#145: Is God a Utilitarian?

February 7, 2019

The relation of God to moral good is difficult to understand. The conundrum is simple to state, but impossible to answer well. Are the moral laws God gives to man good because He gives them, or does He give them because he recognizes their intrinsic and absolute truth. Either way there are problems. On the first disjunct, the moral laws appear to be no more than the arbitrary whim of a supremely powerful being; his claim to human love thus seems unsupported. Satan seems different only in being less powerful. Not a desirable outcome. But on the other disjunct, it seems there’s something out there that has authority over God and His only role is that of an enforcer and He is himself subject to that authority. Kierkegaard famously draws attention to these problems in his writing on Abraham and Isaac. Also not a desirable outcome.

Nonetheless, for at least the Judaeo-Christian God, morality is centrally important in His teachings. God spends an enormous amount of time and energy telling us in the greatest detail what is morally good and what is not. Thus, it seems fair to ask what God’s own morality is.

There are really only just two moral theories and the question of which one, if any, informed God’s cosmogony is made even more difficult because he seems sometimes to rely on both, but they are incompatible.

So, is God a Utilitarian or a Deontologist?

A Utilitarian is willing to sacrifice the good of an individual for the sake of the good of the group, while a Deontologist takes the good of the individual to be equal to the good of the group. A Utilitarian accepts the existence of collateral damage in the form of human suffering for the sake of the group’s greater good, a Deontologist does not.

Alternatively, in Utilitarianism, human value is multiplicative, while in Deontologism it is not. Thus, two people are worth twice as much as one for a Utilitarian, while for the Deontologist one person is equal to the worth of any number of people greater than one.

So, is he a Utilitarian?

The problem of evil is unquestionably the most powerful argument against the existence of God and at least Christianity’s response appears Utilitarian. You know how the argument goes: There is evil on earth; either God can’t fix it or he chooses not to. God is supremely powerful, so it’s false that he can’t fix it; therefore, he chooses not to fix it.

But why is this his choice?

Of course, the ways of God pass all human understanding and His providence is utterly mysterious. Blah blah blah. But if He’s going to stick with that, He’s going to lose a LOT of His followers who are expecting a bit more explanation. “Trust me” is not working so well anymore.

If He’s at all rational in his decision making, it must be because He judges that a world with evil in it is better than a world without it. This is certainly Leibniz’s view, who argues that this is the best of all possible worlds. It seems to him that this must be the case, since God created the world and God can’t create anything less than the very best. OK, but what makes it “the best”?

Well, it’s the best because in it Man has freedom of the will. A world with free humans, it’s argued, is better than one with controlled humans. Freedom is a good thing. Unfortunately, a consequence of this good thing is that there exists evil in the world. Free men (and women!) do some really evil things. It’s man’s freedom that is the source of all evil, and not God. Q.E.D.

This implies that God made a moral or ethical decision in his creation of the world. Even knowing as He does all the consequences of His decisions, His providence intentionally includes human freedom and the inevitable suffering of the innocent for the sake of mankind’s greater good, namely freedom. This is a Utilitarian decision on His part.

God’s choice is interestingly the moral version of Adam Smith’s doctrine on the functioning of markets. Smith’s thesis is that a free market benefits the whole more than a controlled market, though there will be losers in it as well as winners. Overall, the principle of free competition yields the best possible of all economic circumstances, it is an “invisible hand” that ensures the optimal outcome.

Perhaps God also thought that an “invisible hand” would operate within man’s free, lustful, greedy, and deranged history to assure that the greatest good would be achieved. So far, not so much.

[What makes this particularly and poignantly interesting is that Communism (and it’s sanitized cousin, Socialism) are also happy to accept the collateral damage associated with decisions aimed at the greatest good for the greatest number. Just ask the peasants and kulaks of the USSR from 1927 to 1934. Sure, they starved … but it was for the greater good.

The difference between Smith and Stalin is that Stalin had no confidence in the “invisible hand” and replaced it with the visible hairy hands of brutal doctrinaire commissars. How’s that worked out, Miz Ocasio-Cortez?]

In any case, God’s (or Leibniz’s) response to the problem of evil seems to be Utilitarian.

