A “Kuhn”-version: The Rapture of Paradigm Change (Part V)

[Programming Note: This post was written 2 years ago and has been stuck in limbo ever since. It is being published now as-is, so I hope I was right when I wrote this. If not, I have a million excuses.]

I have committed myself to finish my series on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. There are two last features left to deal with in Kuhn’s SSR, the choice of paradigm and the incommensurability of paradigms. This will occupy my final two posts on Kuhn, respectively. Specifically, a discussion of the incommensurability of paradigms will allow some summary comments on the crisis of rationality that Kuhn’s work provokes for the modern understanding of science that presents truth to the world. The previous posts can be found bunched together here.

Einstein, pointing out the errors in our ways

In the previous post, I mused on the nature of revolutions, political and scientific. I explored the relationship between the imagination and the material needs of a situation in the development of alternative conceptual schemes for both politics and science. But a question remains. Science and politics both are continually plagued by the shortcomings of the reigning paradigm. Einstein, for example, had problems with both Quantum Mechanics and Capitalism, the former because it introduced indeterminacy into the world and the latter because it tended toward cycles of growth and recession. He was right, at least about economics.

Sticking strictly to scientific issues, there continue to be major problems that plague contemporary physics despite its enormous successes. One such issue is the unification of the four fundamental forces: electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear force, and gravity. In the 19^th century, Michael Faraday’s work on field theory paved the way for James Clerk Maxwell’s equations that allowed for the unification of electrical and magnetic forces, culminating in the well-known theory of electromagnetism. The weak and electromagnetic forces were unified in 1968 into the Electro-weak theory, and they were united in 1974 with the strong nuclear force to produce the so-called “Grand Unified Theory,” or GUT.

On Critiquing the Masters of the Universe

This post is from two years ago. It’s been sitting in my drafts folder, and I decided it was time to release it from purgatory.

I recently finished the re-imagined series Battlestar Galactica, an epic space opera that drew praise from a wide variety of viewers. I have also been on a Philip K. Dick binge of late, reading many short stories and several novels, including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

As a way of jotting down some of the thoughts I have running through my head, I want to try a short comparison of the criticisms that each face.

PKD’s greatest strength is his ability to weave intricate and complex plots in an effort to explore abstract philosophical ideas. One of the prime examples of this, highlighted in both Ubik and Stigmata, is the line between reality and illusion.

In the former, written in the same year as Electric Sheep, Dick tells a story in which the characters are never sure who is dead and who is alive. In Stigmata, a similar problem occurs, this time on the basis of drugs that create hallucinations that eventually make their way into sober reality. The characters are never sure if they are under the effect of the drug, seeing manifestations of Palmer Eldritch at the most inopportune moments.

Does the Higgs Boson Discovery Resolve the Religion-Science Debate?

Philip Clayton in the Huffington Post:

When they announced the discovery of physics’ most elusive particle this week, scientists didn’t overreach. They just did damn good science. The fans and the foes of religion, by contrast, are overreaching on both sides. The quest for the Higgs boson, and its ultimate discovery, neither proves nor disproves God.

“The poor you will always have with you,” Jesus is reputed to have said. He could have added, “and debates about science and religion as well.” The quest for the Higgs came to a decisive end this week. The quest to understand science and God will not end as abruptly.

Yes.

Why Don’t Americans Believe in Evolution? An ‘Erroneous and Naive’ Answer

The New Yorker has an article up on “Why We Don’t Believe In Science.” This essay, though mainly concerned with a study of our neural reactions to counter-intuitive experiences, begins by citing a recent Gallup poll on what Americans believe when it comes to evolution. Somewhat surprising is the large percentage of Americans (45%) who reject the theory of evolution and instead hold that the world was created within the last 10,000 years by a supernatural agent.* 32% of adult Americans hold what might be called theistic evolution, while only 15% hold to a purely naturalistic account of evolution.**

*Is this regression? Even among those who rejected evolution in the early 20th century, William Jennings Bryan among them, they were generally not this type of “Young Earth Creationist.” Instead, they readily proclaimed that “a day is like a thousand years to God,” which allowed them to accept the antiquity of the Earth without abandoning the 7 days of creation in Genesis – a position known as “Old Earth Creationism.”

**Lost in this is the fact that more people accept evolution than reject it. And I have a major bone to pick when it comes to the use of the word “believe” in reference to scientific theories. One does not “believe” a scientific theory, one can only accept it (or reject it) as the theory that makes the best sense of the empirical evidence. And to do this, one must employ logic – the kind of thing that Aristotle developed and was so important for the medievals, even though Aristotle gets kicked around in this article for being naive and erroneous. If you want to know what belief is, go read this. It has nothing to do with science, and to use faith/belief in reference to science is to actually denigrate what science is in the first place.

