Notes on (notes on) a Review

Over at the ever interesting site, Prosblogion, the bloggers are restless. Trent Daugherty of Baylor has authored a post devoted to attacking a recent NDPR review of Bradley Monton's recent work, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design.

The author of the NDPR review is one Sahotra Sarkar. Anyone who knows me well should know that I am not one of Sahotra's admirers. I suppose the nicest thing I could say of the fellow is that his philosophical competence is matched only by his emotional petulance. That said, the review, while admittedly snarky, was much more even-handed than it might have been. I made some comments to that effect. The "analysis" offered by Daugherty was really quite poor. I'm awaiting reaction.

A Busy Day (not) Working

Over at his blog, Democratic Individuality, Alan Gilbert has done me the kind favor of engaging with some of my comments on his recent post about Plato's cave imagery. The post in question reviews a number of points he made previously, while taking (I would say constructive) issue with some of my interpretive remarks. For now, I'll have to thank him and promise to get back to this shortly. I lack the energy (though certainly not the enthusiasm!) tonight. So, my thanks to Dr. Gilbert!

Fresh Air on the History of the US Labor Movement

I't high time we see quite a bit more of this interview with Philip Dray. Sadly, I only caught a few minutes of it on a recent drive, but I'll remedy that shortly.

Naomi Klein on the Anti-Union Trend

Here is a very good short segment by the talented Naomi Klein on Democracy Now!. Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine, is in essence an extended analysis of the ways in which narrow, usually plutocratic powers take advantage of emergencies to further the economic interests of the very rich at the expense, most commonly, of the poorest members of a society. While it's a bit heavy on metaphor for my taste, and the connections Klein draws are at times tenuous, the book more than repays a good read.

This segment is about both Walker's awful machinations in Wisconsin and similar measures introduced in around 17 other state legislatures. It's pretty nasty stuff. One provision of a Michigan law nearing passage draws particular attention and is the source of DN's blurbed comment.

The Michigan bill apparently contains a provision by which the governor, through an appointed official, would have the power to dissolve whole municipal governments and hand their functions over to corporate entities or individuals. A friend on FB took exception to Klein's calling this an assault on democracy, since, were the bill to pass, it would be at least democratic in the procedural sense. He preferred calling it "bad policy." Of course, I disagree that enactment of legislation by a simple majority is either a necessary or a sufficient condition to earn a bill the "democratic" appellation. Though they are often confused, majoritarianism is often anti-democratic. I'm also not convinced that anti-democratic policies are inevitably bad policies, or even that this particular anti-democratic policy is necessarily bad. The triggering event which would set this particular provision in motion is "economic crisis." This strikes me as too vague to be useful, but I'd have to spend more time with the bill than I'm willing to commit to assess it. My guess--and it is just that--is that the vagueness is intentional, which would simply lend support to Klein's analysis. But it's something worth investigating, in any event.

The context: Klein remarks that the bill

says that in the case of an economic crisis, that the governor has the authority to authorize the emergency manager—this is somebody who would be appointed—to reject, modify or terminate the terms of an existing contract or collective bargaining agreement, authorize the emergency manager for a municipal government—OK, so we’re not—we’re talking about towns, municipalities across the state—to disincorporate. So, an appointed official with the ability to dissolve an elected body, when they want to...."

[Continuing directly] "A municipal government. And it says specifically, "or dissolve the municipal government." So we’ve seen this happening with school boards, saying, "OK, this is a failing school board. We’re taking over. We’re dissolving it. We’re canceling the contracts." You know, what this reminds me of is New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when the teachers were fired en masse and then it became a laboratory for charter schools. You know, people in New Orleans—and you know this, Amy—warned us. They said, "What’s happening to us is going to happen to you." And I included in the book a quote saying, "Every city has their Lower Ninth Ward." And what we’re seeing with the pretext of the flood is going to be used with the pretext of an economic crisis. And this is precisely what’s happening. So it starts with the school boards, and then it’s whole towns, whole cities, that could be subject to just being dissolved because there’s an economic crisis breaking collective bargaining agreements. It also specifies that—this bill specifies that an emergency manager can be an individual or a firm. Or a firm. So, the person who would be put in charge of this so-called failing town or municipality could actually be a corporation."

Morris on Kuhn

Errol Morris is writing a highly engaging and entertaining series about Thomas Kuhn's notion of "paradigms" and "incommensurability" in the Times. While I highly recommend each of the three parts published so far, a lot of interesting points emerge in the post on Hippasus of Metapontum, the poor fellow who, as legend has it, had the misfortune of discovering the square root of two...or rather, that some lengths are incommensurable.

Incommensurability is an interesting notion that Kuhn has doing quite a lot of heavy lifting in his most well-known book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Mathematically, the notion of incommensurability amounts to the idea that two lengths, or more generally, quantities, have no common measure, and hence there is no way to express the relation of the one to the other using a rational number. No matter how you slice one of the quantities up, so long as you do so evenly, the divisions won't be able to exactly map onto the other quantity. Kuhn extended this basic idea to the realm of concepts and scientific theories, arguing that periods of "revolutionary" science resulted in new "paradigms," or what the Germans might call "Weltanschauungen;" whole new inter-nested sets of concepts with which to understand the world. More provocatively (and I would say less persuasively), Kuhn argued (or at least seemed to in some instances) that different paradigms were incommensurable, in the sense that the concepts from any one paradigm could not be fully and faithfully carried over to either its successor or its predecessor paradigms.

(This is far from my specialty, but it would be interesting to see how much cross pollination went on between Kuhn's work and the Quine-Duhem thesis that no scientific hypothesis is testable in iosolation. Maybe next go around I'll specialize in something like that!)

Anyhow, Morris raises a lot of interesting points. For my money, though, the most interesting are those concerning the reliability of the evidence, and the various conjectures about how we interpret the Hippasus legend. He winds up phoning up Walter Burkert, the world's foremost scholar on Ancient Pythagoreanism, who is appropriately skeptical of much of the tradition about, well, both Pythagoras and Hippasus.

All that to the side, though, there's a kind of dark irony to the whole detour into ancient Greek conceptions of incommensurability. Morris' mission seems to rest on a mistake. Noting that in a late interview, Kuhn calls the concept of "incommensurability" a metaphor, he neglects to note that Kuhn is referring to his metaphorical extension of the core mathematical notion. Instead, he intereprets Kuhn's remark as a remark about the mathematical notion, and this error starts him down the odd detour on poor old Hippasus. Worse, there's simply no reason to think that Kuhn was in any way inspired by the Hippasus story. So, in presenting his own historical reconstruction about the history of Kuhn's notion of incommensurability, along with a number of insightful lessons about the possible pitfalls of taking historical reconstructions at face value, Morris very likely gives us a specimen of the kind of work he's warned us against.

Ain't life grand?!