Analysis and Synthesis

Trust in advertising

2012-02-02T20:59:00.000Z

A story in the Independent, here, attributes the following words to Guy Parker, the Chief Executive of the Advertising Standards Authority (in the fifth paragraph):

"Trust in advertising has been declining for a number of years and this is not good news."

If trust in advertising has declined (and I do not know whether it really has), that is extraordinarily good news. If people have become less likely to be taken in by the tricks of advertisers, who mostly abstain from direct lies but who do not hesitate to use carefully chosen images and words (including carefully devised brand names) in order to create unjustified mental associations, that is a sign that the public is becoming more discerning.

Copyright and the Internet

2012-01-20T14:14:00.005Z

Copyright has been much in the news recently, because of the two Congressional bills, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act), which have just led the English-language Wikipedia and some other websites to stage a 24-hour blackout in protest. Here are a few thoughts.

1. Intellectual property does not have any obvious ground in the practicalities of social life, in the way that property in physical goods has. If one person takes another person's bananas without permission, the loser can no longer eat the bananas. If one person copies another's idea or work without permission, the loser can still use the idea or the work. A society without any intellectual property rights is not hard to conceive. A society without physical property rights would be hard to conceive.

2. Given the first point, it is not surprising that intellectual property rights are limited. Patents last for 20 years, literary copyright lasts for 70 years from the later of the author's death and first publication, and so on. Rights have been granted for the benefit of society (encouraging invention and creativity), rather than for the benefit of the holder of the rights.

3. It is not at all clear why intellectual property violations should be a matter for the criminal law, as opposed to civil proceedings by the party that has suffered the violation. The fact that violations are to be treated as criminal is enshrined in international agreements, but violations need not be so treated. If we are concerned with the benefit to society, that benefit is, as already noted, not nearly so obvious as the benefit of respect for physical property. There is not enough of a motive there for criminalization. If we are concerned with the benefit to the holder of rights, we may compare the position on defamation. Someone might reasonably feel that he had property in his good name, and that would be just as reasonable as a feeling that he had property in his ideas or creative output, but that is not thought to justify making defamation a criminal matter, rather than a civil matter.

4. The motives of the corporations who are promoting SOPA and PIPA are obvious. They want to defend their ability to make money. The same thinking lies behind the (so far unpassed) Research Works Act, which would prohibit open access mandates for federally funded research. There is nothing wrong with making money, but the people who want to make it surely have wider responsibilities, not as company directors but as human beings. They should not make it difficult to run websites that attract user contributions (SOPA and PIPA), nor should they make it harder for information to be disseminated freely (Research Works Act), especially not when the taxpayer has already paid for it. There is a parallel with lawyers who seek injunctions and super-injunctions to protect their clients from exposure of the truth. Those lawyers are doing the right thing as lawyers. But if we consider them not as lawyers but as human beings, we can regard their conduct as reprehensible, because they seek to impede free speech.

5. There has been discussion of regulation of the Internet more generally. Some think it is under-regulated. It is certainly home to some nasty stuff. But it is a corner of human activity that governments are not able to control. It shows us that not everything need be governed. That lesson of the Internet is worth heeding.

The enforcement of rules

2011-12-23T17:23:00.005Z

This afternoon, at a supermarket checkout, I witnessed one of life's absurdities. Two people, together but paying for their shopping separately, were both buying alcohol, along with food. They both looked as though they were about 20. The gentleman was asked for proof of age, and produced it, so he was allowed to buy his alcohol. The lady was asked for proof of age, but had none, so she was not allowed to buy hers. Could the gentleman buy her alcohol instead? No, because he would be buying it for her, and that would be illegal if she were under 18. We were all held up while a supervisor was summoned. She confirmed the ruling, and the supermarket lost a sale of three bottles of bubbly.

If the gentleman had gone round the shop again, picked up identical bottles, and presented himself at a different checkout, he would have been able to buy them. Moreover, the lady might not have wanted the bottles for herself. They might have been to give as presents. In that case, the gentleman could have bought them, and given them as presents himself, all within the law. And it is entirely possible that once the couple got home, he would have opened a bottle from those he did buy and shared it with her. The law against buying alcohol for someone else, aged under 18, to consume off the premises of purchase is unenforceable.

I assume that the supermarket acted from an abundance of caution. The couple might have been agents provocateurs, checking on behalf of the police that the law was being enforced. If they had been, and if the supermarket had nodded the purchase through on grounds of common sense, the police might not have been sympathetic.

This raises a question. Is it possible to build common sense into rules? Suppose that an exception for this kind of situation had been written into the rules. The exception might be for situations where there was one person in a group who could prove that he was over 18, offering to step in and purchase alcohol that had been in the shopping basket of someone else who looked as though she was probably over 18, but who could not prove her age. That would not help when the second person looked as though she was under 18, but was in fact over 18, and the first person offered to be the purchaser in her stead. (Then the first person would just go round the shop again.) A comprehensive set of exceptions, that would have the same reach as common sense, would be impossible to compile. This does not make defined exceptions useless. They can eliminate many absurdities. But they are not likely to be a perfect solution.

I suspect that the main problem is that enforcers expect 100 per cent compliance. If they were prepared to ignore a small rate of rule-breaking, especially when the offence would be victimless (buying alcohol for someone who, if under 18, was not much under, or smoking in an enclosed public space), life would be better. Enforcers could tighten up if the rate of rule-breaking started to rise. We should not assume that all slopes would be slippery.

Targeted adverts

2011-12-05T21:57:00.001Z

I am struck by the acuity of the software that selects the adverts on Facebook. I am regularly offered jobs for philosophers (although when one clicks the link, one finds that no job is available today). I am also offered courses in the English language, and hope this is because I use the German interface, rather than because of the way I write in English. Today, I was offered a villa in Portugal, presumably because I mentioned the country in a comment on a post yesterday.

Should we be scared? One might feel that the software was watching one's every move, amassing data and using it in a plot to increase sales. I am more relaxed than that, precisely because it is a mass-production software system, doing the same thing to millions of people. I do not attribute agency to the software, let alone a propensity to fiendish plotting.

I attribute agency to the people who devised the Facebook business plan, and who specified the functions they wanted the software to perform. But they were only out to make money, not to kidnap my soul. The making of money is one of the most harmless of motives a collector of data on people may have. When adverts for groups of political dissidents start to appear on the page, I shall really worry that I am being watched.

The metre

2011-11-15T22:14:00.003Z

Wittgenstein, in Philosophical Investigations, part 1, section 50, commented that we could not say that the standard metre bar in Paris was one metre long, nor that it was not one metre long. He went on to explain that this was not to ascribe some strange property to the metre bar, but only to note its peculiar role in the language game of measurement with the metre standard. Much has been written about the problem since. A good starting-point is the paper by W J Pollock, "Wittgenstein on The Standard Metre", Philosophical Investigations, 27:2, April 2004, available here:

http://www.kslinker.com/standardmeter.pdf

Moving on to the modern definition of a metre as a certain fraction of the distance travelled by light in a second, we can reproduce the problem. One thing of which we cannot say either that it is, or that it is not, a metre is the distance travelled by any instance of a beam of light in vacuo in 1/299 792 458 of a second.

The philosophical analysis may be a bit different because the demonstrative referent (the referent of "that" in "that is what we mean by a metre") is not a physical object but a reproducible phenomenon, and one that is integrated with our physical theory. The words "any instance of" are included in order to separate examples from the theory, and get us as close as we can to actual metal bars. Our theory guarantees that it does not matter which instance we take.

Where was I before I was born?

2011-11-07T22:41:00.003Z

Here is one of my favourite paragraphs, written by Angela Carter.

There's a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: 'Where was I before I was born?' In the beginning was ... what? Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it. ('Alice in Prague or The Curious Room', in Angela Carter, American Ghosts & Old World Wonders, London, Chatto & Windus, 1993, page 127.)

This could mean lots of things. The interpretation of the first sentence that most resonates with me is that each of us has a tremendous urge to merge his or her perspectival view of the world, the view from his or her own point of view, with a non-perspectival view from nowhere. Each perspectival view only endures for a lifespan. The non-perspectival view is in principle available at any time and the same for all, although different people would interpret what they saw differently, but that view is in practice available to no-one. To see the world as it was before I was born, or as it will be after I die, I would have to be somewhere at a time when I was not, or will not be. There would have to be a place I was before I was born, and a place I would be after death. What I can in fact do is see traces left by the past, and current indications of what the future might hold, and make inferences from those traces and indications. But that is not the same thing at all.

Psychology and folk psychology

2011-10-30T11:25:00.001Z

How closely should a theory of thought and behaviour reflect the perceptions of those who are its objects? We would have no qualms if a theory of canine psychology wandered very far from how dogs perceived themselves and the world. We suppose that dogs have no theoretical conception of themselves or of the world at all, so the question would barely arise. But if a psychologist theorizes about our minds, in psychological terms rather than in neurological terms, it seems that the theory ought to keep reasonably close to our own perception of ourselves. We think that we are formed and driven by experiences, thoughts and emotions. We expect the psychologist to draw on the vocabulary that we use in our folk psychology, and to use it in the same way, so that the conclusions make sense to the rest of us. New connections may be made. Trends of previously unnoticed significance may be highlighted, as when Stephen Pinker, in The Better Angels of our Nature, assembles a range of economic and social factors that help to explain the diminution in our level of violence. But there still seems to be an expectation that the theory will stay close to everyday understanding. Furthermore, this expectation is often met. Articles in Psychological Review, for all their talk of cognitive architecture and their reconceptualizations of phenomena, are still written in a language that is adjacent to the language of folk psychology.

