).

On the topic of cheating, I must also confess that I did put a bit of effort into making the atheist entry sound less like me than normal (at which I might have failed, but I hope not, since I think the entry sounds a bit brisque) and a bit more effort into making the Christian entry sound especially like me (at which I almost certainly succeeded). Given the fact that Leah's entries in the first iteration of the Turing Test were very clearly written in her own voice and included many of her public preoccupations, yet she passed the Turing Test with flying colours, I probably don't need to worry overmuch about whether or not my efforts to disguise or reveal myself will have an effect on the outcome. tl;dr: I don't think many people will recognize me anyway.

Update 15 August 2013

My entries having now been posted and the voters having commented on them, I should say that making the atheist entry sound less like me, or at least the way I went about making it sound less like me, was a mistake. Many people note that the voice sounds forced, and while I'm not entirely sure that's true (I don't think most people have a sufficient sense of just how idiosyncratic other people's language is, or at least their understanding doesn't reflect how idiosyncratic my language is, an issue which compromised people's assessments in the Ideological Turing Tests before), I will happily concede that the more particular complaints were likely valid. Some folks noted that the forcefulness of my piece's voice was at marked odds with how a person who held these opinions would probably write, and that's probably fair. I made the voice more confident because I thought that the recent tentativism kerfuffle would alert perceptive readers that ambiguity and tentativeness are kind of my trademark. While one person (Martha O'Keefe) does seem to have figured out that the Christian entry was mine along these lines, I was probably wholely wrong in this prediction otherwise; some voters say they have been using overconfidence as an indication that an entry is fake, which has the opposite effect as I'd been worried about. In other words, I'd have been better off risking recognition and keeping an uncertain voice, because recognition isn't much of a risk. (My narcissism cripples me again.)

More generally, I think that there was a problem with trying to strip an entry of my own voice entirely, in that it then lacks any coherent voice to hold it together. If I want to sound like not-me, I should have created an entire non-me persona to hold it together. I failed to do this, which likely explains a lot of the specific complaints people made. For instance, someone pointed out that it wasn't clear where my persona stood w/r/t libertarianism, anarchism, and liberalism. That complaint reflects a difficulty in my method: I stole the basics of the pro-euthanasia argument from my more anarchist friends, but I built those basics out in a way that is more appealing to me, a person sitting on the fence between anarchism and socialism (though I don't think the two are nearly as incompatible as most people think, and the anarchist friend of mine I know best would likely agree). And for an argument against the sanctity of life I stole and inverted an argument from some pro-life Catholics who were trying to convince conservative Catholics that pro-life theology entails more than anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia politics. What I didn't do is try to work out how this corresponded with the general persona I was(n't) constructing. So it's true that I didn't think through a persona who would hold these views, and as a result the presentation was likely sloppy. Of course, it's also possible that I'd have failed anyway; if the last Turing Test is any indication, the atheists at Unequally Yoked are not bad at all at sorting the real from the fake. It's hard to see how they might be so good based on last year's individual comments, which seem to me to have very faulty methods. But they did well, so either a) my skepticism in their methods might be misplaced, or b) the things that they say influence their decisions are post-hoc rationalizations of pre-conscious criteria which are very accurate, or c) the voters who commented do not accurately represent all voters, or d) a combination of a, b, and c, or e) something I haven't thought of yet.

This being said, I'm open to the possibility that I did a bad job at the Turing Test above and beyond making a poor choice regarding the piece's voice. I remember wishing I had a proof-reader before I submitted the entries, since I'd fussed with them for so long that I was no longer able to see whether they said what I wanted them to say. There are a couple of places where having a proof-reader would really have helped, I think, since particular passages are bivalent in ways I hadn't anticipated.

The Morality of Aliens, Dragons, and Dead Philosophers

or, Disorganized Thoughts on Moral Foundations Theory

A Moral Foundations Theory post

In this post I'm just catching together the topics that I want to bring up but don't have a coherent through-theme which might hold them together.

