19 March 2008

I HAVE DEFECTED TO WORDPRESS

http://sixteenvoices.wordpress.com/

It just works better. Sorry blogger!

18 February 2008

Horse-trading and instability in Communist Czechoslovakia

Horse-trading is "negotiation accompanied by mutual concessions and shrewd bargaining". I think much of the power dynamic under totalitarian regimes depends on horse-trading. This is unstable. More effective is inculcating "false consciousness" in your citizens: then they'll support you even as you act against them. If I was Putin, this would look like a good strategy.

No through-line, sloppy conclusions: that is the best this post has to offer. But I've been wrestling with this for a couple of weeks - maybe someone can shed some light on this area, because I don't seem able to do it for myself...

In 1989 the Czech state was badly weakened. In November of that year people spilled onto the streets and the old regime fell. It seems there was nobody to defend Communism against collapse - all it took (and please excuse me while I pull a number from nowhere) was for 10% of the population to rebel and the remainder to do nothing, and bang! New government. No more USSR.

I think we can assume that the UK and US states wreck enough people's lives to produce an underclass of equivalent size to that which rebelled in November 1989 and brought down the Communist regime. 10% of the population must be in pretty dire straits (there's that number again - it says here that 11.4 million people in the UK live on low incomes).

But this leaves a puzzle: in the UK and US we have this underclass - yet government change in these two countries occurs without drastic upheaval and revolution. Whatever the extent to which people might despise George W Bush or Gordon Brown, be opposed to the Iraq war, dislike tax levels or whatever, they aren't fundamentally opposed to the state and its basic institutions.

What explains the difference in mass behaviour? It must be to do with what the other 90% are doing. In the Czech Republic in 1989, the 90% just went with the flow. In the US and UK, they must be resisting rebellion - I don't mean by taking to the streets, but just refusing in general to go along with the 10%. They resist by being immobile, not active.

Let's look for a minute at the difference in relationship between state and citizen is in the US/UK and pre-revolution Czechoslovakia.

The Communist State wanted its organs and civil society to behave according to a set of goals and priorities that were some way out of step with what many of its citizens themselves considered important: essentially, it needed its citizens to act against their own interests.

To achieve cooperation, the Communist state offered its citizens a complex bargain: to be left alone, on the understanding the citizen never overstepped the boundaries of permitted action.

This horse-trading left a citizenry fundamentally at odds with its leadership: a citizenry tolerant of but opposed to the state. It put the state in a precarious position - it relied on its citizens' consent to remain in power, but was securing that consent contrary to the conscious wishes of its citizens.

Although the Communists had managed to get people to voluntarily act against their own interests, their solution was inherently unstable - should anything happen to drastically weaken the State, its citizens would be expected to rise up against it rather than in support of it.

Obviously, it's better if a state can rely on its citizens to defend it - to oppose the rebellious - rather than accept whatever change is afoot. I think this is the major difference between the Communist regimes, and the UK and US (and, I suppose, Putin's Russia).

In all states there is an underclass ("the 10%"), but I think the politically advanced states know that the important thing is not to get people to put up and shut up (which was the Communists' technique for control) but to make sure the other 90% don't roll over when the 10% get fractious. The US and UK governments may or may not do this by design. Putin may well be using this as his strategy.

How do you isolate the 10%? You need to convince the 90% that everything is OK for them - then the 10% can get as fractious as they like, but it will have no repercussions for the stability of the state.

It's at this point I wanted to include Marx's notion of false consciousness: in the UK and US, there is a lot of people there whose interests are not represented by government policy - who are increasingly alienated from government.

My intuition was that inculcation of false consciousness is one technology of power particularly important in advanced (and above all, stable) states. But I no longer see where that fits into the picture - it's not obvious to me that the 10% live in a state of false consciousness. And it's not obvious to me that the other 90% do, either.

To be honest, I don't even know what false consciousness is. I suspect that it's better simply to look at communications and propaganda, and think about how that can have its effects, than worry about false consciousness - an almost meta-psychological state which will be different in every different circumstance.

Although I'm sure a lot of people believe that many policies are working in their favour when they aren't, I don't see if that's enough for them to live in false consciousness. Until I know how many people live in a state of false consciousness, I don't know what role it can have in explaining power dynamics.

