Author: Ophelia Benson

Then again, JS has clarified his point a little, and it does seem like a point worth making.

…the kind of naturalistic worldview that most
materialists embrace, and the scientific methodology that goes with it,
rules out of court my kind of experience as a datum to be explained.
Therefore, if my kinds of experiences do exist, and if they also have
naturalistic explanations, they’re never going to be discovered, because the
“it must be a coincidence because it could be a coincidence” response or the
“ah but the testimony is necessarily suspect” response are both
unfalsifiable.

Again, I thought that was common knowledge – but maybe I was wrong to think that. I thought it was common knowledge that the inadmissability of personal experience rules a lot of important material out of court, just as literal legal standards rule a lot of genuine evidence out of court. I thought it was common knowledge that science errs on the side of caution and that that necessarily closes off a lot of important, interesting, and perhaps valid evidence. Anyway, as JS says, it’s not something to take lightly. No, it’s not. There should be research on weird stuff like his experience. I thought there was, but I don’t know that for a fact.

Meanwhile here’s the FT making his point for him.

Peer review is a bulwark against cranks, crooks and incompetents. But too much reliance on peer review carries its own dangers. Every profession defines its own concept of excellence in inward-looking ways. Successful academics learn how to trigger the buttons that win the approval of referees…A further step down a well defined road wins easier acceptance than a deviation from the beaten track…Big advances come through the paradigm shifts and peer review makes this difficult. The line between the crank and the genius is sometimes a fine one and may only be apparent after time has elapsed.

It’s interesting that Matt Ridley said much the same thing in his contribution to the Kitzmiller article here.

There is one sentence that troubles me…: `Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community…’ My concern is…about scientific consensus. In this case I find it absolutely right that the overhwelming nature of the consensus should count against creationism. But there have been plenty of other times when I have been on the other side of the argument and seen what Madison called the despotism of the majority as a bad argument. On climate change, for example, I used to argue fervently that the early estimates of its likely extent were exaggerated, that the sceptics raising doubts should be heard and answered rather than vilified. Yet this minority was frankly `bullied’ with ad hominem arguments. Again, the reaction of many environmental scientists to Bjørn Lomborg’s splendid and thought-provoking book was to pour scorn rather than assemble counter evidence. Scientists are no better at coping with disagreement than anybody else.

So what’s the difference? I agree with the scientific consensus sometimes but not always, but I do not do so because it is is a consensus. Science does not work that way or Newton, Harvey, Darwin and Wegener would all have been voted into oblivion. Science must allow for minority views. Intelligent Design is wrong because it is dishonest, not because it is outvoted.

Consensus blocks new discovery, they both point out. Okay. We’ll try to guard against that.

The discussion of special powers seems to have ended, but it raised some interesting epistemic issues, at least I think so; so I’ve thought about them a little more. I think there was a basic, unresolvable problem at the center of the discussion in that JS’s experience was (naturally enough) very convincing to him, but (also naturally enough) not at all convincing to anyone else except perhaps me, and not all that convincing even to me. I think JS didn’t make enough allowance for the fact that there was simply no reason at all for B&W readers to take his account at face value – although he seemed to have made allowance for that, in that he said he’d expect readers to be skeptical; but then he also seemed not to have, in that he called readers’ replies complacent and the outcome predictable. (‘Predictable’ is a tricky word. It can be just straightforwardly descriptive – or it can be a pejorative. Perhaps it was just predictable in a factual, neutral sense that readers would ask skeptical questions about JS’ account; then again perhaps it was predictable in the sense of tediously unimaginative.) To put it another way, I think he’s making a reasonable and interesting point, but I think the account of the weird experience doesn’t have the argumentative force that he appears to think it does or should. It is, as I said, somewhat more convincing to me than it has any reason to be to other readers, merely because I know him and thus know that he’s not, for instance, some giggling hacker playing a joke. On the other hand, knowing him undercuts my willingness and ability to be convinced as well as aiding it, because he has told me of so many jokes of his that rely on sustained deception. And that’s his doing, not mine! So charges of complacency are misplaced.