What support does this expectation have? We should not impose any such constraint on the sciences in general. If we imposed it on physics and chemistry, expecting them to use languages that were adjacent to the language in which we describe the everyday objects around us, most of the progress that has been made in the past century would not have been made. It is hard to see how we could justify imposing it on psychology by saying that the discipline is about our minds, and that we know our own minds from the inside. The data we get from the inside may be distorted in all sorts of ways. Moreover, we can imagine aliens, without a sense of our own minds from the inside, devising a human psychology that would be very effective in predicting or explaining thought and behaviour, but to which we could not relate in the way that we can relate to folk psychology, because the aliens had not drawn on that folk psychology. One option seems to be left. Our discipline of psychology is still too immature to construct a full enough set of robust, contentful, concepts, using its internal resources. It still needs to piggy-back on the content that is supplied by folk psychology. So long as it needs to do that, a requirement to stay close to the language of folk psychology imposes a useful control, ensuring that theorizing does not go off on an undisciplined frolic. But any such dependence on folk psychology is not guaranteed to continue.

Mathematics as a native language

2011-10-07T09:48:00.000+01:00

A couple of days ago, I was in a discussion in which I expressed one of my favourite views. This is that we should not be disturbed by our puzzlement at the meaning of quantum mechanics, or anything else of that nature. Explanations that try to picture the quantum world in the terms that are appropriate to our life in the macroscopic world are bound to be inadequate. The reality is in the mathematics, and the only thing to do is to start speaking mathematics as a native language.

I think my interlocutor agreed. But afterwards, I wondered whether there would be any reason why mathematics could not be a native language, in the way that French and German can be. Obviously, it is learnt later than other languages. The pattern of human development prevents its being a native language in the sense of the first language one learns. But that would not prevent its being a native language in the sense of a language in which one thinks, a language that is transparently meaningful. Likewise, someone who moves to a country with a different language, even as an adult, can go native, and take on his or her new language as a native language.

One possible difficulty would be that languages do not exist in isolation from the world. Just as one needs agency and a sense of agency in order to have a full sense of self, one needs to live in the world and navigate it, as well as living within a linguistic community, in order to know what words mean. Words need to latch on to the things with which one has dealings. This is not true of all words, but it needs to be true of at least some of them. How can this be true of mathematics?

The obvious answer is our starting-point. We live in the world that physics describes. Various mathematical statements can be interpreted to be about that world. So the terms and structures that are used latch on to the world. They could latch on to different things, but so could terms and sentences of a natural language. There is more scope for mathematical terms to latch on to something different than for terms of natural languages to do so. The mathematical terms are more neutral as between forms of life. Moreover, a given mathematical theory could latch on to any one of a set of isomorphic worlds, and the concept of isomorphism here underlines the neutrality as between forms of life. But this does not strike me as debarring us from seeing mathematical talk as latching on to the world in which we live.

The main problem would seem to be that the form in which the mathematical expression of quantum mechanics represents that world is utterly unlike the form in which the world is experienced by us. But even this does not strike me as a decisive objection to going native. As someone learns quantum mechanics, he or she learns how the quantum world gives rise to our everyday experience of medium-sized objects. The new picture of the world is linked to our experience through that understanding. Furthermore, the mathematical terms and methods that are used also have direct application in the world as it is experienced. We can come to understand them in that context, then apply them in the quantum context.

That leaves one last gap to close. Is anything lost when we transfer our understanding of mathematical terms and methods, acquired in the world as experienced, to our conception of the quantum world? I think it is not. At least, there is no loss that would debar us from taking on mathematics as a native language for the purpose of making sense of quantum mechanics.

LaTeX

2011-09-12T20:37:00.002+01:00

I have just started to write in LaTeX. using the Kile package. It is an interesting experience. LaTeX makes one focus on the structure of the document. The tree of chapters, sections and subsections that Kile provides on the left hand side of the screen is a constant reminder of where one is in the structure. I do not know whether this will lead to better writing, but there is a good chance that it will. I expect to stick with it. The visible structure very helpfully makes it easy to jump back and forth, filling out a section here and a paragraph there, rather than working through a document from beginning to end time after time.

A question lurks here. The technology of writing has changed enormously since computers came into general use. What difference, if any, has that made to the finished products? Would a book or article produced today, using helpful software to structure, write and correct it, have come out much the same, or very different, if it had been produced using old-fashioned methods? It would have taken longer to produce, but the author might still have come to the same point eventually. And if an author changes from Word, LibreOffice or some similar package to LaTeX, will that change the nature of his or her finished products?

The style of LaTeX brings back happy memories. Commands are distinguished from text to be typeset by starting them with special characters. I came across the same approach when I first used computers, at Cambridge around 1980. I think it was the Zed text editor that distinguished commands by starting them with a full stop that followed a space, unlike full stops in ordinary text (for example .italic, although I cannot remember whether that was an actual example).

Linux

2011-08-29T11:02:00.001+01:00

A newspaper article reminds us that it is 20 years since Linus Torvalds set about writing the Linux kernel:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8725363/Linux-at-20-the-quiet-giant.html

As a big fan of Linux, who started with Ubuntu and has now switched to Mint (both of which are at least as user-friendly as Windows and the Mac OS, as well as being free), I feel inclined to celebrate. But there are also some questions to ponder.

How exactly does the evolutionary environment for Linux distributions (distros) work? Anyone can create a new distro, and plenty do. Many of these are direct developments of existing distributions, for example, Mint from Ubuntu. If an existing distro lacks something that enough people consider important, such as lightness, or changes course in a way that many do not like, as with Ubuntu's switch to Unity, a new distro will arise. If it is good enough, it will attract fans away from existing distros.

This may look like simple Darwinism. New variations arise, and the ones that are well-adapted to the environment (the demands of users), grow fat. But there is a feature that we do not find in nature. The creation of new variations is not random. Someone takes a conscious decision that there is a niche for a new distro, and further conscious decisions as to how best to fit into that niche.

It would be an interesting exercise to model that process as random variation, making the conscious thought drop out of the picture. One might identify the population of distro ideas in the brains of all Linux developers with the existing members of a species, then assume that members of the population bred new members (new ideas) at random, then assume that some new ideas were crushed straightaway by the immediate environment (the individual developer's brain identifying an idea as silly), but that others got out for discussion in the community, meme-like, and a few led to actual new distros.

Thus one would have to change the focus from distros to ideas, in order to model the process as one without conscious direction. That would also change one's identification of the payoffs for good adaptation to the environment. With distros, the payoff for the distro itself is reproduction on lots of computers. The payoffs for the human beings who take the conscious decisions are kudos and, sometimes, the opportunity to sell support services. (A distro itself can be sold, on CD, but it must also be available free because of the terms of the Linux licence.) With ideas, the payoff is simply reproduction, in the heads of all others who agree that the idea is a good one.

We can also ask about the effects on the software industry. Those who make money out of software may complain about free alternatives. Witness Steve Ballmer's infamous "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches". A (secondary) source is here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/

That remark was, however, made ten years ago, and I think the complainers now know that they have lost the battle. Anyone who still complains should be referred to Frédéric Bastiat's wonderful Pétition des fabricants de chandelles, bougies, ..., in which the candlemakers argued that curtains should be kept closed during the daytime in order to defeat the unfair competition of the Sun. The text is here:

http://bastiat.org/fr/petition.html

Retouched photographs

2011-07-29T11:35:00.002+01:00

The National Portrait Gallery in London currently has an exhibition "Glamour of the Gods", showing photographs of film stars from the 1920s to the 1960s. One of the displays shows a photograph before and after retouching. The label explains that retouching was meant to remove the effect of harsh lighting in accentuating blemishes. Thus the retouched photograph would give the viewer a fairer impression of what he or she would see, in ordinary light, on meeting the subject. Or perhaps, it would yield the photograph that would have been produced if high-resolution film could have been used in ordinary light.

These two are different, because only the latter respects the fact that one still has a photograph, and that seeing a photograph is not the same as seeing its subject in the flesh. We doubtless do some unconscious work on a photograph before our eyes, in order to imagine the experience of a meeting in the flesh. That makes the latter characterization better than the former, because it leaves a place for that unconscious work.

But it is still problematic. There is the obvious practical problem of limiting the extent of retouching. The difference made is astonishing, and one can assume that the photographer was happy to go way beyond correcting for the harsh studio light, in order to produce a false perfection. Beyond that, there is the theoretical problem of thinking in terms of a photograph that would have been produced if photographic technology had been different. The notion will only be well-defined if we can specify the respects in which it would have been different, and can justify our choice of one particular set of differences rather than any other set.

Conveniently, there may be a good answer here. We may assume either that the same film could have been used in much lower light because the subject could have kept perfectly still, or that the chemistry of film might have been different, so that fewer photons were required to produce a high-resolution image. But once we probe a bit, it seems that even those answers are not perfect. A human being who sets out to remain perfectly still for a minute will hold herself differently from one who is not required to do so. And there comes a point when fewer photons lead to blurred edges: a minimum number of photons is required for a given quality of image, regardless of the film's chemistry.

We should therefore ask whether we ought to make arbitrary assumptions in order to save an aesthetic analysis, on the ground that the assumptions look as though they are about something that is independent of the work of art: in this case, how people hold themselves, or the physics of light.

Public space

2011-07-09T13:26:00.003+01:00

Yesterday I noticed that yet another bookshop along Charing Cross Road has been transformed into a café. So what? Cityscapes change. Cafés in London are often too crowded, so we could do with more. And we can find books, new and secondhand, on the Internet. It would not even be difficult to reproduce the pleasure of browsing by integrating shops' catalogues and the sample pages that are visible on Google Books. Only the musty smell, and the exchanged smiles with fellow hunters of obscure volumes of desire, would be lost.

Those losses would be real, but not great, and there are gains too, in this case café space. But cafés are for those with the money to buy their wares. London has never encouraged the hire of a table for the whole morning by the purchase of a single round of espressi. Even decent restaurants tell you that you have only 90 minutes for lunch. So we cannot see the proliferation of cafés as providing the public space for all that is so valuable. In fine weather, there is no lack. There are squares and parks. But when it is cold or wet, we need something else. We have it in London, up to 6 pm or thereabouts, in our splendid, and free, museums. But they are not places to chatter too loudly, or to sit down in large groups and gossip.

