Distinct Notion and Kindly Mode of Feeling

To examine any thing wisely, two conditions are requisite: first, a distinct notion of the desirable ends, in the complete accomplishment of which would consist the perfection of such a thing, or its ideal excellence; and, secondly, a calm and kindly mode of feeling, without which we shall hardly fail either to overlook, or not to make due allowances for, the circumstances which prevent these ends from being all perfectly realized in the particular thing which we are to examine. For instance, we must have a general notion what a man can be and ought to be, before we can fitly proceed to determine on the merits or dements of any one individual.

S. T. Coleridge, The Friend

Meet Nicholas Steno (repost)

Depending on whether you date according to the Julian or the Gregorian calendar, Niels Stensen was born in Copenhagen January 1 (Julian) or January 11 (Gregorian) 1638. (The Gregorian calendar only began to be used in Denmark itself after 1700.) He was a second child of the goldsmith Sten Pedersen; his mother's name was Anne.

In 1656 he matriculated under the name Nicolaus Stenonis at Copenhagen University, and it is under variants of this name that he is most widely known. While he was attending University, Denmark and Sweden became involved in a war, and King Karl X Gustav of Sweden invaded. Because of winter ice in 1658, Karl Gustav was able to cross over to Zealand, the island on which Copenhagen was located. King Frederik III of Denmark had to cede territory to stop the advance. Karl Gustav invaded again in 1659 in an attempt to take all of Denmark; Copenhagen repelled the main attack, but remained under a landside siege until 1660. We know that Steno spent some time in a student company manning the ramparts, but not much more; most of what has survived of Steno's life is found in a text called the Chaos-manuscript (discovered in 1946 in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence, Italy, by Father Gustav Scherz): 92 folio pages of closely written observations, experiments, reflections, & excerpts.

In 1659 Steno seems to have sailed to Amsterdam, perhaps with an extended stop in Rostock, where he attended lectures by Gerard Blaes (Blasius), the City Physician. He was given leave at the time to do his own dissections, and entered the first major controversy of his life. During dissection of a sheep's head, he discovered the parotid excretory duct, and showed it to Blaes, who was inclined to dismiss it as either an artifact of dissection or a freak of nature. While it had been discovered before, this was not known at the time. Several days later he found the parotid excretory duct in a dog's head, and showed it to Blaes. After defending his thesis (on hot springs), he left Amsterdam for Leiden. At the University of Leiden, he showed his discovery to to several professors, one of whom (Van Horne) began demonstrating it in his anatomical lectures as the ductus Stenonianus (Stensen's duct, which is its name still). At about the same time, however, Blasius was demonstrating in his lectures - as his own discovery - and by 1631 had published the discovery. Niels found himself attacked as a plagiarizer by Blaes and his supporters. The dispute, quite fierce, lasted for some time, and did not entirely die out until it became more generally known just how brilliant an anatomist Steno actually was. Spurred on by the dispute, Steno plunged into his investigation of glands and ducts, and discovered (among many others) the lateral nasal gland, which is still called Steno's gland. Steno published his work, which was very well received. At this point he wanted to give anatomy a rest, but for various reasons soon returned to it. One of those reasons was the posthumous publication in 1662 of Descartes's Treatise on Man. Niels began to study the major subjects of that work: the heart, the muscles, and the brain. In 1662 he discovered sino-atrial and atrio-ventricular dissociation. He proved that the heart was entirely a muscle (which has been affirmed, without explanation, by Harvey, but was not the common view at that time); he also discovered, pace Harvey, that the muscle was arranged spirally rather than circularly.

While in Leiden he made a number of acquaintances, including Swammerdam, de Graat, and Spinoza, but he didn't stay long; in early 1664, he returned to Copenhagen. There he published De musculis et glandulis observationum specimen, one of the most important works in the history of cardiology, which contemporaries said had turned medicine upside down. At this time he was 26.

In autumn of 1664, Steno left Copenhagen for Paris, and at some point in winter of 1665 he delivered a lecture on the brain (published in 1669 as Discours sur l'anatomie du cerveau). In the lecture he criticized Descartes's view of the brain, and, in particular, the appeal to animal spirits. After traveling in the south of France, Stensen arrived in Tuscany. In 1667 he published his major work on muscles, the Elementorum myologiae specimen, one of the distinctive features of which is that in it Steno develops a theory of muscle contractions that did not appeal to animal spirits. His alternative theory was attacked again and again, so that it was no longer held by anyone by the end of the 18th century. Work on the subject since 1980 has shown that he was largely right, and, on this point at least, myology has now caught up to where Steno was at age 29 in 1669.

