On The Margins

Friday December 09, 2005

[ Philosophy ] Communities of Practice, Learning, Meaning, and Identity

I've begun reading Etienne Wenger's Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity.

I ran into this book while reading John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's Social Life of Information, about which I've written here earlier. I've always been interested in how social groupings and organizations learn, evolve, prosper and survive, how we learn and work, and how we come to be who we are as individuals.

Wenger's book would be a good start for whoever wants to explore these topics. Wenger is also deeply interested in building the conceptual framework that will help with the design of organizations, artifacts and processes.

Wenger's ambitious enterprise suits the practitioner as much as it stimulates the theoretician. As the book plate says, the material "is presented with all the breadth, depth, and rigor necessary to address such a complex and yet profoundly human topic."

2005-12-09 00:13:05.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
community education information learning philosophy practice social

Monday October 10, 2005

[ Philosophy ] Existential Phenomenology Of The Internet

Søren Kierkegaard

The Internet has introduced, among other things, new modes of transactions, mostly involving what one can buy from a relatively competitive market. The Internet has reduced some transaction costs while increasing others. The pundits have often exaggerated the effectiveness of the Internet in organizing and searching for "information," in distant "learning," and in citizen participation and "democratization" even if we include more recent phenomena such as blogs and podcasts. Much more has been said about the role, importance, expansion and revolutionary effects of the Internet than about how it can stultify action and movement.

Hubert Dreyfus is the one philosopher who has paid attention to these other concerns regarding the Internet. Earlier, on this weblog, I have written short entries on Dreyfus' book On The Internet. Now, I'd like to point to an essay of his whose content can also be found near the end of this book: "Kierkegaard on the Internet: Anonymity vrs. Commitment in the Present Age".

In this essay, Dreyfus explains why "Kierkegaard would have hated the Internet."

This is a must-read essay for anyone who wants to know what is going on with the Internet. I will quote a few paragraphs to titillate your interest:

Kierkegaard would surely have seen in the Internet, with its web sites full of anonymous information from all over the world and its interest groups which anyone in the world can join and where one can discuss any topic endlessly without consequences, the hi-tech synthesis of the worst features of the newspaper and the coffee house. On their web page anyone can put any alleged information into circulation. Kierkegaard could have been speaking of the Internet when he said of the Press, "It is frightful that someone who is no one ... can set any error into circulation with no thought of responsibility and with the aid of this dreadful disproportioned means of communication" (Journals and Papers, Vol. 2, p 481.) And in interest groups anyone can have an opinion on anything. In both cases, all are only too eager to respond to the equally deracinated opinions of other anonymous amateurs who post their views from nowhere. Such commentators do not take a stand on the issues they speak about. Indeed, the very ubiquity of the Net generally makes any such local stand seem irrelevant.

What is striking about such interest groups is that no experience or skill is required to enter the conversation. Indeed, a serious danger of the Public Sphere, as illustrated on the Internet, is that it undermines expertise. Learning a skill requires interpreting the situation as being of a sort that requires a certain action, taking that action, and learning from the results. As Kierkegaard understood, there is no way to gain wisdom but by making risky commitments and thereby experiencing both failure and success. Studies of skill acquisition have shown that, unless the outcome matters and unless the person developing the skill is willing to accept the pain that comes from failure and the elation that comes with success, the learner will be stuck at the level of competence and never achieve mastery. Since expertise can only be acquired through involved engagement with actual situations, what is lost in disengaged discussion is precisely the conditions for acquiring practical wisdom. Thus the heroes of the Public Sphere who appear on serious radio and TV programs, such as the United States's MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, have a view on every issue, and can justify their view by appeal [to] abstract principles, but they do not have to act on the principles they defend and therefore lack the passionate perspective that alone can lead to risk of serious error and also to the gradual acquisition of wisdom.

Kierkegaard even saw that the ultimate activity the Internet would encourage would be speculation on how big it is, how much bigger it will get, and what, if anything, all this means for our culture. This sort of discussion is, of course, in danger of becoming part of the very cloud of anonymous speculation Kierkegaard abhorred. Ever sensitive to his own position as a speaker, Kierkegaard concluded his analysis of the dangers of the present age and his dark predictions of what was ahead for Europe with the ironic remark that: "In our times, when so little is done, an extraordinary number of prophecies, apocalypses, glances at and studies of the future appear, and there is nothing to do but to join in and be one with the rest" (85).

