Linguistic Simplification

An exquisite jigger of philosophy of science from Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz:

"The community has been curious about your labors," he told the scholar. "We'd like to hear about it, if you don't mind discussing it. Of course we've all heard about your theoretical work at your own collegium, but it's too technical for most of us to understand. Would it be possible for you to tell us something about it in--oh, general terms that non-specialists might understand? The community has been grumping at me because I hadn't invited you to lecture; but I thought you might prefer to get the feel of the place first. Of course if you'd rather not--"

The thon's gaze seemed to clamp calipers on the abbot's cranium and measure it six ways. He smiled doubtfully. "You'd like me to explain our work in the simplest possible language?"

"Something like that, if it's possible."

"That's just it." He laughed. "The untrained man reads a paper on natural science and asks, 'Now why couldn't he explain this in simple language.' He can't seem to realize that what he tried to read was the simplest possible language--for that subject matter. In fact, a great deal of natural philosophy is simply a process of linguistic simplification--an effort to invent languages in which half a page of equations can express an idea which could not be stated in less than a thousand pages of so-called 'simple' language. Do I make myself clear?"

[Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz. Bantam (New York: 1988) 182.]
The point could scarcely be put in a better way. Of course, it raises further questions, because it's precisely this that gums up the works when it comes to scientific pedagogy and popularization.

Latour on Critical Barbarity

There has been some discussion of Bruno Latour's article in Critical Theory on the problems with the popularization of critique. We should be careful about over-interpreting the article. Latour explicitly denies that popular relativisms and the like are direct appropriations of critical theory: he insists that they are absurd deformations of critical arguments, "like weapons smuggled through a fuzzy border to the wrong party". The repeated parallel to nuclear weapons -- a result of applied science -- is, I would be willing to bet, quite deliberate; Latour's claim is not that he and other critical theorists were wrong but that he and other critical theorists find themselves in much the same boat as nuclear scientists. One of the longstanding points of critical theory has been that when scientists reassure themselves that things like nuclear weapons are simply the result of 'bad guys' using any weapon at hand, they are kidding themselves; and thus Latour finds critical theory in much the same state: critical theorists can't simply say that the conspiracy theories are just what you get when your critical arguments land in the hands of 'bad guys', even though the conspiracy theories, like nuclear weapons are a sort of absurd deformation of scientific work. Latour is unreprentant about what what he calls his critiques of "an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact"; he simply doesn't want to deny that something else also requires critique, namely, "an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases."

In other words, Latour's argument is simply that critical theory must be examined by critical theory. This becomes much clearer, I think, in the expanded version of the article on Latour's website (actually, the lecture on which it is based). There Latour discusses critical theory as pharmakon -- i.e., drug, one that can heal or poison. As he sarcastically says,

Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind? Why critique, this most ambiguous pharmakon, has become such a potent euphoric drug? You are always right! When naïve believers are clinging forcefully to their objects, claiming that they are made to do things because of their gods, their poetry, their cherished objects, you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naïve believers are thus inflated by some belief in their own importance, in their own projective capacity, you strike them by a second uppercut and humiliate them again, this time by showing that, whatever they think, their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don't see, but that you, yes you, the never sleeping critic, alone can see. Isn't this fabulous? Isn't this really worth going to graduate school to study critique?

Latour calls this suspiciously convenient inconsistency 'critical barbarity'. In his view it's a failure of consistency in the application of critical theory itself: "We explain the objects we don't approve of by treating them as fetishes; we account for behaviors we don't like by disciplines whose makeup we don't examine; and we concentrate our passionate interest on only those things that are for us worthwhile matters of concern." On one issue the critical barbarian uses antifetishism; on another, positivism; on another, realism; without the slightest concern that the three positions are mutually inconsistent. However, Latour goes on to insist that people in science studies are at least somewhat immunized:

But of course such a cavalier attitude with such contradictory repertoires is not possible for those of us, in science studies, who have to deal with states of affairs which fit neither in the list of plausible fetishes—because everyone, including us, does believe very strongly in them—nor in the list of undisputable facts, because we are witnessing their birth, their slow construction, their fascinating emergence as matters of concern. The metaphor of the Copernican revolution, so tied to the destiny of critique, has always been for us, science students, simply moot. This is why, with more than a good dose of field chauvinism, I consider this tiny field so important: it is the little rock in the shoe that might render the routine patrol of the critical barbarians more and more painful.

