The Courage of Your Convictions

It is really easier to say nothing. You are under no obligation to say anything. If you must voice an opinion against some nonsense, it is enough to say that you disagree and leave it at that. Moreover, a postmodernist or someone similar will tell you that right and wrong are only cultural constructs. Of course that assertion itself is a cultural construct. And even a scientist will remind you that our ideas about truth have changed as new facts have been discovered and new theories developed to explain them. It was not always so. There was a time when a scientist would truly go to the ends of the Earth to prove a theory. 

Today, scientists are not alone in accepting a false theory of induction which asserts that we can only approach but never know the truth. 

From Susan M. Lea and John Robert Burke, Physics: the Nature of Things (Thomson Brooks/Cole; 1997). 

“Physics is an experimental science that prides itself in getting close to reality through laboratory testing of theory. … How can we be certain that the experimental process of dissecting nature into component part is ultimately correct? We can’t! Belief in experimental science depends on one’s worldview.” -- page 12.

 

“Consistency with experiment and usefulness in understanding nature are the properties of a good physical theory. The word truth is conspicuously absent. Aristotle… Kepler and Galileo… Newtonian physics, [were] thought absolutely true for 250 years. In the twentieth century, we have learned that Newtonian physics is not exact but stands as an excellent approximation. Absolute truth is elusive. We continue to seek greater depth in our understanding, greater elegance in our theories, and greater precision in our experiments. Whether truth can be achieved in some approximate sense by this process is unanswerable. We believe in physics because we know we can organize our knowledge and employ it to describe the behavior of nature with greater accuracy using only a small number of fundamental ideas.” -- page 14

Not all scientists are timid.

“As a scientist, Sagan speculated freely, sometimes wildly, and outraged his more cautious colleagues. ... He anticipated some interesting scientific discoveries, although sometimes (and oddly) for the wrong reasons. ... The price of fame is a big head, and Sagan’s grew mighty big; eyewitness testimony to this effect abounds.... Most scientists, by contrast, are rarely so self-assured. To them, Truth is a like a blob of mercury—it’s hard to pin down. Sagan’s air of omniscience made him seem sometimes slightly inhuman, more like Mr. Spock than Mr. Wizard.” ) Carl Sagan: A Life by Keay Davison, John Wiley & Sons, 1999, pages xiii- xiv passim.

 

When the American Astronomical Society sought to present Margaret Burbidge with the Annie Jump Cannon Award in May 1971, she rejected their offer.  

[quote] In a letter to AAS secretary Laurence Frederick, Burbidge wrote, “I believe that it is high time that discrimination in favor of, as well as against women in professional life be removed, and a prize restricted to women is in this category.” Underlying that official statement was the suspicion that the Cannon Award had kept women from receiving other recognition. In conclusion, Burbidge wrote, “It would be interesting to know, however, how often our names have been excluded from consideration for professorships, directorships . . . because we are women.” 

At that time, AAS offered two other awards—the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship, which honored an astronomer’s long and distinguished career, and the Helen B. Warner Prize, for astronomers no more than 35 years old. No woman had received the Russell. Burbidge was the only woman to have won the Warner Prize, in 1959, and she had shared it with her husband Geoffrey for their work on stellar nucleosynthesis.

From Physics Today 27 Feb 2018 in People & History: The award rejection that shook astronomy by Roberta Humphreys at https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.4.20180227a/full/

Interviewed by Joe Rogan (YouTube here) Neil deGrasse Tyson said that while the dictionary definition of “atheist” applies to him, the functional definition does not. Functionally, he said, an atheist is someone who feels compelled to argue with religious people. He also said that he often uses the word “God” in the vernacular sense, as when he wished an astronaut friend, Godspeed, echoing “Godspeed, John Glenn.” 

 

On the other hand, Richard Dawkins advocates for militant atheism. Granting that religious people can be good, he refuses to relinquish the epistemological high ground. Not only does God not exist, as good as many people seem to be, only religion specifically allows and encourages them to be bad. Arguing against that proposition some people point to the atheists of communist governments—the USSR, Cambodia, and China--who carried out atrocities against people holding religious beliefs. However, despite claims to “scientific socialism” political Marxism-Leninism is really another religion: it has books of sole truth, a priesthood, and intense internal battles over dogma, none of which can be empirically verified. Whatever failings that scientists have as individuals—to err is human—they do not bomb each other’s classrooms and cafes. 

