The Night of January 16th

Telling someone that you enjoy reading the works of Ayn Rand is different from admitting that your opinions are informed by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or that you relax with William Faulkner. I recently worked with a team of a dozen technical writers. In fact, I was the only true technical writer on the team. The core group held MAs in technical writing from Texas State, but they were doing it just because it was a job that paid well. Another was a kindergarten teacher. Probably the most talented member of the team was an unpublished novelist. Of course, we talked about writing and literature. One of my colleagues said that he does not like Ayn Rand. “What have you read?” Nothing, he admitted, correcting himself to say, “I find that I don’t like the people who like Ayn Rand.” Up to that point, I thought that we had been getting along quite well.  Apparently not…

When Gerald Ford became President, I heard a radio program (NPR most likely), on which the interviewer asked the expert what Ford would bring to the Oval Office. The expert replied that from his long service in the House of Representatives where he had been elected Speaker, Ford learned that “to get along, you have to go along.” That advice has served me well these past 40 years. I am not much for getting along or going along, but I understand those who do. 

My primary motivation is at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy: self-actualization. That being as it may, I am not a recluse. I do not live in a cave in a forest. For me, the rewards in city life come from the anonymity of the division of labor: when you need a plumber, you don’t care who his cousin his, you just want the water line fixed. It may seem paradoxical, but the marketplace deeply engrains the personal ethics and moral behavior that makes socialization possible in the first place, and ultimately rewarding on all levels, physical, emotional, and spiritual. 

On the other hand, around the world most cultures are “high context” societies where who your cousin is makes a big difference. Spain, Sicily, Greece, Iraq, Iran, the Philippines... The “low context” societies are the advanced, industrial and now post-industrial, information-age leaders: the USA, Australia, NZ, and Canada, the UK especially the English, Scandinavia and Finland, Germany, Switzerland, and (oddly, perhaps) Israel. 

"The Weirdest People in the World?" is a paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, (2010), available online from the authors here. These mainstream psychologists sought to demonstrate that most of the research being carried out to find “human nature” is flawed because the test subjects are usually university students or their children. They sent a dozen teams to non-industrialized locales to interview people by carrying out a variety of standard psychological games from simple optical illusions to more complex interactions such as Dictator and Ultimatum. Among their many findings was that the degree of market integration predicts how deeply individuals internalize their sense of fairness. Basically, we share because we want to. Other people share—when they do, which they might not at all—because they have to. 

“Crime in the city” is an easy topic of casual conversation. But the gangs of New York came from high context societies. The best narrative I know about crime in the city is the movie Family Business. Sean Connery plays Jessie McMullen who married an Italian. Their son, Vito, was played by Dustin Hoffman. Vito married a Jewish girl. Matthew Broderick played their son, Adam. Ethnic cleansing is impossible in the city. Gang wars in the city (these days, usually over drug markets) are carried out by Hispanic and African-American high context cultures. As they say, “It takes a village…” 

The Night of January 16^th is a crime drama. It centers on a global financial fraud and includes a street hoodlum. What made the play popular was that the jury was drawn from the audience. Rand wrote two endings for the final act. A bad adaptation was created for the big screen, directed by William Clemens with a screenplay by Delmer Daves, Robert Pirosh, and Eve Greene.

“Though Rand was years away from articulating her own ideal, she had since childhood admired the individual who acts on his own judgments, defying social pressure. Thus the main characters in Night of January 16th are bold egoists who unapologetically seek the world’s rewards and pleasures for themselves.“Notably, however, this play’s heroes don’t embody Rand’s moral philosophy. ‘I do not think, nor did I think it when I wrote this play, that a swindler is a heroic character or that a respectable banker is a villain,’ she writes. ‘But for the purpose of dramatizing the conflict of independence versus conformity, a criminal — a social outcast — can be an eloquent symbol.’”  -- AynRand.org here.   

The screen adaptation mangled the plot. Names were changed for no apparent reason. Elements were added that sidetracked the integration of actions and motives which is an essential element of Ayn Rand's fiction.

“The story revolves around three people; Tycoon Bjorn Faulkner, who is being called upon by his board of directors to explain a missing $20,000,000; Kit Lane, his secretary who also has a personal interest; and Steve Van Ruyle, a sailor who has inherited a position on Faulkner's board of directors. Faulkner is (presumably) murdered, and Kit is falsely accused of the murder. Steve assumes the job of clearing her name.” -- IMDB.com  “Van Ruyle attempts to prove Lane's innocence with fake evidence, but his ruse is discovered. The two flee with evidence from Faulkner's apartment, which they use to track down the mysterious Haraba. They trace him to a hotel in Havana, Cuba, where they discover that "Haraba" is a pseudonym being used by Faulkner, who has faked his own death. When Faulkner takes Lane captive, Van Ruyle rushes with police to Faulkner's room to rescue her. Faulkner is arrested, and Van Ruyle and Lane decide to get married.” – Wikipedia.