But, is He also a Deontologist?

Well, to some extent it depends on what He’s doing. When He’s practising cosmogony, He’s a Utilitarian. But when He’s campaigning, He sounds like a Deontologist. His message on the stump, as it were, is that He loves you qua individual. Love Him, He says, and He loves you right back, in fact He gives you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Even more, in the Christian version He even sacrifices his only son for your sake, qua individual. You couldn’t ask for more. And, by the way, for all those still on the Abraham and Isaac problem, let me point out that the Christian God could defend his demand of Abraham by pointing out that He didn’t ask anything of Abraham that He wasn’t willing to do himself. Abraham, He asked, sacrifice your only son for your love of Me. Later, He sacrificed His own only son for the sake of His love of Man.

Still, it can be argued that in both the Abraham and the Jesus case, He is still in the Utilitarian mode. His Deontological turn is almost exclusively rhetorical and cosmetic, designed just for campaign events.

Remember that He’s willing to accept collateral damage in the form, first, of Isaac and, second, of Jesus. In both cases, there’s a greater good involved. In both cases, a person is treated as a utensil, as an instrument towards some special end. Abraham is made the father of a people special to God because of his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, and Jesus dies for “all our sake.”

On balance, for good or for ill, it does seem most likely that God is a Utilitarian.

 #144: Fake Science and the Explanation Vacuum

August 9, 2018

You’ve had your fake news, now get ready for your … Fake Science.

 What is it, and why do we have it?

I.

Modern people are generally agreed that hypotheses respecting natural events must be confirmed before being believed. Such confirmation is expected to take the form of prediction with consequent empirical verification. But this formulation conceals an important complexity. We tend to be so focused on the verification of simple empirical hypotheses that we forget that methodology must itself also be confirmed. Descartes was the first to draw our attention to the importance of method in the acquisition of knowledge. His views on scientific method can certainly be criticized, but not his extraordinary insight that knowledge-seekers must be reflectively and critically aware of the method(s) they are applying.

This insight is as important today as it was in the early 17th century. The reason is that the successes of empirical science have made it an attractive camouflage for academic grifters, purveyors of fake science. Hence we find the existence at most universities of faculties of “social science” and departments which falsely designate themselves as sciences. The most transparent and egregious of these bogus sciences is the ever more popular “Political Science,” ubiquitous among 16 year old hormonal girls aspiring to be social justice warriors. The use of “logy” as a suffix is also an attempt to borrow empirical science’s prestige, the suffix standing for “theory of.” Thus, we have “logies” like Psychology and Sociology and Anthropology. “Theory of” has seemed so remarkably powerful that some at the academy have introduced departments simply called “Theory.”

And, of course, now we have (drum roll) … “Climate Science.” (Ta Dum!)

II.

The effort to pass for “science” is not limited to only the borrowing of a word. The effort also involves taking on the trappings of fake science methodology.

There is no doubt that the progress of the empirical sciences has been in the largest part due to the progress in our ability to render qualitative changes in quantitative terms. The history of empirical science has been largely determined by the increasing power and sophistication of mathematics. But this has made it natural for the imposters to couch their doctrines in numerical terms.

So, how exactly do the snake-oil salesman coming into town package their fraudulent products? Well, they wrap them up nicely in paper featuring lots of “scientific” looking symbols and especially ones “borrowed” from math. Two areas of mathematics have been particularly useful to the academic grifters: statistics and computer modeling.

If statistical reporting were disallowed, the so-called “social sciences” would virtually disappear. They exist on the basis of the endless reporting of correlational data without any discernible causal significance. This is nothing other than fake-science and I call such “data” scientistic rather than scientific, where my term intends superficially resembling science without actually being science. That the “results” of these “studies” are scientistic rather than scientific is borne out by the fact that, in psychology at least, over half the “results” of published papers are not reproducible [https://futurism.com/study-finds-half-psych-research-not-reproducible/]. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that this is as true for the other “social science” disciplines as it is for psychology. And reproducibility of results is a necessary condition of a study being scientific!

