The philosophers are right. There is something awe-inspiring about knowledge. Rather than simply accepting whatever comes through our senses or whatever we first think or whatever we’re told, we can step back and consider what is worthy of belief. We can even wonder what constitutes “worthiness” and then we become philosophers and end up driving a cab. Knowing is a break with the world, a recognition that the world isn’t always as it first seems.

But our culture, under the grip of philosophers, came to believe that knowledge is a corrective for fallibility. Having recognized that our unreflective grasp of the world is unreliable, we’ve treated knowledge as a way to gain the certainty that we had previously assumed we possessed. Thus, the story of knowledge begins with mathematics, and it ends — an ending in which we still live — with Descartes’ reduction of the realm of knowledge to a single, self-reflective proposition.

When we think of knowledge as a corrective for fallibility, we are comfortable with a knowledge aristocracy in which there are authorities different from you and I. They are the great encyclopedias, the great newspapers, the great journals. We are mere footloose commoners who look things up in the works the aristocrats have announced.

But there is no corrective for fallibility. We live in the breach between the world and how we take it. We are that breach. It closes only when they shovel the dirt over us. Until then, there are only degrees and modes of fallibility.

That doesn’t mean the authorities have no authority. It does mean that there is nothing with total authority. We’re stuck with always having the argument about what to believe because knowledge is a way to manage fallibility, not to escape it.

[Tags: knowledge wikipedia epistemology philosophy]

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AKMA raises question about The Da Vinci Code that advance the discussion beyond the canapes served at Jesus’ wedding and the resurrection of the mullet. (I read the first page of the book and put it down. And I haven’t seen the movie.) [Tags: akma da_vinci_code movies theology]

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I’m going to a talk today by Victor Pérez-Diaz called “Markets as Conversations.” It’s being held at Harvard’s Center for European Studies, 12:15-2pm in the Cabot Room at 27 Kirkland Street in Cambridge. The paper of the same name is about how markets influence politics, culture and society. Looks fascinating and I’m sorry I’ll have to leave early for a chat.

From the author’s summary:

The points I intend to make here are, basically, three: (a) that markets should be
understood, in an ideal-typical manner, as part of a general social order which I refer to
by the ancient expression ‘civil society’ (CS); (b) that markets reinforce that order by
shaping and influencing culture, politics and society so that they proceed, or function,
in a civil manner; and (c) that we may get a better grasp of the way markets act and
achieve this effect by developing an understanding of markets as conversations.

…

I develop a view of markets as conversations, that is, as a system of communication (mostly, but not entirely,
by non-linguistic means) which works as an educational mechanism shaping people’s
habits. In turn, these habits may help them to develop a complex of capacities and
dispositions, of civil and civic virtues, which we can bracket together under the rubric
of ‘civility’.

The paper has nothing to do with the Internet and does not mention Cluetrain or Doc. Nevertheless, I’m bringing Prof. Pérez-Diaz a copy of the book ;) [Tags: cluetrain victor_perez-diaz markets philosophy habermas]

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Last week AKMA struggled with the precise meanings of genotext and phenotext. I have no idea what either term means, but there is a certain joy in watching someone as smart and honest as AKMA trying to understand something in public. Before blogging, where would we have had the opportunity to see this?

AKMA writes that he thought that an Eric Idle sketch in which a talk show is conducted in enthusiastic gibberish provided a good example of the distinction between the two terms. (Remember Andy Kaufman’s foreign man routine?) And that reminded me of the following unrelated cheap shot:

Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can’t say it clearly you don’t understand it yourself. — John Searle, Intentionality, Introduction, p. x.

The key to meaning is simply that it can be part of the conditions of satisfaction (in the sense of requirement) of my intention that its conditions of satisfaction (in the sense of things required) should themselves be conditions of satisfaction. — Intentionality, p. 28.

Got it?

PS: Congratulations to Nate. [Tags: akma philosophy monty_python]

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Sean Coon muses about how Silly String completes trees. Well, actually, he muses about the shape of language, wrapped in an homage to his felicitously-named mentor, Bill Readings.

I like a lot what Sean says and the people he quotes from. And it makes clear just how un-tree-like is the structure of language. Ferdinad de Saussure, whom Sean quotes, talks about words not as leaves on forking conceptual branches — a picture Aristotle might have liked and that WordNet assumes — but words as standing in distinction from other words. Saussure’s view does not resolve into anything like a tree. At least as far as I remember. Likewise, when the British philosopher John Austin says that the word “real” usually doesn’t signify some positive quality but merely flags a distinction in mode — we only talk about a real gun if we need to distinguish it from a toy gun, a fake gun carved from soap, or a pretend gun made by pointing a finger — the meaning of “real” does not consist of its position in a tree.