So, to a couple of specific questions.

But it is a lovely example of precisely the kind of complacency about explanations that I think is a worry where you have a whole load of people who are committed to more or less the same worldview that people are so keen to explain away this stuff by invoking coincidence, when it seems perfectly possible that there might be other mechanisms at work that we either don’t yet understand, or that we understand but will always be epistemologically in the dark about in these situations (e.g., the possibility that you’ve both seen a magazine cover).

But why is that complacency rather than just good practice? Or, what is the difference? Why isn’t it reasonable, rather than complacent, to consider what seems to be the most plausible explanation first? We do that all the time (so in that sense I suppose one could say it’s complacent, but since it also gets the job done, who cares? I mean, maybe it’s complacent to brush one’s hair with a hairbrush rather than with a sock, but it does save time and effort). When we can’t find our wallets, we don’t instantly leap to the conclusion that a space alien came in and stole it to buy linoleum for the chateau in Perth Amboy, do we. We try the more likely scenarios first, and only then check out the space alien possibility. Sure, sometimes routine and habit prevent us from looking for and finding more thrilling possibilities, but the more thrilling possibility isn’t always the epistemically best one.

The thing is though that this is precisely the explaining away that I both expect, and think is undesirable. Basically, it’s a move that relies on the fact that one can never have direct access to the content of other people’s minds, in order to render said contents inadmissible as data in scientific explanation…But if one automatically retreats to those positions in order to explain away phenomena that are troubling for the naturalistic worldview, then that simply confirms the charge that motivates this posting.

Yes and no. Or yes but it can’t be helped. Because the alternative is just plain dumb credulity – for everyone except the person or people who experienced it. As I said Tuesday, I just don’t see any way around that. Since we can’t have direct access to the content of other people’s minds, and we know that, we can’t refuse to entertain the possibility that people who tell stories of Weird Experiences are wrong or joking or lying or misremembering or exaggerating or distorting or all those. If you make it a rule to refuse to entertain such possibilities, you find yourself buying all these bridges you don’t want and don’t have room for. There’s no way (that I can see) to get past that. I get that it was overwhelmingly convincing to JS, and I do find that interesting, and I don’t dismiss the idea that it was some rare natural phenomenon that hasn’t been mapped yet; but I can’t just decide to be as convinced as he is. That would be fatuous. It was his experience, it wasn’t anyone else’s. It’s just a fact of life that X’s experience is not as convincing to any not-X as it is to X. So I consider it unfair to call it explaining away, or a move, or automatically retreating. I just don’t see what else sane people can be expected to do, other than beam happily and throw their brains out the window for the squirrels to eat.

I said this on the subject in comments on Tuesday, and I still think it’s right: “There’s an interesting issue here, because the trouble is, this business of being skeptical and cautious about accepting personal testimony on blind faith is both a valid methodological rule and an evasive tactic. It can be either or both at any given time, and there doesn’t really seem to be anything that can be done about that. That’s true in courtrooms too. Evidence can be entirely true and still be ruled out as hearsay. Objections can be (and are) evasive tactics but still raise valid points. I take myself to be not automatically dismissing your account in order to avoid questioning naturalistic views, I take myself to be raising perfectly valid objections to accepting your account on faith – but of course the upshot is the same (except that in fact I do believe your account, but that’s for largely non-epistemic reasons).”

So I don’t think it’s complacent to be more skeptical of someone else’s experience than the person who had the experience is, and I don’t think it’s complacent or (reprehensibly) predictable to ask searching questions about it. I think if we did anything else we might as well forget the whole thing, re-name this site ‘The Bide-a-wee Home for New Age Woollies’, and talk nothing but nonsense from now until curtain-time.

Rhetoric. Funny how quickly people reach for it. Well, no it’s not, because it works, but you’d think people would have a little shame. But they don’t.