I offer no particular remedy, not even agorai in giant plastic bubbles. But it strikes me that public spaces, open to all, without payment or any other qualification such as residence or respectability, are vital. It therefore pains me to see large chunks taken out of Hyde Park and walled in for commercial events, as often happens on the eastern side of the park. More generally, those thinkers (often right-libertarians) who are opposed to all public property, who would put all land into private ownership on the basis that it will be in the interests of the landowners to sell admission to others, suffer from far too narrow a vision of human life.

Neuromania?

2011-06-16T18:32:00.007+01:00

On Tuesday, I went to hear Ray Tallis and Robin Dunbar speak at the British Academy, under the title "Neuroscience and Neuromania". The point of departure was Ray's new book, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Ray's thesis was that while neuroscience was great, we should not expect it to explain everything about us. In particular, the key to understanding what is special about us, our self-consciousness and our capacity for creative thought and action, is not to be found there. Furthermore, this is not just a matter of complexity, of the fact that a neuron-by-neuron description of a human being would be hopelessly unwieldy. I agree with his conclusion, to the extent that I would certainly place my bet for it, rather than against it. But I do not think that his reasons are sufficient to make the conclusion even close to certain.

The humanities are definitely not going to become redundant as keys to our collective self-understanding any time soon. But I would not go so far as to say "never". There was some discussion of whether Ray underestimated the potential of neuroscience. It has, after all, made great strides in recent decades, and no-one knows how it might progress in the next fifty years. As Ray pointed out, we cannot place much weight on such promises, any more than we can on an assurance that "your cheque is in the post". And if we look at current neuroscience and expect more of the same - greater refinement in distinguishing the physical correlates of mental states, for example - then we can easily make a case that the contribution to our self-understanding of future neuroscience will be pretty well as limited as the contribution of present neuroscience.

But that would be to neglect the possibility of fundamental reconceptions, within neuroscience. We cannot yet see what such a reconception might be like, but we can draw a parallel. It would be natural to think that the unity of consciousness depended on the activity of some locatable part of the brain. But it now seems that it is more likely to be a consequence of some overall co-ordination that is located nowhere in particular within the brain. (See for example chapters 44 and 47 of the Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, ed. Velmans and Schneider, 2007.) If we can make other leaps of this kind, from looking at concrete neurons to looking at abstract structures, without losing touch with the biochemical underpinnings that make the subject neuroscience rather than anything else, the explanatory reach of the subject might turn out to be far greater than current work would lead us to expect.

I have another worry about Ray's case against the pretensions of neuroscience in the hands of the neuromaniacs. To set it out, I must outline the two central themes in his case.

The first theme was that we can only understand what we do if we do not have too narrow a focus. A little action is part of a whole life. He gave the example of the Libet experiments. An experimental subject moves a finger, as the experimenter directs. But the subject also got himself to the laboratory. Before that, he decided to participate. He looked in his diary, and saw that an hour at the laboratory would fit nicely in between the other things he had planned for the day, perhaps some shopping and a drink with friends. And so on, perhaps right back to an education that made him feel that it was worth contributing to the advancement of knowledge, and perhaps right forward to an idea that one day, he might be able to tell his grandchildren that he participated in experiments that proved to be of great significance.

The second theme was that certain things, absolutely crucial to our condition and our experience, are missing from what the natural sciences provide. These are points of view, intentionality and secondary qualities. The natural sciences describe the world without describing it as it would appear from any time or place, they find no place for the outward-directed gaze that underlies intentionality ("I am thinking about, looking at, acting upon this glass of water"), and they do not recognize secondary qualities such as colours. We, on the other hand, are keenly aware of our locations in space-time, locations that allow us certain experiences and actions, but make others impossible. We also think about, pay attention to and act upon particular things, and our experience is replete with secondary qualities.

Now consider the matter-maniac, a replacement for the neuromaniac. This matter-maniac takes the point about wider context, and acknowledges that we need to look way beyond the contents of someone's head. We need to look at the whole planet, over a long stretch of time, in order to understand what people do. But, the matter-maniac maintains, we can do all we need by talking in terms of particles and their trajectories.

We can identify thoughts with certain dispositions of particles, not just at the moment of thought but before and after (in order to provide the context that makes sense of thoughts). We can do the same for actions. We can identify points of view by working out what information can reach a given person, and what lies within her influence - at the most extensive, her past and future light-cones. We can accommodate intentionality by identifying relations between pre-existing brain states, their origins in prior events, current dispositions that would mean that any changes in objects that were the focus of attention would produce certain responses in the subject, and the practical effects of changes of brain states that would normally be identified as decisions to act in certain ways. Finally, we can correlate secondary qualities with the influences of some particles (those that reflect green light, for example) with others (in brains when people experience green).

The problems with the matter-maniac's approach are legion. I do not think it is a sensible approach at all. But anyone who wants to see off the neuromaniac decisively without falling into the clutches of the matter-maniac, and to do so on the basis of the need for broad focus and the need to accommodate points of view, intentionality and secondary qualities, must show that it is a bad approach. Furthermore, it would be dangerous to do so on the basis of the many specific difficulties in a particle-by-particle approach. The matter-maniac's approach is easily generalized, to something that says "We only need to find one description, of any sort, that is couched in the terms of physics, chemistry and biology, that has a broad focus and that somehow accommodates points of view, intentionality and secondary qualities. Then we can conclude that the neuromaniac has only been shown to be mistaken in detail, not in principle". Such a general threat must be seen off with a general response.

One general response that was offered after the formal proceedings is interesting but it does not, in my view, do the trick. This is the response that the matter-maniac has helped himself to the notion of a point of view, in describing the world in material terms. That is, the matter-maniac must conceive himself as standing somewhere and looking at the world. He relies on the notion of a point of view, and does so in a way that he cannot support merely by identifying the consequences of the people within the world that he conceives having the spatio-temporal locations that they have.

This response fails if, as I think is the case, we can conceive and discuss a world without, even in imagination, perceiving it. If, for example, we want to set out a structure of space-time, we give the mathematical formulation. Then we can give data on how the space-time is populated (beyond any population that is necessary to give the structure itself). Just to see off a challenge to my counter to the response, I take it that we can set out some mathematical data without worrying about where they are written down or the point of view from which we contemplate them. Mathematical structures (including sets of data) are not spatio-temporally located, even though representations of them are. This may look like dangerous Platonism about mathematics. I regard it as harmless Platonism. Mathematical structures just are, without being here or there, although physical instantiations of them are here or there. If one thought of the structures as here or there, the flavour of serious mathematical thought would be vastly different from what it is.

Suppose that this counter to the response failed. Then there would be another counter. Even if the matter-maniac must perceive the world he conceives, whether in imagination or in reality, he could perceive without bringing the fact of his perception into consciousness and analyzing it. He would not need to recognize the existence of his point of view. He would therefore have no need of the notion of a point of view, applied to himself, logically prior to the points of view that he analyzed out of his data on the conceived world.

If neither of these counters worked, then the independence of the natural sciences from more humanistic disciplines would be under threat. Reductionist ambitions that would create dependence of the humanities on the natural sciences may very well be excessive. But to create the reverse dependence would be implausible in the extreme.

Vincible ignorance

2011-06-04T11:09:00.004+01:00

Last week, a friend pointed out an inadequacy in my terminology. I referred to people who do not believe in evolution. She pointed out that we should refer to people who do not know about evolution. The creationists and the advocates of intelligent design are just plain ignorant.

If we take a couple of reasonably uncontroversial principles, that knowledge implies true belief and that doxastic voluntarism is suspect, we can unpack this a little.

Given that the broad evolutionary account is true, and that there is a stack of evidence for it, and that research institutions and practices are such that we probably would not believe it if it were false (satisfying a tracking condition), those who do believe it and who are sufficiently in touch with the progress of science that they would become aware of major changes in the direction of thought, also know it. And those who do not believe it certainly do not know it, because knowledge requires belief.

Then we come on to the accusation of ignorance. This is not, in this context, a mere accusation of failure to be aware. The creationists and the advocates of intelligent design do know about evolution, to a limited extent. They are aware of the evolutionary account in outline, and of some of the evidence. But they claim to have weighed the evidence and to have rejected evolution.

It is easy to suspect them of straightforward doxastic voluntarism. It looks very much as though they have decided to reject evolution, and have then deliberately misread some evidence, and ignored other evidence, in order to support that position. The obvious motive would be to bolster their position within a group of people, usually a religious or religious-political group, who take pride in something that from the outside can be seen to be intellectual perversity. The perversity is a great instrument for distinguishing between the in-group and the out-group. If you can only join by professing to believe something that goes against the grain of rational thought, that gives the group a certain exclusivity.

There is, however, another twist. It seems unlikely that many people could live with naked doxastic voluntarism. That is why flat-Earth societies and the like have very few members. It would be almost as hard to live with a nakedly selective choice of evidence, to know that one had looked at certain fossils but had deliberately ignored others.

I suspect that what allows those who reject evolution to live with themselves is the fact that the evidence is far more subtle and extensive than a collection of fossils in a glass case. We have genetic mechanisms, features of the genome that can be traced across species, the geographical distribution of species, and so on. One needs some understanding of genetics, of molecular biology, and of mathematics, to grasp the significance of all that evidence. So those who lack such understanding can overlook the evidence without deliberately rejecting it.

That is where we should level the charge of ignorance at creationists and at the advocates of intelligent design. They simply do not know enough to grasp the evidence. My friend was correct to say that they do not know about evolution, but primarily because knowing about it means more than knowing the rough outline. That is also why it is so hard to convert them to good sense. They need to go back to school first.

Sometimes, one observes the same phenomenon in other fields. I once knew someone who was utterly convinced that something supernatural was going on when people walked across glowing coals. It had to be, because the coals were at a thousand or so degrees. I tried to explain that while the temperature was high, the thermal energy that was held by the coals was low, so the temperature of the coal-walker's feet did not rise to a thousand degrees. (Do not try this at home: it can go wrong, and people do get badly burnt.) Alas, she just did not have the concept of thermal capacity, and probably did not have the concept of energy as it is defined within physics.

