Houyhnhnm Land

Sobel's final objection to ontological arguments is that, even if they are sound, their conclusion does not mean that God exists. That is, according to Sobel, a necessarily existing 'being than which none greater can be conceived' or 'being with all perfections' or 'being with all positive properties' would not be God. His argument for this is rather confusing and depends (1) on a controversial modal intuition, and (2) on an odd definition of 'worshipfulness'. As far as I can tell, the argument goes like this: it is clear (so Sobel claims) that such properties as consciousness, knowledge, power, love,...

Just a quick note to say that I will now be doing some new entries, as well as some cross-posting and re-posting from EWP at the new Whewell’s Ghost blog, which has been set up by John Lynch, evolvingthoughts.net’s John Wilkins, and Rebekah Higgit of the National Maritime Museum in London.  It is meant as a clearing-house for high-quality posts on history and philosophy of science, and already seems to be dwarfing readership here after about one day on the internet.

In historiographical discussions, a key concern is whether certain problematics prejudice historical portraiture.  By “problematics” I mean the dialectical process that determines what topics are researched, how they are investigated, and how the results of investigations are presented.  By “portraiture” I mean the sum total availability of information about the various aspects of history, apart from any analytical statements made about it and from our ability to navigate within the resulting historiography.  In other words, how do the questions we want to ask about the historical record both expand and limit our summary and publication of the record’s contents?

For at least a half a century, one way that professional history of science (and history more generally) has consistently attempted to distinguish itself is by pointing to its ability to recognize and correct for earlier historians’ and non-professionals’ prejudicial limitations in their portraiture.  Hagiographic biographies discount major historical actors’ flaws.  Positivistic accumulations of scientific contributions discount scientific “wrong turns” and the importance of theoretical frameworks.  Intellectual histories of science discount the culture of science.  Philosophical accounts of the historical establishment of claims discount the sociological work necessary to secure assent around them.

Invisibility

Initially, criticisms of prejudicial portraiture emphasized that important constituencies have been rendered invisible through various forms of bias.  Social history in the vein of E. P. Thompson emphasized bias against histories of common people in favor of interest in political figures, cultural leaders, and other heroic or otherwise individually influential figures identified through what we might think of as a problematic that emphasizes concerted action.  Along these lines, portraiture of disempowered and marginal constituencies has flourished (although sometimes these retain a concerted-action problematic, choosing to emphasize actors who are on the fringe but who, within the confines of their particular sphere, are influential nonetheless).  Historians who discover new classes of invisible things stand to gain significant cachet.

In the historiography of science, scientists, historians, sociologists, and, indeed, many philosophers, have been noting for an exceedingly long time that the motivation behind scientific work, and the actual processes of that work, are often expunged or rearranged when work is distilled into a finished product.  There is a strong tradition, therefore, of offering a supplementary, informal portraiture to demonstrate the “human side” of science, the craftsmanship of scientific work, or the social and political context and implications of that work, for example.

In the last 30-40 years, however, an influential socio-epistemological point has made the rounds that scientific work actually depends on rendering the socio-cultural content of science “invisible”, because, it is argued, maintenance of the authority of scientific claims requires that they be regarded as the product of a purely epistemological process.  This strategy is said to break down when assent is not successfully secured, and socio-cultural content is rendered visible.  Notable here is Steven Shapin’s chapter, “Invisible Technicians: Masters, Servants, and the Making of Experimental Knowledge” in his Social History of Truth (1994), but the whole train of objectivity studies in the mid-’90s takes this to be a key point, and it is crucial to the claims to relevance and cogency in the commentary of Bruno Latour on “science”, “nature”, and “modernity” from the late 1980s on.

Various criticisms of prejudicial portraiture and resulting invisibility have often been confounded.  Thus, discussions of historiographical craft often segue effortlessly into discussions of scientific epistemology and, for example, the nature of this epistemology’s relationship with public ideas.  I gather this is because epistemological misconceptions are taken to be a generic cause of systematic invisibilities in historiographical craft.  It is not clear to me that this is so, nor is it clear to me that scientific legitimacy has actually depended on sweeping cultural content under the rug, exactly.  More on these suspicions in follow-up posts.

For the time being, I want to suggest that there is a pressing need for an alternative posture to assumptions that a prejudicial historical portraiture is grounded in a particular kind of epistemological bias.

Positive Portraiture

The criticism of David Edgerton provides an interesting variation on the problem of historiographical invisibility.  This blog regularly promotes Edgerton’s critical observations on historiography (speaking of, see his most recent essay in the July Technology and Culture).  To date, I have paid less attention to his craftsmanship.  Edgerton’s history-writing is characterized by his assembly of inchoate sets of portraits, which typically highlight points that are “of importance”, for example, in assessing the history of British state sponsorship of R&D, he has noted the importance of the postwar Ministry of Supply.