It is not a lack of standards or a want of values. Right and wrong exist and we can know them. Only physical force is forbidden. As the US Supreme Court ruled on the legality of polygamy in Utah (Reynolds vs. the United States 18 US 145; 1879):You are free to believe whatever you want; you are not free to do whatever you want. Personally, I believe that SCOTUS was in error on the wider issue. As long as no one was coerced, they were all free to do whatever they wanted. The fundamental truth remains, however: The strength and resiliency of an open society is a consequence of the interactions—even acrimonious debate—among people advancing their own ideas.

 

It is infamously known in astronomy that Cecilia Payne changed her doctoral dissertation to agree with the (widely accepted) theory of her advisor Harlow Shapley and astronomers generally that the elements are distributed in the stars very much as they are on and within the Earth. Payne found that hydrogen is a million times more abundant in the stars. Similarly, 80 years later, confronted with doubts from the highest authorities, Bruce Campbell and Gordon Walker retracted their claim to have found the first evidence of an exoplanet. Nonetheless, it remains foundational to the scientific method that you have to know when you were wrong. How you know is as much a matter of introspection as it is of epistemology. 

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Karl Popper and His Enemies 

Karl Marx and the Dustbin of History 

The Scientific Method 

The Scientific Method (Revisited)

 

Absolutes and Objectives

The law of identity is an absolute. Your right to trial by jury is not an absolute.  That humans have a nature is absolute. Existence is identity. To be is to be something.  However, not every claim about "human nature" is absolute (or even true).  

Absolutes are not contextual.  Some people claim that taking a human life is absolutely wrong.  Immanel Kant's deontology ethics were absolute, to be carried out whether any one benefited or not - in his words, to be carried out even if they caused harm.  

Contextual truths are objective: based in physical reality, we know them through reason. But they are not immutable, eternal, or intrinsic. Is gold the best money?  It depends on the context. 

 

Not everyone wants to be a collector.
Not every collector is interested in coins.
Not every numismatist pursues US federal.
Only some care about Mint errors.
Those errors have special value --
to some people.

"Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter’s stomach, is an absolute." -- Galt's Speech.

The law of identity is absolute. This lamp in my office is not. I could paint it blue. I could disassemble it, and some point, it would cease to be a lamp qua lamp. I could use the bulb screw sockets to mount relays and use it as a switch for a model railroad. In fact, I could mount photocells on it, leaving the bulbs in, but rendering it unusable as a lamp qua lamp, while it is a switch. That would be its identity: a switching mechanism made from a lamp. That the lamp has some nature is absolute. Existence is identity. Although the nature of the lamp is mutable, I can do nothing to change the law of identity.  

Some people claim that it is absolutely wrong to take a human life. Libertarians typically offer self-protection and defense of your rights as contexts to allow killing.  The moral absolutists disagree. For them, the wrongfulness of homicide is like the law of identity. They are wrong, of course, and it is because context matters. Taking a life may be wrong, or may not. It depends on the context. Knowing the context requires an objective understanding: perceived evidence explained by reason.    

“Engineers will tell you that the sound barrier is an absolute, like the firmness of the Earth.” – Slick Goodlin in The Right Stuff.
“If you ask me, the damn thing doesn’t even exist.” – Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff.

Ayn Rand said that the choice to think is the fundamental choice. But do you not need to be thinking in order to choose to think? You do not. The choice to think is avoided by evasion. Rather than focus – rather than think – the mind goes blank, or switches to some other non-threatening stream of consciousness. The choice to think must be made consciously.  So, too, is the decision to discover and apply context, a choice. That choice is one that absolutists seek to avoid. Once something is true or false, good or bad, right or wrong, there it must remain forever, never to be re-examined.

And, indeed, absolutes do exist. Existence itself is absolute. Your need to choose your values is absolute. If you ignore that, it is no less destructive than ignoring the laws of physics while driving your car. But not every truth is absolute. Absolutes are the deepest and broadest of truths. Mid-range truths are often contextual: they are objectively true, i.e, empirically perceived and rationally explained. The perception might change. The nature of the event might change. Understanding – the theoretical model of explanation – could be improved.

Humans could not hold abstractions in their minds until we had language. By “language,” I mean something conceptually different from animal calls.  By language I mean the expression of a mental state with no external stimulus, i.e., with an internal motivation only.  In other words, the event that triggered the communication was not the presence of a predator or the calling to a mate. It was not the feeling of hunger or thirst. It began within the mind of the creator.

The making of a stone hand axe was taught by demonstration for perhaps one million years across three species of hominids. But the communication by demonstration was necessarily limited. Our modern languages are no more than 10,000 years old. Language itself is no more than 100,000 years old. You began to learn language before you were born when you heard (felt) your mother's voice.  And yet, creators and inventors were (and remain) difficult to understand. We do not share their mental states, the way our ancestors shared the demonstration of how to make a hand axe.

