King, Washington, Lincoln, and the Iconization of Heroes

In thinking about Dr. King, it is truly odd what we do to our national heroes. They begin as flesh and are transformed in the most unusual way.

At first glance, there is nothing terribly strange there. All cultures have their mythological heroes and those based on the lives of real people require taking the story of a notable life (or more usually a part of it) and retelling it in a fashion that more perfectly engenders and typifies some virtue held dear to the society. That transformation fictionalizes the figure, makes him or her bigger than life, certainly bigger than the actual life lived, and places the figure upon the pedestal reserved in the cultural pantheon. Think of Parson Weem's version of the life of George Washington.

And, in a certain sense, so it is with King. One of the central leitmotifs of the 20th century was liberation. It was the century that saw women get the vote, the civil rights movement with all of its successes, the start of the gay rights movement, guaranteed accessibility for those with disabilities, and the end of mandatory retirement for older Americans to name just a few examples. Because of his vision, his commitment to peaceful change, and his power as an orator, Martin Luther King, Jr. was selected at the end of the century as the national symbol of justice and opposition to bigotry and discrimination, virtues that the our nation now had a place to celebrate.

Those seeking to undermine the figure, the virtue, or both, often choose to more carefully recount the actual history, taking special care to point out where personal failures illustrate a conflict. With Dr. King, it is often questions of adultery. "How could he be held up as a paradigm of virtue when he embraced such a vice?" the challengers whine. Of course, the move fails. Yes, we all have personal foibles. No one lives up to the fictionalized perfection, but that does not make the life lived any less heroic not the virtue embodied any less significant. Dr. King was a man, fallible, flawed like the rest of us, but it it in that fact, that he was able to do what he did as a mere mortal that makes him worthy of being more than a mere mortal.

Yet, in our admiration, we have done what the critic could not. Not by tearing down Dr. King, but by flattening him, taking one of the deepest of Americans and turning him into a flat icon. The writings of Dr. King, their development, intricacies, and meaning -- both in the historical context and universally -- are never considered. What may be considered his masterworks, the letter from Birmingham jail and his speech at the Lincoln Memorial, are read by a few, but as a culture we really possess no sense whatsoever of the mind of the man. Martin Luther King, Jr. has become nothing more than an iconic image -- portrait facing slightly to the side in black suit jacket and tie -- and a four word slogan -- "I have a dream." That's it. We don't probe what the dream truly meant, its many aspects he enumerates in the speech to see how far we have come, or whether such content was worthy of a dream. We simply repeat "I have a dream" like an advertising jingle.

Of course, it is not only King who gets this treatment. Washington has the image taken from Gilbert Stuart's portrait and the five word slogan "I cannot tell a lie," while Abraham Lincoln has the beard and stovepipe hat with the six word slogan, "Four score and seven years ago." It is a statue that one puts upon a pedestal, a three-dimensional sculpture that represents in marble an idealized version of the model. But for us, now, our heroes no longer can fit on a pedestal, just on a bumper sticker. The conversations their lives ought to force us to engage in remain undiscussed. The reflections on our own abilities to change the world go unreflected. The virtues they engendered and the ways we can become a more humane society by taking their example are too often left unconsidered. Heroes may not be real, but the effects of having heroes are. Sadly, we have turned our heroes into icons where we can remain safe from their heroism, true and embellished.

Feast of Saint Graham

Brothers, Sisters, and Transgendered Comedists Everywhere,

This week we celebrate the feast of Saint Graham. It would have been Graham Chapman's 66th birthday last Monday. In addition to being King Arthur and Brian, he appeared in innumerable sketches in Monty Python's Flying Circus including my personal favorites "Colin 'Bomber' Harris vs. Colin 'Bomber' Harris" and as the bookshelf climbing mountaineer in "Kilimanjaro Expedition," and the instructor in "Flying Lessons."

Despite the fact that in Flying Circus sketches he often played the straight man, in real life he wasn't. Graham Chapman was one of the first major public figures to come out of the closet, revealing his orientation in 1972, and became a well-known voice in Britain's gay rights movement.

A medical doctor by training, he sadly sacrificed his own health to alcohol and tobacco, ultimately contracting throat cancer which took him up with Saint Shecky. If you have never seen the eulogy John Cleese delivered at his funeral, it is well worth the look.

We close this week's sermon with a central teaching of Comedism. Quoting from Saint Graham,

"You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody. You've got to think for yourselves. You are all individuals. You're all different. You've got to work it out for yourselves. Don't let anyone tell you what to do."

Now, piss off.

Live, love, and laugh

Irreverend Steve

Peroxide Makes the Art Grow Blonder

As usual, amazing questions again this time. There were a couple of questions about aesthetics, the philosophy of art.

BKriplur asks,

Has anyone applied analytic philosophy to art criticism?

Yes. The most famous analytic figures in aesthetics are probably Jerrold Katz and Arthur Danto. Actually, I’ve always wanted to write a paper on Arthur Danto’s take on Platonic aesthetics and call it, "Plato on Art/Art on Plato."

Jeff Maynes asks,

Are aesthetic judgments relative to local aesthetic sensibilities, or do you think there is any hope for more meaningful judgment?

The key here is to realize that there is a big difference between the sentences "X is aesthetically valuable" and "I like X." The purpose of aesthetics is not to justify or shape personal preferences with respect to art anymore than ethics is meant to make sure that what is morally right is the same as things you really want to do. Why humans tend to widely like the same sorts of artistic pieces, for example, why certain musical works are particularly catchy, is a psychological question, not a philosophical one.

I think that there is perfectly good grounds for making meaningful aesthetic claims that are non-local appealing to various sorts of artistic properties. Certainly, what counts as such a property is open to discussion and hard and fast rules will be very difficult to formulate. Indeed, one can see art in the 20th century as a movement turned intellectually inward on such questions. Just as philosophy became about the process of philosophizing and analyzing the linguistic foundations of philosophy itself, art became about art and about creating art that challenged attempts by critics and aestheticians to formulate these sorts of criteria. But the very point of challenging them was to create more thoughtful conversation. The act of creating art became in some cases, applied philosophy. Works like Rauschenberg’s "Erased De Kooning Drawing" (exactly what it sounds like) or Duchamp’s "Fountain" (a urinal) for example, was intentionally designed to create concern over the nature of art.