All I can conclude with is the obvious: systematic misrepresentation of State agenda garners a more stable, consensual support from citizens, which represses a revolutionary instinct. States which employ this power technology will last longer than those which don't... I just wonder where the weaknesses are in this system?

I suspect in alienation from the political process. More rambling on that another time.

Discussion group has moved

The Google Group I set up turned out to be lame. I think Facebook will work better as a forum - it's more tightly integrated with updates, works better with the blog, is better for discussion - and instantly got thirteen members where the Google Group got, um, three.

So, long live Facebook - with a few quid pro quos. Go to the new forum here. (You will need a Facebook account. It's not sooo bad.)

12 February 2008

The importance of being wrong

What if it's more important to communicate - and be thought wrong - than it is to be right? (I guess this is another way of saying "no publicity is bad publicity".)

I was thinking last night about social networking and Metcalfe's law (as you do). And I got to thinking about being thought to be wrong about something, which happens to me sometimes.

And then I thought about what would happen if I spoke to someone who disagreed with me about something important, and if that was necessarily a bad thing - from a communications perspective, at least.

This is something that happened recently. I'm cultivating a blogger for work - she's articulate and interested in what my organisation does. Interested enough to want to talk about it with her professors and friends.

Because I'm a filthy environmentalist, her professors haven't always taken too kindly to what it is she has to say about what it is I have to say. In short, they think I'm as wrong as anything.

So wrong, in fact, that they go around telling their friends just how darned wrong I am.

Intuitively, you might think this is a problem, if I'm supposed to be recruiting people to the cause. But the more I think about it, the less certain I am this is a bad thing.

These people who go around telling their friends and colleagues how wrong I am are bound to bump into someone who disagrees with them about me being wrong. I imagine the conversation would go like this:
Questioner: "Who do you day is wrong, again?"
Jerk-who-disagrees-with-me: "That Paul asshole, he's the guy who's wrong."
Quesitoner: "Uh-huh."

Because of that exchange, the questioner will know who I am and where to find me. I'll have successfully connected with someone, even though the linking person thought I was wrong.

Sure, it would be better if they had thought I was right - then I'd be connected with two people instead of one, and I'd have someone evangelising for me instead of telling everyone what a doofus I am. But it's still a darned sight better than nothing.

It may even be that this is the best way to deal with these people who think I'm wrong - the chances of me convincing them I'm right are about zero, at least in the short-term. So they might as well go around telling people that I'm wrong - at least they're doing more than nothing.

As a concluding leap too far, there is a tie-in to Foucault here (kind of). Discourse isn't shaped by an instinct for truth - it's shaped by social forces. The social forces can't act on silence, so to give yourself any chance of winning an argument-at-large (meaning, getting society to go along with you rather than your opponent) you have to hang it out there and be thought of as wrong.

At least that way the discourse is happening and the conflict begins. Whether or not it ends up resolved the way you want - well, maybe that is where convincing people becomes more important. But I don't think it's enough to be right.

01 February 2008

The funnies are mocking me

I like Dilbert because it mocks my colleagues. Today, Dilbert was mocking me. Fortunately my self-esteem got an 11th hour reprieve from the UnderstandingSociety blog.

Today's Dilbert goes a bit like this (I'd reproduce it, but that would be copyright infringement - and besides, it won't fit in the column - if you want, you can see the cartoon here).
Girl: Do you have any hobbies?
Boy: I like to read obscure articles on the internet and imagine having friends who are interested in the same things.
Now that I've found UnderstandingSociety I no longer have to imagine there are people out there who are interested in the same things as me.

All I need to do is imagine that the blogger is my friend.

29 January 2008

It's too easy to control journalists - so we need to end media monopolies

The value of a diverse media lies not in education of people, but in maintaining diversity of world-view in society. Since news is easy to manipulate through soft censorship, media monopolies must be discouraged - because they threaten the social conflict on which meaningful democracy is based.

The Soviet states pulled out toenails in order to get people to say the right things. In Western media, however, a lot of journalists seem to say the "right" things in support of certain agendas without having to be threatened at all.