This ‘trustee and spokesman for the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health’ for instance. He’s not shy about it.

The row was stirred last night when the Prince of Wales made a groundbreaking speech to the World Health Assembly in Geneva, outlining his philosophy of holistic care to an audience of the world’s health ministers. He urged every country to develop a plan for integrating conventional and alternative medicine. “Many of today’s complementary therapies are rooted in ancient traditions that intuitively understood the need to maintain balance and harmony with our minds, bodies and the natural world,” he said. The prince argued that in “the ceaseless rush to modernise … many beneficial approaches, which have been tried and tested and have shown themselves to be effective, have been cast aside because they are deemed to be ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘irrelevant’ to today’s needs”.

His ‘philosophy’ of holistic care – meaning what? His woolly idea that it’s a good thing? Based on what? His training in medicine or biology or pathology or immunology or microbiology? No? His training in architecture? His training in botany? No? What, then? It’s kind of funny (I think) that no one bothers to ask! Not even the damn Guardian. If the Guardian can’t be bothered to ask, who is going to ask? The Guardian just said he made a ‘groundbreaking speech’ – there’s some rhetoric for you right there, before we even get to his spokesman fella. Why doesn’t anyone care that some guy who has no expert knowledge of a technical subject at all gets up at the World Health Assembly and tells the world’s health ministers what’s what? Why don’t they mind? Why do they think it’s okay that someone with zero training and zero expertise considers himself entitled and qualified to make a speech of that kind in that place to those people? I would really like to know.

Back to his spokesman.

If you look at them, they are surgeons, a pathologist, and none of them represent any GPs or anyone in primary care. It seems to me odd that these clinical barons should be telling those of us who have to deal with daily human suffering what to do. It is almost like some protectionist guild. They have a slightly old-fashioned view.

Well that won’t do. Old-fashioned? Away with it. Oh but wasn’t the Prince just saying…’many beneficial approaches, which have been tried and tested and have shown themselves to be effective, have been cast aside because they are deemed to be ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘irrelevant’ to today’s needs’? Yes, but never mind. Let’s not be slavish and sycophantic here. What we have to do here instead is cast these pesky interfering doctor types as ‘barons’ and a ‘protectionist guild’. They’re exclusive, that’s what it is! They’re excluding people. They’re barons, with a guild, and they’re excluding all the nice amateur doctors who want to help everyone. Terrible thing.

Dr Peter Fisher of the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital also spoke up; he ‘described the letter as an attempt to introduce a form of “medical apartheid” into the NHS.’ There you go! Barons in a guild are attempting to introduce apartheid. Those bastards! Those exclusive, excluding, border-patrolling, complacent, elitist bastards. It’s an outrage.

Hitchens doesn’t agree with that Ian Buruma piece on Hirsi Ali I commented on the other day.

Ian Buruma said that Ayaan Hirsi Ali ought to have spoken out more for those who had been denied asylum in the Netherlands…This point doesn’t seem to me to carry much weight. If she had become the spokeswoman for other refugees, her own story of making a partially false application could (and would) have been used against her even more. Instead, she pointed out that many perfectly legal immigrants to Holland were trying to import dictatorship rather than flee from it, and for this she attracted lethal hatred…Hirsi Ali calls for a pluralist democracy where all opinion is protected but where the law does not – in the name of some pseudo-tolerance – permit genital mutilation, “honor” killing, and forced marriage.

There’s one very bizarre remark in this Observer article, a remark about the tv documentary that (apparently) prompted Verdonk to revoke Hirsi Ali’s citizenship:

The fact that she had lied was well-known, retorted Hirsi Ali, making the point that was she was fleeing a forced marriage. Not so, said van Dongen, using testimony from her brother and husband to allege that the marriage was not made under compulsion.

Oh, from her brother and husband! The ‘husband’ she went to the Netherlands to avoid marrying. Oh, well then, clearly they’re telling the truth about her, because, being her brother and husband, they couldn’t possibly be doing anything else. The reporter making that remark could have interjected just a little note of caution, I’d have thought.