These, of course, are the sort of thing that folks point to when they try to discuss the worthlessness of modern art, the fact that it is all a scam. But, art, like philosophy, does not occur in a vacuum, it is part of a conversation and like any conversation, if you don’t know who is what to whom, then by in large you won’t understand what any given response means. In the 20th century, the self-referential movement in the art world put the discussion in a private language, a coded discussion that made sense largely only to those in the in crowd. I was in the National Gallery one hot July day — the same day as the big union march in DC — and I heard over and over again how eight year olds could do that. When art made the move from representation to conceptual comment, it became an endeavor that required being hip to the conversation, you had to be on the inside. Art was not about techniques that made
But those who were inside were having a very interesting philosophical conversation...in parts, at least. Sure, some was banal, but much was interesting. So when we talk about aesthetic judgements, we can talk in non-local terms, but that doesn’t mean that everyone will suddenly be tapping their toes to Schoenberg.

Death and Taxes...Well, Ethical Theory and Taxes Anyway

A couple of ethics questions, one applied and one theoretical:

Max Alaniz asks,

“Can taxes be fair?”

The idea behind taxation is that there are certain functions that we asks the government to take care of and we have to pony up the money to make it possible. Is there a fair way of dividing up the burden. First, we need to differentiate between taxes that go for focused projects and those that go to the general fund. We need to pay for road maintenance and it seems fair that those who use the roads more pay more, so we fund it with gasoline taxes. That seems to be a fair tax.

But the question seems more to be about income taxes. Here we have two points that need to be made. First, the folks who argue for fairness in taxation are often the flat tax advocates. The idea is that if we all paid the same percentage of our incomes, then we would have fairness. Progressive taxation, where not only amount paid, but percentage paid is inherently unfair they argue because the wealthy pay more than their share.

The problem with the flat tax argument is that it confuses “wealth” with “value.” Money can be used to do two things, it can be used to purchase goods or services and it can be used to make more money. If you have greater wealth, more money, each dollar has a greater value. Consider two brothers, one a poor philosopher and the other a wealthy new economy entrepreneur. Both brush their teeth with equal frequency, for the same amount of time, applying the same amount of tooth paste. One is barely scraping by and can only spare a little money for toothpaste each week and so must buy the small tube. The other has plenty expendable income and so can buy the larger tube, the economy sized. Over the course of the year, the poorer brother has had to spend more on tooth paste because he had less money. If you have more money, each dollar is more valuable in that it can purchase more goods. Similarly, suppose you were given the following offer, “Either you can invest one million dollars for a year and keep all the money you make with it or you can have ten million dollars to invest and keep one tenth of what you make.” You should choose the ten million because having more money opens up more lucrative opportunities. If you have more money, each dollar is worth more because it can be used to make more money.

As such, we need a progressive tax scheme if we are going to have any chance of fairness in sharing the burden. The question is can we ever accurately determine the relation between wealth and value accurate enough to have fair tax tables and while it seems like the two are not terribly out of whack as we have them now, I’m not sure what the mechanisms economists have developed to judge, but maybe some of the econ folks out there could comment.

The second part of the discussion is whether fairness is the only operative virtue here. Taxation is designed not only to fund the government, but also to direct resources in directions that are socially beneficial. If there are places we want people to spend money because we think them advantageous to the society, then we give tax breaks for it. We can employ lots of people if we have new housing being built, so we give credits for the interest paid on mortgages. This provides an incentive for people to spend their money in ways that advance the general welfare. As such, we will allow people to pay less than their fair share in income tax if they are using their income in ways that advance the general welfare.

Jeff Maynes asks,

“In ethics, if one wishes to rely on multiple ethical theories in decision making, does that commit one to a choice between (a) an alternative, supra-theory that uses all of the traditional theories and (b) anti-theoretical view of ethics? Or is this a false choice?”

The point of an ethical theory is to provide a definition for the basic notions of “morally right” and “morally wrong.” Utilitarianism, for example, defines morally right in terms of creating the best overall consequences for everyone, while deontology defines moral rightness and wrongness in terms of absolute moral duties. There are several classical moral theories that all appeal to our intuitions in certain cases, but conflict in others. The problem is that these ethical theories posit different foundations for ethics and so don’t fit nicely together.

One possibility, the hope of nearly every student to whom I’ve ever taught moral theory, is that there is some sort of meta-system that will decide which system is operative in any given situation. Philosophers of the last couple decades, however, have had other ideas and tried to do away with theory. These are the options Jeff mentions. There is a third option, however, that has become popular in certain quarters – deliberative democratic discourse. The idea is that ethical theory can narrow down the number of morally acceptable possibilities, then it is the job of society at large to engage in critical, thoughtful discussion in order to resolve the conflict based on non-moral, contextual factors. It is not anti-theory because the results of ethical theories are still taken seriously, but it is not the sort of supra-theoretical approach because there is no deterministic meta-ethical algorithm that does the thinking for you.

Because Y Is a Crooked Letter

From Phil:

“I maintain there are, in fact, no such things as 'why's, just 'how's. Or to put it another way, all 'why' questions are meaningless. So as a challenge I would ask: Are there any 'why's?”

Good thing you brought this question here to the “why’s” guys.

I suppose the first question that pops to mind is, “Why do you believe that there are no why questions?” Done.

But to be less of a smart ass...Before we can say whether there are any legitimate why questions, we first need to determine what why questions are asking. Turns out that there are several different types of information you could be requesting with “why questions.” One is intent. “Why did you buy that hybrid?” “Because I wanted to drive a car that gets good mileage.” Another is explaining the factual basis for your choice of tactics in trying to achieve an intended goal. “Why did you choose that Thanksgiving promotion?” “With God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”

Now, both of these require intentions and when we look at science, there is no such thing. Phil’s sense that why questions in science are nothing but a hold over from previous times in which questions about the structure of nature were really nothing but questions about the Divine will places him in good company. In one of my favorite pieces, Bertrand Russell argues that when we ask why questions we are looking for causes, but contends that the notion of cause, like the British monarchy, is obsolete but kept around only because it is wrongly thought to do no harm. Russell sees modern science as substituting the notion of a differential equation for the concept of cause. Like Phil, Uncle Bertie sees science as describing, not explaining.

