Subject closed – or not
Something W K C Guthrie said about Socrates set off a train of thought.
[S]ince no one will try to find out what constitutes right action, or what is the real meaning of freedom or justice, if he thinks he knows it already, the first task was to convince others too of their ignorance.
True enough, probably – unless she already thinks that things keep on being worth thinking about even if she does think she knows something about them already. That’s why a basic stance of skepticism, uncertainty, revisability, is a good thing. If we have it, we’re likely and predisposed to go on (and on and on) trying to find out things even if we have thought about them before. We’re never finished. There are no closed questions.
The belief or conviction that we already know all that needs to be known on a subject probably does impede further inquiry and thought about it. That’s a sensible time-saving mechanism in a world of finite time and attention, especially when it comes to simple straightforward factual information like bus timetables, but it’s also the high road to dogmatism and delusions of infallibility and lack of practice in thinking and questioning on more complicated subjects. The absence of a sense that ‘That subject is settled, closed, there is nothing to think about’ is a necessary condition of thinking about it. If you really think there is nothing to think about, then you won’t.
So, as with biases, I’ve been trying to figure out if I can think of any closed subjects – subjects that are closed for me. Subjects I just wouldn’t want to think about no matter what the new evidence or arguments. Er – I couldn’t do it. I can think of subjects that bore me into fits, and that I avoid discussing or thinking about in certain terms – US politics, for example, which is 95% campaign and only 5% substance (figures pulled out of air), and just unbelievably boring and pointless. But that’s different from closed. I can’t think of anything actually closed. I must be fooling myself! I must be, that must be sheer delusion. Tax policy. Economics. No…I feel resistance, but that’s laziness and ill-informedness, not imputed knowledge. I can’t think of anything I know so much about that there’s nothing to think about. Well that’s plausible enough! Maybe I’m not fooling myself: maybe that’s just the product of ignorance and a bad memory. I’m serious. I find it easy to get interested in subjects I’ve already learned something about, because I’ve forgotten what I learned. I can just start over. Wonderful quality, that! It leaves you pig-ignorant, but also keeps you interested. Let’s see…belief in the existence of the self. We’ve never talked about that (surely?), so let’s get down to it.
G. Tingey 
outeast 
To me, professional association football is a closed subject.
I know that there are footie supporters who are not thick fascist skinhead louts, but that’s the way to bet.
It is a vast amount of money spent on bread and circuses to keep themoronic thugs who are the majority of footie-suuporters “quiet”.
UGH.
Oh, and by extension, the horrid school idea of “team games” – another form of true fascism, as you are bound together as bundles of sticks, for the greater good of the jolly old team…..
I really don’t want to know, at all.
Possibly golf, in England (Scotland is different) – as most private golf-club memebers seem also to be an incredibly unpleasant collection of people … (?)
Anyone else got similar feelings. or even thoughts on similar subjects?
Football… The perfect marriage between strategical planning and tactical elegance… The sheer joy of seeing the opponent taken by surprise by a perfect pass… The low hubbub that runs through the stadium in anticipation of a shot on goal… The racial memories stirred of our Celtic and Teutonic ancestors playing ball-games before bashing each others’ heads in…
I love football. It was the only team game I was remotely good at during high school days. All the rest are dreadful memories.
As to the subject, I don’t think there are any utterly “closed” subjects to me as there are areas of knowledge I have little interest in. Even with areas to which I am extremely biased, I guess that under certain circumstances I would be willing to change my mind. Those areas would include such things as racial/sexual inequality or Holocaust denialism (though the latter is as close to a closed subject as one can get, I guess).
Yeh, well I meant to rule out closed due to boredom, but I see I didn’t really do that. There are plenty of things that are closed due to boredom, for me, but I was thinking of closed due to completion. Closed as in finished, dealt with, wrapped up. Closed by thinking one already knows it.
I must admit there are one or two topics which I tend to assume can produce no useful knowledge. The whereabouts of Noah’s ark, or the holy grail, for example.
Curiously, GT, I know from earlier correspondence that American Football is a closed topic for Ophelia – but again through boredom more than through total knowledge I believe.
So she will not be interested to know that the Seattle Seahawks are battling the Chicago Bears in an NFC Divisional playoff game this evening.
I think we need to be careful of “punning” on what it might mean to say that a subject is “closed.” Some subjects may remain open, in a theoretical sense, but be closed in practice. Heliocentrism might be an example, or the non-efficacy of astrology. Either, in theory, remains open to refutation if some new and unexpected evidence comes to light. But that’s so unlikely that as a practical matter these subjects are closed. There is no good reason to revisit them. Further inquiry is indeed impeded. This is more than a “sensible time-saving mechanism” (although of course it is that). The alternative would be lunacy, or at least crackpottery.
Quite so. It seems that the US parks Dept. are required to carry for sale a book which argues that the Grand Canyon was caused by Noah’s flood. Anybody plan on reading it?
