With that diversion into philosophy of physics finished I can now return to my initial subject. The disturbingly prevalent descent of analytic philosophy into confused definition making. Most recently I was reminded of this when I ran across Belief in Naturalism: An Epistemologist’s Philosophy of Mind but Ms. Haack’s paper is the rule not the exception. Far from being uncommonly bad, Ms. Haack’s paper is a useful example because her clear writing lets us see straight to the heart of what’s going on without the charitable blinders that bedevil attempts to critique philosophical discourse. However, it still should be blindingly apparent from simply reading the abstract (reprinted below) that someone is deeply, thoroughgoingly confused about the subject and it may not be Ms. Haack. I know my wife is perfectly willing to write papers that while correct wouldn’t hold any interest if it wasn’t for manifest confusion on the part of her readership. Indeed, it is my fear that to succeed in analytic philosophy one must appeal to this kind of fallacious ‘realism’ about the meaning of words.

Abstract: (emphasis mine)

My title, “Belief in Naturalism,” signals, not that I adopt naturalism as an article of faith, but that my purpose in this paper is to shed some light on what belief is, on why the concept of belief is needed in epistemology, and how all this related to debates about epistemological naturalism. After clarifying the many varieties of naturalism, philosophical and other (section 1), and then the various forms of epistemological naturalism specifically (section 2), I offer a theory of belief in which three elements – the behavioral, the neurophysiological, and the socio-historical – interlock (section 3), and *apply this theory to resolve some contested questions: about whether animals and pre-linguistic infants have beliefs, about the fallibility of introspection, and about self-deceptiion* (section 4).

Let’s stop and consider the italicized sentence and consider whether this is even the sort of thing a (naturalistic) analysis of belief could even hope to usefully provide. Note that as a naturalistic theory we assume from the outset there is no metaphysical mumbo-jumbo going on that renders a belief more than the sum of it’s parts. That is we assume the entire world can be fully described in terms of the trajectories of elementary particles and just because those particles assemble themselves into a human brain doesn’t give rise to some kind of ghostly new entity, ‘the belief.’ In other words belief is nothing more than a defined term that stands in for some complicated property about elementary particles just as in mathematics we abbreviate the epsilon-delta definition of continuity with the term continuous. While it would cost us brevity and flavor our language would be no less expressive if stripped of the term ‘belief’ only less convenient.

So what then to make of Ms. Haack’s claim that she will “resolve” the question of whether infants and animals have beliefs? (She resolves both in the negative.) Obviously she could proffer a definition of “belief” that could decide the question in either fashion (X believes P if … or X is an animal) but in no way would most people consider that to be resolving a question as that phrase clearly suggests something of significance has been learned. It would be extremely strange to say, “I’m going to define living being to be an entity capable of reproducing itself without hijacking another being’s protein making machinery,” and then to tell your listeners that you’ll use your definition to “resolve” the contested question of whether viruses are alive. After all you didn’t resolve anything, you just blatantly excluded them when you choose a definition.

Those unfamiliar with this kind of philosophy paper may be excused for assuming that what Ms. Haack means to say is that no concept satisfying desiderata 1…n that she takes to be necessary features of any definition she would consider for the word belief is compatible with granting babies or animals have beliefs. Let me assure you she is making no such argument. She quite plainly is advancing her definition¹ as the right definition for belief as if definitions could be right or wrong the same way answers to arithmetic questions can be. Unfortunately, in philosophical writing less clear than that of Ms. Haack the text doesn’t specifically and clearly refute this reinterpretation and the communities norms of charity thus protect it from such damning criticism. Certainly the norms about charity allow for criticism but they stridently resist writing off the entire work as such a simple an embarrassing confusion without incontrovertible, definitive textual support. Especially when the paper was written by an eminent philosopher. Thus we are left in the odd situation where minor fallacies may be freely critiqued and then corrected but pointing out that an entire body of literature is based on a profound confusion is beyond the pale.

At this point I’m sure some readers are spluttering that surely Ms. Haack means to be analyzing the English word belief and is really arguing that any moderately simple definition compatible with usage would preclude ascribing beliefs to animals or babies. Simple reflection on our frequent use of the word belief to successfully describe animal behavior shows this can’t possibly be correct and it’s quite clear this isn’t the claim being argued. But rather than refute every strained explanation seeking to resolve the tension in this paper I instead hope to sway you by offering a positive account of how this kind of blatantly confused situation develops.

Simple observation of people’s behavior reveals that we are instinctively naive realists about the meaning of words. Indeed, we are instinctively naive realists about a great deal more than that and many of us are disposed, when not reflecting on the question, to behave as if there were right and wrong answers (in more than a statistical sense) about what food is tasty, what movies are good and what people are pretty. One could easily offer some evolutionary story about the benefits of conformity/standardization but whatever the cause our natural temptation is to act as if there is an objectively correct fact about what a given word means and in our usual interactions such an assumption serves us well. To a first approximation there is only a single universal definition and this fiction only begins to unravel when we consider bizarre edge cases, subtle distinctions in context or when meaning shifts over time. The later case explains why people will often stubbornly insist that a supermajority of the population is using a word incorrectly when it differs from what they learned in school.

This attitude then leaks over when philosophers offer a conceptual analysis of a term and it is easy to slip into assuming that there is a single correct conceptual analysis just as there (more or less) a single correct meaning of the word. Conceptual analysis, however, involves cleaning up vagueness or imprecision in a natural language term and often results in multiple equally valid preciseifications. For instance even a perfect understanding of the natural language term “size” won’t tell you whether measure or cardinality is the ‘right’ way to preciseify the size of a set of reals. As each individual is likely to find one or the other potential preciseification more intuitive and is likely not to even think of the other alternative it’s easy to see how one might fall into the trap of assuming that your analysis was correct and the alternatives outright wrong. Once the dispute between alternatives becomes an established philosophical debate (like the argument between internalism and externalism, definite descriptions and the baptismal theory of names or the choice of function to provide a quantitative measurement of evidence) the existence of genuine conflict, i.e., the uniqueness of the correct analysis, is simply taken for granted.

Sadly there seem to be few effective forces working to, even slowly, eliminate this kind of confusion. It is a particularly hard issue because those people who have expertise in a dispute or genre of philosophy so afflicted are usually professionally invested in the dispute and unsurprisingly uninclined to advance the idea that their prior work was the result of a vast confusion and largely without merit. On the other hand those without a horse in the race are unsurprisingly reluctant to dismiss a traditional philosophical dispute as mere confusion and risk being lambasted for jumping to judgmental conclusions without sufficient knowledge. Worse, the allegation that a traditional dispute is wholly based on such a blatant and devastating confusion might generate a single paper, at most creating a selection effect where the only people who bother to study or write about say definite descriptions as opposed to the baptismal theory of names are those who naively accept the traditional ‘naive realist’ account of the dispute.