But I digress. People have been suspicious of statistics for quite some time, nothing really new here. Mark Twain famously distinguished lies into “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Just to forestall the high-pitched screams of protest from real scientists who use statistics in real science, I do not mean to deny the real utility of this mathematics in a wide array of applications. However, it is precisely the fact that such genuine uses exist that makes it possible for so many empty correlational “studies” to be published. It is the focus, determination, and effort required to distinguish the real from the dross that allows fake science to survive. And the fake can be found not only in the “social sciences,” it can also be found in important places like medicine.

III.

Computer modeling is, however, less widely recognized to be an instrument of academic grifters. And what makes it more insidious is that its position as a legitimate scientific methodology is rarely challenged. Who would challenge it? Academics? And why would they challenge something so very useful in cranking out nonsense subsidised with enormous research grants? Perhaps computer modeling is “just too big to fail.”

What is a computer model? It is nothing other than a “virtual” simulation of some natural sequence of events. That is, it’s an effort to reproduce the circumstances of some feature of the natural world in the form of digital information. The digital information includes facts of some initial state along with a set of putative natural laws governing those facts.

Thus, for example, we could attempt to identify the relevant starting facts of the 1929 market crash and enter them into a computer database. We could then enter what we considered to be the “laws” acting upon those starting facts. And, finally, we could “run” this simulation and check whether those data and those “laws” actually yield a market crash on the computer.

The methodological fantasy here is that once we have adjusted the model so as to produce the wanted effect, that we can then proceed to use the model to actually make predictions in the real world. But having once adjusted the starting facts and so-called laws precisely to yield the wanted effect, we have absolutely no assurance that this model would work in any other situation. The second we change the starting data assumptions, all bets are off!

Computer simulations are in current use in weather forecasting, economic forecasting, commercial makeup testing, automobile aerodynamics, new drug development, as well as many other places.

But is this scientific reasoning or scientistic? I suggest it is often the latter. Why? Because it regularly fails the most fundamental criterion of scientific methodology, namely predictive success.

Just as we appraise an empirical hypothesis by its ability to make true predictions, so we must appraise a methodology by its ability to make true predictions.

Computer modeling has notoriously been a failure. It’s predictions, for example, with regard to the directions of hurricanes could have been better made with tea leaves. With respect to the economy, one would be advised not to bet the farm on its advice. And, particularly visible, have been its failures on climate change predictions.

[Hat tip to friend A.W.: https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/29748-failed-predictions-of-climate-alarmists-make-future-predictions-suspect%5D

The methodology stinks. It stinks because the variables in real world applications far outnumber any possible computer database capacity and because the “laws” have not been adequately identified and/or refined in detail.

In short, the simulations are not and cannot be adequate representations of reality. As long as that is the case, the method must remain too suspect to employ scientifically.

IV.

It is one thing to recognize the existence of fake science, it’s another thing to account for its presence. Why and when do we wind up with fake science?

The answer, I think, lies in the existence of a gap in the reach of real science, a kind of “science vacuum” which draws the spurious imitation science in.

There is a natural need in human beings for explanations of natural events. But what must be understood is that this need is visceral rather than cognitive. Human beings are not intellectually critical with respect to their needs, not with respect to their appetites, and not with respect to their psychological needs. When we’re hungry or in the mood, we eat, and we mostly eat whatever is at hand, whether it’s “good for us” or not. The same applies to our need for explanations. We’re really pretty easy to satisfy. Before scientific explanations were available, people made do with fantastic ones provided by priests. These stories were utterly useless as predictors, but they had social/political usefulness for the priesthood and they filled the explanation needs of the credulous population at large more or less.

As empirical science progressed, it filled human explanation needs more and more, but regions continued to exist where science simply could not explain to the point of accurate prediction. It is into those regions that fake science penetrates. Climate change at this point in time lies beyond the abilities of predictive science simply because of the enormous size of the phenomena involved. And, as always, such a situation gives rise to a priestly class which thrives on cultivating an “explanation” narrative with all the old hallmarks of religion. It does so in this case because the new religion has the potential of enriching its practitioners beyond all imagination. To paraphrase Rahm Emanuel: Changes in climate are a natural phenomenon simply too good to waste!