The Elementorum myologiae specimen is also significant in that appended to it were two works describing shark dissections. One of these works, called the Canis carchariae dissectum caput, noted the resemblance between shark's teeth and certain fossils; Steno agreed with those who had suggested that the latter were somehow versions of the former, and began to develop an argument that this was possible. The second treatise, the Historia dissecti piscis ex canum genere, showed that the 'testes mulierum' of the non-oviparous dogfish were sufficiently ovary-like to be considered ovaries. This is commonplace now, but at the time it was unclear whether the females of many species had ovaries. After the publication of this work, Steno continued his study of female reproductive organs, and is credited with being the first discoverer of the mammalian ovarian follicle.

In November 1667, Steno became Catholic. He was confirmed December 8, and on the same day he received a letter from Frederik III ordering him to return to Copenhagen; he replied with a letter asking if the order still stood given that he was no longer Lutheran. In the meantime, he studied geological formations, publishing a preliminary report on them in 1669: the De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento dissertationis prodromus (also here in Latin). In it he gives the first systematic classification by common origin for solids within solids, and in so doing laid down the principles of reconstruction of geological history. The Prodromus is the founding text of paleontology and dynamic geology; it is, with the work of Erasmus Bartholin on Iceland spar, one of the founding works of crystallography. One of its many important contributions was the recognition that the faces of quartz crystals are related to each other by a constant angle, which is perhaps the fundamental insight of crystallography. Here and there it is referred to as "Steno's rule".

From late 1668 to early 1670, Steno traveled through Europe confirming his geological theories and giving anatomical demonstrations. At one such demonstration (at Innsbruck in June) he dissected the head of a hydrocephalic calf, showing that the deformity was caused by a disease, and thus providing a strong argument against the view that it was caused by maternal fantasies, a view that was still being used in the early nineteenth century. When he returned to Florence in 1670, he was made court geologist by the Grand Duke, Cosimo III. Steno became more involved in theological discussions, and on the publication of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in 1670, he wrote a letter to his old acquaintance urging him to become Catholic.

In April 1675 he was ordained a priest in Florence and became tutor and moral preceptor to the Crown Prince. In 1677 he was appointed by Innocent IX apostolic vicar of the northern missions and was consecrated the titular bishop of Titiopolis. Steno went to Hanover at the invitationof Duke Johann Friedrich of Brunswick-Lüneburg. When Johann Friedrich died, Steno became auxiliary bishop to Prince Bishop Ferdinand von Fürstenberg of Münster. Catholicism there seems to have been rather lax; Steno spent much of his time there advocating pastoral reform against strong opposition, and eventually left in protest. He began to live an ascetic life of poverty at Hamburg, during which he began, but never completed, an essay reviewing confirmed knowledge of the nervous system.

Steno died November 25 (Julian, 5 December Gregorian). He was 48. His last words are said to have been Jesus sis mihi Jesus et misericordiam tuam, Domine, in aeternum cantabo. Cosimo III had Steno's body brough back to Florence, where it can be found in the Church of San Lorenzo. on 23 October 1988, John Paul II beatified him. His feast, officially celebrated in certain areas of Europe, is celebrated (as they often are) on the day of his death, December 5.

It's difficult to find good works on Steno in English. Here are two recommendations.

Troels Kardel. Steno: Life - Science - Philosophy. Acta Historica Scientarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, vol 42. Munksgaard (Copenhagen) 1994.

Hans Kermit. Niels Stensen: The Scientist who was Beatified. Michael Drake, tr. Gracewing (Leominster, Herefordshire) 2003. (This is good as a purely introductory work.)

The Treasury in the Second Jerusalem

Contrary to some very false claims circulating in the media recently, the Ethiopian Orthodox are not opening up the Treasury to reveal to everyone what longstanding Ethiopian legend holds to be the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark is a very important symbol to Ethiopian Christians; every Ethiopian Orthodox church has its own representative of the tabot, and at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, the most important church in Ethiopian Orthodoxy (you can see the layout of its grounds via wikimapia), is what Ethiopians insist is the Ark of the Covenant itself, the legend being that Menelik I, son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, brought it with him for safekeeping, thus making the city of Axum, at least in the eyes of most Ethiopians, the Second Jerusalem. Very few people have ever seen it, and usually the only person who ever sees it is the monk chosen to guard it and pray before it day in and day out for the rest of his life. The Ethiopian Orthodox are not going to change this all of a sudden; the rumors seemed to be based on a misunderstanding of comments of by the Ethiopian Orthodox patriarch.

