Hermeneutic Heretic

Obama has the smarts, the plans and, yes, the charisma to capably lead and transform a nation that aches for a new direction.

Editorials & Opinion | Obama for the Democrats | Seattle Times Newspaper

My voice, particularly on this blog, with no readership is of no consequence. I have no vote in American elections although I’ve often felt that people around the world should have at least some delegates in the US nominating conventions. Nevertheless, I cannot but endorse Obama. I’ve reviewed Audacity of Hope (twice, once on the radio, once in Czech press) and I’ve watched quite a few of his speeches; and I cannot do a better job of summarizing my impressions than the Seattle Times above.

BBC - Radio 4 Woman’s Hour -Male Primogeniture Jenni discusses the law of primogeniture with Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone, who has asked the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate the legality of this centuries old practice, and to royal commentator and author Charles Mosley.

BBC - Radio 4 Woman’s Hour -Primogeniture: Should the law be changed? Thirty years since the passage of the Sex Discrimination Act, the law that governs Succession to the Crown in Britain is also based on primogeniture: a male-preference law that dictates the throne should go to a male heir over a female. Why does the law continues to exist and is there a case for changing the law sooner than later?

The really interesting (for this analysis, not for itself) argument in this discussion of male primogeniture was made by Charles Mosley. Several times he presented two ‘logical’ objections (invoking the term logic) 1) "if you’re interested in equality why not prefer the abolishment of monarchy which is even a more startling symbol of inequality?" 2) "if you [Lynne Featherstone] are also a spokesperson for the rights of the young, why not also include a change in the inheritance going to the firstborne?" [my paraphrases] His interlocutor responded by saying "ah, that’s the old chestnut that is often used to stop change".

That fact that they were both justified in their remarks tells us something startling about public debate: logic and rationality cannot be and are not what decides the argument. At least, not in the traditional sense. The traditional view of logic is that it is independent of the matter at hand as well as of the arbiter of correctness and can be therefore used as yardstick of the validity of the argument. That’s why Mr Mosley could sound a bit condescending (even though that could have been by dint of his being the ‘royal’ commentator) when he said something like ‘then it surely follows’ and ‘isn’t it logical’. Mr Featherstones justified objection that this was not a ‘legitimate’ argument did not have nearly as much weight purely because of the high regard we have for logic in these contexts.

Yet, it is ‘obvious’ that in this case the logic is gerrymandered and used as a rhetorical device. But is that always so? There are many times when the ‘logic’ applies.

Basically, the ‘logic’ of any argument needs to be negotiated. And any negotiation will bring with it all the factors that ‘real’ negotiations do. I.e. aspects of power, prestige, location, primacy and recency, ingroup/outgroup concerns, etc. In other words, it is not easy. But it is the only way it can go. This is not a suggestion as to how things should be, merely a description of how things are. There is an open question whether such debates would be more fruitful if both interlocutors were aware that they are engaged in a negotiation and subject to various influences. I’m a bit skeptical on this count but not convinced yet either way.

Let’s have a look at other similar examples.

The right wing’s argument that if you allow gay marriage what’s to stop you from allowing zoophilic unions? Of course, there is nothing that would do that. A perfectly valid modus ponens argument can be constructed to demonstrate this entailment. Yet, intuitively, we know that such a occurrence is very unlikely.

Similarly, an argument can be (and has been) made, that if we stop abortions and outlaw prophylaxis we should also force any young heterosexual couple in an encounter to procreate. For, are they not depriving a potential human life of coming into being by avoiding copulation? Again, logic fails completely. Only negotiation of categories, concepts, and their mappings can bring any results.

Of course, it also works the other way. An fairly undisputably legitimate logic can be overriden by negotiation. The claim against the legalization of marihuana is that it is a gateway drug. Yet, the numbers of people who have smoked marihuana (almost everybody - except, for some reason, me) are so great that if there was any underlying causality significant proportion of the population would be addicted to hard drugs. Yet, that is clearly not the case. Other factors prevailed in the negotiation.

Another example is the British argument against immigration for the reason that ‘Britain is a small island’. First, it is neither small nor comparatively densely populated but most significantly, its being an island doesn’t make its borders any more solid than, say Germany. If, Belgium needs more space to house migrants, surely, they can’t borrow a spare bit of France. Nevertheless, this is a very common argument.

And how about opponents of the smoking ban. It is quite true that smoking does not ’cause’ cancer in the way that a bat causes a person to have their skull smashed in. Nevertheless, it was possible to generate a consensus of causality that overrode the logic. (I’ve heard a similar argument made against evolution.)

And so on, and so on.

But wait! There’s more. Not only is not logic a good tool for independently judging the validity of an argument (although it is a good tool for putting an argument forth), it is not a good predictor of cognitive and social outcomes. And this applies to metaphoric implicature, as well. This is due, again, to the fact that these outcomes are negotiated. This doesn’t bode well for most social commentary and a good chunk of social science.  But that can be explored some other time.

Women Are Never Front-Runners - New York Times

But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.

What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.

What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.

What worries me is that reporters ignore Mr. Obama’s dependence on the old — for instance, the frequent campaign comparisons to John F. Kennedy — while not challenging the slander that her progressive policies are part of the Washington status quo.

In these few paragraphs Gloria Steinem summarizes the findings of social psychology of the last forty years. Including earlier on in her column where she wonders why we consider Obama black when his mother was white so we could just as easily consider him white or mixed race.

There is little controversial both about the social psychology or politics of these statements. However, the question is what conclusions we’ll draw from them. There is the rationalist approach which Steinem seems to imply assuming that this condition of assymetric perception existing in that strange space between the individual and the group. The rationalist position places the problem squarely inside the individual’s cognition (brain) which of course is ultimately the only place where it can live. However, the question remains whether this is a reductionism that is descriptively and theoretically fruitful. On the political side it implies that this state of ‘irrationality’ is an ailment that can and should be cured. However, this discards the totality of the human condition.

An alternative position, for which there is not sufficient social scientific theory or descriptive framework, is to place the locus of this situation in the collective. This, of course, can only be a descriptive convenience, because ultimately these things exist or are reflected in the individual’s brain. But looking for these effects in the brain may be as foolhardy as trying to design a bridge using solely quantum mechanics or Einsteinian physics. The descriptive advantage is obvious. Not reducing collective phenomena to the individual would make it possible to take certain phenomena at their face value. The political advantage is less obvious. Taking the individualistic reductionist perspective makes it possible to appeal to individuals to change and to reflect on their inner biases. On the other hand, it does lead to the alienation of many who cannot identify with the individual position despite the collective consequence. Of course, many if not most of these biases are individual and can be brought to our attention to be challenged but is that always the case and/or is there a situation where the collective is primary and the straightforward causality from the individual to the group and from the group to the individual does not apply. Saying "male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own" simply describes a fact of logic but does "male voters are supporting their own" follow from "male voters are more likely to vote for a candidate that is also male". Perhaps it does but just because these two sentences are equivalent in terms of push-and-shove container logic they may not be the same from the perspective of social psychological description. Something that will need to be investigated more.