Month: May 2019

Metaphors as Bridges to the Future

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David Lewis’s (I’m coming to accept this new convention with s-ending possessives!) solution to Putnam’s semantic indeterminacy is that we have a network of concepts that interrelate in a manner that is consistent under probing. As we read, we know from cognitive psychology, texts that bridge unfamiliar concepts from paragraph to paragraph help us to settle those ideas into the network, sometimes tentatively, and sometimes needing some kind of theoretical reorganization as we learn more. Then there are some concepts that have special referential magnetism and are piers for the bridges.

You can see these same kinds of bridging semantics being applied in the quest to solve some our most difficult and unresolved scientific conundrums. Quantum physics has presented strangeness from its very beginning and the various interpretations of that strangeness and efforts to reconcile the strange with our everyday logic remains incomplete. So it is not surprising that efforts to unravel the strange in quantum physics often appeal to Einstein’s descriptive approach to deciphering the strange problems of electromagnetic wave propagation that ultimately led to Special and then General Relativity.

Two recent approaches that borrow from the Einstein model are Carlo Rovelli’s Relational Quantum Mechanics and David Albert’s How to Teach Quantum Mechanics. Both are quite explicit in drawing comparisons to the relativity approach; Einstein, in merging space and time, and in realizing inertial and gravitational frames of reference were indistinguishable, introduced an explanation that defied our expectations of ordinary, Newtonian physical interactions. Time was no longer a fixed universal but became locked to observers and their relative motion, and to space itself.

Yet the two quantum approaches are decidedly different, as well. For Rovelli, there is no observer-independent state to quantum affairs.… Read the rest

¡Reconquista!

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¡Reconquista! lives! Though with fewer exclamation points, much less signo de apertura de exclamación! Ahem. Here’s a preview:

Herb Malconia has a dog problem that goes back generations. The rabid beast chained to his shed is the incarnation of his grandfather. Or so says the local seer in the hamlet that straddles the border with Mexico. Once men raided into Texas and his great-grandmother bore a child from the border ravishment. There is an antidote to the dog curse, but it involves hijacking surveillance drones, avenging raids into Mexico, trapping bats by moonlight, and stealing the possessed cowboy hat of an up-and-coming politician.

In ¡Reconquista!, a farce and satire of today’s America, the country is polarized by identity politics, conspiracy theories, the opioid crisis, and a surly impotence in the face of social change. A host of characters entwine in subplots and vignettes that build toward a dark climax. The reader meets Maria de la Santa Ana Cuellar Ramirez de los Trinidad Martyr Remedios Sanchez, PhD, a Mexican academic elitist (and Herb’s distant relation) who rises to colonel in a drug cartel that has become a vanity project for luchadores and narcocorridos celebrating the cartel’s leader, El Chacal. There is Cleo, aggressively queer and predatory in pursuing love. Juicy is trying to reclaim his Muslim heritage that was forced underground and to the New World in fifteenth century Iberia. A relentless FBI agent hounds and ultimately kills the wrong man, blinded by conspiracy-fueled biases. A war party of constipated white supremacists bogs down in a muddy arroyo while staging a raid into Mexico. A political boss is luridly sexist and racist while thriving on folksy revisionism in a divided America.

… Read the rest

Doubt at the Limit

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I seem to have a central theme to many of the last posts that is related to the demarcation between science and non-science, and also to the limits of what rationality allows where we care about such limits. This is not purely abstract, though, as we can see in today’s anti-science movements, whether anti-vaccination, flat Earthers, climate change deniers, or intelligent design proponents. Just today, Ars Technica reports on the first of these. The speakers at the event, held in close proximity to a massive measles outbreak, ranged from a “disgraced former gastroenterologist” to an angry rabbi. Efforts to counter them, in the form of a letter from a county supervisor and another rabbi, may have had an impact on the broader community, but probably not the die-hards of the movement.

Meanwhile, Lee Mcyntire at Boston University suggests what we are missing in these engagements in a great piece in Newsweek. Mcyntire applies the same argument to flat Earthers that I have applied to climate change deniers: what we need to reinforce is the value and, importantly, the limits inherent in scientific reasoning. Insisting, for example, that climate change science is 100% squared away just fuels the micro-circuits in the so-called meta-cognitive strategies regions of the brains of climate change deniers. Instead, Mcyntire recommends science engages the public in thinking about the limits of science, showing how doubt and process lead us to useable conclusions about topics that are suddenly fashionably in dispute.

No one knows if this approach is superior to the alternatives like the letter-writing method by authorities in the vaccination seminar approach, and it certainly seems longer term in that it needs to build against entrenched ideas and opinions, but it at least argues for a new methodology.… Read the rest

Causing Incoherence to Exist

Mark Davis1 Comment

I was continuing discussion on Richard Carrier vs. the Apologists but the format of the blog posting system made a detailed conversation difficult, so I decided to continue here. My core argument is that the premises of Kalam are incoherent. I also think some of the responses are as well.

But what do we mean by incoherent?

Richard interpreted that to mean logically impossible, but my intent was that incoherence is a property of the semantics of the words. Statements are incoherent when they don’t make sense or only make sense with a very narrow and unwarranted reading of the statement. The following argument follows a fairly standard analytic tradition analysis of examining the meaning of statements. I am currently fond of David Lewis’s school of thought on semantics, where the meaning of words exist as a combination of mild referential attachment, coherence within a network of other words, and, importantly, some words within that network achieve what is called “reference magnetism” in that they are tied to reality in significant ways and pull at the meaning of other words.

For instance, consider Premise 1 of a modern take on Kalam:

All things that begin to exist have a cause.

OK, so what does begin to exist mean? And how about cause? Let’s unpack “begin to exist,” first. We might say in our everyday world of people that, say, cars begin to exist at some point. But when is that point? For instance, is it latent in the design for the car? Is it when the body panels are attached on the assembly line? Is it when the final system is capable of car behavior? That is, when all the parts that were in fact designed are fully operational?… Read the rest