But there do seem to be two ways in which we can formulate meaningful scientific why questions. One is in the case of subsuming a phenomenon under a law of nature or a law of nature other than the one that is expected. “Why did that helium balloon float towards the front of the airplane cabin when the plane took off?” “Because the cabin is accelerating and by the principle of equivalence, an accelerating reference frame is equivalent to a local gravitational field and helium balloons in air and gravitational fields go away from the source of the gravitational field.” Or “Why did that heavy metal disk not fall to the ground since it is being pulled by gravity?” “Because there was a strong magnetic field that produces a stronger pull in the other direction.”

The other sort of why question in science is the case of a functional explanation. “Why do giraffes have long necks?” “Because a long neck conveys a survival advantage in gathering food which made those early giraffes with longer necks more likely to achieve reproductive success.” There is not intent here, since there is no mind to form an intent but there is still a part of an organism that performs a goal-oriented function and we can ask why it’s there.

I suppose if one were clever enough, one could always frame the request for the same information with a sentence that started with the word “how” instead of “why,” but it does seem that asking “How did the giraffe get it’s long neck?” is not identical to “Why do giraffes have long necks?” and the latter seems a perfectly legitimate scientific query.

Meet the challenge?

Faitheism: Does Atheism Require Faith?

pm asked,

Does atheism rely on faith? Additionally, if it does, is atheism then a religion?

Two fascinating questions, but not necessarily connected the way that the question seems to assume.

Does atheism require some sort of faith? The right answer is the philosophers’ answer...it depends. If atheism is the belief in the non-existence of God, then we before we can answer the question, we need to clearly define what we mean by faith and what we mean by God.

There were some interesting assertions about the nature of faith in the original comment thread and I think that even those that seemed to be competing claims all got part of the story right. Faith does involve belief, but Kerry is correct that it is not an epistemological concept (that’s fancy philosophy speak for a concept related to the nature of knowledge, which we can think of as true justified belief). The notion of justification or good reason to believe is not operative when you talk about faith. To have faith in x is to accept the truth of x regardless of evidence for or against it. The claim that you can only have faith in propositions that are unlikely is half right. You may certainly have faith in a proposition for which there is very strong evidence, it’s just that it isn’t generally necessary because you could lean on the evidence as the foundation for your belief. But one could have faith in a proposition that is well supported, so that even if suddenly we discovered extremely strong evidence against it, you’d still believe it. This is what happened when Einstein’s special theory of relativity came along. there had been unbelievably good reason to believe that Newton had it right, then suddenly, there wasn’t. Yet, some very good, very smart scientists – Mach, Weber, Arrhenius – refused to surrender the classical theory, clinging instead to their faith in it. It is only in cases where the proposition is unsupported or has significance evidence against it that faith suddenly seems to become important because it is only in these cases in which it becomes obvious or necessary.

Notice that we are not saying that any belief for which we do not have absolute proof requires faith. We have proof for a very, very small number of things for which we have good reason to believe (pretty much only mathematical theorems and logical propositions which are largely uninteresting for daily life). A good inductively supported claim, say, that tomorrow the sun will rise, that bread will nourish, and arsenic will poison are not guaranteed true because of past experience and our best current scientific theories. It is not logically impossible that they might all turn out that they all will be false, but nonetheless, because of our best theories and our observations, we have good reason to believe them even if they aren’t certain and thus may have but do not need faith for belief in these propositions.

We also have to figure out what we mean by God, what precisely is being denied here. I think this is one place where many atheists and sophisticated theists talk past one another. The way atheists and non-sophisticated theists think of it is a being whose physical presence or some of whose willed actions have physical effects – that there are marks of the supernatural in the workings of nature. Let us call the God who has a hand in the material world a “physical God.” The existence of a physical God means that it is impossible to give a complete, naturalistic account of the working of the universe. Another sense of God is a being unnecessary as a basis for factual beliefs, but thought necessary to provide a foundation for ethical truths. We can call this the “moral God.” A third concept of God is that which neither has a hand in determining how the physical world works nor in grounding moral right and wrong, but is a purely spiritual concept, an experienced sense of the Divine in the way one lives one’s life and aspires to live it. We can call this the “phenomenological God.”

So, when we ask whether one needs faith to be an atheist, we have several cases to consider. Start with the physical God. Does one need faith to believe that the physical God does not exist? Is there any good reason to believe that for any given observable phenomenon, there will not be a need to give supernatural explanation? Here the unrelenting successes of science in explaining phenomenon after phenomenon, predicting new, bizarre and counter-intuitive results which are then confirmed, and allowing us to create workable solutions to real-life challenges in engineering and medicine do give grounds to think that appeals to the supernatural are superfluous. If what we mean by God is a being outside of nature necessary to explain some or all physical, chemical, biological, or psychological occurrences, then it certainly seems that one does not need faith to be an atheist of this sort.

Again, this does not mean that there are not atheists who take it as a matter of faith that all phenomena can be naturally explained. Maybe they can, maybe they can’t. Atheists with faith would take it as axiomatic that no matter what happens in the world a move to supernatural explanation is wrongheaded come hell or high water (although it may be particular tough come hell), atheists without faith could be convinced by evidence that certain events are singular enough to require positing some physical God. They don’t think it will happen and it would be a very high threshold to cross, but the question is whether that threshold is there or not.

As for a moral God, there is good reason to think that ethics can be perfectly well grounded without an appeal to the will of a Divine being. There are two parts to acting morally: (1) figuring out the right thing to do in your given situation, and (2) doing it. The question that Gwydion poses about being a moral atheist then has two components. first, is it possible to form meaningful ought sentences without having an ethical dictator to declare them by fiat. Of course. Here is where ethical theory comes in with duty, virtue, utility, care, justice, and rights. These of course conflict and that was the question Jeff Maynes asked and I’ll answer later in the week, but suffice it here to say that none of these systems require understanding the Divine will. The second part of the question is, “if you aren’t going to be punished by being sent to your room with no dessert for all of eternity, why bother being moral?” The answers range from empathy as The Wife discussed to Hobbesian fear and social contractual obligation. As such, one does not need faith to deny the existence of a moral God.