Ludwig Wittgenstein denied the validity of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He wrote it in the trenches while in the Austrian army. His military service did not protect him when the Nazis took over. He was forced to liquidate his family inheritance into gold and deliver it to the government in return for permission to emigrate to the UK. While in England, he worked out a different set of problems and solutions. He was accused of attacking Karl Popper with a fireplace poker. It is irrelevant today that both men were closet homosexuals. 

But is possible to discuss Wittgenstein’s metaphysics and epistemology or Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, without having to answer for all of their philosophical errors or lifestyle foibles. Not so with Ayn Rand. She is a lightening rod. It was from a Theodore Sturgeon story that I learned that I am not the only one who falls in love where the lightening strikes.

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Hawking's Brief History of Time

The problem with popularizations is that something gets lost in the translation. At best, A Brief History of Time, reminded me of the predicament of Nuñez in "The Country of the Blind." Hawking's doctorate and subsequent work validate his own understanding. His later popularizations may have fewer problems. For now, based on this, his first mass market book, my judgment is that Hawking's knowledge of quantum relativistic physics is impossible to transmit to those of us who know so much less. 

First edition. First printing.

I marked the book up, noting errors and omissions, beginning with the history of philosophy and the history of science. I also tagged contradictions within the text. Worst, he seems not to know at least one fundamental fact (concerning time dilation) about black holes. It may be that in trying to explain the very difficult in very common language, the ambiguities are unresolvable. Toward the close, Hawking laments that modern philosophers have retreated from the physical world explored by Aristotle and Kant, and, following Wittgenstein, they worry more about the structure of language (p. 174-175). That might be the more relevant concern, considering Hawking's disrespect for Aristotle and endorsement of Kant coupled with the very many problems in his book.

Hawking seems to confuse chaos, randomness, entropy, and order. He seems to have a high school understanding of imaginary numbers. Or maybe it is just that he expects his readers to be at that level, but not beyond.  And, the blame may best be directed at his publishers who told him that each equation in the book would reduce his readership by half. So, the presentation was dumbed down to level of gee-whiz and good golly as we gaze like slack-jawed apes at the mind-numbing marvels of our incomprehensible universe. 

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Is Philosophy a Science?

Sociology, philosophy, music performance, almost any pursuit can be a science, if the scientific method is applied.  The scientific method is the process of rational-empiricism.  You need both sides of that, the analytic and synthetic, theory and practice, logic and experiment.  If you begin with a falsifiable question, explore it, and explain it, and test your explanation, then the activity is scientific.   

(This is based on my reply to “What is Philosophy? a Status Seeking Answer" by Fabio Rojas on the OrgTheory blog here.) 

I find a dose of humility in Tom Lehrer's singing about "Sociology" (... they can snow all of their clients/ by calling it - heh - 'science' / when in fact it's only sociology...), but in truth any pursuit can be a science without mimicking physics.  And of course, we all know that physics is taken as the standard.  The problem with that is that human beings are not billiard balls.  History and philosophy and the all the rest are, indeed, sciences, but you can have two or more very different answers to the same question and have both be valid.  “Do the American people support President Obama’s policy in Afghanistan?”  is a complicated question, and perhaps a set of questions, but with statistical - rather than absolute - answers.

The scientific method is the process of rational-empiricism.  You need both sides of that, the analytic and synthetic, theory and practice, logic and experiment.  You can have a useful tool that you do not understand - the steam engine for it's first 150 years; maybe even computer chips today... - but it is not science until you can explain it. 

With history, in particular, we cannot experiment on the past, but any explanatory theory can be validated and falsified by testing it against different experiences, e.g., the Greeks and the Mayans; or different records from the same time and place.  

On whether philosophy is a science, Prof. Rojas suggested: "...  but falsifiability through logic is qualitatively different than falsifiability through experiment or observation." 

My reply is that we understand the unreality of formal logic - "Socrates is an elephant. All elephants are blue.  Therefore, Socrates is blue." - but that is trivial and demeaning when contrasted with, say, Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's Conjecture for which all the experimental evidence never was and never would never be sufficient.  