While occasionally skeptical I’m generally quite bullish about the potential insights offered up by analytic philosophy. For instance better philosophy would prevent this sort of pernicious yet wholly unsupported argument in physics. That is the assumption that the (entropic/memory) arrow of time we observe is something requiring exceptional explanation. Yes, if entropy were defined in some principled fashion independent of our notions of what constitute simple and complex properties the argument might be a good one but physicists consistantly fail to remember that entropy is defined arbitrarily in terms of our idea of what physical states are similar. Any physical system is, by definition, in only a single¹ state at any given instant. Roughly speaking the entropy of that system is the (log of the) number of other microscopic configurations producing a similar macroscopic state.

Now that’s exactly the sort of definition we want for making predictions about the world but it’s no good for evaluating how radically different beings in a radically different universe would perceive their surroundings. Rather than being localized in space we can imagine beings which are localized in spatial frequency² or even encoded into the microstates of macroscopically similar (to us) clouds of atoms. Such a being wouldn’t make use of our definition of entropy but instead count up states giving rise to what they perceived as similar.

So before we go around trying to solve the puzzle of time asymmetry we should first check that it’s really a puzzle. That means answering the following questions:

1. Given any configuration of the world can we always (usually?) concoct a notion of ‘macroscopic’ similarity according to which it is low entropy? I suspect the answer here could easily be shown to be yes.

2. The laws of physics let us construct Turing machines that transition between macroscopically distinct internal states but what about other notions of similarity. In particular is it reasonable to expect that ‘most’ configurations of matter admit a notion of simplicity that both renders the configuration low in entropy and capable of supporting complex computations.

3. Do evolutionary considerations put any further restraints on when we should expect to see complex reasoning beings encoded relative to a given notion of simplicity.

It’s my hypothesis that ultimate answer will simply be that complex thinking computations can evolve from virtually any configuration of matter but always encoded so that their notion of simplicity renders the initial conditions simple. That is thinking always (and only) should evolve encoded in states that make it feasible to remember the past and predict the future. Otherwise, what would be the point of evolving complex thought.

To be fair to the physicists this is a fairly deep and subtle point. They simply aren’t taught to think hard about how entropy is defined and whether that definition depends on the initial conditions of our universe. That is why philosophy has something real and meaningful to offer. Unfortunately, as I will observe in my next post analytic philosophy often drifts far from this useful territory and seems terrifyingly bereft of any correction mechanism.

So over on Volokh Conspiracy Randy Barnett is pushing a suggestion he made in an article in the wall street journal that by acting in concert 2/3 of the state legislatures should have the power to repeal federal legislation or regulations. Since I don’t have a strong position on federal power one way or the other I usually don’t comment on reforms designed to devolve federal power but this suggestion is so deeply flawed on both practical and theoretical grounds I couldn’t let it go without a rebuttal.

Before we begin just consider the fact that creating a second senate consisting of hundreds of senators from each state with the power to repeal legislation with a 2/3 majority of the states would be essentially equivalent to this proposal. If you don’t think that a second senate with this limited power would be beneficial what could possibly be beneficial about this proposal? Now let’s consider the particulars.

First the purely practical aspect: what does it mean to repeal a piece of legislation? Does this mean that the states can repeal any passage/clause/section in federal legislation or does it only grant them an all or nothing choice to repeal an entire bill. I presume the suggestion is the later (so a repeal acts like a late presidential veto) since otherwise the state legislatures would effectively be a second congress, e.g., if congress strikes a balance between some kind of invasive search and judicial protections the states would be essentially writing their own legislation if they could simply strike out half that balance. Since this is the reasonable interpretation and the one closest to the proposed text I’ll assume that only entire bills or regulations could be repealed.

But this now creates massive problems. What if congress passes a law that changes the classification of Marijuana and psychedelics from schedule I to schedule II allowing it to be used medicinally then later congress decides that since it’s only `hard’ drugs in schedule I to increase the penalties for trafficking in a schedule I substance. If the states later repeal the bill reclassifying the psychedelics does trafficking these substances now come with a greater criminal penalty than congress (or a majority of the states) ever intended? This is just the tip of the iceberg.

What if congress decides to change the nomenclature in the same bill in which they legalize the medical use of Marijuana so instead of schedules I-V it’s now class A-E. Shortly afterward congress passes another bill revamping all the criminal penalties and whose text indicates that it repeals all previous criminal penalties for trafficking in drugs in favor of a new system of penalties phrased in terms of classes A-E. If the states repeal the bill legalizing medical use of Marijuana does this mean that all criminal penalties for drug trafficking are eliminated? After all the only non-repealed trafficking laws reference class A-E substances which no longer exist since the law creating them was repealed. As nice as result as that might be in this case the problems are starting to mount.

These issues were bad enough when we imagined the conflicts occurred by accident but what happens when congress wants to prevent the states from repealing their bills? They could simply pass popular bills right after the legislation at risk of repeal in such a way that should the states repeal the controversial bill the popular legislation would be rendered inoperative. As a silly example one might pass an agriculture funding bill which reads “No monies shall be distributed in excess of the number of words in section Y of the law multiplied by 10 million dollars,” where section Y was introduced by the controversial bill. Thus were the controversial bill to be repealed farm subsidies would be immediately halted. Should they wish to be less obviously contrived congress could simply package up the various bills they plan to pass in such a way that 2/3 of the states wouldn’t be able to agree on exactly what to repeal.

Finally, since the house and senate set their own rules it’s quite possible that “deem and pass” is perfectly constitutional. If so congress could break up the laws into an arbitrary collection of bills to undermine any potential state coalition. Alternatively congress could simply rewrite the rules preventing them from packing absolutely everything into one giant bill to evade the veto in that manner.

Now that we hit upon some of the practical problems let’s move on to the theoretical failures. The first and most puzzling of which is why would such a legislative veto be desirable now that we have direct election of senators? For a bill to pass congress it must have already received support from a majority of the elected senators so why should we let state legislatures which are often ignored by voters override the choices of the senators they elected? Despite the implications by Barnett that somehow state legislatures have more wisdom for the most part state legislators are much less likely to be knowledgeable about policy than our federal representatives. Indeed, it should strike one as weird that 2/3 of state legislators might vote to repeal what a majority of senators supported when they represent the same constituents.