The danger of the critical participant in science studies, Latour argues, is believing that he has provided an adequate social explanation of the sciences, because then he has begun to use the results of one field (e.g., sociology) uncritically. And so he ends with a challenge to his fellow critical theorists:

Is it really asking too much from our collective intellectual life to devise, at least once a century, some new critical tools? Would we not be thoroughly humiliated to see that military personnel are more alert, more vigilant, more innovative than us, the pride of academia, the crème de la crème, who go on ceaselessly transforming the whole rest of the world into naïve believers, into fetishists, into hapless victims of domination, while at the same time turning them into the mere superficial consequences of powerful hidden causalities coming from infrastructures whose makeup is never interrogated? All the while being intimately certain that the things really close to our hearts would in no way fit any of those roles. Are you not all tired of those "explanations"? I am, I have always been, when I know, for instance, that the God to whom I pray, the works of art I cherish, the colon cancer I have been fighting, the piece of law I am studying, the desire I feel, indeed, the very book I am writing could in no way be accounted for by fetish or fact, nor by any combination of those two absurd positions?

...The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya between antifetishism and positivism, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution. I am aware that to get at the heart of this argument one would have to renew also what it means to be a constructivist, but I have said enough to indicate the direction of critique, not away but toward the gathering, the Thing. Not westward, but, so to speak, eastward.

I think Mooney's probably right that this article marks a change in the Science Wars; I very much doubt, however, that it marks the change Mooney suggests. Latour doesn't want to let go of the old critiques; he is not saying he was wrong. (Indeed, he explicitly denies that he was.) He is saying that the old critiques need to be reformulated in a more sophisticated form. He's not conceding defeat, or even reluctantly reaching across the table for an alliance; he's gearing up for a new set of battles, for a more thorough critique.

(HT: Reality Conditions)

Links for Noting

* The most recent version of the early women writers meme list is up at Bardiac.

* Cliopatria is holding a symposium on transnational histories of America.

* I'm late on these, but History Carnival #29 is up at "(a)musings of a graduate student", and Carnivalesque #14, fittingly called A Cabinet of Curiosities is up at "Earmarks in Early Modern Culture".

* The Case for Philosophy of Chemistry (PDF) by Eric Scerri and Lee McIntyre. A lovely discussion of my favorite sub-discipline of philosophy of science. (HT: prosthesis)

* Jack Perry is musing on the immigration dispute here and here at "Cantànima".

I have returned home, which means that posting will probably be up in the near future. However, before that I have some cleaning up to do, notably in the blogroll, where some outdated and broken links need fixing.

UPDATE: Nathanael Robinson helps to correct a massive lacuna in the women writers meme by proposing a French-African women writers list.

Thomas Boston

You scored as Thomas Boston. You are Thomas Boston. You set a high value on evangelistic preaching and the Free Offer of the Gospel. Thomas Boston 80% James Orr 65% Thomas Chalmers 55% James Denney 50% John Knox 35% Which Scottish Theologian are you? created with QuizFarm.com

(HT: Rebecca, who is James Orr)

You can read about Thomas Boston's life at CCEL; and you can read one of Boston's most popular works, The Crook in the Lot, online. It's a lovely little discussion of what to do when the path of life seems to be going a bit crooked.

Tolstoy's Resurrection

Leo Tolstoy wrote Resurrection in order to raise money to help the Dukhobors, a pacifist Russian religious sect. In particular, the money was to help the Dukhobors relocate from Russia, where they were persecuted, to Canada. There was some trouble with collection of royalties. Tolstoy had tended to put all his works in the public domain, because he didn't believe in private property; so people were used to using his works freely. Since Resurrection was for the purpose of raising money, this was a problem; there were many, many pirated editions. However, the project was successful; Tolstoy and others raised enough money to send the Dukhobors to Saskatchewan, where they could live a frontier life without the problems of war. (You can read about the Dukhobors here.)