The third concept is the God of personal experiences of the Divine. Here, we are not talking about something for which there is observable evidence or normative rational discourse in play at all. It is more a stance towards life, an experienced sense of connectedness or of there being “something bigger,” or an abstract notion of perfection, rather than an anthropomorphic entity. Since this phenomenological God is one that is experienced, if you don’t have such experiences or no such orientation towards living, then you don’t have it. I suppose one may or may not have faith that one will never have a religious experience, but if it is not experienced, there is no faith involved in saying, “that’s not part of my experience or orientation towards living.” I also don’t think that those of us who don’t have it are missing anything or have impoverished lives because of it.

So, does atheism require faith? No, but that’s not to say there aren’t orthodox atheists with faith.

Is atheism a religion? It depends upon what you mean by religion, of course. If you mean an organized social structure with a doctrine and rituals, then no. If you mean a view about the way the universe works, then yes.

The Bell Inequalities and Proving a Negative

Wow. As usual great questions and really good discussion. I promise I'll weigh in on the atheism and faith question tomorrow; but today, I'll start with the easy ones -- logic and quantum mechanics.

Justin asks,

I frequently hear the phrase that one "cannot disprove a negative." Is this actually true or does it depend on the context?

In order to make sense of this, we need to understand what we mean by prove and disprove. There are two kinds of sentences -- those like "It's raining" whose truth or falsity depends upon the way the world is and sentences like "It's raining or it's not raining" whose truth or falsity is a matter of the form of the sentence or the meaning of the words and does not depend upon the way the world may or may not be. A proof of a sentence means showing that there is no way for the sentence to be false, that it must be true. A disproof is a proof that the sentence must be false. Can you show that the negation of a sentence must be false?

The second sort of sentence, those that are not contingent on the state of the world, are the sort of sentences that logicians and mathematicians deal in. Here, there are some examples in which you can show that a negative claim cannot possibly be true, but in the general cases -- the interesting ones -- you cannot do it with examples. Consider the negative claim, "There are no odd perfect numbers." A perfect number is one where you take all of the positive counting numbers that it divides into evenly, exclude the number itself, add up the rest and you get the number back. 6 is perfect because the only numbers that divide 6 evenly are 6 and 1, and 2 and 3. Ignore the 6, add up 1+2+3 you get 6. 28 is perfect: 1 and 28, 2 and 14, 4 and 7 are its divisors, so ignore the 28 and add up 1+2+14+4+7=28. There are therefore even perfect numbers, but since the times of ancient Greece, the question has been whether there are any odd ones. To this day, no one knows for sure. You could prove that an odd perfect number exists with a single example of one, but you could not disprove the existence of odd perfect numbers with even a huge list of odd numbers that are not perfect because the one that is lurking out there (should there be one) may just not show up on your list yet. Enumerating examples will never produce a disproof of the claim. You can't disprove a negative...in this way. There are other routes that may work -- showing that a result of there being odd perfects contradicts a sentence we have already proven must be true, what we call an indirect proof or reductio ad absurdum.

Then there are the sentences that depend upon how the world is. These cases are different because these are not the sentences of mathematics or logic which are based upon definitions, these require observation. These are the propositions of science and generally are not the sort of sentence for which there can be proof. For these sentences, there may be evidence which shows that a sentence is more or less likely to be true, but you don't get the sort of absolute certainty that comes with proof. There are, of course, cases like "You will see red" or "Your hand will hurt" which are open to direct experience and those may be shown to be absolutely true or false at the time, but general claims, the sort of positive claims that could be laws of nature, generally can be shown false by a counter-example but never true by instances. Take Newton's law of Universal Gravitation which specifies that any two objects with mass will attract each other with a certain pull based on how much mass and how far apart they are. If I find one example where Newton's equation does not hold, the law is false, but I can show thousands of cases where it holds and that will be good evidence that it is probably true, but I will never be able to show in this way that it must be true. The converse, then, is that negative claims could be shown true by examples, but never false by instances.

But sentences do not exist in vacuums (unless you shredded your dissertation, threw it on the floor, and then decided to clean up your apartment). We often determine whether a sentence is true or false relative to what else we have good reason to believe. These things might be false, but we have good evidence for them and so can use them, until shown otherwise, as a basis against which to judge further claims. In this way, we can ask for proof relative to other sentences. We can disprove a sentence on the assumption that some theory is true. For example, if for the sake of argument we accept quantum mechanics to be true, then Einstein's negative claim that "Quantum Mechanics is not complete because there are hidden variables" can be disproved. This is what the Bell inequalities did...

Not Einstein asks,

Can you explain the significance of Bell's inequalities to me in 2 paragraphs or less?

No. But it's my blog, I'll use more paragraphs if I want to.

Quantum mechanics is the physical theory that governs the behavior of matter and energy and is particularly necessary when dealing with very small things. Its central equation is what we call Schrodinger's equation into which you can put the description of a physical system at any given time and it will show you how the state of that system changes over time. Nothing strange there -- that's what all physical theories do for you.

The first strange thing, though, is that the description of the system that gets plugged in and pulled out of Schrodinger's equation is generally a state that we never, ever observe; it's what we call a superposed state. Consider a quantum egg in a quantum egg carton, there are twelve possible places for the egg to be. If we had a "free quantum egg" and did not look inside the carton, Schrodinger's equation would tell us that the egg is in a state of superposition made up of all twelve slots -- that is, the egg in some sense is in all of the slots, just not completely. If we applied a force that affected quantum eggs, we could make it so that the superposition was more heavily in certain slots and even not at all possible in others, but the egg would still be spread out among multiple slots.

The second strange thing is that whenever we open the egg carton, we always see the egg in one and only one slot, but we can never tell which one it is going to be. If the superposed state that we get from Schrodinger's equation rules out a slot, the egg will never be there, but for all the possible slots, there is a chance it may be there. We can get from the theory the probability that we will find the egg in a given slot, but there is absolutely no way in quantum mechanics to move beyond this probability to certainty.