Yes, Virginia, this is a religion. There is a deity to worship (Gaia, the Earth); there is human guilt (population, fossil fuels, flatulence); there are hated non-believers (Global Warming Deniers); there are the priests (the Global Warming “scientists”); there are oracles (the computer models); and there are scared texts (the reports of the UN climate change grifters). But it would still be naïve to expect a modern religion to come in the familiar trappings of the old ones.

When we think of religions, we expect a supernatural invisible god, we expect rituals of a certain antiquated kind, we expect special buildings of worship, and so forth.

When we look at this modern religion, we cannot look for those in their familiar form, we must look for their analogues. But what remains the same is 1) the absence of genuine predictive science, and 2) the full panoply of emotions which have always attended the blind want for explanation.

 #143: Bias & Weltanschauung

August 2, 2018

There’s a new meme in town!

I.

Everyone’s talking about BIAS now. The word started grabbing our attention with the Peter Strzok story, but, as is always the case, the scribbling Lefties immediately saw an opportunity and took possession of it. So, how exactly are they using the BIAS meme now? For those on the Left who are getting nervous that they’re losing the narrative war, they’re using the BIAS story to draw down the difference between Leftie & Conservative from the level of world-view to a merely social-psychological one: we’re not really disagreeing on anything substantive, we’re just in the grip of a social-psychological mass phenomenon. When they think they’re losing, they don’t mind psychologizing the difference between the viewpoints.

This is of a piece with the Nussbaum move of trying to delegitimize nationalism by social-psychologizing it into a “fear of the (gasp) other.”

A couple of asides here. First, the Left always takes any traditional distaste and turn it into a “fear” to delegitimize it. Thus, a historically based distaste for homosexuality becomes “homophobia,” a distaste for Islam becomes “Islamophobia.” By this logic, a distaste for Chihuahuas has to become Chihuahuaphobia. 

It would seem, prima facie, that for the Left, there really can never be such a thing as a distaste, it’s always just a camouflaged fear. But, interestingly, anti-Semitism isn’t converted by the Lefties into a phobia. It doesn’t become Hebraphobia. Maybe that’s because Lefties think that hating Jews is n exception, it isn’t a psychological illness, and that’s because they just hate Jews themselves.

And second, their psychologizing is intended to distract us from remembering that sometimes “the other” is indeed someone to be feared. Don’t hate the XYZ, he’s “just the same as you are.” Well, very often he’s not, and hate might be just the ticket. The Nazi was someone to be feared and hated, the Japanese citizen of WWII was someone to be feared and hated (ask about the Bataan Death March or the Chinese peasants of Manchuria). And fearing the other was not a bad thing until we were taught this rubbish by the post-war Leftie academics at work to undermine the nation-state. During WWII we had no problem speaking disparagingly of the enemy.

And what is this psychological “problem” diagnosed by the Nussbaum called? Get ready for this (drum roll): XENO-phobia! Yes, shockingly, another “phobia” discovered. 

But I digress.

II.

Now, here’s something on which both sides agree: BIAS is a BAD thing.

What makes it bad? They seem to think of it as non-rational and non-conscious and thus an illegitimate driver of belief and action.

Well, I think there’s some truth in this, but, at the same time, that they’re wrong in thinking of it as a BAD thing.

What everyone is calling a “bias” is nothing other than a strongly held global world-view, what the Germans (who have words for almost everything) call eine Weltanschauung.

Is a Weltanschauung non-rational? Yes, but then all of our values are non-rational despite what the Enlightenment types would have you believe. Preferring a Western style democracy over a middle-eastern style dictatorship is indeed no less a preference than liking strawberry ice cream over chocolate. Values are just preferences, get over it!

Is a Weltanschauung non-conscious? In most cases, probably. But so what? It’s not easily noticed simply because it colors everything we think and do. After all, it is our world-view.

III.

The important thing to remember is this: the fact that our world-view is non-rational and (possibly) non-conscious does not delegitimize it. And yes, Virginia, it is a legitimate driver of belief and action. It is simply not the kind of thing to which so-called “rational justification” applies, anymore than our taste in ice cream calls for “rational justification.” This does not mean that we “have no right” to defend it with all our might; talk of a “right” here is a Leftie Enlightenment legacy piece of nonsense. We fight for our way of life simply because we prefer it very strongly over the alternatives. That’s all there is.