Injunctions and privacy

2011-05-21T09:14:00.001+01:00

Lord Neuberger has just published his report on privacy law and injunctions. The Lord Chief Justice, Igor Judge, has complained that the Internet is out of control. Allegations can appear there regardless of British court orders. Something needs to be done about this.

No it doesn't, and no it shouldn't. The courts have got used to having their authority respected, so one can understand their fury when technology means that people can take action that flouts court orders within the jurisdiction, while at the same time saying "Stuff you, I am outside the jurisdiction". My view that the law not only has lost, but should lose, is based on the following considerations.

1. The state has never had any business controlling what we say, or what we read, or offering help to others who would like to control what we say or read. Artificial technology is at last coming to the rescue of natural justice.

2. The harm that is done to reputations is the mere disclosure of truth. No-one has any right to keep the truth hidden. If you did not want it made public, you should not have done it. The law of privacy, in the form of an enforceable right against non-public bodies, is an invention for which there is no justification.

3. Since the harm done is mere embarrassment, there is no justification for effectively extending the writ of courts of one country to other countries through international agreements.

4. Lies are also put up on the Internet, but if there is to be a remedy there, it lies in the law of defamation, not in injunctions. And if there were no injunctions, it is much more likely that the truth would appear in the mainstream media, undermining lies on the Internet.

Impact and the funding of research

2011-05-09T19:28:00.005+01:00

Like many others, I have watched in dismay, and have signed every petition I can find, as some of those who hold the purse-strings in humanities research have accepted that politically trendy mantras have a role in the allocation of funds. The Arts and Humanities Research Council has adopted "the Big Society", a silly slogan if ever there was one. And the management of the British Academy have negotiated a settlement on the importance of the impact of research, rather than telling politicians and civil servants that they will have nothing to do with the concept. The latest, and excellent, petition on the AHRC is here, and I encourage everyone to sign it:

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/bigsociety/

Today, I came across one of the best, and scariest, comments on impact, in a letter in the 28 April edition of the London Review of Books. It is by Richard Bowring, Professor of Japanese and Master of Selwyn College, Cambridge, the college where I had the privilege of studying in the 1970s. It is available here:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n09/letters

He points out that while everyone knows that the concern with impact is nonsense, people will care about their institutions enough to go along with it, and will put something down on the forms in order to secure some funds. The ultimate beneficiaries will be institutions in Europe and in North America, which will welcome the really talented people from our universities with open arms. To put one of Richard Bowring's points in game-theoretic terms, our universities are in a multi-player version of the prisoner's dilemma (except that communication between players is possible). All would be better off if all resisted, but the cost of resisting when others do not is so high that all will capitulate.

And yet, some sort of control is needed. We cannot just hand over taxpayers' money, without some check that it is not being wasted. Fatuous research does get conducted, and the taxpayer should fund as little of it as feasible. It is a matter of finding the right control.

The perfect control from the point of view of saving money might appear to be one that imposed external monitoring on every research proposal. Indeed, one reason to be concerned about impact is that it would encourage precisely that approach. It is not the only supposed measurable that could do so, nor would it have to be used in that fashion. But impact has the special characteristic that it is not a quality that is naturally defined within the context of an academic discipline, unlike, for example, profundity or being wide-ranging. So the external authorities who have imposed the criterion are the natural people to say what it means, and to decide which pieces of research are likely to have it.

In fact, external monitoring of every research proposal would be a bad idea, even if the external authority was often within the institution, as when a general board monitors the proposals that a faculty board approves. Universal surveillance cramps creativity and twists research proposals. But if we are not to have universal surveillance, we must accept that some fatuous research will get funded. That is undesirable in itself, but it is a reasonable price to pay. A certain amount of money may need to be wasted, as a side-effect of properly funding worthwhile research. But we want to make sure that not much is wasted. What sort of control might do? Here are two suggestions.

The first suggestion is to monitor the achievements of our universities against those in other countries. (One reason to make comparisons with foreign universities, rather than with other domestic universities, is that it takes away a sense of competing with others for the same pot of funds, a sense that can all too easily lead to game-playing, and that can also encourage enthusiastic politicians and bureaucrats to devise games, the playing of which will increase their influence over what universities do. The assessment of impact is a game like that, whether or not that was the intention.) There is something wrong if a university does not attract a reasonable amount of private funding, or does not attract people to its conferences in the way that others do, or does not find that its professors are occasionally lured away to prestigious institutions elsewhere, or does not produce enough widely-cited publications. (It would not matter that work can take years to get recognized and widely cited, because in any one year, publications from earlier years should come to maturity and start to get cited.) These measures are chosen at random, but the principle is not. Universities that did badly in international comparisons would lose research money, while those that did well would gain it. Each university would then use its money to fund the research that it chose. It would be helpful to apply the test to each university as a whole. Then each university could develop the departments that it saw as most worth developing. The same scheme could however be applied to faculties separately.

The second suggestion is to put the decision in the hands of the faculties in each discipline. Make a central decision on how much is to be spent on philosophy, how much on history, and so on, across the country. Then ask each faculty member in each university to divide the pot among all university departments in his or her own discipline, excluding his or her own university, first supplying each person with information on the sizes of the departments. Then average the results for each discipline, possibly adjusting in some pre-defined way for the effects of more votes coming from some universities than from others, and leave each faculty to decide what research to fund with the money that it has been allocated. The point is that there should be enough collective wisdom across the country to ensure that departments that did good work, and that picked worthwhile projects to fund, would be favoured. A certain amount of discussion between people before voting would lead to some lack of independence of decision-making, so we would not get the full advantage of the wisdom of crowds. And the process would be at least slightly corrupted by mutual back-scratching. But it should not be too bad.

Mobility and opportunity

2011-04-06T10:29:00.003+01:00

The Cabinet Office has just published Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers: A Strategy for Social Mobility. It is available here:

http://download.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/social-mobility/opening-doors-breaking-barriers.pdf

There are a lot of good practical ideas in this document. But what is the aim, and what are the implications of having that aim?

One possible aim would be to create a meritocracy, albeit in economic life in general, and not as the political system that the suffix -cracy would suggest. But the document suggests that it is not the outcome, but the fairness of the game, that matters to the Government. That is, the aim seems to be equality of opportunity. In that case, the inequalities that are inequalities of natural endowment, rather than of opportunity, and that should influence the outcome even in a fair game, need to be identified. Genetically determined intelligence? Genetically determined physical abilities or robustness of general health? The opportunities for political incorrectness are legion.

I do not think that the term "social mobility" should have been used. We must remind ourselves of the difference between two things. One is everybody's circumstances improving, which is perfectly possible. The other is everybody moving up in society relative to others. Unfortunately, the term "social mobility" suggests the latter. It sounds great, but elementary mathematics shows that it is impossible. If "social mobility" is to be a sensible objective, it cannot mean getting people to move up the order, because the steps up by some and the steps down by others will, in aggregate (sum of (people x size of move) ), cancel each other out.

It must therefore mean ensuring that movement up and down is not impeded by factors that should not impede it. But if that is what is meant, the term "equality of opportunity" should have been used. The use of that term would have several advantages. It would accommodate both the possibility of everybody's improving their circumstances at the same time, and the possibility of individuals moving up on merit. It would avoid suggesting that we must in fact have more movement up and down the order (more movement might or might not be the result of introducing equality of opportunity). It would encourage us to draw on the very considerable philosophical literature on equality of opportunity. And it would not tempt us to hope for the mathematically impossible.

Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar

2011-03-16T22:53:00.002Z

I have just tried to go to www.davidoff.com, not to buy cigars (I do not smoke), but because I came across the brand in another context and was idly curious.

I was redirected to http://www.davidoff.com/davidoff/countryfilter.cfm, and was shown the message:

"We are sorry due to national legal restrictions we can not grant you access to our Website www.davidoff.com. Thank you for your understanding."

This appears to reflect the prohibition on tobacco advertising in the UK. Not only are we not allowed to see adverts, across which we might stumble by accident. We are not allowed to go in search of information on a product that we already know is made of tobacco.

I had feared that in due course, the great firewall of the UK would be built to keep out messages that were politically subversive, or pornography at which uptight politicians took offence. But no, the first target is innocent information on a perfectly legal product. (It is not quite a firewall. The page appears to be one of Davidoff's own, and is presumably displayed if one has a UK IP address. But the effect is the same.)

Davidoff did not think of this themselves. They, or tobacco companies in general, must have been asked to do it, by the UK government. Some politicians, presumably in the last government, or some senior civil servants, had such a casual disregard for freedom of information that they thought it worth interfering with that freedom for a plainly inadequate reason.

We should be worried at the existence of such an attitude, anywhere in government. We should also be told the names of the guilty politicians or civil servants. Meanwhile, I used a proxy server to get to the forbidden, and not in the least bit dangerous, site.

The ONS and subjective well-being

2011-03-01T08:55:00.001Z

The Office of National Statistics is taking an interest in subjective measures of well-being. A new paper has just appeared, "Spotlight on: Subjective well-being", edited by Stephen Hicks. There is a link to it at the top of this page.

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/article.asp?ID=2646

My immediate reactions to this ONS exercise include the following.

1. We need to sort out whether we mean happiness as flourishing or happiness as an internal sense that may be joy, contentment or something else in that general area. If the surveyors ask people about their levels of happiness, I expect that most people will take an internal sense to be meant. But if public policy is to be steered by the results of this kind of work, should we mean flourishing? And if we should, is that something subjective, to be measured by asking people about their own lives, or something to be measured by other means? Eudaimonia is discussed on page 13 (the fifteenth page of the pdf) and on page 16, and it is treated as something to be measured subjectively.