Moral absolutes do exist. They are very basic and very broad. The fact that we must choose our actions is the basis of morality. The fact of choice is morality. Whatever is objectively in your best interest is not of necessity in my best interest. Those truths are objective, not absolute.

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god is not Great

god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens (New York: Twelve, 2007) delivers a coordinated series of complaints with deep merit, each of them fashioned by insight, reason, and experience.  That experience defines the reasons for the insights.

This is Hitchens’s own personal accusation of immorality against all religions. As a prosecutor, he accepts no plea bargaining from the perpetrator.  The crimes committed are documented and often stipulated. Hitchens' begging of us to condemn the malefactor is not enough. For all he cares, ultimately, the guilty should go free lest the innocent suffer unjustly.  While he accuses those who are evil, he grants (always tangentially) that many people live well because of their religions. 

That said, Hitchens remains uncompromising in his charges against Jews, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists. (Lesser populations draw fewer references.) At the same time, he advocates for reason, reality, the Enlightenment, and humanism. This is not the perfect book to convert the unenlightened. That claim could only be made for a holy book. 

Ethics and morality are central here. Metaphysics does not get much attention. If the universe – alternate time lines and parallels and all that – the entire Universe is all that exists, then anything outside of existence would not exist.  How could any entity outside of existence create  the universe? That is not one of his points.  Hitchens does cite (page 71) the argument of infinite regression: what created god? He quotes William Ockham page 68 et seq., after taking us to an encounter between Napoleon Bonaparte and Pierre-Simon Laplace. Laplace had constructed an orrery, a model of the solar system.  “Where is God?” asked the emperor. “I do not need this hypothesis.” (“Je ne pas besoin de cette hypothèse.”)  

http://www.arm.ac.uk/orrery/

 Among the many insightful theses about God, the Catholic Encyclopedia cautions us that when we say that a brave man is a lion we understand that as an analogy. So, too, when we say that God is infinite or eternal or all-loving or all-knowing are we only expressing by analogy what we truly cannot understand.  But religionists do not torture and kill people over admitted analogies. They claim absolute knowledge and the right to destroy in the most horrible ways those who disagree with their highly putative assertions. Perhaps some un-analogilizable Aristotlean quintessence was the creator of the hyperspace wormholes traversed by Carl Sagan's Ellie Arroway. Do you believe that such an entity cares about who occupies the Gaza Strip, Northern Ireland, or Tibet?

Traditionally, atheists have a well-known attack in pointing out that other assertions about God are internally contradictory or mutually exclusive. Can God make a stone so big that He cannot lift it? Can God change his mind so that he will not know in advance what he will do next? Omniscience and omnipotence cancel each other. The Catholic Encyclopedia addresses those, also. Hitchens does not. 

He also fails to find the center of the target when admitting to the atrocities committed by communists who were atheists. Any one of Lenin, Stalin, or Mao Zedong, among others, were worse by orders of magnitude than the sum total of all deaths attributed to the Inquisition and the Crusades combined. Though not on the bull's-eye, Hitchens does find the target.

When I was a Marxist, I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith, but I did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered. The concept of historical and dialectic materialism was not an absolute and it did not have any supernatural element, but it did have its messianic element in the idea that an ultimate moment might arrive, and it most certainly had its martyrs and saints and doctinaires and (after a while) its mutually excommunicating rival papacies. It also had its schisms and inquisitions and heresy hunts. I was a member of a dissident sect that admired Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, and I can say definitely that we had our prophets... 

... But there came a time when I could not protect myself, and indeed did not wish to protect myself from the onslaught of reality. Marxism, I conceded, had its intellectual and philosophical and ethical glories, but they were in the past. Something of the heroic period might perhaps be retained, but the fact had to be faced: there was no longer any guide to the future. In addition, the very concept of a total solution had led to the most appalling human sacrifices, and to the invention of excuses for them. ... 

...  There are days when I miss my own convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general, I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better, too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.  (Page 151)

Near the end, in Chapter Seventeen, he takes on "An Objection Anticipated: The Last-Ditch 'Case' Against Secularism." There he cites The God that Failed, edited by Richard Crossman, which contains essays by Arthur Koestler, Andre Gide, and other former communists. Hitchens acknowledges that totalitarian ideologies bring religion to earth with central doctrines, orthodoxies, and claims of infallibility.