I will take it as fact that censorship still exists (I have a lot of time for Media Lens, for example) but the techniques are softer. Not always much softer, if stories I hear about the Maxwell years at the Mirror and Murdoch's reinvention of the Sun are anything to go by. But softer nonetheless.

I want to note that I don’t think soft censorship and media control are a conspiracy – at least, not quite. I don’t believe in a faceless cartel planning together to subvert the media. Nor do I believe the mass media designed to be vulnerable to control.

Nonetheless, I do think segments of the mass media are being used to propound a certain way of looking at the world, and I do believe mass media lends itself to certain kinds of control. This is because of the kind of thing the media is and how news production is structured.

The basic hierarchy relating to news in a newspaper starts at the bottom with reporters, who are answerable to the news editor, who is answerable to the Editor of the paper, who is answerable to the paper’s owner/s.

Editors are hired and fired for their ability to put together a paper that satisfies the owners (financially, ideologically, or both). News editors are hired and fired according to their ability to produce a news section which satisfies the editor. Reporters are hired and fired according to their ability to find stories and write them up in time.

In short, everyone is dependent on pleasing the editor in order to keep their jobs: the news editor puts together a news schedule which he thinks will keep the editor off his back; reporters write the stories with the slant necessary for them to keep the news editor happy.

Which stories are covered and the angle of coverage are therefore tightly controlled, in a way similar to what you would find in a company PR department. The difference is that in a PR department, employees knowingly submit to an explicit agenda – whereas in a newspaper the agenda is not often explicitly stated.

I guess the reason is that it suits the media owners to perpetuate the illusion that journalists are trustworthy. If media magnates were open about the control they are able to exercise, they might find it harder to get away with censoring and shaping what we read.

It’s probably worth digressing into the question of why journalists accept so much control - why the Pilgers and Monbiots of this world are exceptions in a mass of reporters who don’t speak out about the pressures on them to conform.

I don’t think it’s just the threat of losing their jobs which keeps journalists in line. To some extent, I think they willingly buy into the system – in fact, I don’t think they even realise they are being manipulated. (This might be heart of Maxwell’s and Murdoch’s legacies – they broke the popular media like you would break a horse. But more on that in future.)

The problem journalists have, which explains why they are so accepting of the status quo, is they are not only journalists but also members of the public. They get most of their information from the same sources as the public. They have been raised and live in the same culture as the public. They therefore have the same set of background beliefs and values which form the context in which they make judgements.

If the public’s world-view is tolerant of the mass media, then it is no surprise that journalists are also tolerant of the mass media: they have the same point of view.

The trouble the Soviet Union had with journalists came about precisely because there was a chasm between what the public and the journalists were supposed to say and what the journalists and public thought. The threat of violence had to be ever-present in order to ensure conformity. There is no such need in our system.

All this serves to emphasise why the media must not be controlled by a very few businessmen. If it is so controlled, then there will be only one value system dispensing information to the public.

Although there will be superficial differences between papers to appeal to their readership, the underlying values promoted by the papers will be the same. The large-scale coverage of major events will be the same, as the owners will have the same vested interests in them.

As a result, everyone will end up having fundamentally the same beliefs. The conflict between classes and political parties will be neutralised and replaced by a homogenous, business-centric world-view. We will all agree with each other on the important issues of major events - regardless of whether that viewpoint benefits us or not.

And there is the danger: the value of a free media lies not in its ability to educate people and keep them exposed to other points of view. In general, people have their points of view and read the papers they agree with. The value of a free media lies in keeping a diverse set of world-views in society, so that there is conflict between classes and political parties, so that concessions have to be made.

Without conflict there can be no democracy. If everyone thinks the same, it means only one viewpoint is having its way.

Although I don't believe that people are all that different, we do all come from different backgrounds and live in different economic and social strata. I therefore cannot believe that one viewpoint and one politics is able to serve us all.

Because we all have different interests, not all of which can be fulfilled completely and simultaneously, there must therefore be conflict in society - and this conflict must be resolved through compromise.

If there is no conflict and no act of compromise, entire social demographics must be buying into a system that does not serve their interests - as sure as if this is small landowners under communism, or the working classes under unregulated capitalism.

If we are unaware of what we need, I do not see how we can be happy or free. This is why the great victory of the tycoon - manipulation and control the system of distributing information to change the values of a reasonably free society – must not be allowed to happen. And the first step to that must be to prevent ownership of the media gathering in the hands of a few.