2. If we do mean flourishing, it would be interesting to see whether we could define it in more elevated terms than the meeting of needs one finds in the bottom three or four layers of Maslow's hierarchy, while still having a robust definition, and whether we could do so in a way that would overcome the paternalism objection in the report (top of page 3). The question (the fourth question at the top of page 15) avoids paternalism by asking for an opinion about the value of whatever content the subject's life happens to have. Alternative questions about a sense of autonomy avoid paternalism by asking about the actual form of a life (not one's evaluation of it), rather than considering the life's content. These are different approaches, and we should think hard about which would be the better approach.

3. Should this sort of thing steer public policy, either by leading the state to choose measures that have the main goal of increasing well-being, or by using the results of work in this area as one factor to consider when choosing between policies? My own inclination is to allow the latter but not the former. The former would only encourage an already hyper-active state, and would also be beyond what I regard as the legitimate competence of government. There was a Cabinet Office paper in 2002, "Life satisfaction: the state of knowledge and implications for government" by Nick Donovan, David Halpern and Richard Sargeant. Official nervousness about government involvement in this field was revealed by the fact that every page bore the warning "This is not a statement of government policy". (The paper is now available here.)

4. We must both be sensitive to cultural differences when comparing answers to questions about happiness from different countries, and not get excited about small differences, such as those between Britain, Australia and Sweden (top of the page numbered 7). Such differences in sample results may signify nothing of any importance, and certainly do not signify anything that is large enough for governments to even think about action on the strength of the differences. The levers of government policy are too crude to make small adjustments without having large side-effects.

5. It is disappointing that philosophers do not feature much in the bibliography to the ONS report. This sort of work is interesting, but if the ONS could get thinkers from a range of disciplines (philosophy, anthropology, psychology, etc) actively involved, on the inside and not just as external commentators, the result could be much richer.

Philosophy, money and incommensurability

2011-02-25T20:48:00.005Z

I have just been to an excellent talk by Angie Hobbs (University of Warwick) on the ethics of money. The talk made an eloquent case for the involvement of all kinds of thinkers, including philosophers, historians, psychologists and anthropologists, in debates on the financial system. I think that is right. Moreover, the hard-pressed philosophy lecturers who need to build up their CVs with technical papers should not be seduced into thinking that this would be second-rate philosophy, because not sufficiently technical. It is what Plato and Aristotle did, and it needs re-doing in modern circumstances. Correspondingly, it needs to be given sufficient credit by those who appraise university departments and hand out the money.

One of Angie's central points was that if we are going to get money, banking and the like right, we have to be clear about what we want on a broader scale: what kind of life, what kind of society, and so on. In particular, we can miss a lot if we think that everything is even potentially reducible to monetary terms. On the other hand, there is a strong temptation to try to reduce everything to a common scale of value, because it makes decision-making easier.

She suggested that some important things were not quantifiable. I am not sure that we need to go that far, in order to accommodate the evident phenomenon that some decisions as to what to do are not mechanically computable. It could be that there are quantitative scales, or at worst orderings, for many goods, including cultural goods such as beauty and mental challenge. For example, if there is any sense to the notion of one kind of music being objectively better than another, then Mozart is better than the Beatles, even if one happens to prefer the Beatles. But the problem is that there are many scales, orthogonal to one another or otherwise incommensurable. So we can rate options along single scales. We can perhaps place options on indifference hyper-surfaces that cover a limited selection of scales, then use a production possibility hyper-plane to find a local optimum for the limited selection of scales. But we might still lack the means to find global optima, or even local optima across reasonably wide localities (a locality being defined as a set of scales).

This thought does not of course exclude the possibility that some goods are indeed absolutely non-quantifiable. There can be grounds for thinking that, apart from the fact that some decisions are not mechanically computable. But the optimist in me does not want to rule out quantification, or at worst ordering, in advance.

One thing of which I am convinced is that if something can be measured on a single scale, it cannot be the good for humanity. The utilitarianism of the modern proponents of the science of happiness is refuted as soon as they claim that human happiness is measurable on a one-dimensional scale. It is not just that we happen to be too complicated for one dimension. One-dimensional value would be unworthy of us. We need the space for irresoluble conflict, in order to be human.

Deleuze and clarity

2011-01-18T22:00:00.003Z

I have just had an interesting discussion with people who work on, or in the tradition of, Deleuze. I maintained that Deleuze, and others of that ilk, were wilfully obscure, making it impossible to tell whether there was anything of worth in their works. I also maintained that Sokal and Bricmont did the intellectual community a very great service by writing Intellectual Impostures (American title, Fashionable Nonsense). They exposed the large amount of nonsense, and the gross abuse of science, that are to be found in the work of their targets. Others in the discussion naturally disagreed with me, both on Deleuze and on Sokal and Bricmont.

Even if I am right, that would not exclude the possibility of worthwhile work in response to Deleuze and his ilk. Those who engage with Deleuze may well have worthwhile thoughts of their own, which can then be published and which may deepen our understanding in a variety of fields. Interaction with others often has that effect. Work on Deleuze and his ilk may also contribute to our understanding of intellectual history.

The discussion raised the question of standards of clarity and obscurity. I maintain that some works, such as those of Kant, those of McDowell, and texts in physics, are legitimately challenging by virtue of their subject matter. But others are obscure without good cause. Works by Hegel, Deleuze, Lacan and Derrida are like that.

Such judgements should, however, be supported by some robust and generally acceptable criteria of clarity - although it would be too much to expect that even those who agreed on the criteria, would reach the same conclusion on every difficult book that they considered. I propose two criteria. First, does each sentence make sense? (We cannot expect to get the full sense, or even the correct sense, of a sentence without paying attention to its context; but each sentence should still mean something in isolation.) Second, can I state in my own words what the author has said, listing some specific and worthwhile propositions, and be confident that I have not just invented something that I think he should have said?

The second criterion suggests something that Deleuze scholars might like to do. If they conclude that Deleuze himself said certain things and that those things were worthwhile, they should reflect on whether they have really found those things clearly in the text, or whether they have had to read their own thoughts into the text in order to extract some definite meaning. In particular, could they just have easily have extracted some other, contradictory, meaning? And could they tell when two pieces of writing in the Deleuzian style did contradict each other?

Wikileaks

2010-12-03T19:05:00.001Z

There has been a lot of fuss in the last few days about the communications between US government agencies that have been disclosed by Wikileaks, and that remain to be disclosed. I have no idea whether disclosure of any of the documents will in fact cause serious harm, but there is a light side to this. Those in government are shown to be sometimes rude, sometimes devious and sometimes foolish. We always knew that this was so, but the provision of concrete examples gets us excited.

Some unidentified, but presumably amply insulted, government apparently told the US, "Don't worry, you should see what we say about you". This reminds me of something that Bertrand Russell said, in The Conquest of Happiness (pages 76-77 of the Routledge Classics reprint). He wondered what would happen if we could all see one another's thoughts. He supposed that most friendships would end immediately. But after a little while, we would find life without friends intolerable, and would get back together again, on a new basis of honesty. We may hope, if perhaps not expect, that the same will happen in the diplomatic community.

Meanwhile, the most laughable, and most arrogant, response has come from the French government. Here are some words of François Baroin, on behalf of that government:

"Moi j’ai toujours pensé qu’une société transparente, c’était une société totalitaire."

Source: http://www.liberation.fr/monde/01012305078-wikileaks-la-france-tres-solidaire-de-l-administration-americaine

No, M. Baroin. Only transparency can keep politicians in the service of the people, instead of the other way round. Privacy for people in general may help to keep totalitarians at bay. But those who have got themselves into positions in government need to work in the daylight (apart from a few security operations that really do need to be covert, and even they should be disclosed after the event). Otherwise, the governors will dig themselves in and do as they please.

Internet censorship

2010-11-26T19:51:00.001Z

The Serious Organised Crime Agency has asked Nominet, which runs the .uk namespace, to formulate a policy on the suspension of domain names (effectively closing sites) when law enforcement agencies advise them that sites are being used for criminal purposes. The option under consideration is to incorporate new terms in the contracts between Nominet and other parties. Details of the Nominet discussion, and information on how to submit views, are here:

http://www.nominet.org.uk/policy/issuegroups/current/domainsassociatedwithcrime/

Sometimes, it may be appropriate to close sites at the request of law enforcers. But there is a huge danger that this would develop into a power of censorship of extreme social, political or religious views. The police must never, ever, be given such a power. Even the courts' powers in this area should be either zero, or very very limited.

Here is the comment that I sent to Nominet. I encourage all friends of freedom to send in their views, too.

Dear Sirs

I write to comment on this proposal.

It is sensible to have a clear policy on this topic. But it is essential to distinguish between four sorts of site, to which law enforcement agencies might object.

First, there are scam sites that imitate banks and shops, in order to steal account details or take money without delivering the goods. Here, there may be a case for Nominet to act on police advice, without waiting for a court case, although Nominet should certainly look at the site to determine whether it really fits into that category before acting, and I would question whether they really could not get a court order for the specific purpose of closing the site first.

Second, there are sites that improperly make copyright material available, or in some other way breach intellectual property law, or that make things like child porn available. I suggest that there will always be time for the police to seek a court order to close sites like these. That may delay closure by a few hours, which will cause further harm. But the harm done by allowing the police to get sites closed without going via the courts would be greater.

Third, there are sites that are being used to facilitate terrorism or other violent crime, by being used to send messages between conspirators. (I assume that discussion fora sometimes get used like this.) Here, there may be a case for urgent suspension, but probably only for a few hours while the police arrest the conspirators. Suspension long before arrest is unlikely because that would tip off the conspirators.

Fourth, there are sites that express extreme political, social or religious views, or that give general advice (as for example www.fitwatch.org.uk , which was recently closed down at the request of the police, and soon afterwards reappeared).

It would be totally unacceptable for Nominet ever to close down such a site at the request of law enforcers, without a court order. This is so, however extreme the views expressed.

If law enforcers could close sites like this, it would hand them a huge power of censorship. Of course they would promise not to abuse it, but future law enforcers might well abuse it. The power would also lead to self-censorship, as people moderated their comments for fear of provoking the authorities into asking Nominet to act.

So as far as this fourth category goes, the only acceptable policy for Nominet to have would be that it would always reject requests that were not in the form of court orders.