The unity of Edgerton’s assemblages is to be found in their presentation of an amalgamated portrait that is invisible to, and at odds with, existing historiographical narratives and portraits.  The power of his work is in this strategy.  Among his recent works, Warfare State (2006) challenges the signal importance of the welfare state in British history and the search for explanations for British military vulnerability and weakness in science and technology.  Such narratives fail to discuss Britain as the major military and scientific and technological nation that it was.  Similarly, The Shock of the Old (also 2006) challenges the traditional historiographical bias toward novel technologies, arguing that even histories challenging the hype surrounding novel technologies simply “invert” the narrative to show the failures and problems associated with novel technologies.  To escape the narrative, the point is that it is important to study non-novel technologies as well (as well as related issues of technology use, like maintenance).

The difficulty here is that Edgerton’s criticism can be mistaken as claims to the discovery of new forms of invisibility, which historians can help make visible.  In cases where I have seen him cited, he is often regarded as simply calling for studies of “old” technologies, or of state scientific bodies (see Melissa Smith’s article on the Home Office’s Scientific Advisers’ Branch in the June BJHS).  Such studies are certainly a step in the right direction, but I think these do not capture the full point of Edgerton’s critique, which revolves more around the historiographical riches to be mined through what I call “positive portraiture”.

Positive portraiture relates to the historiographical effort to arrive at useful and extensive depictions of what existed in history, putting individual entities (events, people, technologies) in the context of comparable entities.

Edgerton’s work is interesting in that retains existing historiography’s interest in remedying persistent invisibilities, but, unlike that historiography, it finds a way forward not by arguing with that historiography’s conclusions, but by using positive portraiture to build an alternative vision of the past that undermines the historiography’s key assumptions about what issues need to be addressed and how.

I think a crucial aspect of positive portraiture, is its emphasis on the fact that vast aspects of the past are undocumented.  Undocumented history differs from invisible history in that the assumption is that the primary task of the historian is not to diagnose and undo past concealment, though that may be a useful secondary task.  Diagnosis and remedy too often adheres to that historiography’s investigatory agenda by engaging in a dialectic with it — what Edgerton calls “inversion”.

Instead, the primary task should be to extend portraiture as best as we can, and to build new argumentation on the basis of this portraiture.  How to move forward in this vein is an open question.  We know that undirected empiricism can produce exceedingly tedious and unilluminating history, but there is not much historiographical thought laying out what constitutes the most useful methods of portraiture.  The more inchoate qualities in Edgerton’s oeuvre suggests the need for an explicit new set of problematics, and some overarching means of navigating through our portraiture and the arguments associated with it, rather than engaging with various arguments in the historiography pell mell.  Once we have a better handle on how to do this and how to make historians and others interested in it (I suspect we may actually provoke more interest from outsiders already interested in specific topics), it will be correspondingly easier to engage with the historical record in more open-ended, exploratory, and productive ways.

Susan Blow | philosopher | first US kindergarten | Hegelian

Honored Women - International list of women deserving public honor

Toward a more precise and brief exposition of the concept the Gentile Christian.

It was decided by Paul and the disciples (Acts 15) that it was a fact that the rule of love of neighbor was sufficient for the identification of all good acts. In the context of the understanding at that time (always a consideration) we would expect to see among the Christians model marriages and families, model employers and employees, model neighborhoods, model government.

The conditions for a happy marriage may be different now, but that means merely a different action ensuing from the same principle of the expedient application of the rule of love. One principle and two different actions, both derived from that principle under the guidance of one’s current understanding of the world.

Paul considered same-sex sex as domination, perhaps, as one male dog will hump another male to show dominance. As such it was reprehensible and reflected the spirit of hell. It could not have been natural in his thinking, of course, for then a benevolent nature would have wanted to produce more babies to account for the many deaths. So obviously it was a domination and rebellion against the very laws of nature itself (i.e., in his thinking, where the laws of nature work for the good of the humans in the production of children).

Today the situation is far different. Or rather, our understanding of sexuality is from a different perspective, namely from a world that has too many babies. Now that same benevolent nature would give us people who could enjoy each other without restraint and never have the first child, and never need recourse to all the artificial devices of birth control, the drugs and surgeries and even self restraint. Suppose homosexuals were in all other respect indistinguishable from the majority of the population who find the opposite sex more attractive. Suppose they were just like the left handers of this world, and were morally no better and no worse than these left handers. Wouldn’t we just jump for joy and call God’s blessing upon the homosexual and ask God to give us more? Must we still crucify the gifts of God? The straights have screwed up the world and God has given us a non-domineering same-sex sex, i.e., homosexuality, which, if promoted, can help save the world from over population.