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21 January 2008

Why Chomsky ain't yet dead

Naive despots set up a conflict between people's innate commitment to truthfulness and people's desire to live a successful life (family, job, money, whatever). Smart despots know it is much more effective to produce citizens who don’t value truthfulness - because then Chomsky can talk all he wants, but his words will have no effect.

It is not in the interests of a political hegemony dependent for its survival on widespread misunderstanding of its activities to encourage its subjects to take too deep an interest in social and political matters. Its subjects should be encouraged to place more value on objects such as having a job, or a family, or education, or some such, than finding out what is really going on and whether or not what is really going on is the kind of thing that should be going on.

That is to say, the ruling class shouldn't encourage its subjects to over-value truthfulness - it should dampen the will to find out what is really going on - because the leadership has much more freedom if the populace is not inclined to inquire too deeply into what the leadership is doing.

The model of State suppression of inquisitive tendencies with which I am most familiar with is the kind employed under Soviet rule in eastern Europe after WW2. The system basically worked in the way that, so long as you agreed not to ask awkward questions, or voice your concerns about the leadership’s actions, or say anything that contradicted party doctrine, you were allowed to live a quiet life in peace. You had a reasonable job, your children could go to high school and university, you had a pension.

If you didn’t cooperate, you could expect to lose your job and social benefits, go to prison, suffer police persecution and generally live a pretty miserable existence. It was generally understood that you had a choice: you could either try to expose and oppose the corruption of the State and suffer for it - or you could live as though everything were fine and live a peaceful existence.

The puzzle is why this model of state control is not applied today in countries in Europe and the United States. There is no obvious conflict in the US between a commitment to truthfulness and living a life: we are free to inquire if we want, and to criticize without fear of violent reprisals.

How is it that Chomsky gets published and avoids being shot or locked up? How come I can read Chomsky’s books and check his claims against declassified policy planning documents? It is inconceivable that this could have happened in Eastern Europe before 1989.

I guess some people must be shot or locked up for knowing and saying too much - but why hasn’t the US, Britain and much of Europe gone the way of the despotic, closed, nakedly totalitarian regimes so prevalent in much of the world?

I suppose that some might respond that it's because the truth is sacred in our society. I reject that. There is plenty of evidence to show that the truth is far from sacred. The question just asks itself again: what has happened, such that we live in a society where truth indeed appears to be sacred? Part of the answer, I think, lies in recognizing some of the defects in the communist-despotic approach.

By engineering a society in which you could only have either truthfulness or some other thing which you valued, the Soviet leadership created a social context in which truthfulness clearly conflicted with other values, where you had to choose either one or the other, and in which you were aware of the sacrifice you were making.

This produced a schizophrenic society, especially in Eastern Europe. Because they lived in a social situation in which truthfulness conflicted with other ideals, many people were committed to truthfulness but forced to choose something else. They knew something was wrong, so there was an audience for the dissidents: the dissidents could speak, and people knew they were telling the truth. People went to bed at night knowing they had struck a compromise with the State: peace in exchange for silence.

The behaviour of the State reinforced the sense that something was wrong: people who opposed the State were spirited away, arrested and - in the early days - shot. A large effort went into propaganda to try to persuade Soviet subjects that the victims of state oppression deserved it, but a large group of people were profoundly unconvinced.

In short, the Soviet system suppressed questioning but failed to eliminate the desire to question. The leadership effectively created an underclass of subdued opponents, tolerant of the either/or deal they were offered while the leadership was still strong enough to enforce it, but neither at heart loyal nor at all ignorant of the social injustices which they suffered.

What would work better than the Soviet system? (It's time to put on my policy-planning hat.)

If I wanted to be part of an economic and political elite, I would need a good economy and a political situation in which revolution (or any kind of regime change) was as unlikely as possible. Secrecy is necessary for me fulfilling my goals, but the Soviet system of suppression is incompatible with my primary objectives. I need a better way to keep out of sight, something economically preferable that doesn’t create an angry underclass.