From Hubert Dreyfus, "Kierkegaard on the Internet: Anonymity vrs. Commitment in the Present Age"

2005-10-10 23:23:34.0 -- Comments [7] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
age anonymity berkeley commitment existential internet philosophy present transactions

Wednesday October 05, 2005

[ Philosophy ] Chomsky and Dreyfus

My understanding of Noam Chomsky's work, or at least the essence of it, relates to his pursuit of one central question: Given the "poverty" of linguistic experience a child has, how is it possible for it to learn so much about the language he or she masters? To make his point, Chomsky gives examples of sentences which we have not heard before with grammatical subtlties that we have never been taught before—and yet, we can understand these sentences, and our sense of these sentences agree with the corresponding subtle grammatical points.

Chomsky concludes that we must have some innate faculties, which are tuned by the little experience we have for a particular purpose—in this case the mastery of a particular human language. He then explores whether the same mechanisms are involved in other sorts of mental faculties.

Of course, Chomsky is also interested in the syntactic structure of spoken language, but I don't think he believes that the child actually learns the rules. In fact, what drives his research is the fact that these rules cannot often be articulated by speakers, all of whom agree about the logical sense of a particular sentence. In a sense, and in accord with Hubert Dreyfus' wishes in his American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Presidential Address, Chomsky fits among the analytical philosophers who try to connect the foundation of perception with the higher, abstract modes of conception.

The question remains whether Chomsky believes the perceiving individual needs to grasp (i.e. think in the terms of) the higher level concepts in order to be able to cope with the world of language. It is this question, along with Chomsky's emphasis on logic and his early inspiration from Quine, that might set him widely apart from Dreyfus.

I would love to see Chomsky and Dreyfus to lead a seminar together, or at least their works to be presented side-by-side. The debates, the varying perspectives and concerns should lead to a great dialogue.

Note: A comment by Robin Wilton on my last post has led me to write this bit about the variation between Chomsky's and Dreyfus' takes on what it means to learn. I think there's a lot more to say about how the work and practice of these two American philosophers differ.

2005-10-05 06:11:32.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
philosophy scholars

Tuesday October 04, 2005

[ Philosophy ] Perception vs. Conception

In his 2005 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, Hubert Dreyfus draws on a large number of sources to clarify the distinction between perception and conception.

We're in the world primarily as perceiving bodies.

Dreyfus suggests further research needs to be conducted both by the analytical philosophers and the phenomenologists in order to better disclose how conceptual thinking arises from coping action and perceptual experience.

Given the availability of rich descriptions of perceptual affordances and of everyday know-how, however, couldn’t analytic philosophers profit from pursuing the question of how these nonconceptual capacities are converted into conceptual ones — how minds grow out of being-in-the-world — rather than denying the existence of the nonconceptual?

To demonstrate the subtlties of this question, he reviews how experts become experts, and what it means to act expertly. (See section IV of his APA presidential address.)

While infants acquire skills by imitation and trial and error, in our formal instruction we start with rules. The rules, however, seem to give way to more flexible responses as we become skilled. We should therefore be suspicious of the cognitivist assumption that, as we become experts, our rules become unconscious. Indeed, our experience suggests that rules are like training wheels. We may need such aids when learning to ride a bicycle, but we must eventually set them aside if we are to become skilled cyclists. To assume that the rules we once consciously followed become unconscious is like assuming that, when we finally learn to ride a bike, the training wheels that were required for us to be able to ride in the first place must have become invisible. The actual phenomenon suggests that to become experts we must switch from detached rule-following to a more involved and situation-specific way of coping.

Indeed, if learners feel that they can act only if they have reasons to guide them, this attitude will stunt their skill acquisition.