So, do Conservatives have a “bias”? Goddamn right they do, and proud of it.

 #142: Why One Kavanaugh May be Worth Three with the PIE

July 24, 2018

I know a number of N.Y. Republicans who simply don’t vote because they believe, with some good grounds, that their votes are worthless. They believe this because N.Y.C. is overwhelmingly Democrat and so a person voting Republican is just spitting in the wind. I call this the “Political Impotence Effect,” or the PIE. The PIE is evident in many places across the country, in both red and blue states.

That’s unfortunate, but there’s silver lining to the PIE for the SCOTUS.

The make-up of the court is currently (C=Conservative, P=Progressive):

John Roberts (Chief) (63) C

Clarence Thomas (70) C

Samuel Alito (68) C

Neil Gorsuch (50) C

Kennedy/Brett Kavanaugh (K: 53) C

Elena Kagan (58) P

Ruth Bader Ginsberg (85) P

Stephen Breyer (79) P

Sonya Sotomayor (64) P

Of course, adding Kavanaugh creates a five to four majority for the Conservatives, that’s obvious and that’s very good, but there’s another factor to consider.

The two oldest members, Ginsberg and Breyer (85 and 79 respectively) become in effect lame ducks with Kavanaugh’s addition (because of the Conservative majority). They become impotent on the court, they’re in exactly the same position as Republicans in N.Y.. And what do those Republicans do? They leave the fray: they do not vote. That’s the PIE.

There have been rumors for some time that Breyer would like to retire. Perhaps realizing that he is no longer able to affect SCOTUS decisions, he will make that move sooner rather than later. Because he’s having some of the PIE and there’s another two years in Trump’s current term, and it seems very likely that 1) the Republicans will hold the senate, and 2) that Trump will get a second term. With all that, Breyer would have to wait till he’s 85 before he might have a Democrat president to replace him. That’s a lot of years of impotence for the mere chance of being replaced by another impotent progressive.

And while Ginsberg seems to want to stay forever, perhaps the departure of Breyer (with the addition of yet another Trump originalist to the court) would demoralize her enough to hasten her own (vastly overdue) departure. And that’s the rest of the PIE. Yum!

 #141: The Infantilized Electorate and the Nanny Mind

July 17, 2018

We’re all familiar with the current phenomenon of so-called “snowflakes” who run and hide in “safe spaces” when they hear opinions not their own. They get really “upset” and need to have a good cry. We’re told, rightly, that this is at least partly an effect of university “social justice warrior” indoctrination. But this way of putting it fails to make clear why the indoctrination works so well. I suggest that it does because these students suffer from an emotional arrested development coming from both their parents and the culture at large, an arrested development which makes them natural soil for “social warrior” indoctrination.

But why is this happening? I suspect that it is an inevitable by-product of the recognition on the part of businesses and marketing agencies that women are the majority spenders in the society. And, like it or not, a huge number of women see the world through the eyes of children; and a huge number of women want someone, a father or a husband or a government or even a pimp to protect and provide for them and their offspring. And the marketers have recognized that a huge number of women are vulnerable to the narrative of the fragility of children both physically and psychologically. There is a lot of money in the issues of “the child.” Books written about them sell in the millions, talk shows endlessly deal with them, and manufacturers make money selling every conceivable child protective gadget. The market likes a child centered society. All of this leads the world being perceived as a schoolyard. 

I’ve focused in the past on how the Infantilization of culture is to be seen in the language used in television news media. I wrote in #103:

“…the sentimentalization of our language. Apparently, the world no longer contains any “mothers” or “fathers,” they were, apparently, replaced during some starless night by a whole new cadre of “mums” and “dads.” This is as true for bad mothers and fathers as it is for good ones. Nancy Grace recently made a point of referring to Casey Anthony, a woman charged with killing her infant daughter, as the “tot mom.” The crazed woman who produced eight children was known as the “octomom.” So, these days, even a possible child murderess is a “mom.” A self-aggrandizing mental case who tries to make an industry out of procreation is still a “mom.” Men, on the other hand, who don’t pay child support payments are known as “deadbeat dads.”