Homa has set up a petition. It has lots of signers one is happy to join – Homa, Maryam, Irshad Manji, June Callwood, Caroline Fourest; Anne Zelensky, Présidente de la Ligue du Droit des femmes; Mohan Ashtakala, Publisher, The Himalayan News; Michel Virard, President, Association Humaniste du Québec,Canada; and lots more. It may make Hirsi Ali feel that bit more welcome over here, if nothing else.

Let’s just look at a few comments.

From Flemming Rose:

Dictatorships in the Middle East and radical imams have adopted the jargon of the European left, calling the cartoons racist and Islamophobic. When Westerners criticize their lack of civil liberties and the oppression of women, they say we behave like imperialists. They have adopted the rhetoric and turned it against us…Yet multiculturalism that has all too often become mere cultural relativism is an indefensible proposition that often justifies reactionary and oppressive practices. Giving the same weight to the illiberal values of conservative Islam as to the liberal traditions of the European Enlightenment will, in time, destroy the very things that make Europe such a desirable target for migration.

From a review of Todd Gitlin’s new book:

Todd Gitlin, a founder in the early 1960s of the radical Students for a Democratic Society and now a professor at Columbia University, is appalled by the obscurantism of the academic left…The left, he argues, took a wrong turn when it abandoned knowledge as its guiding light on the grounds that knowledge, as argued by theorists like Michael Foucault and Edward Said, was merely a masked form of power, and illegitimate power at that…Gitlin recounts a conversation with a committed feminist who, like her fellow postmodernists, thought, as did the premodern scholastics, that there was no reality other than that constituted by “discourse.” For the postmodernists who dominate many of our humanities departments, it is as if the scientific revolution never occurred. “The category of ‘lived experience’ was, from her point of view, an atavistic concealment; what one ‘lived’ was constituted by a discourse that had no more – or less – standing than any other system of discourse.” When asked, the feminist was unable to provide a reasoned justification for her own commitments. They could only be asserted as a matter of power and will.

Well – peachy. Since feminists tend to have less power than, say, guys wielding machetes or truck-antenna whips or AK-47s, that’s not a great position to find oneself in. It’s also vacuous, and lazy.

But her problem was more than personal. If, as Michel Foucault told the Berkeley faculty in 1983, “There is no universal criterion which permits us to say, this category of power relations are bad and those are good,” then there is no way to prefer a liberal society to fascism, communism, or Islamism. What that means, by extension, is that, as in the 1930s, many leftists either sympathize with an authoritarian alternative to liberalism or have a hard time explaining why a liberal society should be defended against its enemies.

Or both.

From an article on the Euston Manifesto:

There are cracks in the façade of European leftism that should give us all some hope…Perhaps the most noticeable fissure in the masonry of group-think is a new initiative promoted by old British leftist Norman Geras, who supports the war in Iraq and democratization in the Middle East. Together with a young columnist named Nick Cohen, Geras is leading a new movement dubbed the Euston Manifesto…

That made me snort with laughter when I read it. Hang on! Norm isn’t all that old, and Nick isn’t all that young. It’s not as if Norm is ninety and Nick is seven; it’s not even as if Norm is eighty and Nick is twenty. Get a grip.

The sudden success of the British initiative suggests that there is an untapped vein of rational progressivism in Europe. It is looking for a way to throw off the stifling blanket of doctrinaire thinking that always labels Israel and America the enemy, forgives oppressive and even murderous behavior in minority communities under the relativistic guise of multiculturalism, and excuses terrorism as the only weapon of “resistance” available to the oppressed…But, with a rising generation willing to wake up and rethink some of the received rigidities, there’s reason for hope.

It’s not really a generation thing, that I can see. There are plenty of young multicultis, and plenty of ancient creaking universalists, so this isn’t yet another round of hip new cohort overthrows dreary old windbags. Oldies can be clever, yoof can be damn silly. Relevance, m’lud.