Hmm. Yes, but…
I was partly thinking that the fact that heliocentrism and astrology remain, as Jeff noted, open in a theoretical sense, is what makes them not in fact closed. But maybe that’s a cheat, since what Socrates is talking about is practice. I think an occasional commenter here has argued this very point – that the claim that everything remains open is not really honest, because for instance heliocentrism simply isn’t. I’ve always countered that it would be if new evidence turned up, and he’s always argued that that won’t do, though I don’t remember (or didn’t understand) exactly why. But maybe it’s this. The idea that in some cases practice is what counts.
If that’s right, then I have to agree that lots of subjects are closed in that sense. Although…since the disciplines that replace them are emphatically not closed, but very active and open, we could consider them one subject, in which case it’s not closed.
Yeah, that’s it – that’s what I was getting at. Astrology may be closed but inquiry into stars and the cosmos is not, and it’s that inquiry that counts. Certain methodologies become closed when it’s discovered that they are dead ends, but that’s not the same thing as closing the question.
Angels. That could be considered closed. There is no other discipline or inquiry that replaces angelology, that does what angelology meant to do but did the wrong way. You could group all cases of inventing magical beings and then claiming they are real as closed (exempting a deity, if you like, as a different kind of thing). I’ll cop to that as a subject closed for me because I think I know it’s nonsense. Also will agree with Jeff that it should be closed.
Oh well. Next question.
“You could group all cases of inventing magical beings and then claiming they are real as closed (exempting a deity, if you like, as a different kind of thing).”
I don’t like. Deities are exactly like angels and fairies and what-not. Closed. Although, I admit, closed entirely out of BOOOOOORRRRREDOM.
;-)
G
Well, I don’t like either, but Merlijn has worn me down – metaphysical questions, etc etc. I felt obliged to offer the option! It’s not one I’ll be taking up though.
Maybe we should start pushing a new argument for the non-existence of god: the boredom argument.
God is boring.
It is boring to talk about someone who is boring.
Therefore, God does not exist.
Heh heh heh – but I don’t believe you really consider the subject boring. Seeing as you post about it every now and then. If you want me to take a break from making apologetic objections, though, I can (you’re not the only one worn down, though I find these discussions useful in sharpening my thinking).
Hmm… possibly arguments for the intellectual inferiority of women?
“(That discussion got sidetracked in the earlier thread by an irritating eruption of sexist bullshit. I run a classy outfit here; if anyone’s going to lower the tone it will be me. Sexist bullshit is right out.)”
I do sort of find discussion of God boring, I think. But discussions of belief in God, and why people believe in God, I find interesting. Meta-discussions interesting, I guess, discussions not so much. (Some are interesting. I can think of some. But newspapery ones – not so far.)
No, no need to take a break. It’s good for me to be worn down!
ChrisPer,
No. I’ve been pointing out that Larry Summers didn’t say what most people say he said ever since he said it. (The sexist bullshit on that thread was a different kind of argument, or ‘argument’.)
Trivial, maybe, but it is *definitely* easier to put the butter on the toast before the jam.
Unless you’re three, of course, in which case such subjects still require rigorous empirical investigation…
As perhaps do other areas, where the alternative is to accept arguments from authority [even if it’s the authority of science teachers]??
Ah, but when it comes to toast, is the goal ease of application, or deliciousness? What if toast is more delicious with the butter on top of the jam? And what if only a toddler is equipped to find that out? A new kind of nouvelle cuisine. Watermelon gnocchi; butter over jam.
What makes you think that angels don’t exist? I suppose it depends what you mean by angel. Seriously, the question of a closed topic may come down to the epistemological issue of certainty. Following G. E. Moore, maybe I could hold up my hand in front of me and say “This is a hand” and insist that the issue is closed, that I won’t hear otherwise because any arguments I could produce to prove this is my hand would involve premises less certain than that this is my hand. Still, I suppose, on Wittgenstein’s take, if I could be convinced to keep open the issue of whether this is my hand I have in front of me, I would really be questioning my whole sense of the world.
Clarification: when I say that “this is a hand” is a closed topic because any arguments that might prove it involve less certain premises, I mean that statements like “this is a hand” don’t really function in a way that makes them subject to evidence or falsification except in very bizarre cases.
Well, Wittgenstein drove Russell crazy when they first met by refusing to admit there wasn’t an invisible rhinoceros in the room. So I suppose the same applies to angels.
Lots of things make me think they don’t exist, but I could still be wrong, of course. But they’re not a live possibility for me – which perhaps proves Sock’s point.
Still! If it’s any comfort, I don’t think it’s absurd to think Yetis could conceivably exist. Mind you, that supposed photo of the Sasquatch is so obviously a human in an outfit it’s baffling that anyone takes it seriously, but that doesn’t mean Sasquatches couldn’t possibly exist. Maybe they’re like ivory bills; just terribly isolated and unseen; I don’t know.
(I’d love to believe more than one ivory bill exists, but I’m not very optimistic these days. sigh…)
I think part of the point of the closed-topic thing hangs on whether or not you would really consider any new evidence (as opposed to checking it out simply to hunt for problems). Heliocentrism? OK, can you honestly say that if I told you that http://www.earthisthecenter.com has groundshaking evidence that the earth is the centre of the solar system you would even give a moment’s thought to checking it out (except in the hope of a few laughs)? I really doubt it.
For me,