All entries by this author

Argument by Fashion

Dec 15th, 2002 12:00 am | By

There is a review of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate in the current American Scientist. It raises some reasonable objections to Pinker’s book, including a contradiction I have wondered about too: on the one hand Pinker rejects the “naturalistic fallacy” (also known as the fact-value distinction, or confusing “is” with “ought”), and on the other hand the whole book is an argument that a proper understanding of human nature undermines ideas about social engineering and utopian dreams. Fair enough. But then there comes a very odd paragraph.

At this point in the book I was increasingly struck by resonances with the intellectual conservatism of science warriors such as Paul Gross and Norman Levitt. Pinker’s standard lists of blank-slaters (exponents

Read the rest


The Persistence of Superstition *

Dec 14th, 2002 | Filed by

Magical thinking thrives when the other kind can’t perform miracles.… Read the rest



Secularism is Good *

Dec 14th, 2002 | Filed by

Hermione Lee admires Salman Rushdie’s chutzpah: extolling unbelief in a Sunday address in King’s College Chapel.… Read the rest



Identity What

Dec 13th, 2002 8:34 pm | By

There is an essay by Martin Jay in the current London Review of Books about “situatedness”, about speaking azza. Azza woman, azza Muslim, azza graduate, azza whatever. The subject is similar to that of Todd Gitlin’s Twilight of Common Dreams: the difficulties and limitations of what we like to call “identity”. As Jay points out, in reviewing David Simpson’s Situatedness: or Why We Keep Saying Where We’re Coming From, it is difficult to decide which bit of our identity is relevant to any given discussion.

How can we know, for example, whether it is more important that a person is a woman, a baby boomer, a heterosexual, Asian-American, a Catholic, a breast cancer survivor, upper-middle class, a college

Read the rest


Rawls and Nozick *

Dec 13th, 2002 | Filed by

It is instructive to consider the two opposing principles of equality and liberty taken to the extreme conclusions Nozick and Rawls did.… Read the rest



Truth in Advertising

Dec 12th, 2002 8:12 pm | By

Euphemism is a subject that keeps coming up on Butterflies and Wheels. That’s not very surprising, because much of what we’re talking about is education, writing, public debate. It’s all about language, and euphemism is a well-known and time-honoured way of trying to make one’s case by prettying up crucial facts. George Orwell was particularly good at pointing this out, but he was certainly neither the first nor the last. The tactic was the issue in three stories we linked to recently: the one about incitement to murder as free speech, the one about death threats as a personality quirk, and today, again, a commentary about about death threats as free speech or freedom of religion or piety.

Do we … Read the rest



Threat Envy *

Dec 12th, 2002 | Filed by

When piety equals incitement to murder, not to mention murder itself, there is nothing to negotiate.… Read the rest



How to Attract Corporate Interest *

Dec 11th, 2002 | Filed by

Issues of patenting and profit versus free exchange of knowledge surface in new stem cell research.… Read the rest



Troublesome DNA *

Dec 10th, 2002 | Filed by

Mormon scientist faces excommunication after DNA casts doubt on Mormon heredity story.… Read the rest



Situatedness and its Discontents *

Dec 10th, 2002 | Filed by

Are we doomed never to be able to see past our own situations?… Read the rest



Be Cool, Don’t Study *

Dec 9th, 2002 | Filed by

Report says social conformity among black students works against academic achievement and for confronting the teacher.… Read the rest



Alternative Medicine in a World of Science *

Dec 9th, 2002 | Filed by

Why do we heed “the songs of the New Age pied pipers whose melodies interweave quantum physics and the workings of the colon”?… Read the rest



Hawks, Doves, Dawks, Hoves *

Dec 8th, 2002 | Filed by

Containment, Kurds in jeeps, re-alignments, suspicion, fear, hope, revolution from above, Paine, Trotsky, Bosnia, Iraq…it’s all so complicated.… Read the rest



Different Personalities

Dec 7th, 2002 5:47 pm | By

Here is an interesting statement from a spokeswoman for Surrey local education authority quoted in yesterday’s Guardian:

“The schools are skilled in coping with pupils of all abilities and personalities and have excellent behaviour management practices.”

The context for this statement is the case of two boys who were expelled from Glyn Technology school for making death threats against a teacher, then reinstated by an independent appeals panel. The teachers at the school threatened to strike, Estelle Morris intervened to say the expulsion should stand, and the boys have now been placed at other schools, schools with the above-mentioned skills. It is interesting that a strike of teachers occurred this week at a school in France for precisely the … Read the rest



When in Doubt, Claim Certainty

Dec 7th, 2002 2:59 pm | By

Is it possible to have absolute certainty about something that is unclear? Is it possible to have absolute certainty that something “bore almost no resemblance” to something? Is absolute certainty about something so vague even a meaningful notion? I would have thought not, but some opinion-mongers apparently (I’m not absolutely certain about this, mind) have easier access to absolute certainty than I do. Witness this remark in an article about anthropology, blood sample collection, indigenous people, and the Yanomami, along with James Neel, Patrick Tierney’s Darkness at El Dorado, and Tierney’s accusations that Neel deliberately sowed measles among the Yanomami:

“What exactly Neel told his subjects is unclear, but we can be absolutely certain that it bore almost no

Read the rest


Anthropology and Consent *

Dec 7th, 2002 | Filed by

The Yanomamo want their blood samples back, and Neel is guilty of something or other.… Read the rest



Religion Disguised as Science *

Dec 6th, 2002 | Filed by

Intelligent Design theorists upstage Young-Earthers.… Read the rest



Beautiful Facts

Dec 5th, 2002 8:43 pm | By

The wonderful Anne Barton has an essay in The New York Review of Books that is relevant to the creeping infiltration of gossip and story into areas where they do more to confuse issues than clarify them, that I keep remarking on. The relevance of this subject to Butterflies and Wheels may be remote, but it is relevance all the same. The reasons and motivations behind the novelization of biography, for instance, are probably closely related to those behind the long-standing quarrel between Literature and Science. And then it’s a popular move in Lit Crit circles to say that ‘everything is narrative’, very much including science, in fact science most of all.

It’s easy enough to understand the wish fulfillment … Read the rest



Evans on Williams on Truth *

Dec 5th, 2002 | Filed by

It’s good to read a philosopher who knows what he’s talking about when he talks about history, Richard Evans says.… Read the rest



Blank Dogs and Straw Slates *

Dec 5th, 2002 | Filed by

Kenan Malik considers the implications of ideas about human nature.… Read the rest