2005-10-04 22:40:34.0 -- Comments [3] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
conception freedom perception philosophy

Monday September 26, 2005

[ Philosophy ] The Freedom We Have

People hardly ever make use of the freedom which they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as compensation. Søren Kierkegaard

2005-09-26 23:14:22.0 -- Comments [0] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
existential freedom individual philosophy

Monday August 29, 2005

[ Philosophy ] May 18, 1048

A Sun friend just sent out a note on the birthday of Omar Khayyám. That date was the answer to one of the puzzles posed during a Berkeley showing of a recently released movie, The Keeper. (My Sun friend says the movie falls short of developing Khayyám's character to any significant extent, either through its script or through its motion. For a movie that relies on both to develop characters, including one character who barely talks, see Majid Majidi's Baran. So, it is not a matter of budget or ciematic tricks. It is a matter of artistic genius. For the music to Baran see here. Another recent, American movie that does the same, see Me and You and Everyone We Know.) The year 1048 is the year the city of Oslo, the capital of present-day Norway, was founded, and the year when Benedict IX was driven out of Rome for the last time. My friend's e-mail announcement of Khayyám's birthday amazed me, as it always has when I'm reminded of it. Although Khayyám, the great poet, philosopher and mathematician was born on May 18, 1048, and although I might just be alive when his millennium returns, the greatest part of it all is that we, "modern" Persian speakers, can still read him in the original and revel in its multiple levels of meaning—conveyed through choice of words, phrases, rythms and rhymes. Through his poetry, Khayyám keeps twisting us into some kind of ancient mental yoga in order to bring us to a pure comprehension of our simple existence in this world. Majid Majidi's Baran

I'll be writing a bit more here about Khayyám as time permits today and tomorrow. .

Poetry, Khayyám.

2005-08-29 15:32:16.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Thursday August 11, 2005

[ Philosophy ] Vacaville, Love and Bereavement

I used to live near Vacaville, California, when I was 21. It was a lovely, quiet and agricultural type of place where people are upright. How can anyone claim to grieve like this mother, Cindy Sheehan from Vacaville who has lost her son? (Sheehan, has written several opinion pieces—for example [1]. See also this piece in The Progressive, which I just found. Washington Post, too, has an update on Cindy Sheehan's campaign to be heard f2f.) How can anyone believe they grieve like a mother does for the loss of her child, and yet go on as ever before? How can anyone ask for sacrifices when they make no comparable sacrifices of their own? On the hearts of kings and those of the people, read Chapter VII here, from Mencius—and ponder how the ancients were wiser and more honest than our pundits pretend to be today.

Kings, People, Mencius.

2005-08-11 19:56:03.0 -- Comments [0] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Philosophy ] On Bullshit

Is it daring to title a philosophical book as such? I don't know.

Speaking of PUP turning 100—PUP is also the publisher of On Bullshit by the noted American philosopher, Harry Frankfurt, emeritus professor at Princeton University.

In addition, PUP is hosting an interview with Frankfurt that may be of interest to you. I cannot listen to it from where I'm sitting now but plan to check it out later tonight.

Kevin Lim has a playful review of On Bullshit.

Philosophy, Princeton.

2005-08-11 12:23:03.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Friday June 24, 2005

[ Philosophy ] Of Machines and Men

Executive Summary:

If you would like to read the punchline of this note, you may advance to its last paragraph.

Richard Veryard has left me a stimulating comment that shows he has scratched beyond the simple surface of my little note on playing chess against the computers. I had quoted Rustam Kasimdzhanov: Rustam Kasimdzhanov, the reigning champion of the World Chess Federation, shares why he thinks it is important to compete against computers: "Sports are not about reaching a result. Sport is about developing your inner qualities." And Richard wrote, equally simply: What's the difference between (1) competing against the computer and (2) competing against the clock?

This should be a very deep question, at least for the computing types.

A Turing Machine, which is ultimately the best model of a computing machinary we have, realizes the connection between time and space—otherwise, how could it be capable of trading one off the other? However, we are not, ourselves, machinary per se. Our time-space trade-off fulfils a different purpose when compared to the computer. In other words, just because the Turing Machine can trade-off space and time, it doesn't mean we can. In fact, we are incapable of it, in the sense that we grow to find the distinction between time and space to be fundamental, although time can be interpreted, philosophically speaking, as simply a distance in space—see for example works of John McMurray where he has made this point quite clear in his analysis of how children grow a relationship, in time, with the outside world, with the world of parental love and care, through the occasional spacial absence of that very love and care. (For a good one-paragraph account of McMurray's philosophy, search for his name on this web page for Bannan Center of Jesuit Education.)