Also, seemingly ethereal mathematics has proved worldly: irrational, negative, and imaginary numbers are easy examples of mathematical "fantasies" that became practical tools of business and technology. Indeed, the very concept of "number" was an idea with no "reality" as long as our languages differentiated a brace of pheasants from a pair of shoes. In Japanese, we still count sticks (pencils) differently than leaves (pages).  The problem with linguistic analysis from Wittgenstein on is that such discussions seldom get past English and rarely exceed the bounds of Indo-European. So, when philosophers attempt to argue “meaning” or “the meaning of meaning” they often stray from what is truly empirical and therefore cannot come to a falsifiable claim.  That is not science.  But the errors and omissions of some do not invalidate the entire field.

Prof. Rojas also wrote:  “In the end, through, I approve of McGinn’s status seeking exercise. Systematic investigation of logical arguments is different than art history or music performance.”

Again, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. I could claim that photography informed painting in the 19th century; and I could argue the contrary as well; but eventually, I must show some examples, i.e., provide some evidence. You don't need to play the piano to figure out how to write a piece that no one could perform.  However, you might enjoy reading it; and perhaps, it could be programmed via computer and synthesizer.  Again, the performance validates or falsifies the claim. As performance plus theory music is a science.

While philosophers worried about how we know the sun will rise tomorrow just because it always has, they never worried about “the problem of deduction.”  From valid axioms you can “prove anything” even if you never find one -- again, the square root of minus 1, negative numbers, etc. In fact, the development of double entry bookkeeping and alternating current electricity provided the empirical evidence for those rationalist conjectures.  But the point is that academic philosophers were more troubled by everyday experience than they were by higher mathematics.  The basic problem with academic philosophy - as academic sociology or academic physics - is that it avoids testing.  

Objectivist philosopher David Harriman offered a solution to “the problem of induction” in his book, The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics.  The presentation left some aspects unanswered.  Also, it might have been more productive for Harriman to call his program "objectivism" and leave the word "induction" where it resides, rather that attempting to drag it into his narrative space.  His work remains significant and should be considered by anyone who questions whether philosophy can be a science.

Reality is real.  If something is logically true - not just a blue Socratic elephant - or perceptually evident - not just a trompe l'oeil - then the logical analytic rational side must support the empirical synthetic experiential side, or the “structure” just will not “stand” and the claim must be regarded as unproved. When philosophy is carried out according to the scientific method, then it is a science.

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Eyewitness Testimony: Popper, Wittgenstein, and the Innocence Project

News traveled quickly within academic philosophy that on the night of October 25, 1946, in Room H3 (number 3; staircase H) of the Gibbs Building, at Kings College, Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper had gone at each other with red-hot fireplace pokers.  Of course, that is not what happened.  Yet, the true sequence of events remains uncertain and contested. 

Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers by David Edmonds and John Eidinow (HarperCollins, New York, 2001).

Juries are swayed by eye-witness testimony.  Yet it is highly unreliable – and is known to be subject to simple error as well as police misconduct and prosecutorial fraud.  Over the past 15 years, thanks largely to the Innocence Project, and the advocacy of academic criminologists, some changes in police procedure have been written into law.  However, on the streets, in the lock-ups, in the courtrooms across America, at the local level, tradition rules.  (If you do not know the case of Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton - “What Jennifer Saw” PBS Frontline show here – you need to understand the limits of witness identification.  The Innocence Project page on this case is here.)

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In the matter of Wittgenstein’s Poker, an audience of perhaps 30 academics - students, dons, professors - fifteen professional philosophers at one of the world’s best universities, all of them at some level specialists in the theory of knowledge, did not agree on the details of a 10-minute drama. 

Beneath this is the foundation of science.  Sir Karl Popper invented the theory of falsification, presenting it in his 1935 work, The Logic of Scientific Discovery.  Simply put, a broad theory based on some evidence can explain much.  Astrology works like that.  You are a Libra; your partner is a Capricorn.  You think you are in love, but the charts say you are incompatible.  An astrologer will delve into your rising signs and conjunctions and aspects, and ultimately can produce almost any result you want.  Popper felt that this was true of Freudian psychology, which he called a pseudo-science.  Science is subject to disproof.  According to Popper a complete theory suggests its own testable limits.  This was revolutionary in 1935 but is accepted without question today. 

But social theories are largely not subject to disproof.  The failures of communism (and before that of fascism) are argued away by true believers, just as astrologers and creationists present ever more explanation to overcome difficulties.  (The easiest claim is that the USSR was not practicing true communism, but only state capitalist revisionism.  Actual communism would be successful.  Any failure must not be real communism.)  Ultimately, this applies to radical feminism, to postmodernism, to the broad spectra of both the left and the right.  The true believer finds no reason to be tolerant of other opinions because they are not interested in being proved wrong in the search for truth. 

