The logic of science-2: Determining what is true

(For other posts in this series, see here.)

An important question in any area of knowledge is being able to identify what is true and what is false. The search for what is true and the ability to know when we have discovered truth is, after all, the Holy Grail of epistemology, because we believe that those things that are true are of lasting value while false statements are ephemeral, usually a waste of time and at worst harmful and dangerous.

Aristotle tried to make a clear distinction between those things that we feel we know for certain and are thus unchanging, and those things that are subject to change. The two categories were variously distinguished as knowledge versus opinion, reality versus appearance, or truth versus error. Aristotle made the crucial identification that true knowledge consisted of scientific knowledge, and his close association of scientific knowledge with truth has persisted through the ages. It also made the ability to distinguish between scientific knowledge and other forms of knowledge, now known as the demarcation problem, into an important question since this presumably also demarcates truth from error. (This brief summary of this history is taken from the essay The Demise of the Demarcation Problem by Larry Laudan which should be referred to for a fuller treatment.)
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Casey Anthony and Anthony Sowell

Sometimes I am so clueless about current events that it amazes me. What triggered that thought is that I had been almost completely oblivious to the goings on in the murder trial of Casey Anthony. It was only yesterday when she was acquitted of her daughter’s murder that I became aware that this case had apparently been gripping the cable news world over many years and that people around the nation had been so obsessed by it that some actually flew to Florida from all over the country and lined up early outside the courthouse in order to get a seat at the trial.

Apparently the cable news world and chattering classes had decided Anthony was guilty and the acquittal seems to have caused some kind of national freak-out. Why are people so quick to dismiss the jury’s verdict? After all, they are the ones who followed the trial most closely.

I had not been totally unaware of the trial. I check Google News headlines regularly and had seen mention of the name Casey Anthony accompanied by a photo of her and knew that she was on trial for something but did not see any reason follow it up.

While the death of a two-year old child is undoubtedly tragic and sad, there are many such murder cases and it baffles me why some become the focus of so much attention. Is it due to the fact that the media pays more attention if there is a young, white, reasonably attractive (as far as one can tell from the thumbnail photos), middle class woman at the center of events?

Right now there is a trial going on in Cleveland of Anthony Sowell, a man accused of the serial rape and murder of eleven women and burying their bodies in various parts of his home. It is a macabre and truly sensational case that is a big story locally. But as far as I can tell, it is not receiving much attention nationally. I would not be surprised if even many Clevelanders were following the Casey Anthony story more closely than the Sowell case. Is it because the people involved are all black and the victims were mostly drug addicts, prostitutes, runaways, homeless, or otherwise social outcasts?

My article in The New Humanist is now online

You can read it here.

The article is titled No Doubt and suggests a short and simple new definition of the term atheist that more accurately and unambiguously captures what that label represents to those who choose to adopt it. This new definition leaves little room for agnosticism.

I’d be curious to hear from the readers of this blog what they think of my suggestion. If you think it is an improvement, maybe you could spread the word to the other atheist forums and groups that you patronize.

The logic of science-1: The basic ideas

(For other posts in this series, see here.)

In the course of writing these blog posts, especially those dealing with religion, atheism, science, and philosophy, I have often appealed to the way that principles of logic are used in science in making my points. But these are scattered over many posts and I thought that I should collect and archive the ideas into one set of posts (despite the risk of some repetition) for easy reference and clarity. Besides, I haven’t had a multi-part series of posts in a long time, so I am due.

Learning about the principles of logic in science is important because you need a common framework in order to adjudicate disagreements. A big step towards in resolving arguments can be taken by either agreeing to a common framework or deciding that one cannot agree and that further discussion is pointless. Either outcome is more desirable than going around in circles endlessly, not realizing what the ultimate source of the disagreement is.
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Livening up the fourth

Over at National Review Online, Dennis Prager has come up with an exciting new ritual to liven up that dull holiday known as the fourth of July that he hopes will instill in young people a better understanding of the true meaning of the event. He says he based it on the Passover seder and we know that there is nothing that children like to do on a holiday more than engage in solemn quasi-religious rituals instead of running around outside eating hot dogs and watching parades and fireworks. Here’s a sample of Prager’s ritual (I am not making this up):

Host holds up each symbolic item as he explains its symbolic meaning.

  • We drink iced tea to remember the Boston Tea Party. “No taxation without representation” was the patriots’ chant as they dumped British tea into the Boston Harbor.
  • We eat a salty pretzel to remember the tears shed by the families who lost loved ones in the struggle for freedom in the Revolutionary War and all the wars of freedom that followed.
  • We ring a bell to recall the Liberty Bell, which was rung to announce the surrender of the king’s army. On the Bell are inscribed these words from the Book of Leviticus: “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.”
  • We eat strawberries and blueberries dipped in whipped cream to celebrate the red, white, and blue of our flag.

Once this gem hit the internet, there was much merriment in the land, courtesy of Tbogg and James Wolcott.

Letting torturers go free

The slide into lawlessness by successive US administrations has been aided by the courts which have been cowed by the ‘war on terror’ to essentially give carte blanche to the administration to do whatever it claims it needs to do to ‘keep us safe’. For example, it was ruled that Jose Padilla could not even sue Donald Rumsfeld and others who were responsible for the brutal treatment he received. The Obama administration has continued the process, covering up its own crimes and those of its predecessors while making token gestures towards upholding the rule of law.
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On the pursuit of happiness

On this independence day holiday, I am repeating a post on what to me is one of the most intriguing phrases in the US Declaration of Independence. It is contained in the famous sentence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

I have always found the insertion of the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” as an inalienable right to be appealing. One does not expect to see such a quaint sentiment in a revolutionary political document, and its inclusion sheds an interesting and positive light on the minds and aspirations of the people who drafted it.

While happiness is a laudable goal, the suggestion that we should actively seek it may be misguided. Happiness is not something to be pursued. People who pursue happiness as a goal are unlikely to find it. Happiness is what happens when you are pursuing other worthwhile goals. The philosopher Robert Ingersoll also valued happiness but had a better sense about what it would take to achieve it, saying “Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.” [My italics]

Kurt Vonnegut in his last book A Man Without a Country suggests that the real problem is not that we are rarely happy but that we don’t realize when we are happy, and that we should get in the habit of noticing those moments and stop and savor them. He wrote:

I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

Yes, this planet is in a terrible mess. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any “Good Old Days,” there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, “Don’t look at me, I just got here.”

There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown-up until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity — the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, “Today I am a woman. Today I am a man. The end.”

When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, “You’re a man now.” So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it.

Dan, that was my bad uncle, who said a man can’t be a man unless he’d gone to war.

But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Good advice.

People don’t realize how much they rely on government programs

It is now the fashion to claim that the government should stay completely out of people’s lives and that we should manage on own own. What many of the people who make such claims do not seem to realize is that they are the direct beneficiaries of many government programs.

Steve Benen points out a chart shows the enormous number of people who say they have not used a government social program who have in fact benefited in some way or other.

This kind of cluelessness is only possible because, unlike the private sector, the government rarely broadcasts the fact that they are giving you a benefit. The public works signs that say “Your tax dollars at work” may be the only exceptions.

The most obtuse of such people may be the actor Craig T. Nelson who in a TV interview with Glenn Beck condemned government aid to the poor as coddling, giving himself as an example of someone who heroically struggled through difficult times entirely on his own. “They’re not going to bail me out,” Nelson said. “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No. No.”