I think it would be better to figure out a way to dissolve the dilemma, rather than crush dissent whilst allowing the dilemma to continue existing in peoples’ consciousness. I would discourage questioning of the leadership by giving people other things to do (walk off rather than ask questions). I would also give people the impression that they understand what is going on when in fact they don’t (through intelligent media control rather than blatant suppression of dissent and publishing obvious propaganda).

Critically, I would not actually go very far to hide anything. I would allow people who are interested in reading declassified documents to read them. I would allow people to openly discuss whatever they felt was worth discussing, in order to make people feel secure and that the leadership is open and trustworthy, whilst doing everything I could to manufacture a society that doesn’t question, is not interested in politics, and above all that won’t listen to the dissenting few who point at my failings and what is said in the declassified documents that reveal what is really going on behind the appearances and the rhetoric.

If I had Chomsky shot, or if I banned his books, I would be sending the message that what he said was important enough that it needed covering up. I would be better off tolerating him and creating a society that doesn’t listen to him. Shooting him would be utterly counter-productive because it would help create a society that listens. I would accept that dissent must exist in a stable society. What I would do is create a social context in which dissent doesn’t matter.

That's why Chomsky isn't dead yet.


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15 January 2008

The intelligent postmodern contention

Foucault draws our attention to a historical fallacy. We forget when interpreting events that our concepts are a product of those events. Since our concepts didn't exist before the events, we can't legitimately draw on them to explain the events.

The intelligent postmodernist contention is that the network of concepts which form part of a social institution cannot be used to explain how the institution has come to have the form it does: the concepts are a product of these changes, and therefore can't have a causal role in the development of the system.

These concepts are part and product of the development of the system - they have their own history, their own contingency, and need explaining and evaluating as much as the system they describe. In fact, you can't describe the history of the system without paying attention to the history of the concepts in the system: earlier concepts gave birth to the system and the resulting concepts.

For example, there was a drastic change in the institution of punishment between 1750 and 1850. The change was well-known to historians of the penal system, but until Foucault came along the change was generally explained in terms of an increasing humanisation of the system, brought about by greater recognition of the rights of the criminal (or some such).

Foucault's observation in Discipline and Punish is that the increased degree of humanity exhibited in the modern penal process is a phenomenon that itself needs to be accounted for: to state that increased humanity is the reason for the new system would be to mistake an effect for a cause. The question for Foucault is - what happened which allowed the concept of prisoners' rights to take hold? What happened so that we can even think about and interpret the history of the penal system in those terms?

In his account of the reform process, Foucault describes how much of the reform debate centred not around acknowledging the criminal's rights, but replacing a system which through its uneven activity was providing a locus for opposition against the crown and inhibiting the activity of the bourgeoisie. Reform was not born of a new sensibility, but the was the product of the ruling elite's need for a regularised system of justice.

That need for regularisation produced the ideal of the system which we have today: where punishment fits the crime; where there is a system of surveillance which ensures criminal behaviour goes detected and punished; where courts are disconnected from the influences that make their judgements discontinuous; where punishment only happens after an offence has been verified; where someone is innocent until proven guilty.

This idea of justice has since come loose from its origin and taken on a life of its own, no doubt because it is a vital conceptual weapon for the average citizen looking to defend himself against an omnipotent state. Nonetheless, its existence is an historical accident, whatever its contemporary importance in framing debates around penal reform, identifying miscarriages of justice, and protecting individuals from the state.

In this account, Foucault is highlighting a historical fallacy: it doesn't follow from your ability to interpret a change in a certain way that the concepts you are using in fact explain that change - accurate interpretation is much harder to achieve than that. The fallacy is made when it is forgotten that concepts have their own history, so cannot be assumed in interpretation.

The lesson is to avoid the mistake of using current concepts to explain historical changes: the first job of the historians of cultural change is to learn which concepts were being used at the time of the change they are studying. It is only their second job is to figure out what happened that produced the systemic change they are studying: what caused the old system to break down and disappear, and what happened so that the new system has the form that it does?

For me, this is a very significant lesson in postmodernism, although it rather pulls the interpreting rug out from under your feet. You end up trying to give a history of developments in some area, using concepts which have a history, with your own concepts that have their own history. You can never get out of the system to some point where you can observe all the conceptual moves. You just swim around inside it forever.