That expresses Popper’s political philosophy, expounded in The Open Society and Its Enemies, for which he was knighted.  Written before World War II, but published only afterward, the book calls for tolerance based on ignorance.  We cannot know for certain that we are right.  Our ideas might be falsified.  Thus, we are mindful of the sensibilities of other people, even as we disagree.  In his essay “What Does the West Believe In?” (delivered as a lecture and then added to a compendium, In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years) Popper notes that unlike the Marxists of that time, or too many other creeds and their variants, the West largely has no single doctrine.  The strength of our society, the source and expression of our freedom, is that we do not "believe in" any one thing.  Rather, we accept many things as being true, for as long as they stand up to scrutiny. 

How then did Popper come to promote his idea of falsifiability?  What if it later were falsified?  That would be a paradox, of course, as is his intolerance of intoleration.  It is ironic, then, that he denied the validity of the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein.  Wittgenstein claimed that there are few (if any) real problems in philosophy, but only apparent problems from loose language.  Clarify your concepts and problems disappear.  Wittgenstein’s Tracticus Logico-Philosophicus was nicely organized in outline form and relied heavily on the symbolic logic of Russell and Whitehead. 

The easy resolution is that word games aside (falsifying falsification; not tolerating intolerance), it is usually better to reserve judgment and be open to those who would prove you wrong. Ultimately, of course, right and wrong do exist; and the wrong is discarded for failing a single test, while the right stands up to probe after probe.  Unfortunately, the criminal justice system does not work that way. 

The incident is described on pages 16-20 in Chapter 2, “Memories are Made of This.” 

Both Popper and Wittgenstein are at the tops of their careers.  Both are accustomed to holding the attention of those to whom they speak. Popper is the guest speaker, but Wittgenstein will not yield.  They argue. 

“Consider this poker,” Peter Geach hears Wittgenstein demand of Popper, picking up the poker and using it in a philosophical example.  But, as the discussion rages between them, Wittgenstein is not reducing the guest to silence (the impact he is accustomed to), nor the guest silencing him (ditto).  Finally, and only after having challenged assertion after assertion made by Popper, Wittgenstein gives up.  At some stage he must have risen to his feet, because Geach sees him walk back to his chair and sit down.  He is still holding the poker in his hand.  With a look of great exhaustion on his face, he leans back in his chair and stretches his arm toward the fireplace.  The poker drops to the the tiles of the hearth with a little rattle.  At his point, Geach’s attention is caught by the host, Richard Braithwaite.  Alarmed by Wittgenstein’s gesticulating with the poker, he is making his way in a crouching position through the audience.  He picks up the poker and somehow makes away with it.  Shortly afterward Wittgenstein rises to his feet in a huff, quietly leaves the meeting, shutting the door behind him.”

Michael Wolff sees that Wittgenstein has the poker idly in his hand ... Peter Munz watches Wittgenstein suddenly take the poker - red-hot - out of the fire and gesticulate with it in front of Popper’s face.  Then Russell - who so far has not spoken a word - takes the pipe out of his mouth and says firmly, “Wittgenstein, put down that poker at once!” His voice is high-pitched and somewhat scratchy.  Wittgenstein complies, then, after a short wait, gets up and walks out, slamming the door.   From where Peter Gray-Lucas is sitting, Wittgenstein seems to be growing very excited about what he obviously believes is Popper’s behavior and is waving the poker about. ...  Stephen Plaister, too, sees the poker raised. ... To Stephen Toulmin, sitting only six feet from Wittgenstein, nothing at all out of the ordinary is occurring; nothing that in hindsight would merit the term “incident."

According to Edmonds and Eidinow, Hiram McLendon’s account is corroborated by Bertrand Russell: they remember that Wittgenstein became agitated, grabbed the poker and waved it.  John Vinelott supports Popper’s story published in 1974.  Popper recalled that when asked for an example of a moral principle, he replied, “Not threatening visiting lecturers with pokers.”  Defeated, Wittgenstein threw down the poker and stormed out. 

Several points are at issue, not the least of which is the threat with a red-hot poker. Did Wittgenstein leave abruptly, slamming the door, after he asked Popper for an example of a moral rule?  According to most retellings, Wittgenstein left the room before Popper offered the example.  It may remain forever impossible to falsify any explanation of the events. 


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