This consideration exposes the true effect of such a measure and the motivation for considering it now. State legislators have national party affiliations and feel obligations to support that parties national views. Thus even though you may have voted for your republican state assemblyman because he has reasonable moderate views on taxes, school funding and etc.. he will likely feel pressure to vote for repeal of moderate democratic initiatives at the national level. In conservative states the democratic candidates for state legislature tend to be fairly conservative and vice versa but would still feel pressure from the national party to tow the national party line. In short letting state legislatures repeal federal laws would force voters to compromise between the candidates who have the best local policies and those that are most likely to be loyal to the voter’s favored national policies yielding less optimal results. It’s only because currently states are more heavily republican than the federal government that this suggestion is gaining any traction but if the states started repealing laws then the parties elected at a state level would start to follow the federal trends.

Lastly allowing states to repeal regulations as well as legislation totally undermines the benefits of regulation. The advantage of regulation, and the reason we don’t do everything by legislation, is that regulations can be issued by appointees under less direct political pressure. For instance regulations about safe levels of chemicals in drinking water can be issued by regulators who are some distance removed from lobbyists. Allowing state legislatures to repeal regulations puts this advantage at risk.

I was just reading this post over at Lawfare debating whether the use of targeted killing is justified on analagous grounds to the use of deadly force by the police in resolving a hostage situation. Heller, in arguing that it is not, suggests that law enforcement is justified in using lethal force without trial only when the threat is particularly imminent. While disagreeing with Heller’s conclusion Wittes (the author of the post) seems to agree that imminence is the key issue.

Certainly as far as US constitutional jurisprudence goes this isn’t the rule. In TENNESSEE v. GARNER, 471 U.S. 1 (1985) the court held

It is not, however, unconstitutional on its face. Where the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others, it is not constitutionally unreasonable to prevent escape by using deadly force.

Notice the lack of any mention of imminence. Of course both common sense (and perhaps even other precedents) suggest that if other non-lethal means could be used to eliminate the threat then it would be unjustified to use lethal force. However, apriori consideration shows that reasonable outcomes require that it it be the absence of reasonable non-lethal means to avert a likely harm, not the imminence of the harm, that must justify lethal force against a dangerous individual.

The easiest counterexample is that of a terrorist on the verge of dispersing a surely lethal biological agent with a several week incubation period. Even though the deaths wouldn’t occur for several weeks surely it is justifiable to use deadly force to stop the terrorist from dispersing the germs. Thus it can’t be the imminance of the fatalities that matter but maybe it’s the imminance of the harm where the harm is injection with the biological agent. But surely it would make no difference if instead the terrorist was about trigger a remote device in an unknown, undiscoverable location in a major city that would disperse the biological agent after a week long countdown.

So maybe then it’s the imminance of the murderous act that is relevant regardless of when the consequences come to pass. Thus deadly force is justified in the above examples because the subject is on the verge of an action that seriously threatens the lives of others. This is an attractive view but again we can show this can’t be the right rule by considering a hypothetical.

This time imagine the terrorist has stolen a deadly biological weapon from a military lab but the spores are contained in a tamper resistant box that will take about 5 minutes to be opened. The terrorist is making no attempt to open the box but is about to steal a tank which the police know he plans to drive into a nearby city where he will release the biological agent. Surely if the police know that once inside the protection of the tank they will be powerless to stop the terrorist lethal force is justified in preventing him from entering the tank. I could extend the example further but the point seems clear, the law must deem lethal force justifiable when it’s the last and only chance to prevent a highly probable future murder even if that murder is distant in time and space from the use of the force. Our normal intuitions about the need for an imminent threat are a consequence of the fact that in most situations where the harm is not imminent the use of lethal force can be delayed without great risk.

Still one might distinguish the tank stealing terrorist case from the targeted killing situation by appeal to the fact that the tank stealing terrorist is currently in the midst of a concrete attempt to take lives. However, we allow law enforcement to kill hostage takers who are merely threatening to kill others but not currently executing a lethal plan and surely having a leadership position in a genuine terrorist organization puts you in the position of threatening to kill others, after all that’s your publicly stated goal. Moreover, in such a situation it is impossible to know when the terrorist leader might order an attack so one rarely will have reason to believe the killing may be delayed without incurring substantially more risk. Indeed, the situation seems very similar to a hostage taker, who may or may not be wearing a real bomb, visible through the window to the police sniper where the mere chance that the hostage taker might set in motion a deadly chain of events is enough to justify lethal force.

This suggests to me that the relevant distinction with respect to targeted killings is between those killings undertaken for the purposes of direct self-defense, i.e., to stop a terrorist leader from ordering/organizing a deadly attack, and those undertaken for strategic reasons, e.g., killing a terrorist leader with a purely PR role to instill fear in potential allies of the group. I’m not sure when either should be allowed but this seems to be a much more reasonable place to draw a line than imminence.

On a different point I suspect that it would actually be extremely easy for a suspect terrorist to remove themselves from the US government’s list of targets. Far from being flung in a dark hole in the ground if such an individual presented themselves at a US consulate I’m sure the CIA would offer them piles of cash to reveal information about their contacts.

So awhile ago in an attempt to get even in a personal conflict one Harvard Law student (Yelena Shagall¹) forwarded an email with controversial racial comments by her rival (Stephanie Grace²) to other parties likely to make sure it got published and ruined her rivals career. While I was stunned by the sheer Machiavellian evil of Yelena Shagall at first I just read a tiny snippet and some commentary and not really paying much attention assumed that the inference of racist motives was reasonable if too weak to justify the harsh reaction. After reading the full email my response has totally changed. Not only is the email not suggestive of racism it’s eminently reasonable and the absurd attempts to condemn the sentiment and the writer bear a disconcerting similarity to the methods employed to try witches in the middle ages. I mean when everyone insists they are taking the scientific and evidential high road but feel the claim is just too obvious and absurd to respond with evidence rather than outrage something is fishy. Now some of the accusations of racism are expected but even the moderate and sympathetic articles seem to take it for granted the email was racist. Worse rather than have the courage to step up and defend the claims in the email as eminently reasonable the Harvard leadership and the academic community more generally threw the student under the bus. That’s disgusting behavior and I think academics have a duty to stand up when this kind of crap happens and publicly admit that, while hardy a model of good communication, this is a completely reasonable way for an academic to express a eminently defensible position.

In fact while I have a few small quibbles I would certainly not be ashamed to have sent a similar email. Moreover, even if you thought she got the science radically wrong that hardly makes her stand out. Most members of congress are totally scientifically illiterate and a non-trivial fraction of the country believes in UFOs or rejects Darwinism so surely scientific error is not cause for public hanging. Obviously the problem was she dared to even consider the truth of the ‘wrong conclusion’ and people wonder why there isn’t an open honest dialog about race in this country.