I find that one of my poem drafts is on the subject.

Treasury

A cathedral hewn of a single stone
holds a golden cross and an ancient throne
where the glory sat above the cherubim
in the holiest holy.

The Ge'ez prayers of an ancient rite
softly rise into velvet night
as Ezana's children pray by the wall
of the holiest holy.

I dreamed of Aksum where angels rest
on every tabot and stars are guest
at revels of hope and undying light
near the holiest holy.

Maryam Ts'iyon walks a path alone
through the cherubim beneath the throne
of the Highest High with His glorious gift,
the holiest of holies.

Ge'ez is the ancient Semitic language that was used by the Kingdom of Axum, or Aksum; it is still a liturgical language for the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Ethiopian Catholic Church, and even Ethiopian Jews. Ezana was the first Christian monarch of Axum; he is said to have built the first Church of Our Lady of Zion, although the current church only dates to the sixteenth or seventeenth century. And Maryam Ts'iyon, of course, is Our Lady of Zion herself.

Notes and Links

* "The Wild Hunt" weblog had a post a couple of weeks back on the problem of racist misappropriations of pagan symbols; as the author points out, it's a shielding mechanism: racists use important symbols as cover for their own views, which leads to bad associations with those symbols, which leads to problems for the people whose symbols they actually were. It's a recurring pattern, something that is done again and again, but people are never called on it as they should be; as the author says, "This is why it’s so important to constantly educate people, remain in the public eye, and speak out against the misuse of pre-Christian symbology." And it's certainly not just modern pagans themselves who need to be on the lookout for such misappropriation of symbols; everyone else needs to take care that they are not taken in by such sophistry.

* One of the difficult things one has to face in thinking about the Holocaust is its many-sidedness; Timothy Snyder has an article at the NYRB that notes some often overlooked sides to it. (ht)

* A poem by St. Philaret of Moscow, which apparently was a poetic response to a poem by Alexander Pushkin, who returned a poetic response.

* I mentioned Iamblichus recently; it turns out his book On the Mysteries is online in Taylor's translation (1821) and in Wilder's translation (1911). It's a pretty good way to get an idea of the important but often overlooked second major phase of Neoplatonism, and the sort of elaborate but carefully reasoned Platonic account of pagan ritual that the pagans were putting up against the Christianity of the Church Fathers in the days of Julian the Apostate (Julian was the student of Maximus of Ephesus, who was in turn a student of Iamblichus, although Julian himself was not a particularly outstanding representive of the pagan intellectuals of the time).

* Joe Carter has a good post at "First Thoughts" on the degeneration of Thomas Kinkade's work. Kinkade has a genuine talent that shows through some of his earlier work (and even, here and there, in his more recent work), but commercialism has taken its toll, as each painting outdoes the previous as a caricature of the Kinkade Style ^(TM). It's Christian Pop Music for the painting world.

* Speaking of Kinkade, one should look at SomethingAwful.com's exploration of Kinkade-with-a-twist: Kinkade's scenes on fire, alien-invaded, and more. Some of them really are awful, but some are very good spoofs.

Paintings of Light (Part 1)
Paintings of Light (Part 2)
Paintings of Light II (one of the best is on the last page)

* Sherry's Hundred Hymn List continues:

#81 The Lord's My Shepherd, I'll Not Want
#80 Here Is Love Vast as the Ocean
#79 Trust and Obey
#78 Victory in Jesus
#77 More Love to Thee

* Watching The Lord of the Rings in Tehran.

* Chad Orzel notes a collision of two press releases.

* Congratulations to Wayne Sumner for winning the 2009 Molson Prize for the Humanities (ht); he definitely deserves it. His work on utilitarianism and rights is quite interesting. I don't recall ever actually taking any of Sumner's graduate courses while at UToronto; I think intended to at one point but, as luck would have it, it conflicted with history of philosophy courses that were a higher priority.

