Notables and Linkables

* The newest Philosophers' Carnival is up at "Philosophy Sucks!". The theme is Mind, Meaning, and Morals.

* Anthony Esolen has a fascinating post suggesting the characteristics of flourishing artistic periods; it gets some interesting discussion in the comments.

* Janet Stemwedel discusses whether philosophy of science does scientists any good. I think a lot of the phil. sci. Janet discusses does (or would); I'm less convinced that most of what is published in Philosophy of Science and similar journals, interesting though it be in its own right, does so (or could do so). It's clear enough that philosophy of science has done scientists much good; one thinks of Whewell.

* In response to Medawar's criticism of science papers, Chris Rowan offers a spirited defense, on the basis that they exist less to document scientific process than to persuade other scientists. This is certainly true. I also think it's a mistake to focus on the Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion structure; that's merely presentation, like having an essay with an introductory paragraph that includes a thesis statement, a middle that builds an argument, and a conclusion that recapitulates. That's not the structure of the reasoning. Within a scientific paper, however, we get elements of reasoning that tend to fall in general groups. There was a good discussion of this in Philosophy of Science some time ago. See Fred Suppe, "The Structure of a Scientific Paper" ; Allen Franklin, "Comment on 'The Structure of a Scientific Paper'"; Peter Lipontt, "The Best Explanation of a Scientific Paper"; Valerie Gray Hardcastle, "Scientific Papers Have Various Structures". I don't have the exact bibliographical information for the first three on me, but Hardcastle's is: Philosophy of Science, Vol. 66, No. 3, 415-439. Sep., 1999. (The others are in either the immediately prior issue or the one before that.) I highly recommend it for those interested in scientific reasoning. Suppe argues for an encoding scheme that helps to lay out the rational structure of the scientific paper, and thus the reasoning it expresses; Hardcastle's is an important response, because it shows that there are other types of scientific paper than Suppe considers. At some point, when I dig up the relevant issues of Philosophy of Science from the boxes wherein they currently hide, I'll give a more thorough account of the discussion here.

* Johnny-Dee continues discussing Johnny Cash and philosophy by looking at virtue ethics.

* At "Weitermachen!" Matt Brown discusses the problem with 'thought experiments' or 'intuition pumps' in ethics. Good discussion in the comments and Michele has some good discussion of that discussion here.

* Barry Mazur, When is one thing equal to some other thing? (PDF)

* Well worth reading if you like anything in the way of Blish-like science fiction: A Case of Consilience by Ken MacLeod. (ht)

* Kenny Pearce has a good post on ecclesiology, distinguishing four elements of a complete ecclesiology: somatic, apostolic, evangelistic, and eucharistic.

* Rebecca discusses imputed righteousness and the active and passive obedience of Christ. I tend "reformedish" on this myself, although I'm pretty sure that I diverge from the typical Reformed line on many of the details (e.g., I tend to think imputation involves more than Reformed theologians tend to). I find this a lot with Reformed theology; I tend to agree with the gist but think it incomplete -- and that affects a lot of the details. Still, the gist is often very good, and this is one place where I think it is; the imputation of Christ's active obedience is utterly essential to the full living of Christian life.

* Macht lays out Calvin's distinction between the unknowable essence and the knowable nature of God.

Duhem and the German Mind II

Well, I got hold of a copy of German Science (in John Lyon's translation), so having re-read it, I can put a more precise characterization on my uneasiness at Ariew's characterization of the argument, and one that corrects a few details in my previous post. Essentially, Ariew identified the following characteristics of the argument of La science allemande:

1. The pursuit of truth requires both good sense, whereby we intuit principles, and logical reasoning, whereby we develop consequences.
2. Different minds are differently disposed to each; a mind more disposed to good sense (bon sens) is intuitive (un esprit de finesse), whereas a mind more disposed to logical reasoning is mathematical (un esprit de géométrie).
3. If good sense is allowed to dominate too much, we get the English mind, which is experimental to such an extent that logic suffers.
4. If logical reasoning is allowed to dominate too much, we get the German mind, which is logical to such an extent that good sense suffers.
5. The French mind is un esprit de géométrie corrected by good sense; it is therefore a balance between the two.