So, when we (not the machine) play against the computer, we are not simply competing against the clock. The computer occupies a space that is quite different from the space that a human opponent would occupy for us. Therefore, the game against the computer becomes a sport, just as Kasimdzhanov notes (see above), and by definition, all sports include an aspect that tests the limits of our "performance."

Furthermore, the space that a human opponent would occupy not only differs physically, in the contours that completely distinguish it from the space occupied by a computer opponent, but also extends itself to relations to other human spaces. Human spaces relate to other human spaces in ways that are qutie different from the way the space of a machine relates to the space of the room where it is sitting, the wires that connect it to the wall and the cieling fans that cool the room.

Therefore, playing against the computer cannot be like playing against the clock, unless the one who plays the computer is itself a computer.

Time, Space, Love, Turing, Machine, Chess.

2005-06-24 16:08:26.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Saturday June 11, 2005

[ Philosophy ] The Importance of Limits

All concepts find their meaning through what separates them from other concepts. Limits of a thing define what that something is or can stand for. For example, whether we look at "technology" or "liberty" as concepts, we need to explore their limits so that we may better comprehend their specific nature. Otherwise, important concepts—with no limits as to what they are or can stand for—can become part of an ideological language that can use them to stand for almost anything, dispossessing them of any usefulness they may have served as concepts.

Concepts, Liberty, Technology.

2005-06-11 01:17:44.0 -- Comments [0] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Friday May 13, 2005

[ Philosophy ] Hilbert and Decartes

I had lunch today with a Sun colleague, Larry Freeman, who drew an interesting parallel between Hilbert and Descartes.

Neither Descartes, despite his influence on philosophy, was the best of philosophers, nor Hilbert, similarly influential in mathematics, was the greatest among mathematician. They were both creative artists in their practice but neither was outstanding in the practice of their art. (For example, I would give Brouwer and von Neumann higher marks as mathematicians, even if the latter was Hilbert's student at one point in his varying career. However, Hilbert's early work on axiomatization, say The Foundations of Geometry {Grundlagen der Geometrie}, stands apart in its creative simplicity and importance. By the way, Constance Reid's Hilbert is one of the best autobiographies I've ever read of a scientist or a mathematician.)

What made both special was the questions they asked and the puzzles they brought to philosophy and mathematics.

Depending on what you think about "puzzles" whether true or imaginary, you may value their work differently.

Mathematics, Philosophy., Hilbert, Descartes.

2005-05-13 17:11:06.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Tuesday April 26, 2005

[ Philosophy ] Why Do Successful Organizations Fail

Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad's Competing For The Future has an interesting model for why great companies fail. Their model can probably also apply to other social institutions and organizations such as governments, ministries, sport teams, non-profits, etc.

According to Hamel and Prahalad, organizations fail because of two main reasons, (1) inability to escape the past, and (2) inability to invent the future. For each of these, two threads of degradation from success to failure can be identified.

Inability to escape the past: (1.1) Unparalleled track record of success gradually reduces the gap between expectations and performance, leading to contentment with current performance. (1.2) Accumulation of abundant resources leads to the view that resources can always win out, which gradually creates a tendency to replace resources for creativity. I am amazed how often this is the case with governments, imperial invasions, entertainment companies and monopolies.

Inability to invent the future: (2.1) Super optimized business systems lead to deeply ingrained recipes for doing things, which leads to vulnerability to new rules. This is most often the case with bureaucracies and large organizations. (2.2) When success confirms strategy, momentum is mistaken for leadership, leading to a failure to "reinvent" or "renew" leadership into the future. This the case when a project starts very well. This often leads participants and leadership to become over-confident and complacent. They reduce the necessary effort for renewing participation and leadership. This is the reason why many scholars have prefered to focus on economizing over strategizing.

Now, this is all talk.

What it really says, in summary, is that we have to be modest and vigilant. On the one hand, we should not take too much of today's success, resources, efficiency and strategic prowess as reasons that these will continue into the future. On the other hand, without some of these assumptions tempered by vigilance, it is hard to feel confident about the future. So, there needs to be a balance here.