And the chance of war is called “scary” rather than frightening, while external enemies are referred to as “bullies.” This is the language of the schoolyard.

This is the Oprahfied mass consuming herd and it understands the world from the perspective of the schoolyard. I call this the perspective of the “nanny mind.”  Mrs. Smith, Mrs, Smith, Jimmy said something mean and then Sammy said something bad back to him! Mrs. Smith, make them stop, please! (crying)

It’s bad and sad enough that this occurs in the popular media which amplify and distribute this infantilization of discourse, but it is more than that, it is downright dangerous.

Watching news coverage of Donald Trump since the 2016 election is truly sobering. Of course, we already know the derangement to be found there, but look more closely.

The really frightening part is that even apparently sober commentators seem aware of what the listening public expects, and what that public expects is certain things have to be said and that other things are “just too horrible” to have said. It’s all about talk. But the world does not move this way or that way because of talk. The world does not, but the schoolyard does.

This phenomenon is nowhere more visible than in the recent Trump/Putin news conference in Helsinki. The screaming scribblers (and even some normally sober talking heads) are enraged that Trump did not publicly brace Putin on his various crimes and misdemeanours. The only adult I heard was Rand Paul, whose words I summarize this way: Oh please, grow up!

Other than Paul, none of them asked the critical question: Exactly what would the objective have been in bracing Putin in that venue, given that the reason for the meeting was to de-escalate tensions between the two largest nuclear powers in the world?

Would the world have been a safer place because Trump got as tough on Putin as Obama who told him to “cut it out.” Yeah, boy, that would’ve put the Kremlin strongman in his place! Yeah!

He should have said this and he should have said that and why did he say this and … and … and …

The whole thing is so tooth-achingly stupid that were it not so dangerous, it would be utterly laughable.

Karl Marx believed in underlying laws of historical development. He was wrong about that. But this does not entail that we cannot see definite forces at play and see their at least their short-term destinations.

As long as the nanny mind is the dominant target in marketing, the society will lurch towards Socialism, and, inevitably, that Socialism will go broke. But since capitalism, together with universal suffrage, leads inescapably to the dominance of the nanny mind, we cannot help but conclude that there can be no stable democratic economic system. They all lurch towards Socialism, and beyond that to bankruptcy and starvation.

The West needs an adult electorate, but the forces at play do not work in that direction.

 #140: The EU, Nationalism, Imperialism, and Multi-Culturalism

May 30, 2018

We cannot understand the politics of current Europe without appreciating this critical fact, namely that Socialism in every one of its forms is inherently imperialistic.

This is camouflaged by the fact that post WW II Leftists have identified two culprits in history’s most recent horrors: nationalism and imperialism (aka now as “colonialism”). Modern political convenience made them parse imperialism as exclusively governance by force of non-contiguous (distant) culturally distinct regions and populations. This was partly so that they could agitate third-world populations and their widely distributed descendants, but also to distract attention from the bothersome fact that they were themselves imperialistic. But clearly empires were not only based on distant colonies.

Really, any European not ideologically blinded should find it hard to miss from where he is standing that Socialism is itself intrinsically imperialistic. And further, realizing that, failing some very harsh medicine, it is fated inevitably to disintegrate. But why?

The problem that empires encounter is that culturally distinct populations resent and resist governance from a distance. This is true even when the culturally distinct populations are geographically contiguous. This is called nationalism and it leads to revolution, sometimes afar and sometimes quite close.

This means that the Left’s public position on nationalism and imperialism is not quite as represented. The Left is so hostile to nationalism not because it leads to horrors such as those found in Nazism, but because nationalism is imperialism’s deadliest foe. And Socialism is an imperialism!

Most Socialist (read: Communist) nations have actually recognized this fact and have attempted to deal with the problem by forcibly “re-educating” or culturally homogenizing their populations.

Karl Popper famously accused Plato of fascism in The Republic because he argued that the perfect state could only be achieved if it were begun with young children, the parents having been eliminated. The children could then be properly “educated” into perfect citizens.