(1) and (2) are just Duhem's general Pascalian approach to science. Where I diverge from Ariew is in (3), (4), and (5). My reasons are the following:

(A) Duhem explicitly puts the French mind on the intuitive side. That is, the French mind is un esprit de finesse.
(B) The English mind is also on the intuitive side. It differs from the French mind in that the French mind shares with the German mind an interest in abstract logical structure. (This interest is expressed in different ways. The French, being intuitive, like to classify; the Germans, being geometrical, like to infer.) The English mind, on the other hand, is obsessed with models. This is because (as Ariew says) the English mind is far, far more imaginative than either the French mind or the German mind. This characteristic means that the English mind tends to be willing to accept reasoning that is in some sense broken and inconsistent, if it involves a vivid picture analogous to the thing being studied.
(C) Ariew is right that Duhem regards the English mind and the German mind as diametrical opposites. But his conclusion from this is not that they should both be eschewed, as one would expect if either were degenerate, but that they should get more exposure to each other in order to counter-balance each other. Maxwell discovers his equations by a series of inconsistent models and leaps of thought; Helmholtz starts working out a way to derive them rigorously. The French mind is in some sense between the two; but it is between the two in the sense that going too far in either direction is contrary to the French scientific genius.
(D) The French mind is not perfect scientific genius; even if it is in some sense between the English mind and the German mind, it is not a golden mean between them. Duhem is quite clear that the perfect scientific mind is the one that transcends national quirks, and exhibits the genius of all humanity. The minds of all the great scientists at their best approach this. The scientific mind only becomes national to the extent that scientific communities in those nations get off balance, deviating from the true. The English mind is too imagination-dependent and tolerant of contradictions; the German mind is too willing to sacrifice understanding to complicated reasoning; the French mind is too willing to flit from point to point and take things as obviously demonstrated that are merely plausible. On the other hand, the English mind is better than the others at taking everything into account; the German mind is better than the others at patiently following a line of reason through to the very end; and the French mind is better than the others at laying things out in such a way that the theory actually illuminates the phenomena and enlightens us as to their nature. They are each to be admired in their own ways, but they are each to be regarded with caution for reasons peculiar to them. Thus, all these different mentalities need to learn to live in harmony; the French mind is the indispensable complement of the German mind, and vice versa.

Duhem does hold that the intuitive mind is superior to the geometrical mind, and thus, to the extent that the German mind tends geometrical and the French mind intuitive, the French mind is superior to the German mind. But this is because science as conceived by Duhem must move from good sense to theory to good sense again, and the French mind is better equipped to determine what's good sense, just as the German mind is better able to work out the details of theories. The superiority is not one of the complete to the deficient, or the perfect to the degenerate, but of the end to the means. (How the English mind fits into this is never specified. But it, too, is intuitive. Its chief weakness is its dependence on models, which from the perspective of the French minds is an excessive use of a pedagogical crutch.)

How does Ariew get his interpretation? I suspect that Ariew is focusing chiefly on Lecture IV, where Duhem discusses all three minds, and treats the French mind as a sort of balance between the English and the German. But Lecture IV is chiefly concerned with giving young French scientists advice on how to work with their English and German counterparts. And the advice is roughly, that it's OK to be distinctively French in your manner of doing science (as long as you are striving for balance and recognize that the purest scientific work transcends nationality), that good English and German scientists are to be admired, but that this admiration should not lead French scientists to copy their vices. Thus by focusing too much on a few passages one could get the impression that Duhem thinks the French mind to be fully balanced, when he is actually advocating this as an ideal, not a characterization of the French mind. Likewise, Duhem is worried about the tendency of French scientists to get too mired in German obfuscation and thus leaving the virtue of clarity so assiduously cultivated by their predecessors; if you just focus on these passages the German mind doesn't come across too favorably. But there are other passages in which different purposes are pursued and you can begin to see more nuances to Duhem's position.

Duhem and the German Mind

From Ariew's entry on Duhem in the SEP:

In his last work, La science allemande, mostly a work of wartime propaganda, Duhem added a third kind of mind to his original two, namely, the German mind. If there are two basic types, the French mind and the English mind, then what could the German mind possibly be? Citing Pascal, Duhem tells us that truth requires both reason and argument—raison and raisonnement. Logic, or our ability to link propositions with one another, allows us to deduce one truth from another; but that ability, by itself, merely gets us back to first principles or axioms. We also need a faculty that allows us to intuit the truth of the first principles or axioms, that is, bon sens (good sense). Bon sens is to “esprit de finesse” what “pure logic” is to “esprit de géométrie.” Moreover, bon sens, our faculty of recognizing fundamental truth gets perfected by the practice of history, by our becoming more aware of the failures and successes of previous theories, by thinking about the trajectory of scientific theories, rather than by considering a single theory frozen in time. The dual scheme can now be expanded. We need logic, the ability to systematize, but we also need intuition, the recognition of truth. When one of these is allowed to dominate, we get a science which is all intuition, all “esprit de finesse,” but no logical coherence, namely, English science; or we get a science which is all logic, lacking bon sens, namely, German science. German science then is a degenerate kind of French science, the latter being predominantly “esprit de géométrie,” corrected by bon sens.