As my students would tell you, I am a defender of the theory of evolution and work hard to show them that there is no biblical or theological basis for supposing a conflict between Christianity and evolution. Darwin certainly did not think so, nor have most educated Christians since the emergence of Darwinian evolution. This conflict – and this is so crucially important to understand – has been trumped up (by both sides!) as a subset of the (trumped-up!) conflict between the secular and the religious, and is ultimately a political (broadly understood) conflict that has to do with particular configurations of power rather than ideological beliefs. But that is for another post.

Wittgenstein Quote of the Day

Wittgenstein, being silent

I came across the following quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein‘s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which was cited in Wolfhart Pannenberg‘s Theology and the Philosophy of Science (32-33):

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists—and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world. (6.41)

This, in the manifesto of logical positivism!*

*Pannenberg cites this in a section that discusses the problems presented for theology, particularly the word “God,”  and how certain theologians (van Buren) reduced the content of theological speech to a “mere form of expression.” Of course, Pannenberg does not accept a logical positivist approach to theological language, which results in something like the liberalism of Schleiermacher or the neo-liberalism of Bultmann. Rather, he follows Popper’s critique of positivism (which he considers total and complete) and suggests another way of regarding the content and function of theological language.

When I initially read this quote in its full context in the Tractatus my mind was immediately drawn to the classical distinction between necessary and contingent beings. Wittgenstein is of course concerned with language here, but in his quest to understand meaning in its ultimate or unconditioned sense he is driven “outside the world.”

This statement, rather than lay the foundation of an all encompassing positivism, seems to provide strict limits for the ability of a completely immanent logic (and metaphysics) to establish any final meaning or value. The reference for any one thing, a word in a sentence or an object in a painting, has meaning only in connection with those words or objects that surround it (this was the fundamental thesis of the Tractatus, wasn’t it?). Any necessary meaning, as Wittgenstein says, must lie outside the world, outside the internal reference of a sentence or language or system of culture.*

*There is of course the interpretation of the Tractatus as a big middle finger to the Vienna Circle, who are supposed to have completely misunderstood its purpose and proceeded to build a philosophical system on its basis. I so hope this is true.

In spite of these limits, Wittgenstein is not saying that we should aim to speak of the value of things in their ultimate, unconditioned reference. As he famously concludes:

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

What can we truly and meaningfully say, then? Maybe the monks had it right after all.

For my students: How to write an essay

Huff Po has a nice blog entry up on how to write an essay. Its worth reading for anyone who has to write anything, ever.

The blogger, Ryan Holiday, has a simple method he calls “The Spartan System.” There is nothing revolutionary here, I try to teach my students to write the same way, he has just presented it in a succinct way. Its like this:

Consider your introduction as the creator of the shape, and then the following paragraphs making up each side. They venture outwards when called to but never abandon the safety of the formation entirely. It is a process of constant realignment, maintaining the square at all cost. In terms of “writing” you need only to create a handful of original sentences for the entire essay: a thesis, a theme, a mini-thesis which begins each paragraph and a conclusionary sentence that says what it all means. Everything else is a variation of these four sentences in some way. Together they create the square, and the serves as the point of return..And so the reader always protected and the troops defend your point.

I think that anything we can do to be more intentional in our academic writing, the better the product. Too often are we forced to read ill-formed arguments, and I am not just talking about student papers.

They said it, not me: “only philosophers go to hell”

An interesting post on 3 Quarks Daily, entitled “Only Philosophers Go To Hell.” It is written by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse, authors of Reasonable Atheism (Prometheus, 2011).

It is basically a riff on the Problem of Evil, focusing on how the idea of hell is logically problematic in the Christian universe:

The Problem of Hell is familiar enough to many traditional theists.  Roughly, it is this: How could a loving and just god create a place of endless misery? …Hell, on its face, seems like it is actually part of God’s plan, and moreover, the misery there far exceeds misery here.  At least the misery here is finite; it ends when one dies.  But in Hell, death is just the beginning. Those in Hell suffer for eternity.  Hell, so described, seems less the product of a just and loving entity than a vicious and spiteful one.  That’s a problem.

From this, the authors establish that the only legitimate defense of an eternity of pain and suffering (and no, I am not talking about taking the kids to Disney World) comes from a retributivist or libertarian position. 

Philip K. Dick: Conspiracy Theorist?

I have been musing the past two days on Simon Cricthley’s three-part article on PKD, which has thus far been a summary of Dick’s religious experience (here) and his particular take on Gnosticism (and here). Today, rather than just telling us about PKD, Critchley finally said something. The problem is, its just not that interesting – or at least not as interesting as reading PKD.

