Citations

Followers of this blog, of whom I hope and expect there are none, or at least none perturbed or offended, will have observed that I have interests both in reason and in faith, and have tended to precess between the two, believing neither to conflict with, nor to preclude, the other. What I write, I write to myself, and sometimes as a "clamo ad te" to God. Per Eliot's version of the tempter's comment to Thomas Becket: "That is why I tell you. Your thoughts have more power than kings to compel you."

And it's perhaps why I tell myself the same thing in a variety of languages, from those of theology and philosophy, to that of predicate logic. And the thing I tell myself is that I must embrace my moral compass and reject and repudiate evil, and that I have to believe.

In times that seem hopeless, perhaps even eschatological, that is the final message, though, howsoever and in whatever idiom articulated and internalized. Trust God, see all, nor be afraid.

Today, I'm thinking of Matthew 8:16-17.

Epigoni - Remarks on Teaching

For the null set of you -- let's say, for the sake of solipsistic verisimilitude, I -- who've been awaiting my further cogitations on the matter of logical abduction, I promise not to emulate Stephen King in the matter of The Dark Tower, but "l'explication juste" has been a bit slow in coming to my intermittent consciousness, so I thought, in the interim, I'd return to the subject of education, and the lack thereof to be had in the continental United States, which does relate, and not only tenuously, to the previous uncompleted opus. [Actually, I've just completed it, and backdated it a bit just to have the five parts of the post displayed in sequence, uninterrupted.]

So, as an erstwhile (tenured) academic (maybe more than I want to admit, but true), here's my take:

The quality of minds (like that of mercy) matters. I believe that we in academe are eating our seed corn, making new generations that are less good reproductions of our own, as though agonizingly diffracted, not through a glass darkly, but through a series of 17 mechanically defective Xerox machines with empty toner cartridges, set at the lowest possible resolution. (Has anyone not noticed that each generation is less articulate, less possessed of the breadth of erudition that used to be the hallmark of a liberally-educated human being?) And the reason has to do with the progressive, ineluctable devaluation of teaching and the stigmatisation of teachers. I think it does matter to make the next generation educated, and if the major universities have adopted the stance that only research is of value, and if this attitude migrates down (as it has) into what originally were teaching colleges, then truly, no venue is left from which a generation will come that has been taught effectively, and that has a model to emulate of what being a professor and a mentor ought to be about, other than writing a steady stream of grant applications.

It is possible to do research without having absorbed the fundamental principles of one's own discipline -- indeed, we're demanding it of our students, because what used to be required for tenure at major universities is now the minimum prerequisite for admission to their graduate programs. It is possible to do research without knowing anything beyond one's own discipline, without being able to lecture eloquently (or even intelligibly), without knowing Hamlet from omelets, without walking away from Omelas. It is possible, and it's become our consuming obsession; it's become the only currency in which it's possible to transact academic business.

When an activity goes unrewarded, or worse, is seen to be a manifestation of intellectual deficiency detrimental to the health and fame of the institution that supports that activity, you can be sure that people will stop spending time on it. Such is the status in the colleges and universities of this country of effective teaching. Woe betide the perpetrator, who has as much chance of continued employment as a starving person has of being fed at a Republican convention.

Abduction - Part V (Final)

I'll make this ultra-brief.

1) Believe what you can observe. Do not deny the evidence of your own senses. It's a bad evolutionary strategy, and also makes you vulnerable to deception. And it has negative consequences for your fellow human beings.

2) If you are told something that contradicts the evidence of your senses, then posit that you have been told a falsehood. Look for an explanation (an antecedent) which would explain why you are being told this particular falsehood. Lawyers and police detectives like to ask the question, "cui bono?" (Who benefits from your believing this deception? And how do they benefit?) That's one good approach. Or if there isn't a specific intent to deceive, then why is the source of this misinformation conveying it to you. Does the source believe it? Why? Rationalization of something it's personally or institutionally advantageous to believe? Psychological comfort?

3) Unless you are genuinely schizophrenic, or in some other way pathologically delusional, the evidence of your senses is your best, most direct guide to the reality around you. If you're not going to believe in the reality of what you can see, then why on earth would you believe in the second-order reality represented to you by someone else?

Abduction - Part IV

The question with which I concluded my last post was why. Why do people believe manifest nonsense, utter falsehoods that flagrantly violate the evidence of their own senses? That can't, surely, be the result of sociobiology. It's hard to see the evolutionary value in denying that there's a sabertooth tiger at the door of your cave, because you've been told by Ugh, the troglodytic village elder, that there's no such thing as tigers, or that if you pay him a fee for a magical amulet, the tiger will simply go away. Cavepeople who believed that tended not to live long enough to pass on their genes.

The reason is that we've all been conditioned, deliberately, systematically, consciously and unconsciously, by the ambient belief structure of our culture, by the formal and informal "educational" systems thereof, and even more by the ubiquitous delivery of false and perniciously deceptive messages by our various and proliferating media, 24/7.

If it hadn't been sufficiently obvious to begin with, I would have arrived at this conclusion by abduction: in this case, a kind of meta-abduction because it yields a conclusion about people's methods of arriving at conclusions: specifically, that they've been inculcated with the propensity to rely on "received truths," and discouraged from resorting to analytical thought. And also discouraged, when those "received truths" contradict the evidence of their own senses, from believing in what they can observe. This is a plausible and probable antecedent for the observable consequent circumstance that people believe nonsensical untruths which a) do them harm, and b) advantage the powerful interests that incessantly promulgate those untruths.

Abduction - Part III

OK. This is really simple, so the build-up may seem to have been gratuitous, but bear with me.