This has pissed off many people, among them Albert Einstein, who argued that quantum mechanics is a good theory, a useful theory, a helpful theory, but it is an incomplete theory. This probabilistic element, he contended, is the result of an incomplete description of nature. There are other facts not included in the theory as it stands that determine which slot the egg will be in, we just haven't figured out yet what these hidden variables are. If and when we find them, we can use them to augment quantum theory and create a complete theory that will allow us to accurately determine where the egg will be.

In 1964, physicist John Bell worked on this question and figured out that there would actually be physically detectable consequences if the most natural sense of Einstein's notion of hidden variables were real. He worked out a set of equations called the Bell inequalities which would hold if there were no hidden variables and fail if there were. Turns out that they hold and so there is disproof for a certain sort of claim about hidden variables. Einstein's claim, in the way Einstein most likely thought about it, was shown by Bell to be wrong. A disproof of a negative claim...sort of...

Smart folks have shown that there may be ways to reformulate the notion of hidden variables so that a detour can be found around Bell's roadblock. This is what Phil is referring to in the comments (you are quick out the blocks, Phil, my friend). And we can use this to come back to Justin's original question about disproving a negative. Has Bell shown that there can't be hidden variables? No. Disproving a negative claim in the realm of contingent sentences is tricky business. He has shown that it can't be done in the way we would expect, but he has not -- as Phil correctly points out -- shown that it must be false. Do we have reason to believe that there are hidden variables? No. But we have not disproved it.

Auto Mechanics to Quantum Mechanics: Any Questions?

For those new to the Playground, there's a schtick I use to begin each class and some former students requested that I bring it here, so every couple of months I do. I invite my students to ask me any question, auto mechanics to quantum mechanics; I'll entertain any question at all. So here it is for everyone, if there is absolutely anything you've ever wanted to ask, let 'er rip. I'll try to answer as many as I can this week.

Pity Party: Who Do You Feel Sorry For?

Lots of people deserving pity recently. Here are mine:

I feel sorry for George Allen. Former Senator Macaca tried so hard, but with Keith Ellison, the first Muslim American Congressman, being sworn in with Thomas Jefferson's personal copy of the Koran, Virgil Goode replaces Allen as the biggest racist jackass to be recently elected from Virginia.

I feel sorry for Chevy Chase, with Gerald Ford having gone the way of his talk show, one of his classic bits is gone forever.

I feel sorry for Rush Limbaugh. Nixon and Reagan both used the FBI to cover up the fact that William Renquest was addicted to painkillers and suffering from paranoid delusions. The fact that Limbaugh's own drug addiction and paranoid delusions were allowed to be made public clearly means that he just isn't that important to the conservative movement.

I feel sorry for Generals Casey and Abizade and John Negroponte. I thought that when Bush demoted you for not doing your job well, he was supposed to give you the medal of freedom.

So who do you feel sorry for today?

He Wasn't As Bad As His Brother: Why Not Speak Ill of the Dead?

When Pinochet died, the title of JayinBmore's e post over at Are You Effin' Kiddin' Me was titled "Speaking Ill of the Dead." Ever since, I've been trying to figure out what is the basis for our prohibition against speaking ill of the dead. If we are told not to tell the truth about something, surely, there is good reason. Seems like it must be one of three possible sources:

A moral prohibition:
Is it moral in that it violates a sense of fairness to say something bad about someone who cannot defend himself? You can't properly judge without full understanding of the context and the person cannot speak for himself to fill in the missing details. Is it that the person has just suffered and you don't kick someone while he is down?

An etiquette-based prohibition:
Is it a matter of politeness, making sure that one does not offend the beloved of the deceased who are already dealing with the grief of their loss? Or is it that one's reputation lives on and you may be affecting how he is seen in posterity which also affects the family?

A religiously-based prohibition:
Or is it theological -- the person is having eternal judgment passed on their soul and you don't want to jinx them since so much is at stake or when someone dies it is God's place and not that of a mortal to judge?

What is so special about death that it overrides truth? Thoughts?

Big Blinds? Ditch the Sunglasses.

When the PGA was asked to accommodate golfer Casey Martin’s disability, they could have learned a thing or two from the World Poker Tour – it’s amazing how they’ve been able to make provisions for so many blind players. O.k., the guy sitting in the big blind isn’t really blind, but what’s up with all the sunglasses? If their “World Series of Poker” truly aspires to be Super Bowl of the card game, they need to eliminate the use of sunglasses, hoods, and any other means of obstructing a clear view of players’ faces.

The players use sunglasses to give them a competitive advantage. In my article discussing sportsmanship in the case of Garry Kasparov’s complaints against the programmers of Deep Blue, I argued that an advantage to a competitor is unfair if there is a benefit to the competitor that is not attributable to increased skill, improved strategy, or superior effort. A player should only advance his or her game if he or she is playing better, smarter, or harder. In baseball, for example, it is wrong to use a corked bat, that is, batters will drill out the center of the wood and insert a piece of cork in order to give the bat increased flexibility thereby making the ball jump off the bat and go significantly farther. In this case, the batter hits the ball farther even though he is no stronger, no better at making contact, and has the same stance and swing. The improved performance is not attributable to skill or effort.

In poker, there are three main skills. First, one has to be able to read the cards in able to determine a good betting strategy. Given what you are holding, what cards are showing on the table, and what game you are playing, how likely is it that you are holding the winning hand and given that likelihood how should one bet the hand?

Second, you need to be able to read the other players. To win, you not only need a good hand, you need a better hand than those you are betting against. The challenge of poker is in the asymmetric distribution of information – everyone knows different facts about who has what – and part of the game is to try to discern from how someone else is acting what they are probably holding. Really good poker players will be able to tell what you know from how you act. If someone, late in the game checks his down cards before betting large, he probably has a good hand and just wanted to make sure that the card he thought was down there really was still there. This is a classic tell that the player is not bluffing.

The third skill, is the converse of the second – not getting read. Great players have “poker faces,” stoic expressions that do not ever change, no matter the scenario. As such, you can never tell whether they are bluffing or holding a big hand. Others, knowing they don’t have a good poker face, go in the other direction and over-emote. They’ll talk and talk, feign surprise, joy, or wail at how bad their cards are so that any tell that might slip must be considered suspiciously – was that intentional?

