Hermeneutic Heretic

LII: Constitution To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

I had no idea that copyright was part of the US Constitution until I read about this in an LA Times Op-Ed. The article was debating the semantics and metaphors related to filesharing on which I’ll probably have more to think. But, reading the section referenced in the article reminded me of a recent talk I went to on the default states in frames.

And it seems to me beyond much doubt that the framers had assumed a default state of “limited” that meant actually limited rather than potentially limited which is what the current laws enshrine. Of course, there are many other ‘default’ states in the constitution, for instance regarding what a ‘person’ is. But these defaults have been typically reset by amendments.

Also, it could be more than argued that the current copyright regime does not “promote the progress” of anybody but big corporations. What about the company that owns the rights to ‘Happy Birthday’? Where is progress or even the rights of authors and inventors in that?

I’ve been following this debate from a distance for a while but haven’t seen the conflict with the constitutional wording raised. But maybe I’ve just not been looking in the right places or am missing something.

Nicholas Kristof is puzzled and pleased that the US electorate is keeping two individuals as front runners who are willing to express unpopular opinions:

The World’s Worst Panderer - New York Times All of this is puzzlingly mature on the part of the electorate. A common complaint about President Bush is that he walls himself off from alternative points of view, but the American public has the same management flaw: it normally fires politicians who tell them bad news.

But that is not particularly surprising. What is intriguing is the level of sophistication that a closer analysis of individuals reveals (regardless of education). This was found by van Dijk in the Netherlands and by Gamson in the US with groups under onslaught from an agenda-pushing media. However, this ability of individuals and small groups to discern the details of manipulative discourse does not always translate into collective behaviour at elections or other decision-making moments that would reveal a great independence of views. Until, one rare day it does but it then goes away. By and large political operatives’ wisdom hold true for crowds even if it misrepresents the individuals comprising the crowds. This points to several avenues of inquiry. First, can we think of groups as independent agents? And if so, how can we also represent the individuals’ legitimate interests and views? And second, what are the principles that constitute collective action as described by Becker and how do they form individuals’ behaviours?

Lakoff in ‘Moral Politics’ talks about how competing models of family influence policy and politics debates in the US. This model duality is not only present in a variety of contexts but I would claim is the very foundation of all policy discourse (argument). In other words, whereever you look at a policy controversy you see a conflict of framings and foregrounding. Here’s a good example I culled from two recent podcasts.

Matt Miller has a radical but simple proposal to improve the nation’s public schools: federalize funding to eliminate disparities in per-pupil funding between poor and affluent communities. He also proposes a single set of federal standards for math, science and reading, instead of letting each state set its own standards. Scott Simon speaks with Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
NPR: Plan Would Nationalize Schools to End Disparities

How can government create policies that interact with – rather than police - human behaviour? DAVID WILLETTS, Shadow Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills, argues that politicians could learn something from the recent surge in the study of human behaviour by game theorists, evolutionary biologists and neurologists. David Willetts will be delivering the Michael Oakeshott memorial lecture on The Ideas that are Changing Politics on Wednesday 20 February at the London School of Economics.
BBC - Radio 4 - Start the Week

Quite independently, the progressive Matt Miller and conservative David Willetts have provided a great example of retrenchment of two basic models of governance. 1. Local people know best and don’t need interference from removed centrals of power. 2. Local people are ignorant and need central control to make sure they don’t make a mess of things.

These two models are negotiated in a variety of contexts all over the place. They are given ’scholarly’ support and ‘narrative’ support (the two being often just two sides of the same coin) on almost daily basis. We can also think of stories (real or fictional) where one or the other will apply. For instance, teachers talk about the National Curriculum in the UK today or Voter registration drives in the 1960s in the US south. Plus we could probably list several film and TV storylines that playout one or the other scenario with great conviction.

Now, both Willetts and Miller seem to make good points. How do we decide? Negotiation of framing and generative as well as constitutive metaphors.

On The Media I’m not a psychologist, but I think that at some deep level, if the situation you’re living is a lie, and the situation these boys were living was one, and, moreover, at least the father was complicit in some way in the murder of these children’s parents - that situation, I do not believe, can be healthy.

…

Argentina lived under terror. When societies emerge from these states, any society emerging has to balance truth with justice.

And then he had to say this:

Lost Children, Lost Truths - New York Times

But they had the truth, or something closer to it than a peaceful Paraguayan yard reeking of repressed crime. We journalists are intruders who move on. Was this intrusion worth it? For the dead, and for Argentina, I say yes. For the twins, I don’t know.

Truth or justice? Every society emerging from terror must choose. But truth is messier, and justice less adequate than we acknowledge. Life resides in half-tones newspapers render with difficulty, rather than in absolutes.

This folk magical assumption about the elemental and deep-rooted nature of the truth that is so essential that it seeps into our very existence no matter how much we are trying to paint a veneer of ignorance over it.

Cohen is right. He’s no psychologist, but then neither are a lot of psychologists. Truth is like language. When you grow up in the context of a lie, you will speak the lie fluently and the truth will be just as disruptive as the introduction of a new language.

But this is not just a random quirk of an American journalist brought up on cultural reflections of the psychoanalytic therapeutic tradition. This is a demonstration of one folk theory of truth and it is the same one that underlies our myths about science that is most often represented through something called ‘reductionism’.

And as fractals seem to indicate, this will also be part of science’s undoing. Wilson’s failure in Conscillience to understand science (despite his grasp of the humanities) is a great example of this. Another one is Skinner’s reductionism and re-labelling of old problems with new words in Verbal Behavior which was so deftly analysed by Chomsky. And, of course, Chomsky’s own insistence on limiting language description to that which is subject to reduction. And it also pertains to things like the Sokal hoax and the science wars. And it drives the search for the Unified Theory.

The problem is that the folk assumption about the fundamental nature of scientific truth forces scientists into seeking further and further underlying principles in order for it to be scientific. For instance, genes driving all morphological development of an organism. This is a bad model for science and an even worse model for social science.

An insight from fractals and chaos might help us find a better way. (The following is simply a fractal-inspired metaphor). ‘Truths’ exist on levels of magnification. They exist as tendencies that are exact at certain moments but sensitive to initial conditions.

This might allows us to admit that there are certain things social scientists know with just as much certainty as natural philosophers know the laws of physics. Only the numerical outcomes and predictive powers are plotted on attractors rather than linear curves. For instance, we know that depriving a group of people of resources will result in social unrest, and that not all individuals will participate in that unrest. We don’t know what the breaking point is nor do we know what forms the unrest will take but that’s not insignificant knowledge.

Moreover, it’s knowledge similar to the knowledge of scientists. Scientists know a lot about the chemistry and physics of metals but all that knowledge is idealised (as in ideal gasses). To actually build a bridge engineers need lots and lots of manuals with translation tables that provide constants that can be plugged into equations. These constants are empirically established and can change with changing conditions.

Social engineers have history to do the same job but the translation tables have to be publicly negotiated analogy (as I’ve show in many other posts).

The job of the natural and social philosophers, then, should be to seek the right levels of magnification for their knowledge and proceed with extreme caution when finding causal links between layers.

[This is all very sketchy, at the moment, I suspect I will have a more to say about this later.]