Just to hammer the point home let me go through the email point by point. I’d hope that other academics will, regardless of how clear cut they think the scientific questions at issue are, at least publicly indicate their horror at this reaction to a mere request for compelling evidence before totally rejecting a potential explanation.

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances.

While I could only be convinced that the genetic predispositions to intelligence (to the extent this makes sense) for the two racial groups was within a certain margin of error. Ultimately what is so deeply ironic about all the accusations that Stephanie Grace doesn’t understand the science it’s the people who are insisting that science has absolutely closed the book on the issue of statistical correlations between race and intelligence who don’t understand science. If there is one thing science has taught us about genetics it’s that it’s hugely complicated and there are likely to be a huge number of different gene variants that have some effect on ultimate intelligence³. Given this massive number of different variables, many of which correlate significantly with race⁴ it’s almost absurd to think all these different variables would perfectly balance out. That’s like betting that if you flip a coin 100 times and then flip it another 100 you will get the same number of heads both times. So it’s almost certain that, in a state of perfect racial equality, one race or another would have a slightly higher expected IQ as a result of genetic factors⁵.

Of course one might reasonably insist that the standard rules of conversational implicature make it clear that Stephanie Grace isn’t just allowing for the possibility that by pure chance there are a couple more blacks with some rare congenital mental defect than whites. Obviously what she means not to rule out is the existence of certain genetic variants that correlate reasonably strongly with racial categories that will ultimately be demonstrated to grant some kind of slight increase in intelligence/improvement in brain function. Moreover, implicitly one can take her also to be saying one can’t rule out the fact that some non-trivial amount of the observed intelligence differences between races, in particular the worse results of blacks in measures of IQ, are a result of these genetic variations.

Now there are some some good scientific reasons to think that the vast majority of the observed racial gap in IQ scores, even after controlling for as much as possible, would disappear in an equitable environment. For instance the size of the lead African-American girls have over African-American boys resembles that of past ethnic groups whose average IQ scores used to lag behind the national average. So I certainly wouldn’t bet on any non-trivial fraction of the observed IQ gap turning out to be deeply genetic⁶. But our continued failure to pinpoint the exact social or cultural factors responsible and the continued intractability of questions about the relation between gender and various intellectual skills makes it totally crazy to categorically rule out this possibility⁷.

The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:) Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders.

She isn’t pulling this out of her ass. There is some pretty suggestive evidence that testosterone does impact math/science ability (though these seem to indicate the optimal level is in the low male range). Note that all the trumpeted claims about women doing just as well on math tests as guys amount to squat since women actually do better on academic tests across the board then men.

This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.

Note that her phrasing here makes it pretty clear that she is simply refusing to rule out the possibility. Now I don’t know her so I have no idea if she’s a racist but this is a completely reasonable, if misunderstandable, way for someone to merely express the belief that the science hasn’t yet conclusively ruled out this possibility. Indeed it has not. It’s given us suggestive grounds to think the answer goes one way but it at this point we simply can’t hope to conclusively rule out this kind of possibility. There are just too many confounding variables and far too much complexity to achieve that level of certainty.

Despite some of the accusations obviously Stephanie is merely using Nigeria as an example of a location where children receive insufficient resources and substandard care relative to what we have available in the United States. Bizarrely some critics seem to think Stephanie is suggesting no one in Nigeria is pretty or smart when this is plainly at complete odds with the claim being made (even with poor resources people can turn out well).

I also don’t think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences).

Now she goes out of her way to emphasize she isn’t rejecting the idea that the observered differences in intelligence measurements are primarly the result of environmental factors. Exactly what one would do if you were trying to express the correct view that we simply don’t have the kind of scientific evidence that would let us totally rule out, as opposed to simply judge to be unlikely, a substantial genetic effect. For the love of god what else do you want this woman to say to make it clear that she is just reasonably refusing to regard a scientific possibility as foreclosed until she is handed conclusive evidence.

I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects. One example (courtesy of Randall Kennedy) is that some people, based on crime statistics, might think African Americans are genetically more likely to be violent, since income and other statistics cannot close the racial gap. In the slavery era, however, the stereotype was of a docile, childlike, African American, and they were, in fact, responsible for very little violence (which was why the handful of rebellions seriously shook white people up). Obviously group wide rates of violence could not fluctuate so dramatically in ten generations if the cause was genetic, and so although there are no quantifiable data currently available to “explain” away the racial discrepancy in violent crimes, it must be some nongenetic cultural shift. Of course, there are pro-genetic counterarguments, but if we assume we can control for all variables in the given time periods, the form of the argument is compelling.

Ok, maybe you want her to add this just to make it extra clear she understands that bias and stereotype can in fact cause observed differences in outcome. Clearly she is outlining here what she wants to see to be convinced that the genetic hypothesis for the observed underperformance of blacks on intelligence tests is untenable. I mean how can someone possibly be engaging in the transparent racist misunderstanding of the science alleged when they are simply asking you to provide the correct scientific argument.

It’s this that gives the outraged condemnations the air of a religious inquisition. If they actually had the kind of totally conclusive scientific arguments they insist exist then presumably they’d be happy to simply share them with people like Stephanie Grace so they too are on the right page. Suspiciously not one of the condemnations I’ve seen, for all they fault Stephanie Grace for insufficient science, cite a single relevant study to rebut her supposedly absurd view. Apparently we are supposed to divine citations to the relevant work through the sheer force of our outrage.

In conclusion, I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true. Everyone wants someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.

Very true Stephanie. Sadly you underestimated just how vicious people can be when you draw attention to what their doing. Unlike me most people haven’t actually read enough studies about genetics and intelligence to have any reason to bet that most of the observed differences are behavioral. However, it’s extremely important to people’s worldview that this be true and vital to their self-image that they believe it to be true. Thus when you challenge that view people’s natural response is to strike out to hide their underlying insecurity and lash out at the cause of the painful mental tension.

I wish there was a facebook group to offer Stephanie support but I suppose that’s not in her best interest.

So if you spend any time reading the semi-popular scientific press, listen to NPR or are exposed to the skeptical community you will eventually run into the claim that (human) races don’t exist. Sometimes it’s phrased as a scientific discovery other times the idea that there are different races like Caucasian, oriental etc.. is ‘debunked’ but almost always there is a pretty transparent underlying motivation to scold those bad racist people who make claims about comparative racial abilities or at least to demonstrate just how different we mature objective scientists types are from the people who try and link race and ability. The recent debate over a racist sounding (without context) personal email by a Harvard law student has triggered another round of these supposedly scientific absolution.