As a result, we can talk about a continuum of sciences; at one extreme on the theoretical side is German science, or logicism, and at the other extreme on the experimental side is English science, or crude modelism. In the middle is French science, which allegedly tempers the logical bent with historicism.

Can this be quite right? My text is in a box right now, so I can't double-check, but this sounds like a very different La science allemande than I remember. For one thing, I don't see that the English mind plays such an important role in La science allemande as Ariew is suggesting (even in the earlier works it seems to me to be more a way of looking at the role of models in science than anything else -- models, not experiments, which are something entirely different). For another, I saw no indication that the German mind is regarded as "a degenerate kind of French science". For another, Duhem seems to me to put the French mind on the side of esprit de finesse, not esprit de géométrie; it is the German mind that is a version of esprit de géométrie. In fact, the natural inference to draw from German Science (or, at least, the one that I drew) is that there are two basic mentalities necessary for scientific progress, found in their closest concrete forms in the German mind and the French mind, and the primary problem with the former is not that it is degenerate but that it has a tendency to refuse to recognize any other approach to science but its own, and to exalt rigor at the expense of understanding. (It is the English mind, I think, that Duhem regards as defectively scientific. The German mind would be entirely fine if it would only defer more to demands that its theories be intelligible. So it seems to me.)

My own interpretation of La science allemande is laid out in passing here.

In any case, this is not so much a criticism as a reminder to myself to look at this point again more closely when I have the chance. (Incidentally, I'm an Other Internet Resource; my post on Duhem's works online is linked at the bottom, as a convenient way of not having to link them all separately.)

UPDATE:

See my follow-up post.

Secret's Out

Brandon Watson -- [noun]: An alien 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

A Poem by Keble

Today, if I am not mistaken, the Anglicans remember John Keble, Victorian poet and author of The Christian Year. Here's a poem by Keble that's not in The Christian Year, being taken from Lyra Innocentium, a collection of his children's verse.

Gardening

" He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much."

Seest thou yon woodland child,
How amid flowerets wild,
Wilder himself, he plies his pleasure-task ?
That ring of fragrant ground,
With its low woodbine bound
He claims: no more, as yet, his little heart need ask.

There learns he flower and weed
To sort with careful heed:
He waits not for the weary noontide hour.
There with the soft night air
Comes his refreshing care:
Each tiny leaf looks up, and thanks him for the shower.

Thus faithful found awhile,
He wins the joyous smile
Of friend or parent ; glad and bright is he,
When for his garland gay
He hears the kind voice say,
"Well hast thou wrought, dear boy : the garden thine shall be."

And when long years are flown,
And the proud word, Mine Own,
Familiar sounds, what joy in field or bower
To view by Memory's aid
Again that garden glade,
And muse on all the lore there learned in each bright hour!

Is not a life well-spent
A child's play-garden, lent
For Heaven's high trust to train young heart and limb?
When in yon field on high
Our hard-won powers we try,
Will no mild tones of earth blend with the adoring hymn?

O fragrant, sure, will prove
The breath of patient Love,
Even from these fading sweets by Memory cast,
As deepening evermore
To Him our song we pour,
Who lent us Earth, that he might give us Heaven at last.

Links and Notes

* Currently reading: Jon Miller, "Spinoza and the a priori" Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 34 (December 2004). (Can be found on Miller's website here.)

* Zuska has recently pointed out (here and here) a study that got a lot of attention in the media that drew general conclusions about both men and women even though it was based entirely on a study of men. As I've noted previously (and it is hardly a point original to me), this is precisely the type of case that shows how important it is to take seriously feminist examination of scientific practice. We know that men and women often have different results due to different physiology and development; we know that we can't automatically assume that a generalization about one sex applies to the other, since we've often been surprised by unexpected differences before; and yet people still think they can get away with generalizations from men to women (although almost no one generalizes in the opposite direction!). Perhaps the conclusions really are generalizable, perhaps they're not. We have no way of knowing until women are actually studied.

* My favorite country song, by a long shot, is "Please Come to Boston." This is the best version of it currently on YouTube.

* Arthur Brooks discusses the four major things that tend to be associated most closely with generous charitable giving: religion, skepticism about government's role in economic life, working for a living, and highly integrated families. (ht)

* Very excited: The SEP entry on Pierre Duhem, by Roger Ariew, is up.