Although he admitted to finding The Virtue of Selfishness to be the best of Ayn Rand’s works Hitchens had contempt for her fiction and most of what she advocated.  Nevertheless, this from him could have come from her:

“Until relatively recently, those who adopted the clerical path had to pay a heavy price for it. Their societies would decay, their economies would contract, their best minds would go to waste or take themselves elsewhere, and they would consistently be outdone by societies that had learned to tame and sequester the religious impulse. A country like Afghanistan would simply rot. 

Bad as that was, it became worse on September 11, 2001, when from Afghanistan the holy order was given to annex two famous achievements of modernism – the high-rise building and the jet aircraft – and use them for immolation and human sacrifice. The succeeding stage, very plainly announced in hysterical sermons, was to be the moment when apocalyptic nihilists coincided with Armageddon weaponry. Faith-based fanatics could not design anything as useful or beautiful as a skyscraper or a passenger aircraft. But, continuing their long history of plagiarism, they could borrow and steal those things and use them as a negation.” (page 280)

Hitchens was a rationalist and a materialist. Time and again through all of his writings, he appeals to the critical judgment of his reader.  For Hitchens, writing was a conversation between two people. His thesis here is that many people live well and do good by others often because of their own religious experience; and so do non-religious people.  But only religion can justify the horrors perpetrated since its inception, and can only do so exactly because it is not reasonable, not rational, not logical, not empirical, not evidentiary, and not objectively true.

Previously on Necessary Facts

Kicking Nuns for Fun and Profit

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

The Sokal Affair

Reflections on the Sokal Affair

Gregory M. Browne's Necessary Factual Truths

Gregory M Browne's Necessary Factual Truths

This blog is named for Dr. Gregory M. Browne's work bridging metaphysics and epistemology.  In the Introduction to Necessary Factual Truths, Browne explains that his work was inspired by Leonard Peikoff's essay, "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy."  This book goes further to uniting inductive and deductive truths.  Inductive truths are factual (empirical; evidentiary), while deductive truths are necessary (logical, rational).  As an Objectivist, Browne expects that there is no dichotomy between the factual and the necessary, the empirical and the rational. 

According to Browne, the historical difficulty derives from the fact that not everything essential to identification and definition is immediately perceptible.  He delineates "shallow" truths from "deep" truths.  Mathematics and logic are "shallow" because everything you need to know is immediately provided.  On the other hand, the internal structures of atoms and stars, the mechanisms of life, and the panorama of human history are "deep" because they are less tractable.  They do have natures. Existence is identity: to be is to be something.  However, we just have not always known -- and may not yet know -- much about these more complicated entities.  When such things are first discovered, we know that they are, but we do not know what they are.  Eventually, we learn more.  According to Dr. Browne, historically, Aristotle followed a unified inductive-deductive methodology.  Over the centuries, philosophers narrowed their certainties, eventually abandoning the empirical, evidentiary, experimental, realistic aspects of knowledge for those that could be argued like geometry.

"...I say that some kinds are such that a description that is logically equivalent to the name - which would be a definition by necessary and sufficient conditions - is not always available. ... This is because some some kinds have attributes which are unknown when they are first discovered, as we shall see, and so it takes work to discover the attributes, and thus come up with a definition by necessary and sufficient attributes, and at any given time we may not have discovered them all." (168-169) 

Browne opens his treatise by discussing why philosophers denied necessary factual truths and created dichotomies.  He then goes on to define categories, classes and kinds, necessity and causality, explaining extension (breadth and narrowness of definition) and intension (depth and shallowness of meaning).  The book argues for three broad claims. First, "some admittedly factual truths - including truths in chemistry and biology - are indeed necessary..."  He achieves this by his explanation of Deep Kinds, entities whose nature is complex and not entirely known.  He ties this to other side of the equation by investigating Narrow Classes and the necessary truths about individuals.  His second claim is that certain factual truths - such as Newton's Three Laws of Motion - are necessary.  Finally, Browne demonstrates why the necessary truths are more than conventions, but factual: they are true because of how the world is.


Gregory M. Browne completed a dual major in political philosophy and political science at Michigan State University's James Madison College in 1979.  Continuing his studies at the University of Michigan in history and philosophy, he returned to MSU, completing a master's degree in political science in 1984 and another in philosophy in 1988 before earning a doctorate in philosophy in 1994.  He taught at Yorktown University in Denver and at community colleges in Michigan before coming to Eastern Michigan University.  In the fall semester 2007, waiting for a class in police operations, I was walking the halls and heard him lecturing about Ayn Rand. His essay on reference and neccesity (in reply to Roderick Long) appeared in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies Vol 8, No 1.

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