Now if one was really looking to be scientific or skeptical rather than merely seeking to affirm membership in a certain social/political group this claim should set off two sets of alarm bells. The first set because it’s such a convenient thing to be true. After all if science has proven their aren’t really races then you don’t have to worry about troubling questions like the relationship between race and intelligence so you can go on thinking of yourself both as a good liberal¹ and a critical thinker. Indeed, as soon as one acknowledges the notion of race then the sheer number of correlations between racial background and various gene sequences makes it downright absurd to insist that there isn’t some statistical difference in genetic predisposition to intelligence between different races². Of course we have good evidence that any such correlation will be small compared to environmental effects and individual differences and (to my knowledge) have no particular reason to suspect that the result won’t be ‘favorable’ for traditionally disadvantaged groups but subtle qualifications like this won’t eliminate the suspicion the admission draws. So like belief in an afterlife, trust in homeopathic remedies, or credence in the Loch Less monster there are obvious reasons people would believe the claim regardless of it’s truth giving us cause to be suspicious.

The other alarm bell is the fact that this claim contradicts what we see so plainly with our eyes. People from difference regions of the world look different. People with an African background have a different skin color than those from a European or Oriental background. Kenyan runners seem to do disproportionately well in marathon races³ and hair color/type highly correlates with what part of the world your family comes from. These differences are too obvious for the people claiming that scientifically race doesn’t exist to simply brush off so they try to explain it by saying that there is indeed a socially constructed notion of race it’s simply the genetic notion that doesn’t exist.

This response can’t possibly fly. The differences in skin, eye and hair color aren’t socially constructed. They are determined (largely) by your genetics. It’s a simple and obvious fact that there are substantial correlations between one’s genetic makeup and where your ancestors come from and these genetic differences are surely not only superficial. A child’s risk of sickle cell anemia is highly dependent on the parent’s racial background and we are slowly discovering that race significantly alters one’s susceptibility to many other afflictions and the probable effectiveness of various drugs. In light of this facially compelling proof of the existence of racial genetic variation what kind of scientific result could possibly be described as showing that there is no such thing as race?

Well the true scientific claim in the background is that the boundaries we draw between various racial groups are arbitrary and purely a matter of social construction. In other words if we analyzed everyone’s genes they wouldn’t group into a small number of tidy piles and certainly not ones that match our (culturally) standard categories like black, white, oriental, Indian, etc.. Instead of black/white/oriental/Indian/Native American it might make just as much sense to have Native American & Oriental/White & Indian/Northern African/South African instead. These racial categories might not be as useful in describing the social and cultural fault lines in American society but they (or some alternative like them) would be no less correlated with various genetic risks and just as useful in medical recommendations.

While it’s important to point out that we draw racial boundaries in (genetically) arbitrary places this no more shows that scientifically speaking race doesn’t exist than the fact that light comes in a continuous spectrum shows that scientifically speaking color doesn’t exist. Indeed, we know that different cultures break apart the visible spectrum in different ways but that doesn’t mean that science disproves the fact that blue and green are distinct colors. To illustrate just how much this claim distorts the truth just imagine someone insisting that scientifically speaking baldness didn’t exist because just how few hairs you need to qualify as bald is culturally determined.

It’s bad enough when scientists advance this claim but I understand that they may be trying to balance accuracy with other concerns such as their career, combating racist distortions of the truth in soundbites, and keeping the trust of various political and social coalitions. I still think that in the long run the failure of scientists to reign in this kind of political pandering risks compromising the public’s trust in their objectivity but at least I have some sympathy with their misrepresentation. However, it particularly galls me when skeptical groups participate in this kind of distortion while claiming to exist primarily to oppose just this kind of wishful thinking.

So over at ars they had an article clearing the scientists at the CRU (the guys with the leaked emails) saying that while other statistical methods and approaches would have been superior that’s hardly misconduct. In the conversation about after the post someone was complaining about the ‘absurdity’ of not requiring the highest quality analysis and the most bulletproof possible experimental evidence for an issue like climate change. I was immediately struck by the huge gulf, which on reflection I suspect is widespread, between how people treat scientific evidence and claims and how they treat everyday questions of truth and falsity in their own lives.

However, science is nothing but the process of deciding what you think is true and if people really understood science in this way I think we’d have a lot less confusion about global warming. There is nothing different about the way disputes in science are settled than the way you might settle an argument with your friend about whose route from work to the bar is faster (suppose you have serious money riding on the question so it really matters). So let’s just consider what you’d likely do to decide the bet and see how that would apply in the scientific context. I’m using climate change here as a particular example but virtually everyone who isn’t close to the scientific community is equally guilty as this disconnect underlies many of the unreasonable public expectations about science.

When the argument begins you’d both point out factors that give credence to your route being the faster one based on existing knowledge. Often that alone will be enough to settle the question. If your friend reminds you about the new stoplights the city added on your route recently you might well decide he’s almost surely right and it’s not worth putting to the test. Or maybe his arguments are strong enough that you’d demand very favorable odds to make another bet on your route but you are still unsure enough you think it’s worth testing. (Or you could have the better argument or neither of course).

The next thing you would do do settle the question if debate persisted would be to perform an experiment. You’d probably suggest that you each drive your own routes to the bar that night and see who gets their first. Of course this kind of rough and ready check is far from an ideal controlled study with powerful statistical analysis but whether or not you the experiment convinces you depends on not only it’s quality but also the strength of the results and your prior judgments of plausibility.

In other words if your friend’s remark about the stop lights made you think he was probably right and then he reached the bar in 15 minutes while you took over 30 you’d probably find that quite persuassive and take the issue to be settled. If the results were closer, say 23 vs. 30 minutes and you know your friends a calm steady driver you might still be convinced despite the lack of experimental control for driver differences but if you know he’s highly competitive and given to speeding you might insist on having a mutual friend drive both routes to control for driver speeding. Still, as long as the results aren’t in conflict with your prior expectations, e.g., it’s the shorter, fewer stops route that is coming in as faster you’d probably be convinced without any need to throw powerful statistical methods at the question even though losing cost you a big chunk of change.

On the other hand the very same experimental results probably wouldn’t be enough to convince you if they were in radical conflict with your prior knowledge about the workings of traffic and driving. For instance if google maps said your route was shorter, had a higher speed limit, fewer stops and less traffic you’d probably suspect that the couple of tests you’d done weren’t convincing enough and demand many trials with a test of statistical significance (or compelling theoretical justification of why your route might be slower…say being told all your turns are unprotected left turns while he has right turns) before you agreed to pay up on the bet. The lower the prior probability you assign to the observed outcome and the closer the observed average times are the more statistical rigor you would insist on before paying up.