Kind regards

Richard Baron

Money and the humanities

2010-11-13T21:59:00.002Z

There is much debate in the UK about the proposed increases in tuition fees that are charged to undergraduates. This has been intertwined with a perceived threat to the humanities. Courses in the natural sciences cost a lot more to teach, but they will continue to attract direct taxpayer subsidies. Tuition in the humanities will not be subsidised in this way. So courses in the natural sciences and in the humanities may end up costing individual students much the same.

The perception of threat comes from the perception that the withdrawal of tuition subsidies reflects a Government view that the humanities are not worth subsidising: that their study is a private good, not a public good, so that those who want to pursue that study should pay the full cost themselves. It is natural to see that as reflecting barbarism in Whitehall and Westminster.

I do not think it is pure barbarism. Rather, the new Government is faced with some very tough spending decisions, and there will be casualties. But if serious cultural loss is to be avoided, something will have to change. Are there ways of conducting study and research in the humanities, which will make study and research affordable to individuals, without requiring so much support from the taxpayer, and which could be used more widely than at present? And would such a change have advantages of its own, independently of the question of cost?

We need to start by setting out the important goals for the humanities (these are goals for the sciences too, but the subject of this post is the humanities). Three strike me as covering most of the ground:

the advancement of the disciplines through research;
dissemination of the fruits of the research;
the provision of a liberal education to large numbers of people.

In all three of these, it strikes me that there is a strong element of public good. The achievement of the goals benefits society at large, not just the people who participate in the achievement. (In contrast, the ability of specific individuals to make a living out of research or teaching is an exclusively private good, or very nearly so.) I do not see any need to base the claim to public good on any effects beyond the disciplines, for example, the effect of making us better able to criticize our current social arrangements. There may well be such benefits, but we are on safer ground if we point out that it is part of being human to deepen our understanding of ourselves, and that this demands the advancement and dissemination of the humanities. The practice of these disciplines is part of our nature. It is what we must do. Utilitarians can be brought on side if we point out that a liberal education, which should continue throughout life, is one of life's greatest, and in Millian terms highest, pleasures.

So can we achieve the goals more cheaply?

On dissemination and liberal education, there are plenty of new opportunities to make lectures and written material available over the Internet, and several institutions are doing just that. We just need to put structures of courses and assessment around that material. We have the models of the University of London International Programmes and the Open University, plus several online colleges, although the ones that exist now are of variable quality. This approach would not be as good for a student as being together with professors and other students in a physical university, but it might not be much worse. And it would make it feasible to extend higher education to even more people than at present.

On research, the essentials are good libraries, access to online journals, and seminars and other fora where people can submit their ideas to criticism and learn from others. It would be possible to provide these things outside the context of a university burdened with heavy institutional costs. Again, there would be some loss, but not a catastrophic loss. The important thing would be to ensure that any loss was in the quantity of output, not in its quality. Quality control cannot be enforced outside an institutional context. (It is not always clear how well it is enforced inside such a context.) But quality can still be recognized, and can be the subject of comment. It is pretty clear to the experts in a discipline which authors who work outside institutions are worth reading.

I therefore think that there is scope for a partial (but not total) reversal of the professionalization of research in the humanities that we associate with the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, without serious loss to the disciplines. And this might have advantages. The independent scholar is beholden to no-one, can choose his or her topics without reference to what others in the field think should be studied, and can take time to get a piece of work right, unhurried by a requirement for an institution to publish a certain amount each year. There is no money in that life, but those who really care about their subjects will not mind adopting modest lifestyles that can be sustained by jobs that leave time for other things. We should support researchers right across the humanities out of taxpayers' funds. But if their number must shrink, we should adapt. There is no need either to fear, or to drift into, a new dark age.

Hegel's birthday

2010-08-27T14:20:00.003+01:00

On Hegel’s birthday, Rossini’s comment on Wagner, about wonderful moments but awful quarter hours, came to mind. It struck me as much more apt to Hegel, through whose verbiage we must dig in search of nuggets, than to the glorious Wagner. So I looked up the context. The aptness to Hegel was amply confirmed. Here is what Rossini is reported to have said.

Niemand ist entfernter davon, die Originalität des Schöpfers des Lohengrin anzuzweifeln, als ich: nur daß es uns der Componist mitunter recht schwer macht, das Schöne, was wir ihm verdanken, in dem Chaos von Tönen, das seine Opern enthalten, aufzufinden. Sie werden es selbst schon erfahren haben: Mr. Wagner a de beaux moments, mais de mauvais quart d’heures!

Source: pages 543-544 of Dr. Emil Naumann, Italienische Tondichter von Palestrina bis auf die Gegenwart. Eine Reihe von Vorträgen, gehalten in den Jahren 1874 und 1875. Berlin, Verlag von Robert Oppenheim, 1876.

Robots with emotions

2010-08-09T09:10:00.000+01:00

Here is a nice story to ponder, about robots that at least appear to express human emotions:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/09/nao-robot-develop-display-emotions

It prompts some philosophical questions, including the following:

If something appears to have emotions, does it have them?

What is the significance of the fact that the robot uses human forms of display, while not being a human?

Is there an underlying universal language of emotions (like a language of thought) which then gets translated into the local language of communication, or is the language of communication the only language, so that emotions expressed in different local languages of communication would be incommensurable?

Would such a robot be a moral client, either straight out of the box or after you had lived with it for a while? Would it be alright to turn it off when you went away on holiday, and then never turn it back on again?

I do not have answers, and do not expect ever to have more than provisional answers, but it is good when a philosophers' thought experiment turns out to have a counterpart in a real-world experiment.

Stupid law, stupid authorities

2010-07-21T08:34:00.003+01:00

A story about a councillor who is in trouble for being (justifiably) rude about Scientology is in today's Daily Telegraph, and can be found by clicking here.

It seems that someone is not able to express an honest opinion about a patently false belief system, just because he happens to be a councillor. This is crazy. Our elected representatives need to be both willing and able to speak out, on any issue. Otherwise they will not be able to do their jobs. Indeed we all need to be able to speak out, otherwise we will not be able to fulfil our role as citizens.

Just as worrying is the reference to faith hate laws, further down the article. It is likely that our limited faith hate laws, that still permit reasonable discussion, have given encouragement to the mad political correctness brigade who are now pursuing the councillor, not with legal sanctions (because they have none, yet) but with job-specific disciplinary measures. That is, the faith hate laws are the thin end of a very ugly wedge. They should be repealed, now. Excluding Scientology and other recent belief systems from their scope would not be enough. The big danger is that our ability to criticize the serious political forces of Christianity and Islam will come to be ever more restricted.

(The relevant law is sections 29A to 29N of the Public Order Act 1986. A person who uses threatening words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, or who publishes or distributes written material which is threatening, is guilty of an offence if he intends thereby to stir up religious hatred. "Religious hatred" means hatred against a group of persons defined by reference to religious belief or lack of religious belief. There is protection for freedom of expression: "Nothing in this Part shall be read or given effect in a way which prohibits or restricts discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents, or of any other belief system or the beliefs or practices of its adherents, or proselytizing or urging adherents of a different religion or belief system to cease practising their religion or belief system." But even so, the principle that we have to put up with the offensive remarks of other people - that we can take offence and object loudly, but that we have no right not to be offended - has been breached. This is what makes the law the thin end of the wedge. The danger is not just future extensions to the law, but the fact that the existing law gives encouragement to political correctness nutcases who would go further and use any other tools at their disposal, such as disciplinary procedures, to silence those who would speak the truth about the nonsense that is peddled as religion.)

The unspeakable vice of the Greeks

2010-07-04T21:08:00.003+01:00

These two sentences are from a speech by the Public Orator of Oxford University on 23 June 2010. The topic is the recently re-opened Ashmolean Museum:

"I notice that some of the labelling has been brought up to date. Perhaps the most elegant piece of Greek painted pottery in the collection, formerly called 'Man Courting a Boy', is now labelled 'Paedophile and Victim'."

I believe that the piece is the one shown here.

Unconfirmed reports state that the Ashmolean has decided to change the wording to:

"Man and boy making love. The nature of Greek homosexual love is the subject of current academic debate."

The choice of this new wording, rather than reversion to the original label, suggests that the museum wishes to be guilty neither of ludicrous anachronism nor of covering up a crime. One has to be amused at these academic contortions. Only a fear that we might draw moral lessons directly from 2,500 years ago, with no awareness on our part that times had changed, could motivate such cautious labelling.

Free will and narratives

2010-07-03T22:11:00.000+01:00

Today I went to an excellent British Academy symposium on freedom of the will. As ever, a lot of the focus was on individual actions. But there was a mention of the idea that we should look at lives, or reasonable chunks of lives, rather than individual actions, and a related comment that the neurophysiological experiments to date do not take account of the role of memory (not on principle: it is just that some types of experiment are easier to do than other types).

If the main motive for worrying about free will is a desire to reconcile our inner experience of our lives with our scientific understanding of ourselves, then there might well be mileage in the idea that we should not start with individual actions. Instead, we should look at a period, say a month or a year, that incorporates a large number of actions. We could then ask whether anything in the scientific image would prevent us from viewing that period as a portion of a life that was led, by the subject, in a human way with which we could feel comfortable. Was it coherent, was it goal-directed, did it include the achievement of a reasonable proportion of goals, was creativity displayed, and so on? The individual actions would become secondary. It is tempting to say that they would be epiphenomena in relation to the narrative of the period. Then the relationship between manifest and scientific images of individual actions would become unimportant to us.

Such an approach would neatly accommodate the fact that which actions are identified as such can depend very much on the narrative context. And the form that the narrative took would also depend on the social context.

If this approach were to be pursued, there would however be a stumbling block. One of the features of our lives is that we do not know what is coming next. We live at the forward edge of a growing chunk of past time. That moving edge, and our ignorance of what will come next, are important for our way of life. We often ask “What shall I do now, in order to influence what comes after now?”. The presence of the moving edge, and our awareness of it, place great importance on the momentary action. That importance, and the fact that the movement of the edge constantly adds to the past, strongly incline us to see the narrative as supervenient on momentary actions, not the other way round.