The actual plot of Resurrection was based on a story Tolstoy had heard from a lawyer friend, about a wealthy man who seduced a serving girl. This had led to the serving girl's dismissal, after which she fell into bad straits; years later, the man happened to serve on a jury that was trying the case of a prostitute accused of stealing money from a client. He recognized the prostitute as the girl he had seduced; his conscience sparked to life and he decided to marry the girl, who was sentenced to four months in prison. They eventually did marry. This story touched Tolstoy deeply. He himself had seduced a serving girl once; this had led to her dismissal, and the girl eventually died. He therefore took the basic story and adapted it to his own ends. As the work stands, it is a complex narrative tracing the moral resurrection of a man, and manages also to be an interesting narrative argument against punishment. All punishment; the argument is that no one has any right to punish anyone else at all.

Naturally, such a conclusion raises the question of how we would manage to have any society at all if no one were ever punished. Tolstoy's answer to this lies in his conception of the Kingdom of God, and, in particular, in his reading of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). Tolstoy reads this sermon as a sort of template for society. As the main character, Nekhlyudov, discovers, the sermon on this reading gives five injunctions that, while difficult for those not used to them, are all attainable by every single person. The five injunctions are as follows:

(1) "This was that one must not only not kill his brother, but not even be angry with him; he must not regard any one as insignificant, 'Raca'; and that if he quarrelled with any one, he must be reconciled before offering a gift to God, that is, before praying." (Matthew 5:21-26)
(2) "This was that man must not only not commit adultery, but must also avoid the enjoyment of a woman's beauty, and having once come together with a woman, he must not be false to her." (Matthew 5:27-32)
(3) "This was that man must not promise anything with oaths." (Matthew 5:33-37)
(4) "This was that man must not only not demand an eye for an eye, but must also turn the other cheek when smitten on one; that he must forgive offences and in humility bear them, and never refuse people that which they ask of him." (Matthew 5:38-42)
(5) "This was that man must not only not hate his enemies and not fight with them, but he must love, help, and serve them." (Matthew 5:43-48)

As Nekhlyudov muses, "Let the people execute these injunctions, and there will be on earth the kingdom of God, and people will attain the highest good, which is within their reach."

One issue that Tolstoy does not consider, and would need to be considered in this context, is whether we can avoid punishing people without violating requirements of justice. It's one thing to say we should not punish those who commit offenses against ourselves; it's another thing to say that no one ever has the responsibility to punish offenses against others. Nonetheless, Tolstoy manages to make an interesting narrative argument against punishment, which deserves to be more widely known. (And I, for one, found Resurrection more interesting and readable than I've yet been able to find most of Tolstoy's work. The characterization and description are not anywhere near as rich; but I think this actually makes the work more accessible than his works.)

[Quotations are from Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection. Wiener & Reeve, trs. Heritage Press (New York) 1963.]

Five Early Women Writers

There's a great cumulative meme going around: name five early (pre-1800) women writers. The list so far is at Bardiac.

My five:

(1) Damaris Cudworth (Lady Masham) -- Occasional Thoughts

(2) Catharine Trotter Cockburn -- The Defence of Mr. Locke's Essay of Human Understanding

(3) Anne Finche (Viscountess Conway) -- The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy

(4) Hester Thrale (a.k.a., Hester Lynch, Hester Piozzi) -- Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson

(5) Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz -- Reply to Sor Philothea

I'm fairly sure that none of these have been mentioned yet by anybody, although it's difficult to be sure. If some of them have, I'll have to enlist Catherine of Siena as my back-up writer.

(HT: EMN)

He Is Risen Indeed

Crown Him with many crowns,
The Lamb upon His throne;
Hark! how the heav'nly anthem drowns
All music but its own!
Awake, my soul, and sing
Of Him who died for thee;
And hail Him as thy matchless King
Thro' all eternity.

Crown Him the Lord of love!
Behold His hands and side,
Rich wounds, yet visible above,
In beauty glorified:
No angel in the sky
Can fully bear that sight,
But downward bends his wond'ring eye
At mysteries so bright.

Crown Him the Lord of life!
Who triumphed o'er the grave;
Who rose victorious to the strife
For those he came to save:
His glories now we sing,
Who died and rose on high;
Who died eternal life to bring,
And lives that death may die.

Crown Him the Lord of Heav'n!
One with the Father known,
One with the Spirit through Him giv'n
From yonder glorious throne!
To Thee be endless praise,
For Thou for us hast died;
Be Thou, O Lord, thro' endless days
Adored and magnified.

--Matthew Bridges