From yet another perspective, it all has to do with our limiting assumptions and our failures to see the whole picture. We need to take a more meditative attitude in order to comprehend the whole picture, and perhaps we literally have to mediate in order to stand outside the world of our petty assumptions.

Furthermore, it is not even clear to me to what extent an organization can control the course of events other than for the purposes of securing enough resources to motivate continued participation. (This view or organizational survival comes from Chester Barndard.)

Ultimately, it is the meditative mode of thinking and being (which is wholistic for the purposes of understanding) rather than the calculative one (which always reduces the whole to broken stereotypes for the sake of efficiencies in purpose) that will lead us to a more secure state.

It is surprising but I have seen some companies able to create an environment with meditative undertones, and they seem to have succeeded well into the future, that is to say, today.

Organizations, Failure, Success, Past, Future, Meditation, Philosophy.

2005-04-26 08:52:28.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Sunday March 13, 2005

[ Philosophy ] Heidegger's Hammer, the Handy and the Revolution to Come

In Being and Time (section 15, "The Being of Entities Encountered in the Environment," under the Analysis of Environmentality and Worldhood in General), Martin Heidegger says something quite simple about that simplest of tools, the hammer:

[The] less we stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment … If we look at Things just 'theoretically', we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand. But when we deal with them by using them and manipulating them, this activity is not a blind one; it has its own kind of sight, by which our manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its specific Thing character …

The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all, nor is it itself the sort of thing that cricumspection takes proximally as a circumspective theme. The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in order to be ready-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work—that which is to be produced at the time; and this is accordingly ready-to-hand too. The work bears with it that referential totality within which the equipment is encountered.

Now, there are quite a few technical words here. To understand them, fully, we need to read one of the introductory books on Heidegger, such as the ones by Hubert Dreyfus or Richard Polt. Ideally, we need to know enough of the language of Being and Time to comprehend it. (So, sitting in lectures by Polt and Dreyfus may be a start.)

Nevertheless, I think the passage I've selected here is relatively self-contained for the purposes I have. Not just philosophers or carpenters but any programmer or office worker today should be able to relate to it.

Just think of your favorite office or programming environment (my favorite examples of programming tools would be the simple ones like emacs or vi) and think about how you interact with it. When you can use it competently, it recedes in its theoretical aspects (what it is made of, how it looks, how it works, etc.) and becomes part of the referential totality of the work environment, enmeshed in the purporse and meaning that helps us make sense of it and of our involvement with it.

Now, the same referential totality that applies so naturally to a hammer (for a carpenter) or vi (for a skilled programmer) or a glove (for someone who wants to use it to keep warm, not Dr. P. case of the neurologist Oliver Sacks) begins to also apply to the mobile phone, or as people like to call it in Germany, the handy.

The interesting thing is that the handy has not even begun to become the "equipment" it can become in the referential totality of our mobile lives. The problem is that most infrastructure for it to become even more effective is lacking. It is "equipment" mostly for allowing us to communicate with others in voice. Its utility in our other interactions with the world that surrounds us has not even been fully disclosed or released into our environment. So, we are yet to see the real revolution that it can bring in helping us better scaffold our surrounding, just like hammers have helped us do for thousands of years.

Heidegger, Philosophy, Handy, Technology, Mobile, Environment.

2005-03-13 22:49:26.0 -- Comments [3] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Friday February 25, 2005

[ Philosophy ] Shared Knowledge

When multidisciplinary minds like John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid get together, as they have in their Harvard Business School Press book The Social Life of Information, they will invariably have insightful things to say. I will be looking and referring to this book occasionally in some upcoming weblogs, as I've done in a few previous ones. We are used to thinking of knowledge as bits of "facts". This is in the habit of Hilbertian and von Neumanian mathematical logic but the modern mathematical logician and set theorist knows a bit better, given model theory and theory of recursive functions and degrees. The rigid "axiomatic thinking" was actually a project broadly spoused by Hilbert but its extension to everyday life fails repeatedly. (Daniel C. Dennett's Martians visiting earth come to mind. His Martians are the axiomatic thinkers.) Even Hilbert's life shows that. He did much of his best work on a big blackboard at home in full view of his colleagues and closest students.