Language, it seems to me, generally lacks the basic properties that make a tree a tree, with the one important exception that sometimes concepts contain other concepts. But there’s lots more to trees than that. E.g., a tree structure has a top and bottom. The elements are discrete. Each element hangs from one branch. All the branches signify the same basic relationship. The branches inherit essential characteristics from the branches they’re attached to. Branches have essential characteristics. Meanings can be traced and paths can be followed. The organization is neat, not messy. And even the basic notion of containment is a metaphor and way too general: Does “color” contain “red” the way “nation” contains “city” and the way “actor” contains “David Caruso” ? And, by the way, “yard” does not contain “dog” even if your dog is in your yard and “stomach” does not contain “peanut” even if you’ve just eaten one.

Sean’s post doesn’t get stuck in the tree metaphor. On the contrary. He uses Silly String to remind us that the tree of language has messy connections among its leaves. He points out that language isn’t a single tree, the same for all. He refers usefully to Saussure and Barthes.

So why stick with the tree metaphor at all? It’s gotten in the way of understanding for about 2,000 years now. (Porphyry is usually credited with being the first to draw categories in the shape of a tree.) Except in the limited domains where we carefully structure language into a tree, I think we ought to drop it.

I tried to get at this, or at least hint at it, in my reply to Julian Bond’s comment on a post of mine a few days ago. Or, as a certain book puts it, everything is miscellaneous…although that phrase by itself is misleading unless we immediately ask: Then why didn’t it stay that way?

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I just read Descartes’ Baby by Paul Bloom and found it fascinating and annoying simultaneously.

Bloom is a psychologist who argues for “intuitive dualism.” The fascinating parts are the many experiments he cites that show babies are more sophisticated than we usually give them credit for. At a very early age, babies are aware of the constancy of objects, that appearances may be deceptive, and that other people may hold false beliefs.

The annoying part is what Bloom makes of this. Bloom thinks those experiments obviously show babies are dualists because they distinguish objects from belief-holding humans. But Cartesian dualism isn’t simply the belief that there’s a difference between people and objects. We were making that distinction before Descartes. Cartesian dualism consists of conceiving of the mental and the physical as so distinct and different that it doesn’t seem the two could ever even interact. And that’s not a distinction babies make.

From the fact that babies seem universally (although I suspect most of the experiments were done on babies born into Western culture) to be aware that there’s a difference between faces and balls, that they are aware that the faces may have false beliefs, and that the faces care about what happens to them, Bloom jumps to conclusions.

First, he thinks Cartesian dualism is a natural outgrowth of baby dualism. But baby dualism isn’t even necessary dual. I can believe that you are different from a log because you are aware of and care about your world without thinking that you are made of two types of substance. For example, I can believe fish are different from birds without attributing to fish two substances, animality and swiminess. Getting to Descartes requires abstracting and fragmenting our experience in ways that babies don’t, many non-Western cultures don’t, and our culture didn’t before Descartes. I don’t think Bloom has shown much more than that babies are aware that logs don’t think and feel, but people do. That isn’t Descartes. It’s not even dualism in any interesting sense.

Bloom seems precise when dealing with baby psychology. He’s not so good when he heads into art, religion and philosophy, which constitutes the bulk of the book. His explanation of why we can be moved by “anxious objects” — edgy art such as Warhol’s Brillo boxes, pure white paintings, a real dead horse — is prosaic and oddly disconnected from the dualism that his book is about. He goes through the predictable reasons we like art — it pleases the eye, we look smart by valuing difficult art, etc. — and then comes back to the special case of anxious art. And what he says is distinctly wrong about anxious art:

We still have not fully explained why some of us like anxious objects.

In appreciation of these artworks all of the ingredients of pleasure discussed earlier come into play, but there is at least one more that we have not yet discussed: we enjoy displays of skill, of virtuosity, both physical and intellectual.

Ok, but anxious art can share that feature with the least anxious of art — “Look at how realistic those dogs playing poker seem!” — and much anxious art does not seem very accomplished technically. In some cases, that’s exactly what makes it anxious. But, Bloom drops this line of thought. He instead concludes that some art we like because we like what it shows — the pleasant view from a hilltop or Mary nursing Jesus. Other art, the more anxious type, we can only like because we’re able to see it as more than what it represents. We’re able to see the human intention in it. But, again, that’s true of all art, not just anxious art. His investigation does not come close to answering the question he raises.

