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.

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.]

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.