Religion in the public sphere

2010-04-28T09:18:00.001+01:00

I have just heard a heart-warming story on the radio (Deutsche Welle). It concerned a recent demonstration in Beirut, against the religion-based system of government in that country. For all sorts of position, from the President downwards, you have to be of the right religion. The demonstrators, mostly younger people, wore tee-shirts with the message “What’s your religion? That’s not important”. As the report pointed out, top religious figures will resist change because it will erode their power. But if enough people turn against the system, it may yet crumble. One may hope for a wider effect, with religious figures in general being recognised as having no special expertise, and no entitlement to any more respect or influence than other citizens.

Back in Britain, there has been much fuss over a joke memo about the Pope’s visit that was prepared in the Foreign Office. It included entertaining suggestions like a visit to an abortion clinic, a blessing of a same-sex marriage and the launch of Benedict-branded condoms. But what should the Vatican have expected? Here’s a guy whose institution makes him out to be really important, so that we should pay attention to his views. Well then, he can expect to get the attention of those who think he is wrong, as well as those who think he is right. If it were generally accepted that he was just a regular guy who had some opinions, which counted for no more or less than anyone else’s opinions, then he wouldn’t be the butt of jokes like this one.

Radical interpretation

2010-02-22T13:08:00.000Z

By happy coincidence, when taking a break from preparing a lecture on Donald Davidson, I came across this experiment in radical interpretation:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8527009.stm

The principle of charity, of course. Elephants would not be considered to have good memories if they did not mostly remember truths. The principle of humanity, maybe. Elephants fit well enough into our lives in some parts of the world that they must be a little bit like us. And let us not forget Schopenhauer on the sagacity of the elephant (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, erster Band, Kapitel 6).

If an elephant could talk, ...

Eight records or three?

2010-02-02T00:24:00.002Z

Here is a little puzzle, inspired by the radio programme Desert Island Discs, on which people are required to choose eight pieces of music to take to a desert island. (There is no actual island: the programme was created long before reality television came to pass.)

Most of us would find it impossible to choose eight pieces of music directly. If one aims for eight, one ends up with a list of 20. The obvious thing to do would be to aim for three and end up with eight. But would one then have the top eight, as distinct from candidates to be in the top three?

I suspect that one would not have the top eight, because there would be no such thing as the top eight (for a given person, at a given time). “One of the top eight” would be a term with a perfectly clear intension, but no extension. And “candidate to be in the top three” would be the best approximation to “one of the top eight” which did have an extension.

The same type of argument could be conducted even if the point was not to pick eight favourite pieces of music, but to pick pieces of music to reflect eight important things in one’s life (such as one’s job or members of one’s family). A scale of importance of things in one’s life would replace a scale of liking for pieces of music, and there would be the same kind of competition for the eight places, and the same temptation to aim to select the top three in order to end up with eight.

Likewise, the argument would run if the task were to measure objective importance (in one’s own subjective view), rather than personal preference. One might for example be asked to identify the eight most important philosophers, or inventions. Aiming for three would be a sensible way to approach the task.

In similar vein, I am happy say things like “Descartes would have to feature on any defensible list of the ten most important western philosophers of all time”, but I would never try to list the ten most important western philosophers. It would not, however, be sensible for any one person to say, of more than four or five candidates, that they would have to feature on any defensible list of the top ten. “One of the ten most important” has no extension, but we can still identify some who would have to be within its extension if it had one, at least under the condition that the list would have to be defensible (before some reasonable judges – another source of vagueness).

There is another type of failure to have an extension, on which Simon Blackburn has remarked. It is rather different, because the problem is the existence of irresoluble disagreements between people. An example of a term without an extension that Blackburn has given (when giving his Presidential Address to the Aristotelian Society in October 2009) is “pig-headed”. If X claims, but Y denies, that Z is pig-headed, it is not possible for an arbiter to check whether or not Z is in the extension of the term “pig-headed” and to determine whether X or Y is correct. This is an attractive line of thought, and I would be very tempted to apply it to terms like “beautiful” and even “is a work of art” (in the sense that does not imply special praise). But I think that there are two types of limit to how far one could take this. First, although there may be no way of deciding borderline cases, there must be widespread agreement on a good number of cases. Some people would have to be regarded by most people who knew them as pig-headed, and some people would have to be regarded by most people who knew them as not pig-headed. Without that level of agreement, the term would not have an agreed intension. Second, if X and Y debated whether or not Z was pig-headed, one would expect them to make their cases by reference to a largely common range of factors, and by reference to examples of Z’s conduct which they would both approach with reference to those factors. Thus, while “pig-headed” might not have an extension, “appropriate way to test for pig-headedness” might well have an extension. That extension would do much to support agreement on the intension of “pig-headed”.

Libel reform

2009-12-14T21:38:00.001Z

Just for once, I shall use this blog to promote a specific campaign. It is the campaign to reform Britain’s oppressive libel laws, which are used by the rich, the famous and some business interests to stifle free expression and debate. There is more information, and a petition to sign, here:

http://libelreform.org/

One might think that the Internet meant that such laws no longer worked. That is partly true. Information can appear on sites hosted anywhere in the world, and can be accessed anywhere which does not suffer under a regime that has built a firewall to restrict access. But if, for example, a specialist in a particular scientific field wants to contribute to a debate under his or her own name, so that the contribution is recognised as made by someone with special expertise, anonymous postings are no good. And do we want the UK to be known as a place where debate is limited by fear of legal action, often action on the flimsiest grounds? Anything that might lead anyone to lower their estimation of the claimant now seems to be a good enough ground.

There is another issue, that of the pre-publication injunction, which has now developed into the super-injunction which forbids reference to the fact that it has been made. Recent examples have concerned Trafigura and Tiger Woods. Fortunately, both promptly surfaced on Wikileaks, no doubt to the embarrassment of both the claimants and their lawyers. What do the judges think they are doing, when they are party to secretive “justice” with not the slightest justification for secrecy, either on the basis of national security or on the basis of the protection of children? There are no other respectable grounds. A regime in which you are not only required to obey the authorities, but are also required not to tell anyone about the orders that you are required to obey, is not a pleasant one.

Climate change and the publication of data

2009-12-05T18:44:00.000Z

The University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit has been in the news recently. Data that had not previously been made available ended up on Wikileaks, along with some e-mails that are easy to interpret as evidence of some kind of cover-up, although that interpretation might well be mistaken.

I congratulate Wikileaks and whoever supplied the information. Wikileaks is one of the guardians of our liberty. The site has scored many other victories over those who would hide information.

I make no comment on whether this episode should change our views on climate change or on human beings’ role in it. But there is, as other commentators have noticed, an important point here about openness. If all data and all algorithms had been published, in full, as the research went along, there would not have been this embarrassing row. And we could have had more confidence in whatever conclusions were reached, because we would have known that the sceptics would have had every opportunity to make their case. There would have been other, smaller, rows as we went along, with specific results being challenged. But that would not have been a bad thing. If challenges are justified, then they should be taken seriously at the earliest opportunity. If they are not justified, then the weight of commentators will be enough to squash them.

Some people have, before this episode, spoken of researchers’ intellectual property in the data that they have collected, or in their algorithms. Excuse me? If the planet really is at stake, then it is simply immoral to put your intellectual property rights, or your chance to get to a significant result before a competing researcher, above the effective conduct of research.

How far should we take this call for openness? It strikes me that there are three main grounds for insisting that research data, methods and results be made public immediately.

The first ground is that something very serious is at stake. We increase our chances of getting the right answers if everyone can comment on data and results. And if a public response may be required, as with global warming, only complete openness is likely to build public confidence. Politicians are now going round saying that we should not be put off taking global warming seriously by the East Anglia affair. But public confidence has already been lost. It cannot be re-built merely by the pleas of politicians.

The second ground is that we will have to bear the consequences. This relates to research that is used to formulate legislation or government policy. New policies are often the subject of public consultation. But there are also the private data that are collected and that are used in the taking of policy decisions. Except where national security is at stake, the data should all be published, well before the decision is taken. The data may not give one as much confidence in a policy as the politicians who promote that policy suggest we should have. That strikes me as all the more reason to publish the data, along with full details as to how they have been used. It would do politicians good to have to admit that they take many decisions on balances of probabilities, sometimes quite fine balances. That could even help the reputation of politicians. We could better understand that it is inevitable that some policies will go wrong. Alternatively, we could argue that when things are finely balanced, the state should stay out of the matter and not have a policy at all.

The third ground is that the taxpayer has funded the research. I am not sure that this would justify a requirement to publish as one went along. But it could very well justify a requirement to publish, and to give a general and royalty-free permission to use the research and its results, within a short time after the end of each piece of work, or every three years or so if the project was a long-term one. In some fields, there is a counter-argument that the taxpayer can get his money back by having the results patented and licensed. That argument is to be taken seriously, at least if one believes that having a system of patents is a good idea. But in other fields that argument clearly does not apply, and free, open publication is likely to be the best way to promote the further development of our knowledge.

Films in reverse

2009-11-05T22:41:00.001Z

When I wrote my last post, I did not have the foresight to know that I would be studying the film Memento, in order to teach a class on film and philosophy on Saturday. There are two interwoven series of scenes, the black and white ones which run forward in time from the beginning of the story to the middle, and the colour ones which run backward in time from the end to the middle. The central character. Leonard, has anterograde amnesia: he can remember everything up to a traumatic event, but can form no new memories of events since then. After five minutes, the past has gone for ever. So we, watching the colour scenes, are like him: we do not know what has just happened.