More important, art refutes dualism. As Bloom acknowledges throughout the chapter — belaboring the obvious — we react to objects differently if we know they were created as art. So, here’s a physical object that embodies something mental and intentional. The artwork has no inner life, but it can’t be understood apart from the intentionality it embodies. Art and all objects we create are inseparably infused with matter and spirit. Monism is far more important to our experience than dualism.

The book is muddled over all, except for the fascinating research on babies scattered throughout. For example, his section on our “natural” belief in intelligent design confirms what I think we all already suspected: Children are “consistently more creationist than their parents.” (p. 62). Bloom is careful to say that creationism is not necessarily only for the immature. It is “a natural by-product of a mind evolved to think in terms of goals and intentions.” (p.63) Ok. So is animism. So what? How does this help? And what does it have to do with dualism, unless you define it as weakly as Bloom does?

The book suffers from overstatement. He defends essentialism, but so waters it down that it becomes merely the belief that humans think in categories and are capable of assigning an object to a category based on non-visible characteristics. Wow, that is so not what essentialism is. He knows this, too, contrasting it with Plato’s and Aristotle’s view of essences as eternal, immutable types. He argues against that strong view because it leads to evils such as racism (51). But racism can follow from the “essentialism lite” that Bloom propounds. Both types of essentialism say that there is a real way a thing should be categorized. Plato and Aristotle happened to think that that real way is eternal and immutable. Bloom thinks that the real category “is clear once we consider again what concepts are for. Tomato is a good category, because once you know something is a tomato, you know things about it, including that it is good to eat.” (41) So suppose a lite essentialist believed that dark-skinned humans have the mental and spiritual capacity of cattle. The problem with racism isn’t that it is based on eternal and immutable categories. The problem with racism is that it’s based on false facts and the false categorization that follows from them.

Besides, what Bloom calls essentialism lite just isn’t essentialism. Essentialism implies that there are clean lines between things and clear criteria for deciding what they are. Neither is true in the world of tiny, purple, winter, hybrid, genetically-engineered, insect resistant, square-cornered-for-easy-packing tomato-cantaloupes.

Nevertheless, the book is full of interesting ideas, historical references, and an open-minded back and forth on the issues. It’s fun to read and exceptionally engagingly written. It just doesn’t hold together. At least for me. [Tags: descartes descartes_baby paul_bloom books taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous psychology]

AKMA replies. I can addres part of his concern: I didn’t mean to imply that art is distinctive in its fusion of matter and intentionality. The same is true for all our artifacts. Not did I mean to say that to understand an artwork is to understand the artist’s intentions; rather, to take it as an artwork one must see that it was created intentionally. Bad writing on my part. But AKMA’s point is broader and more important than that.

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I’m talking on Sunday morning at my brother and sister-in-law’s local Ethical Culture chapter in Maplewood, NJ. My topic is “Is the Internet moral?” My sister-in-law, Meredith Sue Willis, posted a notice on the local community bulletin board, immediately drawing a bunch of well-earned contemptuous comments. Lively, to say the least.

I gave a talk at DAMA on Wednesday where someone reminded me about a piece I wrote in 2000. It lays out what I plan on saying on Sunday (skipping the non-moral metaphysics parts). I also realized how much it lays out what became Small Pieces Loosely Joined. (I hate the beginning of the piece. Bad bad writing.) [Tags: internet morality meredith_sue_willis]

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Chris Locke has compiled his list of favorite New Age books at Amazon. If you want some context for this, check out MysticSpellingError, the site where he has been thinking through what I hope will be his next book. [Tags: chris_locke rageboy mystic_bourgeoisie new_age amazon books]

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danah speculates whether production of DMT (a brain chemical) helps explain how cults draw people in. Then, reflecting on it, she asks:

This then puts me into an interesting bind as an ethnographer trying to make sense of these things. If there are changes to the neural processes, are there ways to see practitioners on their own terms? Is it possible to understand the cultures there without experiencing the effects that the rituals are meant to bring on? I have to imagine that anthropologists studying religion and religious practices went through some of this. (Anyone?)

There is, of course, a long tradition of mystics warning that outsiders can only understand the experience by experiencing it. The epistemological question is whether mystical experience is any different from ordinary, non-mystical experience in its ineffability and unknowability. A difference in brain chemistry would suggest that, yes, mystical experience is qualitatively different. [Tags: danah+boyd epistemology anthropolgy]

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The Philosophers’ Magazine has a good, brief review by Alison Ainley of two books, How to Read Heidegger and How to Read Derrida. Both books sound highly worthwhile.

Now if there were only How to Read the Instructions for How to Replace a Faucet. Also, I could use a book on how to read Deleuze since the book I bought that explains Deleuze actually removed whatever pathetic shred of understanding I thought I had. [Tags: philosophy heidegger derrida]

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