1. If moral intuitions can be wrong (which is a truism these days), should we even be talking about Moral Foundations Theory? Shouldn't we be talking instead about deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, moral nihilism, immoralism, divine command theory, or other logical bases for morality? Aren't moral sentiments (for that's what the Moral Foundations are), well, sentimental?

On the one hand, yes. Moral Foundations are moral sentiments/intuitions, and since people disagree about them (that's the whole idea behind Moral Foundations Theory), they must sometimes be wrong for some people. Probably a rigorous and consistent moral philosophy would be better. But...

On the other hand, no. We can talk about morality not as moralists or moral philosophers but as psychologists and anthropologists and culture critics. I can take as my object of study not what I should do, but how people try to work out what they should do. An anthropology of morality is valuable. But I also think that Moral Foundations Theory, or anyway the sorts of things we might figure out when thinking about Moral Foundations Theory, can help in asking the moralist's questions. I cannot act morally without investments (see this post; as usual, Beck is my touchstone for all questions about the psychology of morality). It is good to consider what those investments are and how they operate. Moreover, my response to other people's morality is itself governed by morality; Moral Foundations are then data for my moral decision making.

2. The Moral Foundations tests I took (I took a few) all had a question which asked whether a person's mathematical ability might influence your moral decision. I'm curious about that question. I assume it's a question to determine whether a person is answering randomly; anyone who says that they do think a person's moral worth is linked to their mathematical prowess must either be answering randomly, lying, misunderstanding the questions, or morally alien. But that got me thinking: could there be a morality--an alien, orange-and-blue morality to be sure--that does value math in this way? Some sort of technocratic or narrowly meritocratic society? Actually, now that I write this out, it doesn't seem so absurd; fantasy novels assure me that some people (and cultures) assign a moral value to physical strength. Perhaps another person or culture could assign moral value to mathematical ability?

3. On the topic of orange-and-blue moralities, is such a thing possible? What would a truly alien morality look like? How could one identify it? Would we be able to even tell that it is a morality? (I suppose this might not be too far fetched; for a long time, existentialism struck me as really alien and Nietzsche's immoralism still does.)

4. I wonder how (and if) Moral Foundations Theory meshes with the classic Dungeons and Dragons' alignment system. This is the first time I realized it, but I suppose it would be best to think of Good/Evil as being moral and Lawful/Chaotic as being political; I've always thought of both axes as different ways of measuring morality, but perhaps they are the different branches of axiology. So are the Moral Foundations all subsumed under Good/Evil? This seems unlikely: freedom/oppression and authority/respect look like Lawful/Chaotic--that is, political--virtues as much as Good/Evil--that is, moral--virtues. As far as gameplay goes, it might make sense to replace the moral alignment chart with a simplified version of Moral Foundations Theory, but I suspect we would be even better served to overlay them. You could work out your alignment, and then work out your Moral Foundations. After all, "Evil" doesn't exist in the Moral Foundations; if you are an Evil character, perhaps the Moral Foundations you hold are the principles you fight against? How does acrasia (when people act against their own better judgement) fit into all of this? I'm at times tempted to dismiss the Good/Evil alignment axis on same grounds that Plato would: we cannot will evil. But at other times I know better: I do what I do not will, and I do not do what I will, and sometimes it seems that I do not will what I will, either.

5. And while we're talking about ancient Greeks and moral philosophy, I want to talk about the Euthyphro dilemma. The only reason I scored as highly as I did in the purity/sanctity measure is that I said that what God wills is good. They asked if whether God's feelings about my behaviour influences how moral that behaviour is, and I said yes. But I said yes because God wills what is good; I was not agreeing that what God wills is good simply because God wills it. So the creators of the quiz embedded the Euthyphro dilemma into this quiz: is the Good good because the gods admire it, or do the gods admire the Good because it is good?
But more simply, I think the question is misleading; God's will is not clearly accessible to us, so all we have to work it out is our morality anyway. The question isn't going to illuminate that reasoning at all. (I suspect. But there are tests you can do to see whether a question in a questionnaire contributes to the measure for which it is designed, so maybe I should reserve judgement until those tests are done.)

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