Here, regarding what is special about shared knowledge, I'd like to quote from Seely and Duguid's The Social Life of Information:

Shared knowledge differs significantly from a collective pool of discrete parts. In this pool of knowledge, where one person's knowledge ends and another's begins is not always clear . . . [No one has a] decisive "piece" of knowledge . . . Thus we tend to think of knowledge less like an assembly of discrete parts and more like a watercolor painting. As each new color is added, it blends with the others to produce the final effect, in which the contributing parts become indivisible.

The Social Life of Information (p. 106)

Shared Knowledge, Philosophy, Information, Collaboration, Art, Painting, Mathematics

2005-02-25 10:31:18.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Wednesday February 23, 2005

[ Philosophy ] Beim Stierkampf

Beim Stierkampf ist der Stier der Held einer Tragödie. Zuerst durch Schmerzen tollgemacht, stirbt er einen langen und furchtbaren Tod. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1946; Vermischte Bemerkungen, 50) So, in the game of life who's the bull and who's the bull-fighter?

2005-02-23 00:36:30.0 -- Comments [0] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Sunday January 16, 2005

[ Philosophy ] Why "Liberty" is Meaningless

The ultimate axiom of community states that to be in community, one will have to give some things up.

In other words, since none can survive (in any real sense of surviving) outside of community, there are no viable states of absolute freedom.

As freedom and liberty are often equated with absolute freedom, one may, further, say that our need to be part of community means "freedom," by itself and as an abstract concept, has no meaningful reality unless attached to specific situations and condition.

In essence, one has to be more precise when using such words as "liberty" or "freedom," perhaps limiting their use as modifiers in phrases such as "freedom to move," or "liberty to write," etc. Within a context, i.e. within a more constraint use, the words do have a more real sense. So, "freedom" or "liberty" as abstract concepts offer nothing to aspire for. However, when attached and confined to a particular sense, they may further be defined through the limits imposed through the definition, e.g. "freedom to move where" and "liberty to write what"?

By themselves, "freedom" and "liberty" are quite meaningless words, if not completely useless, except for purposes of agitation.

When one wants to be part of something, one will always have to give some things up.

In other words, in company, there is no absolute satisfaction of all desires.

Part of the price of cooperation is to accept some aspects of the organization or group purpose and to give up some aspects of one's own personal purpose. What one actually gives up may and should depend on what one chooses to do or live with.

All this is so obvious that stating it borders on tautology if not some sort of obsession with words.

However, there are cyber-men who may believe that through cybernetics, through the Internet, through science or advances in technology, they can become more free, liberated from the ultimate "shackles" of community, that they can live independent of all others, isolated and yet willfully connected as they please.

What an unreal dream of a world that is!

In community, however, and through the limits and constraints it imposes, we achieve freedom and are liberated, that's if we are fortunate enough to find a community to be by our side as we move through the maze of our lives.

So says Jalaleddin Rumi in these lines below, translated by Kabir and Camille Helminski (appearing in The Rumi Collection):

The one who cheerfully goes alone on a journey--
if he travels with companions
his progress is increased a hundred fold.
. . . 
Every prophet on this straight path
produced the testimony of miracles and sought fellow travelers.

2005-01-16 00:16:29.0 -- Comments [3] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Thursday January 06, 2005

[ Philosophy ] Susan Sontag 1933 - 2004

Susan Sontag died some 10 days ago and it has taken me this long to write about her. I never read enough of her work to digest its full significance although I have always wanted to read more, including the controversial pieces. A great thinker deserves close contemplation even when we cannot understand or agree with everything he or she might have to say. Life is a passing, fragile and a sacred thing, and she certainly knew that full well as she directed plays in the midst of war-torn Sarajevo.

How many authors walked in her footsteps?

She looked into the small, say photography, to leave something grand behind.

She rescued words, as has, for example, the journalist Richard Cohen in a recent Washington Post column, so that we may better know and be rescued along with those words.

A culture that loses touch with its words has lost touch with its roots, its bearing and its compass. It has lost touch with what makes it unique and a culture. This is a loss that is perhaps too permanent to leave behind, and it is the beginning of a long process of decay.