This is where the sunglasses come in. The eyes are the key to reading a player and if you are wearing sunglasses, your eyes can’t be read. This means that the glasses convey an advantage that does not come from an improved game and should not be allowed.

Of course, the rules of all games are arbitrary. As long as everyone plays by the same rules, there things are fair. If anyone can use sunglasses, then it is not cheating. No one should have an unmatched technological advantage. This was what made the Casey Martin question interesting. Golf requires a lot of walking and this wears down the competitors over the course of the day, making the later holes more challenging. Using a golf cart would eliminate this part of the challenge and generally convey an unfair advantage to the rider over the walker. But Martin had a disability that made walking very painful. The question was whether his degree of challenge doing limited walking with an impaired leg was commensurate with significant walking with unimpaired legs. Was it a level playing field or one slanted in his favor?

The use of sunglasses in poker, however, is not there to level the playing field, but to allow everyone the same slant. If everyone was allowed to ride carts, scores would go down and more impressive shots would be hit. If corked bats were allowed, more and more impressive home runs would be hit. But part of being a championship level competition is to have the best players playing the most difficult incarnation of the game. Greens on pro courses are the trickiest to putt on. Major League hitters must use wood and not aluminum bats. This is part of what makes the big leagues the big leagues. But with poker, you are allowed to hide your face making the game easier in a way that does not require improved skill, strategy or effort. Pulling a sweatshirt hood over your face will keep your opponent from reading you in large part, but not because you have a better poker face, something that ought to be required from someone vying to be considered one of the world’s best players of the game. If the “World Series of Poker” wants to be seen more seriously than the Little League World Series, they need to ditch the sunglasses. Have the players’ face the music...with their real faces.

Saddam, Pinochet, and the Notion of Justice

Helmut, over at Phronesisiacal, says it right:

Two dead tyrants: Saddam and Pinochet. Two tragedies: that neither death is justice, whether the death came naturally or as the result of a bogus, politicized trial and state execution. Apologists for Pinochet on the right ought to be ashamed. Apologists for Saddam from the left ought to be ashamed. To the extent that neither are ashamed, they're moral cretins. The point is tyranny and the prescription is to bring tyrants to justice, real justice, for their abuses. Killing someone for expediency's sake or political reasons itself sleeps on the side of tyranny and only makes space for future tyrants and future states of exception.

If we follow Helmut and desire "to bring tyrants to justice, real justice," the obvious question is "What is real justice?" and the non-obvious question is "Should justice ought to be our concern anyway?"

When we think of justice, we generally think in terms of retribution. If someone wrongs another, the line goes, (1) the perpetrator should set things right as far as possible, for example, if he stole something it should be returned or if he destroyed something the victim should be monetarily compensated, and (2) the perpetrator should suffer some sort of harm himself commensurate with the suffering he inflicted. In cases like those of Pinochet and Saddam, clearly neither (1) nor (2) are possible. Great bodily suffering, of course, could be inflicted, but surely cruel and unusual punishment ought to be loathed for good moral reasons even when we seethe with disgust for people's decisions and actions.

So given that there is no chance for retribution of the classical variety, is death the only acceptable alternative? The line one often hears is that the killing is the one thing that we can give the families of the victims. Set aside whether attempts to satisfy the primal urge for revenge is a good in itself and whether they actually are satisfied by the execution, is it true that taking the life of the perpetrator is the only good that can be done for the families?

In South Africa, they chose differently. Perpetrators were seen to have value beyond a life that could be ended or bodies that could be incarcerated; they also had memories. A question some philosophers have been discussing is whether the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (a) traded truth for justice, allowing perpetrators to escape retribution if they could provide the families of victims with information about their loved ones and the circumstances surrounding their demise, or (b) engaged a notion of justice other than retribution. The idea that having to come clean for your actions, to admit them publicly before your peers is itself a form of justice different from that connected with punishment.

Saddam was executed for his atrocities. Pinochet lived out his natural life protected by allies placed in the government despite his atrocities. But in neither case did we get an honest accounting of what they had done. And that seems an additional harm to the victims.

Even in South Africa, the perpetrators of the most heinous offenses were not eligible for amnesty, and that is surely not what I am proposing here. I'm not saying what ought to have happened was some "come clean and we'll forgive and forget" type deal. But it does seem that there are questions in Chile and Iraq that could have been answered, that for the sake of the families should have been answered, and now never can. In the case of Chile, some in Spain and Britain tried unsuccessfully to intervene and create a forum where such truths would be brought out. In the case of Iraq, the rush to execute Saddam on charges not connected to his most horrific crimes seems almost designed to make sure none of the information came to light. Whether it was by design or not, it is now impossible for those families to ever really know what they might have known. For people who have suffered so much, it seems an additional injustice committed in the name of justice.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

On this, the first day of the first year H.E., we must recognize the righteous folks at Turner Classic Movies who schedule the annual Marx Brothers’ marathon. Watching Animal Crackers, I was struck by the line sung by Groucho (blessed be he), “I hate a dirty joke, I do, unless it's told by someone who knows how to tell it.”

So, here’s a new year’s Comedist question for everyone, “What is a dirty joke?” The obvious answer is a joke about sex. But surely not every joke about sex is a dirty joke. Suppose the sex is mentioned, but not referred to as in:

Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Fornication.
Fornication who?
For an occasion like this, black tie is optional.

Or suppose it is referred to, but not mentioned:

I went to the Frito-Lay factory and took the tour because they said there would be free samples, but all I got was a lousy bag of Fritos.

Or suppose it is a joke where the punchline is based on the lack of expected sexual content as in the classics:

Farmer Brown had a cow and decided it was time to call his neighbor to bring over his bull. The neighbor sent his daughter to take the bull over to his neighbor’s. Farmer Brown’s son stood next to his neighbor’s daughter and as the cow and the bull got on with their business, he turned and said to her, “You know, that makes me want to do the same thing.” Looking up, the farmer’s daughter replied, “Go ahead, it’s your cow.”

Or the related,

Sol Rosenberg turns 90 and as a surprise his friends sent a hooker to his room in the home. Taking off her coat she says, “I’m here to give you super sex.” “What?” says Sol. A little louder she says, “I’m here to give you super sex.” “Huh?” Sol asks. Louder still she says, “I’m here to give you super sex.” Looking up, Sol replies, “If it’s alright, I’ll take the soup.”