The Jacobins of the French Revolution sought to erase the ancien regime partly by elimination (the clergy and the aristocracy) and partly by an enforced newly minted culture of their own devising.

The Bolshevik Russians followed the same recipe, as did the Chinese in their own “cultural revolution.”

This strategy has been successful to varying degrees. Czarism remains beneath the surface in Russia in various mutated forms. Catholicism and Confucianism remains beneath the surface in China in various mutated forms, not to mention its problems with the various resisting minorities on its peripheries.

But, as we know, Europe has opted for its famous “third way” governance, “Social Democracy,” which abjures the use of force in governance. Yet, failing forcible cultural cleansing, Socialism faces exactly the same disintegrative forces faced by the conventional distant empires of the past, and this applies precisely to the EU.

Brexit was no accident. Norway and Switzerland never joined. Italy is threatening to leave, and Hungary and Poland are telling Brussels to get lost. There should be no surprise about this. It is happening precisely where Europe’s most dramatic imperial death took place, that of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The EU is nothing but a Social-Democrat attempt at empire along the Hapsburg line, namely the governance of culturally distinct but geographically contiguous populations without cultural cleansing. The Hapsburgs did not attempt to make all their contiguous “colonies” become Austrian, they allowed them to retain their local cultures. For this reason, we can say that both the Hapsburg empire and the EU are today’s multi-culturalism writ large upon a continent.

We’ve seen how the Hapsburgs fared. We’ve seen how all the conventional empires fared.

The leaders of the EU knew quite well the problem that they faced and they knew quite well that the measures implemented by Communist nations were not available to them. And so they embarked on another, new, strategy to combat nationalism, the threat to their imperialism. It’s very clever.

Their strategy applied exactly the same force that was threatening their empire-in-the-making against their nation-state constituents. Here’s how.

Multi-culturalism in the form of different nation-states was threatening EU disintegration. So the EU leaders decided to force multi-culturalism upon the nation-states themselves to dissolve their unity, hence neutralizing them.

This is the entire point of the EU government’s insisting that member states take in massive doses of third world migrants.

What we’re seeing are culturally cohesive nation-states who are members of an empire insisting on their cultural distinctiveness to govern themselves, while the empire attempts to erase their cultural distinctiveness so as to gain hegemony over them.

A hell of a fight.

 #139: Gettier Counter-Example Lessons [Warning: Boring Philosophy]

April 30, 2018

[These are reflections really only relevant to people of the Epistemology persuasion — my apologies to all others.]

I: Providing Context

From about 1900 on philosophical conceptual analysis increasingly took on a very specific form. Instead of leaving it to our intuitions to determine the “meaning” of a concept, philosophers left any reference to “meaning” behind and became interested instead in what had to be true in order for a particular concept to be properly applied.

A classic instance of such an analysis is that of the justified-true-belief account of the concept of knowledge.

According to the JTB:

S knows that p if and only if

p is true,

S believes that p, and

S is justified in believing that p.

The new method had the distinct advantage of avoiding all sorts of vexatious questions associated with talking about “meanings.” It also had the advantage of specifying exactly how a criticism of an account is to take place, viz. by way of a “counter-example.”

A counter-example, as the expression indicates, is a case, real or fictitious, in which an account fails either by being too demanding (it has too many conditions or too constraining conditions), on the one hand, or by being not demanding enough (requiring an additional condition(s)).

The JTB was considered a rock-solid analysis, a model of the method, until a very short paper was published by Edmund Gettier in 1963. Gettier argued that the JTB is deficient in that the three conditions while necessary were not sufficient. He argued this by providing a counter-example to the classic account, an example in which the three conditions were satisfied, but putatively S did not know.

His argument is instructive for our discussion of the method of philosophical analysis. He provides, in fact, two counter-examples, though I’ll only cite his “case 2” as both are based on the same strategy.

Here’s case 2:

“Let us suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following proposition:

Jones owns a Ford.

Smith’s evidence might be that Jones has at all times in the past within Smith’s memory owned a car, and always a Ford, and that Jones has just offered Smith a ride while driving a Ford. Let us imagine, now, that Smith has another friend, Brown, of whose whereabouts he is totally ignorant. Smith selects three place names quite at random and constructs the following three propositions:

Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Boston.

Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Barcelona.

Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Brest-Litovsk.

Each of these propositions is entailed by (f). Imagine that Smith realizes the entailment of each of these propositions he has constructed by (f), and proceeds to accept (g), (h), and (i) on the basis of (f). Smith has correctly inferred (g), (h), and (i) from a proposition for which be has strong evidence. Smith is therefore completely justified in believing each of these three propositions, Smith, of course, has no idea where Brown is.

But imagine now that two further conditions hold. First Jones does not own a Ford, but is at present driving a rented car. And secondly, by the sheerest coincidence, and entirely unknown to Smith, the place mentioned in proposition (h) happens really to be the place where Brown is. If these two conditions hold, then Smith does not know that (h) is true, even though (i) (h) is true, (ii) Smith does believe that (h) is true, and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that (h) is true.”

The strategy is this:

It is to construct examples in which a proposition (h in the above, the one supposedly known) is validly derived from a false, though justified, proposition f, but because h can be true under more than one condition, it is in fact true, though accidentally so.

I chose Case 2 because the “known” proposition (h) is a disjunction (an “or” proposition) and it is obvious with disjunctions that they can be true under more than one circumstance.

The Gettier examples rely on the following:

That a proposition can be well justified even though false;

That justification is transferred through entailment.

That there are propositions which can be true under various different circumstances.

II: What Should We Conclude from these Cases?

Now, the two Gettier cases have been taken to mean that the JTB account of knowledge is defective because it fails to exclude the cases. I want to suggest that that is not the significance of the cases; rather, I think it points to a problem with this method of analysis.

In both of his cases, Gettier simply assumes that the conclusion must be that his protagonist does not know the proposition in question and that we will automatically agree with that. And it is critically important that we do agree, for without that, the counter-example fails. However, I don’t want to suggest that he does know the proposition; rather I want us to ask ourselves what our own intuitions are about the case he presents. Note that it is a highly artificial case based on a logical trick. Given that, my own intuition is that I want to respond that I have no idea what this example implies with respect to knowledge.

The clear uses of words allow for confident responses, but things get murky as we move away from the center. And this is not a case of a vagueness built into a word, like it is with the word “heap.” In “heap,” we have a vague band between “yes” and “no,” but “no” is ultimately reached. In the Gettier case of knowledge, we are not moving towards uncertainty by tiny increments, not knowing exactly where “knowledge” definitely ends; no, we are given a bizarre, contrived example for which we are not prepared by natural language or intuition, so we really cannot say “no.”

With the Gettier case, we like an ornithologist confronted by a winged, flying pig. Ok, we say to our ornithologist, is it a bird? He would, should, say I have no idea.

Does my belief that a square has four sides count as knowledge? Yes. Does my belief that the sun is 93 million miles from the earth? Yes. But does Smith’s belief that Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona? I have no idea. The word “knowledge” as I learned to use it was never applied to such a case.

Thus, the only way in which the Gettier cases can be made to count as counter-examples to the JTB is if we make the assumption that analyses of the JTB kind must be proof against examples outside the core of normal natural language uses. But why would we make such an assumption?

I think it is because a number of very influential philosophers had a mostly unspoken model of language in which our ordinary usage was no more than a clue to an underlying, concealed perfect language which did indeed consist of universally applicable concepts. The ancient version of this fairy tale was Plato’s theory of Ideas, while the modern one is that of “logically perfect language.” According to this notion, a conceptual analysis must be proof against any counter-example, no matter how foreign to our natural language mastery. I suggest that this is a bar too high, set perhaps with one eye on the physical sciences where observed phenomena are used as signs of underlying natural laws.

A more plausible model, perhaps, would be that of the law, where the prosecution’s claim must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Not beyond any doubt, no matter how contrived. So, the prosecutors in the O.J. Simpson murder trial did not have to prove to the jury that aliens from another planet did not kill Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman in order to make their case; this was a doubt too far, they only had to dismiss reasonable doubts (i.e. doubts for which there was at least some evidence).

In a similar way, if conceptual analysis is to be continued, an analysis can fairly be only expected to be proof against any intuitively recognizable counter-example, but not more than that.