While she looked and she found, the haters of the word rushed in celebration to desecrate her memory even before her body had grown cold.

Tributes posted at the BBC.
Tribute in The New York Review of Books.
Wikipedia entry on Sontag. (This one has a lot of good links to tributes and other pieces.)

2005-01-06 22:36:50.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Thursday December 16, 2004

[ Philosophy ] Incoherence from Baghdad to Cordoba

In a couple of previous notes and comments, I have stated that modern science, despite its glory, is incapable of answering the following, very basic question: Why is there anything at all when there can be absolutely nothing?

Goeff Arnold, in one of his comments on my note, takes issue with (a revised and different version) of my question in this way:

As for "Why is there anything rather than nothing?", I think that the positivists had this right: the question is incoherent.

That is a very interesting way for "positivists" to dismiss a very basic but important question.

Nevertheless, I do not want to harp on that any more right now. I have tasted of the positivist works long enough to know of their methods and limitations, and it would be an easy matter to demolish this particular approach to the basic question I've raised. Rather, I want to turn my attention to something else.

Geoff's use of the word "incoherent" reminds me of a bit of history I cannot help but recite.

Right about the time Europe was in the middle of its dark ages, that's about a thousand years before a Russell or a Popper came into existence, two Muslim scholars, one in Baghdad and one in Cordoba were debating the relevance of analytical philosophy in much the same way as we are today.

The first scholar was Ghazali, and the second, non other than Ibn Rushd. Both of them made great contributions to the scholarly debate of the time. (This is way more than Geoff and I can expect or hope for, I think, but we will continue to try.)

Abu-Hamid Muhammad Al-Ghazali (450-505 A.H., 1058-1111 A.D.), Dean and Law Professor at Baghdad University, wrote a book called the "The Incoherence of the Philosophers." (For an analysis from Sweden, see Manzoor, where a reference is made to how modern scholars of Maimonides' theosophy have traced his ideas to those of Al-Gazzali's.)

Some have noted that Al-Ghazali's main object of analysis and critique was the philosophical work by Abu Ali Sina (Avicenna, 980-1037). I've only briefly looked at Al-Ghazali's book, and don't remember reading anything on Abu Ali in it.

Of course, Abu'l Walid Muhammad Ibn Rush Al-Qurtubi (Averroes, 1126-1198), wrote back, in response to Al-Ghazali, from Cordoba in a thicker book called the Incoherence of the Incoherence. Al-Gazali had just passed away and could not produce a response but the path chosen by Ibn-Arabi, Ibn-Rushd's most brilliant student, should tell us something. (By the way, I remember reading some place that Ayatullah Ruhullah Khomeini wrote his dissertaion on Ibn Arabi.)

All of these philosophers, even as they write about the incoherence of each others' works, do indeed concern themselves with questions of existence albeit from opposing and very distinct perspectives. Unfortunately, most universities in the U.S. have no programs or scholars teaching and doing research in their works. I first ran to many of their works while taking breaks from my courses in mathematical logic and analytical philosophy to meander through U.C. Berkeley libraries.

On the other hand, I hear they still teach courses on all these philosophers in Qom and Najaf, not to mention Cairo and some other Western universities.

2004-12-16 22:15:00.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Philosophy ] More on "Truth"

Goeff Arnold has written a short essay on a discussion I seem to have started with my note on Popper, sharing some of his ideas.

I found myself writing a comment in response to his, and decided, because of its length, that it was more practical to just say it here.

In his comments, Geoff asks: When faced with a claim that "proposition X is true", I want to know in what sense the claim is made. Is X a statement in some formal closed system, so that truth is essentially analytical? Are you claiming correspondence truth to some real world? Etcetera.

These are deep questions, the answers to which will require a far longer dialog, and frankly I may not be able to produce any satisfactory answers at the end.

In mathematics, Alfred Tarski answers Geoff's first question. In formal terms, it's also given in Joseph Shoenfield's book on mathematical logic. However, science is a different matter. Although certain parts of mathematics are used in science (and other parts, perhaps, in art, religion or other activities), there's a distinction between science as an activity and mathematics (and logic) as a dicovery of abstract structures of formal languages and models.