Are any of these dirty jokes? What is it that makes a joke dirty? And if you don’t know, what’s your best?

Looking Back at the Year 0

Brothers, Sisters, and Transgendered Comedists Everywhere,

So the year Comedism went worldwide is coming to a close. We will designate it year 0, the year between B.C. (before Comedism) and H. E. (humorous era). What were there funniest parts of 0? My nominations:

Funniest radio dedication: "Someone wanted to send this one out to Congressman Mark Foley, Bob Seger's 'Turn the Page.'"

Best bit of the year: Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Press Corp's Annual Dinner...at least up until the video bit.

Funniest hunting accident: No contest

Funniest version of Hava Nagila: The Freaking Brothers

Funniest Mug Shot: Tom Delay

Funniest Onion Headline: Critics Blast Bush For Not Praying Hard Enough

Other humorous highlights?

Watch Out! I'm Dangerous!

With so much competition these days, it’s hard to get any recognition for your efforts in corrupting the youth. But every once in a while...

One of the classes that I, Aspazia, and everyone else in our department teaches, a course that goes by the seemingly innocuous name, “Contemporary Moral Issues,” has been listed on the right-wing website Family Security Matters as one of ten of "America's Most Dangerous College Courses.” This is funny and disturbing on many, many levels.

First, our department at Gettysburg is extremely quirky. In the world of very staid, starched collared philosophy departments, we have an unusually large number of offerings that are not only creative and off the beaten path, but the sort of courses that right-wing nutjobs would get their panties twisted in a knot over. But Contemporary Moral Issues ain’t one of them. That class is everywhere. It’s standard fare. There are a huge number of textbooks on the market for these courses and pretty much all of them look the same which means that not only is it a course that is taught all over, but pretty much identically taught all over. If Mr. Rantz wants to list some of our courses as dangerous, a little research might prove useful. I, for instance, will be teaching a course next semester entitled, “Wrong Science, Bad Science, and Pseudo-science” that will examine issues including intelligent design and the false claims of there being a scientific controversy, the corporate influence on science, and the way partisan appointments affect what government scientists can tell the public. Let me invite others to nominate their "most dangerous" courses.

Second, I love the hypocrisy. We hear over and over and over again from the right how we need to teach morality, we need to teach values. Ok, what would such a class look like? I guess it would look at, oh, I don’t know,...contemporary moral issues and discuss them intelligently.

But I suppose the most worrisome part is the model of education that Mr. Rantz has in his head. There are two pictures that get presented by conservatives in their war on learning. One is to extrapolate from the high school classroom to the college classroom. Often in secondary education, the model is training rather than teaching. The teacher says something, you write it down, remember it, believe it is true, and write it on the exam. This is clearly the model behind the testing fetish of those who brought us “No Child Left Behind.” The world is comprised of facts, education’s task is to put those facts in kids’ heads, and we need to make sure they know all the important facts. Teaching, on this model, is just a form of indoctrination. This, of course, is NOT how the college classroom works. I am not out there creating “Gimbel Youth” when I teach any class, but least of all Contemporary Moral Issues. That class is about moral reasoning; it teaches how to think about hard ethical questions, not what to think. That distinction between process and result is the one that folks like Mr. Rantz need to understand. Everything deserves to be thought about careful, cleanly, and rigorously. That goes double for the hard ethical questions facing us today. Legitimate discourse is not comprised of O’Reilly-style rants where the goal is simply to shout louder than your opponent whom you are trying to dehumanize. We need to learn to take all positions seriously, subject them all to rigorous scrutiny, reject those that fail to meet muster, and rationally, but passionate discuss those conflicting views that are left. That is what Contemporary Moral Issues is all about and if that is dangerous, I plead guilty.

But then there’s the other conservative understanding of education that gets all of this and still objects. I had a rabid conservative Christian once tell me that my course “Critical Thinking” was incredibly dangerous and should not be taught because it trained people to doubt, to demand evidence, and to question their own faith. Yes it does. And it does more. It gives them the tools to see where they are being bullshitted, lied to, and tricked. And it gives them the tools to build arguments, good, solid, rational arguments for what they believe and enunciate it clearly and persuasively. This course does lead many students to re-evaluate positions they had accepted unquestioningly for their whole lives. Some change their views, others think hard, and realize that there is good reason to hold the beliefs they have. But that sort of process is healthy – especially for a society that claims to be a democracy.* A flourishing democracy requires rational, passionate discussion and anyone who seeks to undermine it is not only unamerican, but truly dangerous.

I wish I could flatter myself and think that I am one of those dangerous academics the right keeps screaming about. But, fact is, it’s just philosophy. It’s questioning presuppositions, building arguments for alternatives, and evaluating the relative strength of those arguments. If you find that worrisome or problematic and want to see something dangerous, may I suggest a mirror?




*Void where prohibited. May not apply in Florida and Ohio. Consult Diebold for details.

Old Friends

Aspazia wrote a touching post the other day on that feeling of never being able to outgrow one’s place in the family. Old discomforts and awkwardnesses persist regardless of how much you’ve changed or grown. But I’ve been thinking about the flip side of that sentiment.

In my circuitous journey through life thus far, I have met many, many people. Some unbelievably intelligent, others incredibly funny, still others caring and humane, but never have I found a cluster of people like the friends with whom I grew up. Yes, I know Wolfe wrote, “You can’t go home again,” and Heraclitus wrote “No man steps in the same river twice,” but they are both wrong.

The measure of a true friend is not whether he or she always remains a central player in your life. A better criteria is after getting separated in the daily hecticness, having pursued your projects and dreams, growing and changing, whether that old spark is still there, whether there is even a moment's hesitation before the old playfulness returns.