* Koons reviews Rescher's book on presumptive reasoning.

* Doug Marlette, the cartoonist behind Kudzu, recently died at age 57 in an automobile accident. Marlette was also a Pulitzer-prize-winning (and often very controversial) editorial cartoonist. The Comics Curmudgeon, the blogosphere's snarky comics connoisseur, comments.

Faith and Fiction

L. E. Modesitt, Jr. on why people look down on science fiction and fantasy:

The problem isn't that of a "literary" establishment, but the fact that any culture is composed almost universally of individuals whose thought processes and preconceptions are tethered to the present reality in which they live. That present reality is the basis of their preconceptions. Some can speculate slightly beyond the here and now. An even smaller number is comfortable in reading farther beyond the "now." But... the farther one goes from the comfortable here and now, the fewer individuals there are who will make that leap, and even fewer who are comfortable with it. Even in the theoretically more open society of the United States, there are tens of millions of people who cannot conceive of, let alone accept, any sort of domestic arrangement besides a two-partner paternalistic, heterosexual union sanctioned by a religious body. There are possibly more than a hundred million who have no understanding of any theological system except those derived from European Christianity. Effectively, the vast majority of individuals from such backgrounds are self-alienated from science fiction and to a lesser degree from fantasy.

(No permalink, but see here, entry for 6/25/2007.) My thought processes seem a little too tethered to the present reality to follow the leap into that last sentence. But it is refreshing to find religious people criticized for being too reality-based. John C. Wright, the science fiction author, has some sarcastic comments in response. (HT: Claw)

UPDATE

Modesitt responds:

First, please note that I did not say that any and all heterosexuals were close-minded; I said that the majority of those who could not conceive of and accept a wider view of marriage were -- despite the fact that history and culture have consistently demonstrated far more arrangements than the heterosexual model. Second, given that the United States has roughly three hundred million people, tens of millions do not represent a majority, although the polls I've seen indicate that people who reject all forms of marriage except the western heterosexual model indicate well over a hundred million in the USA. Third, I'd like to point out that I did not say that all of the individuals from such backgrounds were self-alienated; I said that a majority were. In that, the numbers don't lie, because, compared to any segment of the population, F&SF readers comprise a very small percentage. Therefore, my point about the majority of individuals from such backgrounds being self-alienated from the field stands.

Since the point doesn't follow from anything he stated, it really doesn't. The "numbers don't lie" bit doesn't advance the argument, as far as I can see; on the same grounds you could claim self-alienation from just about anything: courtroom dramas, speculative theology, weblogs, romance novels, Jane Austen, etc., etc. So if taken seriously it simply reduces the whole long paragraph to the claim that the reason lots of people don't read science fiction is that lots of people don't have much temperamental inclination to it; and this is true (largely) regardless of background. The implicature, however, was that the background was an explanatory factor in the self-alienation from F&SF, and that the lack of imagination noted was a species in the same genus as the lack of imagination for appreciating F&SF; otherwise it would have been irrelevant to bring it up. Thus it is also irrelevant that he hedged only by claiming a "vast majority" rather than everyone, because what he wrote sugggests a causal link between the background and the self-alienation and that was what stirred the hornets' nest.

(For a much more reasonably stated argument for the explanation of why people don't read SF than anything Modesitt has given, see here. The sides of the brain part is a bit silly, but other than that it makes some excellent points. As Pinchefsky points out, things are not so simple as we tend to assume, since there are arguably lots of factors.)

Modesitt goes on to say:

You can also misread what I wrote and tell others. That also happens, more than I or any other writer would like, but it's part of being an author.

What bothers me about all of this is simple. I'm an author. I love words and strive to use them clearly and effectively, and so does every other author I know. Usually we succeed. Sometimes, we don't, but not for lack of trying.

Is it really too much to ask someone to read what we wrote, rather than what they thought we wrote?

This strikes me as simply irresponsible; a writer who is going to use this as a defense should not try to obscure what his original words implicated (even if only unintentionally), as Modesitt does. (Particularly when he goes on immediately to say something that shows that he does not give the Pope the courtesy he demands for himself. The Pope didn't say that Catholicism was the only 'true' Christianity; which would be contrary to Catholic doctrine, as anyone with the slightest familiarity with it knows. The document stated that Christianity subsists in the Catholic Church, where 'subsists' indicates an enduring historical structure in which all the elements of Christianity come together in their proper fullness; these elements can genuinely exist outside that historical structure. It weakens the force of the complaint somewhat when one goes on immediately to do what you were complaining about.)