Science builds, in a large part, on induction, ultimately based on experiments and conceptual frameworks. To elucidate that such conceptual frameworks are somewhat arbitrary, I recommended Plato's classic dialog Timaeus, in my comment to Geoff's note.

Science (and much of human reasoning for that matter) moves through associations, a la David Hume. The significance of this, of course, is only related to its logical structure. Hume wanted to say that there's no bottom or foundation for the certainty drawn from such associations and inductions. Just because Sun, the star, has risen every day, does not mean it will rise the next (my physicist friend from Sorbonne always hated this example), even if I've deployed Newtonian and other explanatory frameworks and tools to explain how it does rise. Ultimately, in science, all "what" questions end up getting a "how" explanation. That may satisfy some but doesn't satisfy every one of us. Such reasoning may provide assurances but it does not provide certainty either at the micro or macro level. (See my earlier note on Popper to see what I mean by micro and macro levels of uncertainty.)

Hume's discovery was simple enough but Popper can be read to be simply adding that to call a constellation of activities science, and to do so in some honest way, i.e. in a way that distinguishes it from other human activities such as art or religion, must include with it a commitment to accept that science is structurally and inherently refutable. This is not simply about micro-refutability, i.e. falsifiability along the lines of the first clause of the statement Geoff quotes from Bertrand Russell. (The remaining clauses of Russell's statement fit very well, not only with Russell's positivism but also with his utilitarian attitude towards reasoning and choice, but that's a different discussion.)

To repeat what I said in my earlier note, if science needs to remain refutable, it cannot address some important questions, such as: Why is there anything at all when there can be nothing? In fact, it cannot address any question regarding existence. Now, some may argue that such questions have no value (again a utilitarian argument) but the fact remains that for many human beings (not to mention many great philosophers), existential questions remain the most important questions of life.

2004-12-16 11:49:29.0 -- Comments [6] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Saturday December 11, 2004

[ Philosophy ] Popper's Contribution to Science

Truth has only to do with beliefs, and as such, science has nothing to do with truth[1]. That conclusion, I believe, is a great contribution to science made by the 20th century philosopher Karl Popper. He and his proponents may argue otherwise, but as a scientist, I'm eager to be proven wrong. In my opinion, Popper (1902-1994) frees science by adding the most important ingredient that any human endeavor must have at its core: a good measure of modesty.

Science, according to Popper, is science to the extent it remains doggedly refutable (i.e. inherently possible to refute and prove false) not only through facts and new findings but also through its very structure and from its very basic premises.

By finally adopting dogged refutability as a requirement of science, modern analytical philosophy comes to the admission that David Hume had indeed touched upon a serious limitation of pure human reasoning, whose motion Hume discovered to be powered by inductive associations.

Refutability in science remains quite evident on a micro level. On a micro level, for example, I may postulate that 1 mililiter of water weights 1 gram at 10 degrees Centigrade but later discover the statement to be refutable and move to replace it with another. Refutability on a micro level is, in fact, admitted as science's one true virtue by those who want to make a religion out of science and scientific knowledge. However, these same proponents are unwilling to accept science's other virtue that admits the modesty of its scope and the very general nature of its refutability embedded in its very structure.

So, more significantly, the refutability criterion must also hold operative on a macro, or conceptual level. For example, as scientists, we cannot hold on to the claim that it would be false to accept anything but science as a criteria of truth and correctness. Such a claim, stated as a pure truth, would itself be unrefutable, therefore unscientific, and hence unacceptable, to start with. It would be a very false start indeed.

If a claim is put together such that new facts will be unable to challenge it, then it cannot be a scientific claim.

In conclusion, it is worth noting that science is not equipped to answer universally significant questions such as why there's anything at all when there can be nothing.

Any answer to that question cannot be refutable because there's no way to add a fact that would refute that answer.

Notes:
[1] Back in 1997, when I made this statement on a walk with some friends during a DARPA principal investigators' meeting, they appeared shocked with surprise. So, I have attempted to explain what I meant then in a bit more detail here.

2004-12-11 23:34:53.0 -- Comments [5] ; Permalink ; Trackback.