Importantly, while better controlled experiments with more powerful statistical techniques (if understood) are always better it doesn’t mean other tests can’t add to the weight of evidence. Even if you and your buddy got a third party to do many trials and used tests of statistical significance if your buddy Bob tells you he drives your way and always gets their after his wife who drives your friends way it still adds to the strength of your case despite the low number of trials and uncontrolled variables like the driver (just much less so).

So let’s take this back to the climate science situation. Would it be even better if the CRU scientists had used more powerful statistical techniques correctly? Sure. But all experiments are imperfect but they can still provide valuable evidence just like the initial tests or Bob’s anecdote in my story. Not only is it not bad for scientists to publish results from imperfect experiments it’s important for them to do so as long as other scientists aren’t being mislead about the strength of the tests/results (the scientific community seems unsurprised about the underlying statistical techniques used so it’s reasonable to assume they probably had a good sense of the strength of the evidence published). In fact often it’s preferable for scientists to publish imperfect experimental results with non-ideal methods of analysis and invest their time in new experiments instead of investing the time/energy to apply more powerful mathematical techniques to a particular result. For instance I think it was probably a good decision on Galileo’s part to let the crude experiments with balls on inclined planes and simple timers convince him objects all accelerate at the same rate under gravity than to insist on waiting for fancy statistics and running many tests. That way he could say important things about the heliocentric model as well.

Ultimately what’s wrong with the expectation that papers giving evidence on matters of enormous public concern always live up to some kind of school book ideal of scientific experimentation is that it makes a single paper stand in for the mountains of accumulated evidence. I mean complaining about all these minor ‘imperfections’ in climate research is like arguing that we shouldn’t assume it takes longer to drive from New York to LA than from Chicago to LA because the people who had made the drives never had a proper control. If you have shitloads of distinct pieces of evidence for a claim (like many people saying 2 days for Chicago LA and 3 days for NY LA) which is supported by a sound theoretical justification (NY is farther away) demanding the tests be redone with the right formal methods (controls/better statistics/etc..) would make no noticeable difference in your (rational) confidence of the claim.

Equally problematic is the background assumption that most public criticisms of consensus scientific results tend to ignore the critical importance of prior probabilities. For instance if there was one thing I think that most people on both sides of the climate debate ignore (or glass over) is the high prior probability we should assign to anthropogenic global warming. Basic thermodynamic considerations tell us that absent some unexpected large systematic effect of CO2 emissions to create cooling it must cause global warming and that human emissions are large enough that we should expect them to give rise to the level of warming observed. This isn’t some crazy computer model or complex bit of climate science subject to judgment calls. Just look up a few basic values for light absorption by CO2, strength of solar radiation and the (directly observed by satellite) level of reflected solar radiation and you can work it out on a single piece of paper.

So it’s the guys who want to deny anthropogenic global warming who have the burden of proof to convince us there is some unexpected process that gives rise to a seemingly paradoxical absence of anthropogenic global warming. Given this context merely suggestive experimental results supporting the accuracy of this simple model are enough to up our confidence from “likely” to “almost certain.” These scientists should no more waste time polishing these experiments than they should spend money rigorously verifying the earth is round. In other words we already have SOOO much evidence that making this paper a bit more persuasive wouldn’t budge our rational confidence.

A similar point applies to resistance to things like food irradiation or other all natural type movements. As with climate change the prior probabilities are ignored and the burden is shifted from the person suggesting the possibility of novel unexpected mechanisms to those who are simply claiming that things work the way we reasonably expect them to work.

In my view one of the most glaring indictments of the way philosophy and other humanities are taught and practiced is the senseless insistence on reading original works by the great masters. This is most apparent in the continued consumption of Plato, Hobbes, Aristotle and the like in philosophy but can be equally well be seen in the reverance for Chaucer, Shakespeare or other literary classics. To my horror this reverence for the original works is even being promoted in economics. So even though I gave a short reply in the comments at overcoming bias when this issue came up I’ve been meaning to discuss the question in more detail.

For the moment I’d like to set aside the issue of literature for another post and focus on subjects like philosophy and economics where (at least in theory) the aim is to genuinely progress towards a (more) accurate/useful understanding. Since I find it genuienly perplexing why one would ever feel the need to read the originals rather than the digested and improved material found in modern expositions as one does in math of physics I’ll quote Tyler Cowen’s justifications for returning to the original thinkers. Obviously these don’t represent every possible justification but they are the best justifications I’ve ever heard.

First though I’d like to be perfectly clear that the issue under consideration is whether there is some pedagogical benefit to reading original thinkers as opposed to modern summaries (of either the original thinker or simply the current state of the discipline). There is no accounting for taste so if you simply have some Plato fetish or like the way reading Plato makes you feel sophisticated you might find it more enjoyable to read Plato rather than more modern work just as someone else might prefer to have their philosophical arguments interspersed in Harry Potter slash. Also if your interest is in original historical research then influential works are a reasonable thing to read¹ but again the question at hand is the benefit of reading original works by great thinkers to the advancement of the discipline itself not it’s history or the practitioners feelings of sophistication. With this point clear let’s examine what Tyler Cowen has to say point by point.

1. Secondary sources are unreliable and they do not capture or understand many of the original insights. To remove it from the distant past, what I get from John Rawls or Robert Nozick is quite distinct from what I get from their distillers.

So what? The standard isn’t whether a latter distillation captures the exact content but whether it’s a more effective way to gain understanding. Reading a modern calculus book is extremely different from reading the original Newton. Newton’s notions of infinitesimals and fluxions have been excisced wholesale and replaced with the modern notions of limits and epsilon-delta proofs and that’s a huge improvement in the ability of calculus books to convey understanding.

2. Truly great thinkers require numerous distillers. Can you read just one book on Keynes? No. So you have to read a few. Shouldn’t one of these then be Keynes himself? Yes.

This presupposes the goal is to understand what Keynes thought. Keynes was a brilliant economist but he was just as human as the rest of us and some of his ideas were simply confused or poorly thought out. The benefit of later distillers is to transmit the insights while avoiding the confusions, so no, one of these shouldn’t be Keynes himself.

I mean imagine Keynes was really a highlander and was still alive and at the height of his intellectual powers. Who would it be more beneficial to read the 1936 Keynes or the 2010 Keynes who has used the intervening years to excise the confused parts of The General Theory and find more lucid explanations of the key insights? Surely it’s the 2010 Keynes who would (likely) provide the better explanation (if you disagree would you go back to his half-assembled notes? Further?). Yet surely if Keynes could improve on his own work than (as the goal is to convey economic ideas not Keynes personal beliefs) surely others could as well, especially when the benefit from the collaboration and exchange of ideas provided the academic discipline.