This final installment revolves around the idea, common to both Gnosticism and modern sci-fi, that the world as we know it is an illusion. In fact, this idea is rather common in many religious traditions, though in varying degrees of paranoia. Gnosticism represents one of the more extreme forms, but Eastern philosophy also trumpets a similar tune.

These connections also abound in sci-fi films, as Critchley points out. Probably the most famous (at least in my generation) is The Matrix, but he also includes in his list James Cameron’s Avatar and a few Lars von Trier films, Antichrist and Melonchalia (neither of which I have seen). We should also put Inception here, as well.

Philip K. Dick: A Messenger from the Gods?

Today finds the second part of Simon Critchley’s essay on Sci-Fi writer (and potential philosopher) Philip K. Dick. I should have noted yesterday that the interest in PKD comes from the recent posthumous publication of Dick’s Exegesis, a 976-page collection of his journals following his experience of 2-3-74.

In this second part, Critchley discusses Dick’s connection to the idea of the Logos, and ancient Greek philosophical term and a central idea in the Gospel of John. In Stoicism, the logos was the principle of creation that guided all things, while in the Gospel of John it is said that this logos “became flesh” in the person of Jesus.*

*Though this is not really relevant to PKD, in the fourth Gospel there is as much if not more connection with the Hebrew story of creation in the first chapter of Genesis than there is with Greek philosophy. In Genesis, YHWH creates by speech, i.e. by the use of a word. In fact, both Genesis and John begin with the phrase “In the beginning,” and both give a theological account of creation in which the “word” is central.

But as Critchley writes:

…the core of Dick’s vision is not quite Christian in the traditional sense; it is Gnostical: it is the mystical intellection, at its highest moment a fusion with a transmundane or alien God who is identified with logos and who can communicate with human beings in the form of a ray of light or, in Dick’s case, hallucinatory visions.

Philip K. Dick: The Schizophrenic(s’) Philosopher?

Philip K. Dick

In preparation for a course this fall on Science Fiction, I have been immersing myself in Philip K. Dick. One of my summer projects is to make it through some of his major novels, beginning with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I also hope to read  Ubik and the VALIS trilogy, among others. For those of you in the dark about who PKD is, his stories were behind the films Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly, and Adjustment Bureau. Unfortunately for Dick (but not for his heirs), he did not live to see these movies released and lived most of his life around the poverty line.

PKD is regarded as an extraordinary literary mind, though beyond the realm of fiction his place is a bit less certain. In an effort to address the possible contribution of Dick to philosophy, Simon Critchley, a well-regarded philosopher at the New School in New York, has embarked on a three-part essay in the New York Times philosophy blog The Stone.  He writes:

Dick was a consummate autodidact. He survived for less than one semester at college, at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1949, taking and quitting Philosophy 10A in the space of a few weeks. Dick left the class in disgust at the ignorance and intolerance of his instructor when he asked his professor about the plausibility of Plato’s metaphysical theory of the forms — the truth of which was later proven for Dick by the experience of 2-3-74. Dick was evidently not trained as a philosopher or theologian — although I abhor that verb “trained,” which makes academics sound like domestic pets. Dick was an amateur philosopher or, to borrow a phrase from one of the editors of “Exegesis,” Erik Davis, he was that most splendid of things: a garage philosopher.

What Dick lacks in academic and scholarly rigor, he more than makes up for in powers of imagination and rich lateral, cumulative association. If he had known more, it might have led him to produce less interesting chains of ideas. In a later remark in “Exegesis,” Dick writes, “I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.” He interestingly goes on to add, “The core of my writing is not art but truth.” We seem to be facing an apparent paradox, where the concern with truth, the classical goal of the philosopher, is not judged to be in opposition to fiction, but itself a work a fiction. Dick saw his fiction writing as the creative attempt to describe what he discerned as the true reality. He adds, “I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis.”

It will be interesting to see where this leads in the next two parts. Most of the first part is devoted to biographical issues, particularly related to Dick’s use of drugs (prescription and otherwise) and his ‘religious’ experience in February of 1974.

Christ Pantocrator with “Ho On” Title in Halo

There is also the issue of Dick’s mental health. In his journals that followed the experiences of 1974, Dick describes a relationship with a clay pot that he named “Ho On.” In Western religion this is the title given to God (and in the Christian tradition, to Christ as seen in the halo to the right), and can be translation as “the One Who Is,” clearly a play on the name of God in Exodus 3:14. So like Moses, Dick seems to have met God in a meager form, and one that involves some connection to plant life.

However, as Critchley notes, those closest to Dick’s work, like  Jonathan Lethem, felt that “Dick wasn’t a legend and he wasn’t mad. He lived among us and was a genius.” As Dick himself wrote, “the schizophrenic is a leap ahead that failed,” suggesting that the line between madness and brilliance (geniusness?) has often been blurred – especially in figures like PKD.