It may seem to you (and it will, if you're sane and conscious) that the world does not make sense. The people in charge (and it's part of the American mythos that achieving power is *good*, and is something that is only managed by *good* people) take actions of which the perfectly foreseeable outcome is that hundreds of millions of less powerful people will suffer hideously. And they tell you that those actions are good and right, and that they will have completely different outcomes from the ones that any child could anticipate. Giving untold billions of dollars to rich people who don't need them will help you and your starving neighbor. Paying hundreds of billions to fight a pointless and destructive war will help you much more than spending ten or twenty billion to give everybody free health care. After all, you don't want to see your starving neighbor's child saved from death, because it's obviously his fault that he's not rich and powerful. (If he were truly *good*, then of course, he would be. If you have a job and he doesn't, then it is obviously because you are a better person. If she's sick and you're not, then likewise.)

There is a word for these ideas. They're nuts. (They're also evil, but let's confine ourselves for the moment to declaring their manifest insanity.) So why does anyone believe them? Why do so many people believe such a broad array of insane and destructive things that aren't true, and then become confused when the proverbial fecal matter hits the fan (as in New Orleans, or as in Iraq, or as in a global economic meltdown)?

[And don't misunderstand me about "people in charge." I do know that our current president is admirable and an immeasurably better person than recently-retired Caligula. But he (Obama) is not the one in charge.]

...incomplete, much more to come. I'll get back to abduction, and how it can help you, in just a moment.

Abduction - Part II

I've casually bandied about for your delectation (or annoyance and revulsion if you're averse to recondite lexemes, which aren't ever indispensable or even particularly helpful, except for establishing your bona fides among academicians :)), so I should probably explain them, though a full exposition of "Abduction" could certainly be managed without the distraction.

If you know that the truth of A will guarantee the truth of B, then in logic we generally say, more concisely, "A implies B," which is also written, "A-->B," which latter fact you can now immediately forget. (Take my word. Sherlock Holmes even advises it.) As an example, take "if it rains, the ground gets wet." Raining is A. Wet ground is B. If you know A is true, you can pretty much take B for granted. A implies B. Raining implies wetness. Here, we call A (raining) the "antecedent," and B (wetness of the ground) the "consequent." This is an implication that is almost always true. Sure, someone could have covered the whole landscape with a tarp, but we go with the odds. (There is a saying among physicians oft cited in connection with diagnostic methodology: "if you hear hoofbeats, do not first think of zebras.") We embrace the likeliest or the simplest explanations or implications that seem to pertain. (This principle, by the way, has also a name. It's called, "Occam's Razor," after Sir William of Occam, about whom you want to know, believe me, nothing else.) So if you come along and tell me that it's raining, I'm going to assume the consequent is now true and that the ground is wet. Actually, this is *deductive* (not "abductive") reasoning, of the specific variety known as "modus ponens." Forget that, too.

Now, we could also work this backwards, though our conclusions would lose the imprimatur of logically guaranteed truth. For example, you could tell me you've noticed that the ground is wet, and knowing that one possible (and probably the simplest) explanation (choice of implications) for this is that rain is occurring, I might jump to that conclusion. And it wouldn't be a bad jump. Not logically guaranteed (maybe a pack of wild dogs has decided to anoint the sidewalk), but very, very likely. If, however, I lived in a world of delusion in which I didn't believe in the existence of rain (or of global warming, perhaps), or if I somehow believed that rain always evaporated before it hit the ground, then I'd never hit on the right explanation providing me with the right "antecedent." I'd never guess "rain," and I'd come up with some screwy explanation such as that the sidewalk was crying.

That's what keeps happening to us. As Paul said, "video meliora" (we see what's right, the evidence in front of our noses), but we just can't believe the truth (it would conflict with one of the BIG LIES), so we arrive at the wrong conclusion.

Icebergs are melting everywhere, glaciers are disappearing, Greenland is starting to look like Palm Springs. If we weren't forbidden to reach out for the simple explanation (if there's global warming, the ice sheets will melt, and they're melting, so there *is* global warming because of old William of Occam), we'd get all alarmed and might even have listened to what every climatologist on the planet who wasn't a paid whore had been screaming about for at least a decade. This is abduction, but not, for our purposes, the most important application, though it might be nice to prevent NYC, Los Angeles and Tokyo from submerging under 100 feet of water.

Next: where it really matters.

Abduction - Prolegomenon

No, I don't mean kidnapping (by grey neotenous aliens with a penchant for wasting time on hopelessly backward planets, or of children who tragically end up on milk cartons, or of the passengers and crew of freighters by pirates off the coast of Somalia). "Abduction" is a term used in logic for reasoning backward from the consequent to the antecedent, say, by contrast with the more popularly understood spectator sport of "deduction," wherein you know that A implies B, and that furthermore, A is true, so you triumphantly proclaim "B" (but not *too* B), and everyone goes home happy, except the people who are annoyed by logic generally, which is practically everyone.

Abduction, though, is important, because I've found that, in a world in which you can almost assume a priori that anything you're told officially is an egregious lie, it's the one effective workhorse of a thinking tool that lets you figure out what the <fill in bad place, here> is actually going on. (Not that it ever proves useful to know, if you, like I, happen not to be one of the self-designated "masters of the universe" who want to replace God in that capacity, and since God has accorded them free will, and something (genetics, apparently, or childhood abuse) has deprived them of empathy and filled the vacuum with Schadenfreude, they do pretty much manage to run the show temporally, and knowing won't help you a bit. "Talk to the hand" is yesterday's popular, all-purpose obnoxious expression, but here, it's more a matter of: talk into the barrel of a gigantic rocket launcher; see what good it does you.)

Still, for those of you still with me (the null set cohort who bother to read these posts), it's still a remarkably interesting kind of reasoning to be able to do, and the methodology, together with some conclusions, will be the subject of the next post.