Bacon on the Clever Crow

The distinction between human reason and the sagacity of brutes appears to be a perfectly correct one. Yet there are certain instances of actions performed by animals, by which it seems that brutes too have some power of syllogising; as in the old story of the crow which, in a time of great drought being half dead with thirst, saw some water in the hollow trunk of a tree; and finding it too narrow to get in, proceeded to drop in a number of pebbles, till the water rose high enough for it to drink; which thing afterwards passed into a proverb.

Sir Francis Bacon, New Organon

ADDED LATER: The sufficiently well-read reader will be reminded, of course, of Aesop's fable of the Crow and the Pitcher.

On a Confusion about NOMA

Sean Carroll has recently had a couple of posts up on NOMA, i.e., the idea that science and religion have 'non-overlapping magisteria':

The Principle of Non-Overlapping Food Groups
Science and Religion are Not Compatible

The first of the two is just bad all the way through. Arguing from analogy can be a helpful tool in this context, but only if logical consistency is maintained through the analogy, which it is not here: the absurd conclusion arises not from the non-overlapping principle itself but from the fact that it is assumed in one part of the analogy and violated in another part. It is trivially easy to get absurd consequences even from correct claims if we are allowed to be inconsistent in applying them. The second post, however, which develops more lines of reasoning than just the faulty analogy, is much better, and makes a few decent points, although you have to dig for them a bit.

Both posts, however, seem to involve a confusion about NOMA, leading the main argument of the second post to beg the question against it. This is a pretty common confusion, one I've noted before in a slightly different context, and so it's worth pointing it out. And the confusion lies in thinking that the existence of people who conflate the two somehow is a problem for NOMA:

Seriously, there are billions of people who actually believe things like this; I’m not making it up. Religions have always made claims about the natural world, from how it was created to the importance of supernatural interventions in it.

But NOMA is effectively a diagnosis of a category mistake, a fallacy, and you don't refute a claim that a certain move in reasoning is fallacious by pointing out that someone commits it. The NOMA proponent can quite agree that people often commit the category mistake -- indeed, it is precisely the point of NOMA to do so. NOMA is put forward precisely in order to say that people who treat religious claims as claims about the world, or scientific claims as claims about morals, are engaging in a rational confusion. What would refute NOMA is not people making this alleged confusion, but people who are making this alleged confusion who are clearly doing so in a way that is rationally consistent. NOMA is not the claim that nobody ever treats religious claims as factual or scientific claims as ethical; it's the claim that whenever they do so they are being rationally inconsistent. Likewise, it is entirely possible for lots of people to be rationally inconsistent in their religion, and that is perfectly compatible with the claim that it is possible to be completely rationally consistent in one's religion. The former does nothing to block the other.

One sees this in the failure of a certain part of Carroll's argument. Carroll, urging people not to jump too quickly in calling ethical matters religious, says:

Be honest and clear about what you actually believe, rather than conveying unwanted supernatural overtones.

Unfortunately, Carroll himself doesn't quite follow his advice, because at several points he states things in a misleading way. For instance, he says that religion and science are incompatible because people have religious beliefs that are inconsistent with scientific conclusions. The indefinite quantification here would ordinarily be taken to indicate a universal or near-universal claim: that there is something about science and religion themselves that makes them generally incompatible. But such a claim is not proportionate to the evidence to which he actually appeals, which doesn't show a general incompatibility, but only, at most, that some religious claims conflict with some scientific claims. That is, it only establishes a particular conclusion, and leaves open the question, "What about the other claims?" Are all religious claims in conflict with scientific claims? The NOMA proponent will say, "Look, there are obviously religious claims that don't, because there are ethical claims that are also religious claims, and ethical claims and scientific claims can't conflict because they fall into rationally distinct categories -- to make it look like they conflict you have to engage in a category mistake." Carroll himself knows for certain that 'religion' as usually understood extends to such claims, because he takes the trouble to argue against atheists and nonreligious who take the term to extend so far, and it's precisely in this context that he gives his advice. Thus Carroll himself fails to be clear, glossing over the fact that many common uses of the term 'religion' do, in fact, work as the NOMA theorist claims it should, and therefore glossing over the fact that his argument is just as revisionary for our understanding of the term 'religious' as the NOMA theorist's is. Likewise, the way he states the incompatibility thesis is misleading; in the way his words would ordinarily be taken it isn't proportioned to the evidence with which he supports it, and if taken in such a way that it would be proportionate to the evidence given, it is consistent with NOMA. The cases of people taking religious claims as factual or factual claims as religious are in themselves only inconsistent with NOMA if one begs the question against it.