Is this a contradiction at the heart of postmodernism, that renders inquiry itself unintelligible? Or is it a discovery about human inquiry? I think it's a discovery. I think it is possible to do historical research within these limits - better research than the penal theorists whom Foucault was criticising, certainly - so there is no loss.

It might be interesting to ask in conclusion: If what Foucault says is so damaging to inquiry and undermining of our concept of truth and ability to interpret, then why was he such a painstaking and relentlessly thorough historian? Why did he try so hard to uncover errors? He wasn't a stereotypical postmodern waffler - so what gives?


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10 January 2008

knowing vs Knowing

I have a suspicion that if there is a type of knowing that merits a capital letter (a different spelling) then you already acknowledge that it's not knowing, but something different. But if you are talking about something different to knowing when you talk about Knowing, then what do you reveal about knowledge?

The author of the SEP entry on Descartes's Epistemology thinks that it is helpful to split knowing into two kinds: the defeasible kind (knowing) and the indefeasible kind (Knowing).

I'm puzzled as to why he would do this. Descartes was, presumably, only talking about one kind of knowing - or at least, he thought he was. I don't remember him ever saying that the demon only wrecks one kind of knowledge, but it's OK - there's this other kind of knowledge out there.

The thing I find weirdest about this knowing/Knowing distinction, is why anyone would think that such a conceptual division could be explanatory. Obviously this person must think the split is intuitive and explanatory, otherwise they wouldn't have done it. But what motivates them to split the concepts, rather than decide they've screwed up and need to start again?

I guess the answer is pretty easy. The temptation to make the distinction between two kinds of knowledge lies in our intuition that we often say we know things like football scores, which bus goes near our flat in the evenings, and so forth, but which don't survive the method of sceptical doubt.

Since we want to continue to describe this ordinary stuff as knowledge, even though it can be doubted, then we need a weak concept of knowledge. But weak knowledge isn't everything - there is the second kind of knowing, that does survive sceptical doubt. That's the kind of Knowledge we really want. So, there are two kinds of knowledge.

Note that Descartes didn't make this distinction. As far as he was concerned, if you could doubt it then you couldn't know it. In order to preserve knowledge (with a small "k"), he had to invoke a benevolent God who would ensure that we weren't fooled about ordinary things. He didn't split knowledge into two varieties.

And nor should he have. We can't solve the problem of knowing by conjuring a new concept (not unless discovery of a sceptical argument creates a new class of knowledge). We're in the business of explaining and understanding the concepts we have - we can't just create new concepts to resolve these conceptual difficulties.

When Descartes talks about certainty, he at least believes he is talking about knowing. If he thought he was talking about a better, rarefied form of Knowing, then he wouldn't have written the Meditations as a manual for acquiring proper knowledge, but as an account of his amazing discovery of something called Knowledge (like knowledge, but Better).

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08 January 2008

Shouldn't knowledge be described, not defined?

This is a response to a comment: "Any argument that shows that we can't know anything has a misguided concept of knowledge." I think the poster misunderstood my point (my bad) - my complaint is not about sceptical conclusions.

My complaint is with assumptions: Nozick starts his argument with the assumption that it's possible for us to be systematically wrong. I think scepticism is a symptom of a deeper problem, not a problem that itself needs to be solved, so I don't see how Nozick helps.


The problem I have with Nozick and his attempts to get around the troubles of defining knowledge as TJB+ is not his success (or maybe lack thereof) in coming up with a definition. From what I can understand, his definition is pretty water-tight. My problem is that he's been very successful in a project which I can't understand the value of.

I think that, whatever it means to have knowledge, the concept means what it does as a result of social interactions that render the word meaningful: the word "knowledge" means whatever has to obtain in order for the sentences containing the word to be true; and the particular meaning comes from the social interactions involving the word between people who live in a world.

That's pretty much Davidson plus whatever it takes to eliminate the "wrong" theories of meaning - there's a blog post related to this over here. Or at least, my own mangled understanding of the issue.

The thing is, these social interactions don't have much to do with truth (except insofar as utterances are nearly all true), and less stil to do with "counterfactuals" (unless you are living in a philosophy department, perhaps). Since Nozick has developed his concept of knowledge using his own concepts, I don't see how he has helped explain what it means to have knowledge: he has created a concept, rather than explained one.

