Historians, Archaeologists, and Scientists

Are historians scientists?  They frame hypotheses about the causes and effects of real events and use empirical evidence to support their accounts.  But they don't do not look for regularities to make into laws; to the contrary, they account for singular events in their uniqueness.  Isn't science about generality?

What about archaeologists?  Are they scientists?  Are they historians?  Both?  Neither?  Why?

RIP Peter Bergman

My Fellow Comedists,

This week, we lost another great comic mind.  Peter Bergman has gone up to comedy heaven to take his place next to the Cosmic Comic.

Founding member of Firesign Theatre, Bergman was a master of late 60s intellectual surrealist humor -- cross Monty Python with Lord Buckley.  At a time when the world was in turmoil following the McCarthyist war on ideas, Firesign Theatre provided an absurdist take on the world around them.  They created linguistic dada.  Sophisticated, but innocent, gentle, but sharp, it was clever and insightful humor for the smart and hip. 



Thank you Peter Bergman for all of your playfulness.

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Ritual and Superstition

Thinking about the relationship between ritual and superstition.  Clearly some rituals are non-superstitious.  No one thinks that not getting together for Thanksgiving will invite bad luck.  The ritual is culturally enforced, but has clear and explicit social goods (enforcing unity, allowing a time for rest and rejuvenation,...) completely explainable without resort to anything that one would classify superstitious. 

One often hears the claim that athletes are the most superstitious people around.  It's an empirical claim, don't know if it is true.  But, I was a lacrosse goalie for many years and up through the end of my playing days as a college student, I had an intricate pre-game ritual.  Before the game the two teams line up with goalie at the end facing each other to receive instructions from the referees.  this ended when they said "goalies cross" at which point the two goalies met in the middle for a handshake which signaled the rest of the players to do so and then the game would start.

I would always sprint to the middle to make the other goalie come to me.  I would then sprint down to my goal with my stick in my right hand.  When I got to the goal, I would transfer the stick to my left hand and touch the left post, the crossbar, then the right post with the butt end of the stick, pivot around holding the stick in both hands, reach behind me to tap the right post then the left, do a knee-bend while twirling the stick in my hands, and then finally jog out to touch gloves with my three defensemen -- right side, crease, and then left side.  I always did it.  I would feel that odd feeling in my stomach if I didn't or if I deviated from the way it was usually done.  I did not think that it invoked the lacrosse gods, but it seemed a necessity to get things off in the right way.  When I returned to play an old-timers a few years back, thirteen years after I had last played, I found myself doing it exactly that way without thinking.

Was the sense that something was amiss if I didn't do it just so an indication that it was a ritual that was grounded in superstition?

The Dignity of Inanimate Objects

Working in Gettysburg and driving past the cemetery where Lincoln delivered his address every morning, you understand the ways in which we take things and places and grant them a special status.  I have a student who argues that this status is dignity and is the same sort of dignity we grant to human beings.  Kant argues that with dignity comes moral consideration and therefore, my student contends, we can understand why certain things that may not have been thought to be moral objects become objects of moral consideration.

It made think of a story told by The Old Man when he and mom got back from a trip to Las Vegas.  They were in a nice restaurant and at the table next to them was a small group of college students who had clearly just hit for a bunch of money in the casino.  They used it to buy an incredibly expensive bottle of wine which they were swilling.  The quality of the wine, the specialness of the vintage, was clearly unappreciated.  The Old Man spoke of this not in objective terms of reporting facts, but indignantly.  The bottle of wine was being treated without the proper sense of dignity, something it deserved for being what it is.  Similarly, a longtime baseball card collector I was talking with recently was saying how his wife cannot understand why his 1909 Honus Wagner card is not "just a piece of cardboard."

Do these sorts of things have dignity and does it carry with it a certain moral responsibility for us?  Or is it just that we have an attachment that creates a sense like dignity, but is different?

Is Compulsory Education Granting or Limiting Autonomy?

It's Einstein's birthday today, a good time to think about one of the Einstein quotations you will find on bumper stickers -- "Imagination is more important than knowledge." We have a senior major considering the argument that children have a right to education because they have a right to autonomy, something that is challenged by the influence of their parents. Being raised by parents forces you to be indoctrinated with certain beliefs, in Einstein's terms a limitation of imagination, a shrinking of the possibilities of the world. Education, on the other hand, will inevitably cause you to have to face other beliefs, it will enlarge the pool of possibilities. Since it is only when you have a choice that you have autonomy, to guarantee the autonomy of children when they reach adulthood, it is crucial therefore to counter the influence of the parents to some degree. The children may choose to believe what their parents do, but we only treat them as autonomous beings if we guarantee them the right to make that choice. The odd part of this argument is that we grant a right by coercion, by forcing them to confront something they may not want. We make them autonomous by removing their autonomy. Should children have to think about different ways of being as a part of required education? Is it healthy to think about education as deprogramming?

The Moral Responsibility to Friends and Family

We grant special moral considerability to people who are our friends.  Friendship comes with responsibility.  You care about your friends in ways you do not care about strangers and therefore there will come times when you have to do things for them.  But with some friends, we elevate the friendship to a level higher.  We will often say "you are not just a friend, you are family."  This seems to imply that being family grants a level of moral responsibility even higher than that we have to friends.  But we choose our friends and not our family.  Do we really owe a greater degree of moral consideration to our relatives than we do our friends?

Are there Varieties of Ownership?

Our senior thesis writers this semester have been working on some interesting topics.  Want to raise some questions this week that have come to mind listening to them develop their arguments.  One is looking at the notion of ownership.  From the Enlightenment, rights-based approach to property, there seems to be a single thing which is ownership, but is this true?  Does how you came to own the thing alter what it means to own it?  If four people have the same thing, but one person made it for herself, one person bought it for himself, one person received it as a gift, and one person inherited it from a relative who passed away, the object may have different meanings for them, but is the sense of ownership the same in all of them?

If I buy a Picasso, it is my painting, I own it, but in a sense it is not my painting.  Is there a partial sense of ownership here?  Can something with cultural meaning be fully owned or is it partly owned by the culture?  Does this apply to something like a sports team as well as say an important landmark?