3. The errors of top thinkers are often more interesting and instructive than their successes. Distillers have a hard time capturing these errors and their fruitfulness.

But that’s the wrong comparison. The right comparison is whether it’s more useful to build upon the work of past greats and digest this new material including the mistakes made by those who have built upon the great thinkers of the past than to spend time digesting the errors of the past. Obviously if it was costless one would read every book on the subject but the key question question is would the time spent exploring the errors made by Keynes be better spent exploring later work that builds upon his insights.. The reason it’s so tempting to advocate reading originals is that we don’t properly take into account the opportunity costs incurred reading those originals.

Moreover, given that there is only so much time for students (or professors) to devote to learning a subject either one must give up totally on the idea of making progress or admit that it’s sometimes more effective to substitute modern materials for some works of great thinkers. Hence this argument either proves too much (progress is impossible because it’s always better to learn from the mistakes of past great thinkers) or proves nothing at all since we continuously make beneficial trade offs of replacing originals with more modern works.

4. We often read great thinkers not to learn what they understood but also to set our minds racing and to find interesting new questions. Great thinkers are usually better at supplying this service than are their distillers.

Again this assumes that the job of the distiller is to summarize the original author. A good analysis book doesn’t summarize Newton it digests his insights and presents them as part of a grander theory. Reading a modern analysis book does a much better job a posing interesting new questions than does reading Newton.[^empirial]

Moreover, I suggest this is largely a placebo effect. One is told that the reading great thinkers in the original is particularly inspiring so we search for questions to inspire us. We would probably do equally well if told that Joyce’s Ulysses conveyed deep economic questions. If you doubt this consider the stunningly large number of people who, despite not being religious, claim to derive deep moral messages and insights from the bible despite it’s blatant encouragement of genocide, rape, and every other kind of brutality imaginable.

5. Sometimes the value is in having read common sources and benefiting from the commonality per se. Great thinkers are usually more focal than any of their distillers and thus reading them is a good input for discussions with others.

OFten this is simply false as influential textbooks and articles are often just as widely read. More importantly by virtue of the novelty of their ideas original thinkers are usually lacking in clarity meaning the same work is usually interpreted in a host of different ways.. However, even if true this argues for more canonical books. In mathematics this issue is solved by the publication of various yellow books that provide a common base for everyone to use as a reference and there is no reason not to do the same for other subjects.

6. Original sources often help you challenge or reexamine your world view or intellectual ethos. Distillers very often pander to that world view, while pretending to challenge you.

Given their status as influential originals the content in these works has largely been either incorporated into your modern world view or people have developed standard objections. I know my world view (or even philosophical position) has never been threatened by the original work of an past great thinker but often it’s been shaken by a new argument or idea from a modern source.

7. Consider a simple comparison. You can read either Adam Smith’s two major books or any ten or even twenty books on him, toss in articles if you wish. It’s a no-brainer which you should choose.

Right, neither. Who the hell cares what some dude named Adam Smith thought. Given the choice between reading a modern economic textbook and any of Adam Smith’s books I know which one I would choose and it’s the same thing we always choose for undergraduates.

8. The best distillers often are original sources in their own right (and in part unreliable expositors), such as in Charles Taylor’s excellent book on Hegel.

Again the false dichotomy. Instead of trying to find out what Hegel said we should be finding out what is true (which in the case of Hegel will involve simply ignoring him).

9. Distillation works best in very exact sciences, such as physics and mathematics. If you rely on distillation for an inexact science, you will do best at capturing its exact parts. You will be left with a systematic bias, and knowledge gap, regarding its inexact parts.

So it’s only when you can’t actually go out and check whether going back to read the original works by great thinkers that it’s beneficial? That’s awful suspicious

Stepping back for a moment I would point out the fact that there are many different mutually contradictory disciplines of theology (every major world religion has one). Thus regardless of your religious views (and especially if you are an atheist) you must admit that there are academic disciplines which are totally bullshit. Now I would point out that in virtually all instances of theological study the original work of prior influential (but not prophets or otherwise supernaturally gifted) theologians is regarded as similarly important to read in the original.

Hence, we must all admit there are situations where academic disciplines are convinced of the important of reading influential past thinkers in the original despite even though it provides no actual benefit. Conversely in all those disciplines where we have reliable quantatative measurements of progress (with the obvious exception of history) returning to the original works of past great thinkers is decidedly unhelpful. Therefore at the very least anyone who wishes to claim that reading past great thinkers in the original (be it Plato, Keynes, Aristotle or whomever) has a substantial argumentative burden to meet and until they do the assumption should be against spending time doing so.

This morning a story on slashdot linked to A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart as well as a blog post discussing the issue. This is the first time I’ve read Lockhart’s rant but little of what he said was new to anyone who has listened to any of the mathematicians vocally crusading for better mathematics education. As usual most of his piece was the same unrealistic claptrap about how if we could only show the children the joy and beauty of math all would be well. It’s a pleasant fiction to believe, and it’s seductive to think that with just one little nudge all children could discover the pleasure we take in mathematics, but it’s about as reasonable as believing everyone would love to garden, read Shakespeare or anything else if they were only exposed to it.

To be fair I was quite impressed with Lockhart’s brutally frank analysis of what currently passes for mathematical edification in K-12. Apart from teaching kids to sit still and signaling social status¹, for 95% of the class everything after multiplication (and a good bit before) is totally pointless. Go talk to some doctors (GPs), lawyers, managers, etc.. to solve a simple algebra problem (say two linear equations in two unknowns) and see just how few have the slightest clue. No one’s benefiting by making them rotely memorize some rules they promptly forget. However, the notion that if we only taught children real math they would gobble it up is simply absurd.

I remember taking a differential geometry class in college that was taught in what was (at least for me) an abominable way. No rigor, just vague comments about pictures and twisting so unsurprisingly I kept putting that homework off and gradually falling further behind. At that point understanding became nigh impossible. Just doing the problem sets made me feel frustrated, angry and perhaps a bit inferior and I’m unreasonably over confident about my mathematical abilities. Naturally one then puts them off and when you force yourself to work you just grind through the problems without any curiosity or hope of understanding the bigger picture. Psychologically you just can’t force someone to be curious and deeply thoughtful about a subject that makes them feel bad and that’s what understanding math requires. So certainly a sufficently bad teacher (who won’t follow a book) can discourage real learning but could better teaching really significantly encourage real mathematical understanding in K-12?