Thus NOMA can't be refuted by the fact that some people take some claims about fact to be religious. The real problem with NOMA is that the reasons for accepting it are generally rather vague, and in practice boil down to one particular reading of what is usually known as the fact/value distinction. This way of taking the distinction is highly controvertible, and thus NOMA is built on a pretty tenuous support -- and, indeed, I think it is ultimately a rationally unsustainable position for precisely the fact that its way of taking the fact/value distinction is itself rationally unsustainable. But it gets plausibility in part because most of the arguments brought against it are very flawed; as I said, Carroll's confusion here is a very common one. (An additional reason for the support it gets is utilitarian: it is a compromise position that has potential appeal across a wide spectrum of views. Thus many people find it attractive as a peaceable proposition, a claim that if accepted would allow for peace in a contentious area, even independently of any reasoning or evidence in its favor. But, of course, pointing this out is not a refutation of NOMA, but merely a diagnosis of one of the reasons why it is popular among such a wide variety of people.)

A Brief Note on Talking about the Conjunction Fallacy

Suppose we take the standard Tversky-Kahneman example of the conjunction fallacy:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Which is more probable?

1. Linda is a bank teller.
2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

Most people will pick #2. But in standard probability theory, the probability of #2, being more specific than #1, will always be less than or equal to the probability of the more general #1. Making this mistake in contexts requiring standard probability theory is what is known as the conjunction fallacy.

I very deliberately put it in those terms, because I think people are often quite sloppy in discussing it. What is it that makes this a fallacy? Contrary to what some people seem to assume, the notion of probability in standard probability theory is not a particularly natural one; in fact, it is (in comparison with many other notions of probability) very artificial, and took an immense amount of thought and effort to develop even at a fairly advanced stage in the history of mathematics. Its importance derives not from its being our root notion of probability (or likelihood, or any other such terminology), but from its being a derivative notion of probability that is both very mathematically tractable and of fairly extensive utility. But it's clear enough that when we talk about probability in colloquial life we are generally talking not about probability theory but about analogical and presumptive reasoning, which are very different. For instance, we usually mean by 'probable' nothing more than 'fitting the appropriate profile well'. Thus what makes this a fallacy is not using a notion of probability in which #2 is more probable than #1, but in confusing this notion of probability with that of standard probability theory, or (perhaps more commonly) using this looser notion of probability where standard probability theory would be more appropriate. People do, in fact, make this error, so it is a genuine fallacy; and, in fact, we should expect this given that the notion of probability used in standard probability theory is so unnatural. But we should be careful not to characterize it in such a way as to suggest that the less mathematical notions of probability are themselves fallacious, because they are involved in different kinds of reasoning, and each kind of reasoning must be examined on its own merits. One of the points of the 1983 paper by Tversky & Kahneman was the distinction between "extensional" and "intuitive" probability inferences. They argued that their cases showed "people's affinity for nonextensional reasoning". However, even they sometimes slipped into talking about the latter form of reasoning as if it were a degenerate form of reasoning -- "seductive," as they called it, introducing a perhaps ineliminable "incoherence" into our reasoning, where "incoherence" means simply "not satisfying the constraints of probability theory" -- when in fact all the conjunction fallacy shows is that this reasoning is inappropriate in cases where standard probability theory should be used. There is no reason to think that these kinds of reasoning lack a proper domain, nor is there reason to think that in their proper domain the constraints of probability theory are even relevant to them.

(Of course, in practice we also have to keep in mind interference from implicatures. That is, if we are not careful #1 can easily be read, in the context of #2, as meaning "Linda is a bank teller (and not a feminist)." This is a pretty standard way of reading things -- if A is contrasted with (A & B), it is very natural to take the original A as meaning A alone, that is, (A & not-B). And, while reading this way will often, perhaps usually, allow us to interpret what we are reading correctly, this implicature also sometimes confuses us, and we act as if it existed even where it would make no sense for it to exist.)

UPDATE: By happy happenstance it turns out that Robin Hanson pointed to a paper on the conjunction fallacy that argues that incentives and group interaction can both massively reduce the extent to which people commit the fallacy, and that therefore there are certain areas (economics, for instance) where it may not be as serious an issue as some have speculated it might be.