So I'm going to try to be a little less me-like here and impose a little categorization on the past week or so. It's going to be entirely artificial, not that any kinds of categories are really all that authentic, a little dilly I just read a book on a couple of days ago. It's called nominalism, folks, the basic argument that our systems of knowledge impose an order on the world that is not necessarily there (and I mean necessary in the philo sense - in other words, I'm not saying it's not there, just that it's not de facto, by definition there. Don't worry, it's not just you - I'm finding myself hard to talk to lately, too). A basic example would be the color spectrum: we make all kinds of divisions (red v. orange, visible v. invisible) which have a lot to do more with our cultures and biological circumstances than any real categorical divisions of light. Getting back to the point, The Ballad is a rambling song containing everything under the sun, but I'm gonna try to impose some "school" and "Ultimate" divisions that aren't inevitable (and, as you;'ll see, not even really very applicable).
So it was a short week on campus, just the four days thanks to the holiday. (On Monday Beck and I went to see Wall-E with a slew of four year olds and their unskilled parents who let them blabber throughout. Review pending, but really, people, in a movie with no dialogue for the first half-hour or so, SHHHH YOUR KIDS! Thanks). I spent part of the weekend catching up on some articles for my Human and Social Dimensions of Science & Tech seminar and reading a book called Leviathan & the Air Pump. Besides having a silly title, the book is a historical account of a sort of debate on knowledge acquisition between Thomas Hobbes (he of social contract / enlightened despot fame) and Robert Boyle (He of P1V1 = P2V2) against the backdrop of the Reformation. Leviathan is Hobbes's seminal work; the Air Pump was essentially a suction chamber with a glass bulb which Boyle used to demonstrate some phenomena that he construed as "the spring of the air." Boyle was a proponent of "experiemental method" - probably more accurately described as "demonstration" method, as he wasn't exactly testing hypothese and such - while Hobbes preferred logical / rational methods, more akin to geometric proofs. Hobbes was a bit dogmatic about this and thought not only was the experimental method unreliable (what with human senses being fallible and all) but that only reason would be strong enough to undoubtedly convince people of knowledge that would lead to social stability. Boyle favored a "democratic" approach that allowed for dissenting opinion - "democratic" because it favored knowledge production by a select few who had membership in the Royal Society - and believed that consensus forms of knowledge, not handed down from on high axiomatic proofs, were the way to generate social stability. If you're interested, the wikipedia article is quite thorough. Interesting stuff - not a perfect text by any means, but it's a soilid foundation in some historical methods that allow us to see the social development of scientific institutions. Boyle ultimately "won" in the science context (maybe noit so much in the political context, where Hobbes is still largely The Man), but some of Hobbes's accusations - that the Royal Society was essentially functioning as a a priesthood - still apply to our scientific knowledge structure today. (The book humorously ends, after several hundred pages of detailed - oh the details - debate with "Hobbes was right").
Also this week, we read a book called The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking. It's a semi-analytic philosophy attempt to define and outline exactly what people mean when they claim things are socially constructed and what they are trying to accomplish. Highly recommended, if for no other reason than so you can understand where people are coming from when they say seemingly nutso things like "electrons are socially constructed." And, thanks to a delay in my professors getting me the syllabus for the course and a delay in shipping, I now have a spanking new copy for anyone interested. Great book, and it engendered some great discussion* in class this week.
Otherwise a lot of miscellaneous reading at school. I had a law, science and technology class on Wednesday in which we continued to talk about expert witnesses, their effectiveness and admissibility in court cases. Pretty cool, though the prof did give a very cursory take on stats which contained, imho, some inaccuracies**. The whole lecture was predicated on a sort of "well, now we HAVE to talk about statistics, I'm sorry," that nice anti-math attitude that permeates. I don't really agree with that academic approach, though he is somewhat constrained by the fact that this is a law class. That, and it's the second time he's presented something pretty near and dear to me with a very dismissive sentiment - last week we were discussing philosophy of science and he approached social construction with in science with a sort of "get a load of these bozos" attitude. Again, not that it's really an atypical attitude, and it could be argued that law has to take such an attitude to function. Still, me no likey.
Interlude: A quote that came up more than once this week:
"I guess you can tell I'm into language. Language is kind of my thing, being a comedian. If you don't have a command of language it's nothing to be embarrassed about, but let's face it: some people have a way with words, other people...Classic. That's Steve Martin, if you're unaware.Um...
Oh...
Uh, not have way, I guess."
And yeah, lots of reading. That's going to be the rule around here for awhile. Okay, next post.
* - Actually, there was a rather bizarre event where a student tried to argue that Hacking himself was a constructionist but used a blatant misquote to prove his point. Wowsers. He got called out on it rather harshly by the professor, too. Pretty awkward. But then, THEN we had some great discussion. The offending student, incidentally, casually dropped Lyotard in his discussion in an attempt to name drop, and quoted The Postmodern Condition. Which was reviewed here on the Ballad! So I knew exactly what he was talking about. Sweet.
** - Specifically with regard to how to use p-values. I've got a nice post on it from the SASI days here. He missed the fact that you have to include the entire end of the bell curve, not just the exact point. I explained it elsewhere thusly:
Example: I hand out 1,000 lottery tickets to 1,000 people. I want to test if the lottery is rigged. I run the lottery. Jane wins the lottery. There was only a .1% chance that would have happened. That's less than 5%, so scientifically, the lottery is rigged. Right? Um, no - in order to make that claim, I have to predict that Jane will win ahead of time. Obviously, every time I run the lottery, the person who wins only had a .1% chance of winning. But if I predict Jane ahead of time and she wins, i have much greater statistical grounds to be suspicious.
It's pretty clear in that example, but less clear in others. Take the coin-flipping example from class: if you flip the coin 10 times, get 8 heads and after the fact say, "there's only a 4.4% chance that would have happened," you are doing something akin to looking at jane after the fact in the lottery example above. You have to make a specific prediction beforehand (e.g., "this coin is not a 50/50 coin") and then evaluate what happens. Again, I don't want to delve too much into the math of the stats, but if your prediction is just "this coin in unfair," then you have to account for the fact that you would be equally surprised by 8, 9 or 10 heads OR 8, 9 or 10 tails. When you flip a fair coin, there's actually a 112/1024 = 10.9% chance that you'll get 8 or more heads or tails. This is one of the reasons you have to do more than 10 trials to show an effect like this.
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Now playing: Pavement - Elevate Me Later
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