The concept Nozick has created may even be co-extensive with knowledge; it may even be co-extensive enough that we can compare what we think we know with his counterfactual scheme, and come to some conclusion about whether in fact we know this thing we think we know or not. At least, it would be if we could travel to possible worlds.

But that still doesn't mean he has told us anything about this peculiar condition of knowing which is inflicted on human beings; that is there one minute yet disintegrates so readily under the sceptical ruminations of a Frenchman in a cellar. For my part, when I say I "know" something, it has bugger-all to do with counterfactuals. (Trust me.)

Why should I be interested in a theory of knowledge that explains a concept without any reference to my use of the word?

04 January 2008

A note on the insincerity of philosophers

Modern philosophy smacks of insincerity because it denies experience the depth which its proponents take for granted.

Postmodernism is, in part, a reaction to the metaphysical deficiencies in philosophy which we’ve been stuck with at least since Kant, and no doubt longer in one way or another. The modernist contention is we cannot know things (not even ourselves) directly – all experience is mediated by representation.

The reason I find myself more sympathetic to the posts than the moderns is the Kantian approach puts appearance and reality on a par, so we can only know the necessary preconditions of appearance, or mathematical truths, or abstract moral principles - because these are things which have no appearance, or are not based on appearance.

This makes our experience of the world highly insubstantial and elevates the most insubstantial of things (such as triangles) to the status of the most concrete knowledge. This alienates us from the world in which we live, distancing us from our lives as if we were watching ourselves on the screen in a cinema, a screen where suspended disbelief removes the barrier between fantasy and reality.

Ultimately, it locks us firmly in our heads and makes the world around us neither myth nor reality – instead of beating radical solipsism, modern philosophy has embraced and entrenched it, isolating the subject in a realm of appearance.

Personally, I feel that our engagement with the world is much deeper than a number of philosophers would have me believe. I also think that much modern philosophy, insofar as it implies solipsism, is deeply insincere: nobody acts as if their world is mere appearance, so to talk as if it is, or to build philosophical theories to get around this problem, more-or-less amounts to denying that the depth of experience is something which needs to be explained.

Whoever said self-publication discourages quality writing? Meh, this was rubbish. I can rescue a point though: as any newspaper knows, regularity of publishing is sometimes more important than quality (hence silly season instead of the journalists going on holiday along with the politicians and public).

03 January 2008

update

Two new things: there's now a google group for this blog. If you want to throw around some ideas of your own and make some suggestions for discussion or whatever, then head over there.

I've also linked to a blog by a fish. The fish does something called a semantic web. Whatever that might be, he's the only programmer I ever met who was conversant in possible worlds theory and has read Gareth Evans. You can check him out here.

02 January 2008

A bad reason for normative postmodernism

Some postmodernists appear to think they have discovered a way to liberate us from the straightjacket of modern thinking and lead us into a bright, new, more intellectually productive future. They haven’t – at least, not for the reason I’ll look at here.

There are some important lessons in postmodernism and hermeneutics of which (rather embarrassingly) we need to be reminded: our ideas have a history which someone else’s ideas may not share. If we are to understand one another, we had better get to grips with these histories and not interpret each others’ words as if we had said them ourselves.

This idea is more powerful than this rather trivial statement suggests, and requires a good deal of imagination to work through to its conclusion. I think Foucault did a particularly good job of this in Discipline and Punish (a book I’ve actually read, believe it or not), in his discussion of the conceptual shift in the justification of punishment over the time when power relationships in society moved from being based in confrontation to avoiding confrontation and instead exercising power through observation and norm-setting.

However, from time to time a the postmodernists go beyond the basic lesson of hermeneutics and appear to take it to legitimate a whole new methodology for intellectual endeavor. I have yet to be convinced that any such move can be justified – or is even desirable.

The big thing about postmodernism which ruffles so many feathers is its cheerful obliteration of legitimacy: because genealogy exposes claims to the necessity of different ways of thinking as a sham, it becomes monstrously difficult to justify any particular way of doing something as better than another.

The problems become especially intractable around ethics: where once we appealed to God, then Reason, then (Lord help us) Science, it soon became impossible to deny that a lot of our moral truths are the contingent products of culture. There is simply nothing out there to which we can appeal in order to justify our beliefs about what is right and wrong.