Sure if you somehow eliminate the social significance of mathematical ability and turned math class into a non-threatening fun activity like most HS art classes you might make some progress. That, however, is simply impossible. Nothing the teacher says can erase the knowledge that actually showing interest and talent in mathematics opens up many lucrative doors and signals intelligence. So long as the mathematically gifted are financially rewarded students (and their parents) will care about how they perform in the subject. Unlike art or literature math also has right and wrong answers and can often leave one feeling lost and frustrated so unavoidably half your student body will resent math for making them feel stupid and inferior even if they would never admit it. No matter how excellent the teacher they can do no more than try to distract the under performing students from inevitable comparisons with those who are doing better. Worse, any attempt to discourage people who dislike the subject from taking the courses will simply increase the incentive for them to camouflage themselves as someone who does like math to future schools and bosses. The problem would be a lot easier if it was just that some people weren’t smart enough.

I don’t really know what we should do about this situation. However, I suspect one reason people are so reluctant to face this possibility is that it would require us to explicitly consider how we want to trade off the benefit to the small fraction students who could benefit immensely from non-rote proof based mathematics and in turn contribute disproportionately to our economic growth against the interests of the larger number of students who are too intimidated by the subject to do anything but rote work. I think we ought to consider using programming, with it’s more video game/slot machine pace of rewards, as the means to teach logic and quantitative thought but that still doesn’t answer the math question.

So browsing the web this morning I came across this amazing blog largely focused on the author’s (apparently a philosophy grad student somewhere) continentalist approach to Godel’s incompleteness theorem. Rather than describe the content I’ll just include his last post.

Perhaps this will be my last post here? A simple reiteration of negative Platonism, situating its significance in the context of awakening from the wrong expectations performed so thoroughly and unconsciously in the second Critique.

To put it once again with maximal simplicity: The diagonal is what relates, without religious/imaginary synthesis, our mathematical/cognitive and ethical/existential lives.

We already live in both places: in consistency through calculation and consciousness, in completeness through care and the unconscious. What we suffer from, as both theoretical inadequacy and ethical alienation, is an inability to relate these in a way that makes sense and is good.

Thus it has suddenly become possible, after long stagnation, to say something rigorous and suggestive, something that opens logoi both mathematically lucid and existentially thick (again without synthesis: it’s a matter of bridges and transitions, not of sovereign unities or systems) about the fundamental Socratic question: which knowledge, which part, of knowledge, would do us any good?

At stake here is exactly what gets talked about, prephilosophically, as “the meaning of life”. It is good philosophical practice to avoid this question until one has something real to say about it, and instead, to work the problem from either side. But it is not good practice, once the relation has become clear, to remain squeamish about naming it: Idea of the Good, Diagonalization.

Note, if you read the rest of the blog it’s totally clear that he really means diagnolization in the sense of the mathematical technique employed by Godel. Moreover, he seems to genuienly understand the mathematics (Godel’s theorem is a result in a meta-system describing provability in some formalized system) so what’s going on here is surely not mathematical confusion. It’s the philosophy that’s totally fucked (I’m pretty confident now that it’s not a hoax).

However, to be fair to this blogger, he isn’t some isolated crank, but rather a participant in a ‘respectable’ philosophical tradition. Indeed, one of the famous philosophers he references, Alain Badiou is even more incoherent. While he would almost certainly quibble with the description given on wikipedia if the following is even remotely accurate he might as well be spouting gibberish.

Badiou’s use of set theory in this manner is not just illustrative or heuristic. Badiou uses the axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory to identify the relationship of being to history, Nature, the State, and God. Most significantly this use means that (as with set theory) there is a strict prohibition on self-belonging; a set cannot contain or belong to itself. Russell’s paradox famously ruled that possibility out of formal logic. (This paradox can be thought through in terms of a ‘list of lists that do not contain themselves’: if such a list does not write itself on the list the property is incomplete, as there will be one missing; if it does, it is no longer a list that does not contain itself.) So too does the axiom of foundation — or to give an alternative name the axiom of regularity — enact such a prohibition (cf. p. 190 in Being and Event). (This axiom states that all sets contain an element for which only the void [empty] set names what is common to both the set and its element.) Badiou’s philosophy draws two major implications from this prohibition. Firstly, it secures the inexistence of the ‘one’: there cannot be a grand overarching set, and thus it is fallacious to conceive of a grand cosmos, a whole Nature, or a Being of God. Badiou is therefore — against Cantor, from whom he draws heavily — staunchly atheist. However, secondly, this prohibition prompts him to introduce the event. Because, according to Badiou, the axiom of foundation ‘founds’ all sets in the void, it ties all being to the historico-social situation of the multiplicities of de-centred sets — thereby effacing the positivity of subjective action, or an entirely ‘new’ occurrence. And whilst this is acceptable ontologically, it is unacceptable, Badiou holds, philosophically. Set theory mathematics has consequently ‘pragmatically abandoned’ an area which philosophy cannot. And so, Badiou argues, there is therefore only one possibility remaining: that ontology can say nothing about the event.

For any readers familiar with set theory the part about drawing ethical maxim’s from Cohen’s method of forcing might be even more amusing. Sure, he is hardly the first continental philosopher I’ve read who should be properly regarded as a crackpot but when it’s about my subject (mathematical logic) it just makes the point all the more clearly.

Now reading this sort of BS is kinda amusing but I do have a broader point. Despite being essentially indistingushable from the sort of crank theories that pop up from physics crackpots all the time the people publishing this stuff are still seen as respectable, even acclaimed, philosophers. If philosophy wants to be a serious intellectual discipline it needs to take the same hard line that they physicists do about crackpots, even if it means tossing out entire university departments.

The physicists wouldn’t simply sit quietly and say nothing about a crank being allowed to teach physics courses, nor attend conferences or journals that treated them as respectable researchers. Moreover, were they to do so the progress of the discipline, and certainly the public understanding of physics, would be greatly harmed. My point is ultimately that it’s not enough for analytic philosophers (particularly tenured ones) to sit back and privately dismiss all this crap as rubbish. They have a positive duty to denounce these people as cranks and eliminate them from the field. Failing that they have a duty, even if it imperils funding, to demand departments be split and otherwise clearly distingush what they do from what the continental crankpots do.

To be clear not everyone one might classify as a ‘continental philosopher’ should be deemed a crank. Despite being notoriously confusing Kant surely is not. Mere error or poor writing is not enough to be a crank. However, neither the blurriness of the line or our inclinations to charity are an excuse for tolerating obviously incoherent gibberish as valid philosophy. Since it’s notoriously difficult to conclusively establish that some convoluted continental style ‘argument’ lacks any reasonable interpretation the burden should be on the person presenting the apparent gibberish to convince others they are merely really poor writers with a meaningful point.