The “necessary things” (Acts 15:29) were a clarification of the meaning of the follower of Jesus among the gentiles. They were to defer to the Jewish Christians at the table and they were to exercise self control as a signal of their allegiance to the Lord Jesus. This was the self restraint of the gentile Christian: being prepared (under control) and sensitive to the weakness of fellows on the path of the Lord, especially those following the “right” foot print of Jesus as Jews.

In a word: in all sincerity the gentile Christians were to apply the rule of love in their present condition, and be especially mindful of others on the Way (especially if a different foot print) and be always prepared to represent the Lord Jesus.

In this wise then the Council of Jerusalem gave the OK for Paul’s experiment with the gentiles, in making them followers of Jesus apart from the Jewish culture, i.e., lawless and beholden to the rule of love alone as totally sufficient and without need for supplementation.

Note: All this comports nicely with the lesson of John 5, namely that no interpretation of a communication of God may inhibit an immediate act of love.

Mr. President,

First of all I hope you are doing well. We are doing better and a lot of the credit goes to you.

Here is a smart tactic that will work. We have health care reform, but we need to understand better why we have it and especially why we have mandated that all Americans take part.

The fundamental principle of our union is this: we agree to live together in a free realm (like that conceived by Immanuel Kant). The first principle of that realm is that all people are equally endowed with dignity and respect. This is Kant’s mighty moral law that impels us ever toward perfection in our existence. That is the great given. What within those universal and categorical bounds are we trying to accomplish in a union together? We want, all of us, to live freely without external restraint and we agree to guarantee to all of us that our rights, given by God, may be restrained only universally (and not for just some of us), and that we have to agree by majority vote as to what those restraints might be. With regard to foreign relations and dangers we agree to bind together and be a single people and pledge ourselves ready for defensive duty if called upon. [This is not unlike a marriage where before the law is there is a singularity and no division.] We have a duty to each other to help ward off any restraint of our liberty by a foreign power. This now leads to health care.

We cannot expect to continue as a free people, making our own destiny in freedom, unless we are militarily strong and well educated and creative and productive and healthy. Our military readiness is in good order and we are well served. But we are not so well served by our health care, not well enough to be ready for the challenges that we face today for ourselves and for our children and for all who will live in our free realm. Consistent with our need for a better health as a nation, we will now impose a tax upon ourselves for the express purpose of making health care available to all people at no cost to the individual but only to the society. This is what health insurance is all about. We agree to pay up front and we do it as a society by means of a self-imposed compulsion. We will tax ourselves in the name of our common security from foreign advance and then say to our citizens, “Look, in the pursuit of happiness you will find little that is more important than good health. But even more importantly we need to be healthy for our security in this competitive and dangerous world. Now you can go to the doctor (at no charge to you*) and he will advise you how to get better health. It’s up to you then and upon your confidence in the doctor. The point is you really ought to go to the doctor now and then in order to be more healthy and thus better help us all together as a free nation to be on owr toes and in shape and ready for whatever may be coming at us.”

[* I am ignoring any co-pay and am focusing on the brunt of the doctor’s bill which will now be born by the entire society via the mandate.]

So, Mr. President, you can reach across the isle and give credit to the Republicans for suggesting this justification of the mandate (and its like jury duty too) and accordingly proclaim the mandate to be bipartisan and an example of how you are willing to accept a good idea once it is fleshed out.

In this way, I think, you could score a few points and catch the Republicans off guard, and find greater solidarity with the conservatives, be willing to accept many of their principles, e.g., legalizing medicinal marijuana. You ought simply to do this. Call for the rationalization of medicine but letting the doctor decide with the patient. Let the doctor be given all the facts of this drug and of his patient and then prescribe what he thinks is best regard bodily and mental health. Furthermore you might then also agree and side with the (true) conservatives with the recognition of the same-sex marriage. As we should get the government out of the doctor’s office with regard to therapy, we should also get the government of the driver’s seat with regard to marriage. The concept of the marriage is two free people who enter into a union of total identity with each other and with respect to others. It is a restriction of rights to say to the world that these two people have to be of the opposite sex. It would be like saying that two left handers could not get married. Imagine that. Two people who write with their left hands cannot get married. Or two people of different color. Or two people of different hair color, or all this never ending involvement in the lives of two people. This really ought to expand to include more than two people in communes (and this is a bit risky, I suppose), but let’s keep it at two until the divorce rate approaches 0, and we might decide it is more practical always to keep it at two. We are a free people. We decide together what shall bind us all. Either we will have a marriage of two people, or we will have no marriage at all, for we cannot restrain the rights of just some, but only of all together.

So let’s take what is intelligent and right for us our and our future in our common liberty, and let’s pull together and insure that our liberty shall continue and be an alternative for all people.

There is a logic which derives the health insurance/tax mandate from the commerce clause of the Constitution, but a more powerful logic can be developed in the name of national defense.