Philosophers are finally being forced to accept (it might be better to say “rediscover”) that ethical views are contingent and complicated: whatever it is that legitimates one way of thinking over another is not going to be found in some meta-narrative. It’s going to be found here on Earth among people. And the problems in ethics are between people and will be solved by people, not by absolutes in a metaphysical beyond.

In my humble opinion, rummaging for answers in the beyond is a distraction from the problems of living in the world.

A weak response to the contingency of ethics and the difficulty of legitimating one view over another is soft (“anything goes”) relativism. I don’t have much time for this position. Refusing to justify yourself is lazy, and relativism itself requires a metanarrative: “It is difficult to justify one ethical system over another; therefore we shouldn’t even try.”

As if anybody could really get anywhere with that kind of view – it’s a mindset for paralysis (or nihilism, if there’s a difference). If whoever alleges themselves to be a relativist were sincere, then they’d do nothing, or act randomly. If they don’t act randomly then they’re not engaging with the problem of legitimacy, they are ducking it - and saying nothing about the choices they justify to themselves with every day. Soft relativism is boring, insincere and foolish.

A stronger response to the problems posed by contingency, also wrong-headed but an improvement on relativism in its affirmativeness rather than nihilism, is on show in Gary Aylesworth’s interpretation of the philosophy of Jean Francois Lyotard.

Apparently, Lyotard was interested in the idea of progress in science, among other things. He was unconvinced by the idea that the human mind is a homing-missile for the truth and that the latest science is somehow legitimized by its greater proximity to the truth than preceding theories. That would be a metanarrative, and skepticism about the existence of these is what Lyotard too to define postmodernism. And so far, I’m with him, although I’m not sure what “science” means in this context.

At the same time Lyotard appears to have thought that, however badly misconceived the concept is by moderns, progress does happen in science. Not all outputs from social inquiry are equal; some outputs amount to a step forward; in general, humans are able to take the step forward. This means that some theories or explanations of what we do have greater legitimacy than others.

The problems I have with Lyotard come in when he gets prescriptive. He argues that we should dispense with our modern notions of progress and instead apply a standard of “performance” to discussions of the legitimacy of one theory over another, where “performance” means something like maximizing the flow of information within a system and minimizing the number of non-functional or static moves.

I think the prescriptive move is dud, because we go from a project of describing how inquiry is done to prescribing how inquiry should be done. I’m not sure it’s possible to make prescriptions about a social endeavor.

It’s not just the difficulty of pre-judging the “performative” qualities of a theory before adopting it (although that sounds weird enough). If we can’t do this, we’re left able to diagnose the relative quality of a theoretical shift in science, but not able to help ourselves choose which theoretical shift we could take.

It’s the idea that we can be prescriptive at all about this kind of thing, without halting the project of describing the human condition.

It might be true that we need to change what we do, but if we are trying to understand how one theory is legitimated over another, then we should look at that process rather than solve the problems by doing something differently. If you change the system you are trying to understand, it’s like fixing a bug in Windows by installing a Linux OS in its place.

I have the same kind of problem with Utilitarianism (and deontological theories, and the rest). They don’t seek to understand human ethics – they seek to substitute human ethics for something else. Maybe the world would be a better place if we were utilitarians, but we aren’t. To become utilitarian is to give up trying to understand the problem of having values.

So maybe “performative legitimation” can replace whatever goes on in legitimation right now. But Lyotard shouldn’t kid us that he’s solving the problem of legitimation rather than ducking it.

Overall, I would like to turn this whole approach to the problem on its head. Rather than argue myself into accepting that there is no such think as legitimacy, I would rather take it as cold, hard fact that some narratives have greater legitimacy than others – and ask why this is so.

What goes on behind the scenes when a narrative gains the power to legitimize certain actions and beliefs? We have rival narratives duking it out: sometimes sexy wins, sometimes parsimony, no doubt external influences are just as responsible (if not more so) than the internal qualities of the narrative for determining whether it secures legitimacy or is able to legitimize.

This puts people at the centre of the issue of legitimacy – but as creators of value, we always have been. Postmodernism is just a philosophy that recognizes this.