Stephen King ends “Stand By Me” with the line, “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” I am incredibly blessed in true Comedist fashion to have those folks still with me. We can go decades between encounters, but put us in a room and there is the same pun-filled, movie quoting, old-joke making banter, the same affectionate ribbing, the same everything. It’s a different flavor from what you experience with your parents, children, or partner, but there is a kind of unconditional love from old friends that comes from a deep knowledge of who you are – they were there that night when you (fill in the blank) and that time when you (fill in the blank), and you never would have gotten through (fill in the blank) without them, so don’t even think of trying to put on airs. These are people you can’t bullshit. These are people with whom you are completely free to be who you are. And that sort of security lends itself to laughing, the sort of full body, soul-cleansing laughter that only comes from being in a place of love.

Gwydion is my oldest friend. He was the first person to ever say aloud my name spelled backwards. After leaving for college, we spoke on the phone occasionally and saw each other sporadically at best. Then he came to the graduate writing program at Hopkins where I was working on my doctorate one floor above. It was like we had never been separated. He introduced me to racquetball and it was like we were still eight – “O.k., this time you have to bounce it off one wall, over this line, hit it behind your back, turn around...” And now we have respectable careers, live-long loves, responsibilities we could never have imagined in Mrs. Tompakov’s first grade class, but to be in a room with him, and Egg, and You Know Who, and Mrs. You Know Who, and the rest of the gang is just like it was then. No one is as funny as old friends.

More Bad Gifts

My discussion of bad gifts got picked up a couple of places, including the Sacramento Bee and the Washington Times (yes, that Washington Times).

Let me make one clarification. I am not saying that there are no cases in which gift cards make good gifts. My folks and TheWife's folks have given us gift certificates to some of our favorite restaurants with IOU's to babysit. In this case, the gift certificate was a wonderful gift, but its worth was not purely in the thing that it bought -- the food. Instead what it represented was a nice night out with a person I love, something difficult when you have youngins. Similarly, a gift certificate to, say, a spa could be a wonderfully caring gift for someone who deserves pampering, but who you know does not have the money for it or would never spend the money on herself. But in line with my thesis, it is the experience, the doing and not the having, that is important here. Yes, this is a long way of saying thanks Mom and Dad for the gift certificate to The Wife's favorite Persian restuarant (if you are in the Baltimore area and haven't gone to the Orchard Market Cafe -- boy oh boy are you missing a good one).

That being said, back to bad gifts...what's the worst gift you've gotten?

James Brown, RIP

The Godfather of soul, the hardest working man in show business, soul brother number 1, the one and only Jaaaaaaames Brown has left us.

In addition to his own magnificent works, he had a lasting effect on popular music. Brown's work putting the accent on "The One," the first beat of measure, gave a special funk to his music. It was well learned by his later bass player Bootsy Collins, who took it to his work with George Clinton who spread the funky gospel far and wide.

My favorite James Brown related story: I was playing summer ball one year and one day the coach showed up looking off. He explained that his wife was pissed at him because she found out why he wanted to get married on May 3rd. He wanted to make sure he never forgot his anniversary, so he picked a date he could remember...James Brown's birthday.

Sad news, indeed. Papa's in a brand new box. Thanks JB. Rest in peace.

Christmas Questions

A few things I've never understood about the whole Christmas thing:

How is it a silent night if you are all out in it singing "Silent Night"?

Who was Carol anyway?

If it is Jesus' birthday why do you get the presents?

If a child was an avid coal collector and wanted nothing other than more samples for Christmas, but was extremely naughty all year, what would Santa bring for him?

Since it's Christmas and anyone who could answer the questions is too busy to read blogs today, here's a quick one for Jewish readers:

Apple sauce or sour cream?

The Chanukization of Judaism

In the space between Chanukah and Christmas, I had one of those realizations that on the one hand is trivial, but on the other makes you really think. We were saying the blessings before lighting the candles at my brother’s house on the third night and a discontinuity arose that I had known about since I was a kid. When we all said the words together, my father pronounced those that involve the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet in the Ashkenazi (European Jews) fashion, with an “s” sound. My brother and I use the Sephardic (Middle Eastern Jews) pronunciation, a “t” sound as we were taught in Hebrew school. We, and everyone at the school -- including the teachers, were of European origin; so why were we taught the Sephardic pronunciation? It was only this year that I figured it out.

Chanukah is a minor holiday that has been elevated to a major focus of contemporary Jewish life solely in order to provide a counter-point to Christmas. Unlike the other celebrations, the Talmud does not have a discussion of Chanukah. It is the only Jewish holiday dedicated to a military victory and that made the rabbis uneasy about it. Judaism is not a aggressive system of belief, it is not a theology of the conqueror, but a philosophical approach based upon being an outsider, considering how to treat the powerless. It wears its tribal, nomadic roots in the open. Unlike Christianity and Islam, it is a non-evangelical religion. If you weren’t born into the tribe, they don’t want you. If you demand to come in loud enough, they’ll let you, but don’t expect a free toaster for signing up. Chanukah celebrates not just the miracle of the oil, but control over land. The spirit is a commemoration of “this is ours, get the hell out,” and that is not the true tenor of Jewish thought.

But this accident the calendar mirrors a change in Judaism itself. In Hebrew school, they would spend a third of the time teaching the Hebrew language, a third of the time teaching Jewish history where you learned how every major civilization that came down the pike beat the living crap out of your ancestors, and the final third teaching theology where you learned that Jews are “G-d’s Chosen People” (tm). After a while you began to wish that He would choose someone else for a while to give those poor Jews a break.

Then came the horror of World War II. Suddenly technology had advanced to a point where true annihilation, something threatened from ancient times forward, actually became possible. Out of the realization of the very real chance that their deepest collective fear could be realized came the establishment of Israel.

The original spirit of Israel was one of the Kumbaya Yiddles, idealistic leftists seeking a social laboratory to create a caring communal corner of Creation. But, of course, the actual history ended up elevating the modern-day Maccabees. Judaism after WWII became Zionism and Zionism once it was on the ground required a much more aggressive stance. The generals were given the lion’s share of the social capital. All of a sudden, the spirit of the religion as practiced became one that more resembles Chanukah than Yom Kippur.

And that is precisely why we were taught to speak Hebrew with a Middle Eastern accent. We were being prepared to go to Israel. It was the first aggressive step in our indoctrination. We were being made into Chanukah Jews.

I don’t know why it took me a quarter of a century to connect the dots. But next year, if I light the candles, I will pronounce it with an “s” and make sure that my children hear it that way.