There are many points of contact with philosophy. There is the obvious connection with the memory criterion for personal identity, with the twist that Leonard is at all times psychologically rooted in the unchanging memories of his pre-trauma life. There is the fact that Leonard takes notes and photographs to help him to keep track of things. If we take Andy Clark's line that our notepads should be thought of as extensions of ourselves, rather than merely as external tools, then Leonard plus his notes and photographs can be seen as an organism that does have a continuous memory. And there is the fact that Leonard is used by others, in ways which mean that they would certainly not have agency-regarding relations with him in Carol Rovane's sense.

But for me, the most striking thing was something that was not there. When I watched Cinq fois deux, which presents five scenes from a relationship in reverse order, I found that scenes shown later seriously upset my interpretations of scenes shown earlier. The person who appeared to be in the wrong, turned out not to be (until the next scene). There was no such upsetting of interpretations with Memento. Perhaps this was because it is an action movie, rather than a film about a relationship.

Forsyte speculation

2009-09-30T22:32:00.001+01:00

Engrossed in The Forsyte Saga, an excellent series of novels, I ask myself why a Hindsight Saga would be of no interest. Why is the unexpected so important in novels? Why would it not do for the characters to know what was coming, to be as well-informed about how things would turn out as they would be with hindsight? (This is quite different from the reader's not knowing what is coming, an ignorance that may be important on a first reading, but the later lack of which does not make re-readings a waste of time.) I think that the main reason is that they would not be leading our kind of life, a life in which we do not know what is coming, so that we could not identify with them.

Kierkegaard famously remarked that “It is quite true what philosophy says, that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other principle, that it must be lived forward” (Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, volume 2, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al., JJ:167, page 179). But that makes the lack of foresight sound like an accidental handicap, rather than a deep feature of our way of life. It is amusing to speculate on how much would change if we were endowed with reliable foresight. I suspect that our social institutions would change just as much as if we were endowed with the power to read one another's minds.

Segregation and disapproval

2009-08-16T20:37:00.000+01:00

Jim Fitzpatrick, a British Member of Parliament, has been in the news. He and his wife went to a Muslim wedding to which they had been invited. They found that male and female guests were to be seated in separate rooms, as happens at some but not all Muslim weddings, so they left.

Comments have centred on issues such as good manners and multiculturalism. I think that given that he wished to register his disapproval of the custom, his conduct exemplified exactly the right approach.

We should not ban such practices, or the ugly prison that is the veil. But freedom to engage in such things must be matched by freedom to criticise, to say out loud that what lies behind them is a religious tradition that perpetuates the oppression of women, and freedom to campaign hard to get people to change their ways. The tradition exists in several traditionalist forms of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. They are all the same on this point. The point with the veil is obvious. But segregated weddings and other social gatherings tend to locate community political power in the men's half, an equally oppressive practice.

Mr Fitzpatrick's reaction makes the strong criticism that it is perfectly appropriate to make, without calling for any kind of ban. This is, I think, the most appropriate way forward. There is a large area where criticism but not legal restriction is appropriate, in between the morally neutral and that which should be illegal. Critics may fervently hope that the practice they criticise should die out, but that hope is quite different from a desire to prohibit the practice.

The identification of this large area is anathema to those who wish to give religious codes of conduct the force of law. They think that the immoral should ipso facto be illegal, and their supposed direct line to God gives them entirely unjustified confidence that their view of morality is the correct one. That is why it is so dangerous when religion (as opposed to people who happen to be religious) gets its hands on political power.

Postscript added on 19 August. There is an excellent piece in the Independent here. As well as making important general points about the evils of enforced segregation, it refutes the claim that segregation at the wedding in question was the couple's personal choice and makes it clear that it was intrinsic to that venue's interpretation of Islam.

Creationist exams

2009-07-31T10:38:00.000+01:00

Here is a story which, if true, is horrifying.

The National Recognition Information Centre (NARIC) have advised that a qualification that appears to contain creationist codswallop is equivalent to international A levels.

On the NARIC website, there is a news section, and an item there gives more information. To quote from that item:

"Using the NARIC benchmarking methodology, these qualifications have been closely examined in terms of their learning outcomes, assessment frameworks, underpinning quality assurance mechanisms, mode of learning and delivery. ...

This exercise continues to show how useful the NARIC benchmarking methodology is, it can really make a significant difference for less well known qualifications."

This explains how NARIC reached their conclusion. They focus on everything except content. So what do we know about the content?

The curriculum on this webpage does not go into detail, but the page does contain these words: "If, as a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, you believe that the Bible is the Creator’s reliable and trustworthy handbook to the whole of life, then you will be glad to hear that the ACE curriculum is written from the literal Bible creation base. In other words, we believe that God says what He means and means what He says."

So there probably is a good slug of creationism in there, along with perfectly sensible courses in mathematics, languages and so on.

I do not blame the perpetrators. They are entitled to their scientific illiteracy. But NARIC's action has exposed the weakness of an approach that disregards content and concentrates only on form. There is such a thing as factual error so gross that it renders the best possible form worthless. Would NARIC approve of a geography qualification that ticked all of their boxes but that taught flat-earthism?

The same point must be made about schools. In the UK, you have to get your child educated. The normal method is to send a child to school. Schools that follow this ACE curriculum may tick all the boxes for child welfare, discipline and so on, but the content of what they teach should lead us to ask whether sending a child to such a school satisfies the legal requirement to educate children.

It would be nice to see some gutsy response from our politicians. Will the Secretary of State for Schools and his shadows now stand up and say, in no uncertain terms, both that NARIC needs to change and that scientific illiteracy is not acceptable in schools? (NARIC appears to be funded by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, but it is in schools that the real danger lies.)

Science and government policy

2009-07-26T22:30:00.000+01:00

I have been away from blogging for too long, finishing a book (due out in February, under the title Deliberation and Reason, since you ask). But now there is again time for this blog.

There has recently been a bit of a fuss about the role of science in UK government policy-making, with concerns that the science does not have enough influence:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8164383.stm

If there is a problem here, then it must be sorted. You cannot beat nature, and if the evidence is that a policy is not going to work, you should drop it, however great the headline that will thereby be lost. But I fear that this harsh message will not be fully accepted by ministers because they very often have to deal with human nature. The concern is with how people will respond to an educational programme, or to a change in benefit entitlements, or something like that. Human nature is known to be changeable, and ministers can then all too easily convince themselves that people will respond to new approaches or incentives in the ways that will make the policies succeed. Uncertainty about how people will respond leaves space for unwarranted optimism.

So what is the remedy? We have tried select committees, which are good but are easily ignored. When was a minister, or a senior civil servant, last sacked because a select committee found his or her policy-making skills wanting?

Here is my modest proposal. Any white paper that proposes new policies which rely for their success on people responding in certain ways must be written up with a full base of evidence, then the whole paper must be submitted to a couple of respected independent journals in the relevant field, which must each appoint a couple of reviewers who will go through the paper exactly as if they were peer-reviewing for publication in the journal. The reviewers' reports are then published.

Delia, happiness and achievement

2009-02-21T19:48:00.001Z

The following paragraph is taken from an interview given by Delia Smith to the Daily Telegraph (21 February 2009). The topic is her religion.

Of late, the idea of silent contemplation seems to be having something of a renaissance, with the numbers called to monastic lifestyles reportedly on the up. Delia thinks the economic climate may have something to do with it, in the sense that material plenty tends to equate to spiritual poverty, and vice versa. “I think there may be an opening to God right now because of the pressures people are under with this recession. They may be realising that materialism can never make you happy in the end.”

I have no quarrel with the idea of silent contemplation. It can be very beneficial, with or without a religious element. But I am concerned about the suggestion at the end that religion can offer us something that materialism cannot. Religion can indeed do that, but that fact need not, and I think should not, be used as an advertisement for religion. We can undermine any attempt to use it that way by drawing on a long philosophical tradition to the effect that happiness, in the sense of a state of mind, is not what matters. Instead, it is achievement that matters, whether or not a contented state of mind follows as a by-product. Aristotle's eudaimonia is famously mis-translated as “happiness”, when “flourishing” would be nearer the mark. And Nietzsche, at the end of Also Sprach Zarathusta, has Zarathustra say “So do I pursue happiness? I pursue my work!”.

It might seem that because this response to the possible advertisement for religion depends on not focusing on one's own state of mind as the important thing, religion could claim the credit for the response because religions often tell us not to focus on ourselves, but on other people. But that would not be so. The philosophical tradition encourages us to focus on our tasks, which might or might not be defined by reference to other people. They might even be tasks, the performance of which would do nothing for other people but would enhance our own status, not a particularly selfless thought. There is both nobility, and an indirect answer to the true claim that religion can bring a happiness that is not available through material goods, in the motto that has been adopted by Reinhold Messner and others, “Ich bin, was ich tue”.

A terminological inexactitude

2008-12-27T11:25:00.001Z

Andy Burnham, UK Culture Secretary, is quoted in the Daily Telegraph, 27 December 2008, as saying the following:

“If you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that Governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now. It’s true across the board in terms of content, harmful content, and copyright. Libel is [also] an emerging issue.

“There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical. This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it; it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people. We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it.”

When will politicians learn either the value of freedom, or the value of accurate speech? Burnham is happy to trample on the former. He cannot manage the latter. His ideas very clearly do amount to a campaign against some free speech of which he disapproves. And free speech counts for nothing unless it is extended to things of which one disapproves. I might respect him if he said "Yes I want some censorship, for the following reasons". But if he said that, he would be forced to recognise the uncomfortable need to justify his proposals properly.

For those who care about freedom, and want to know where it is under attack, I recommend www.melonfarmers.co.uk

Ignoring the value of liberty

2008-12-19T19:46:00.001Z

Sometimes, too often for comfort, there is cause for concern that those in positions of authority do not attach much value to liberty of thought, word and deed, not for its instrumental benefits, though they are many, but as a good in itself. Someone must be protected, or standards must be upheld, even if liberty is trampled on in the process. Here are two recent examples.

The General Teaching Council has issued for consultation a draft code of conduct for teachers. It can be found at http://www.opm.co.uk/gtc/

As well as containing the usual extensive but vacuous reformulations of the obvious injunctions to know your subject and teach it well, it requires teachers to “uphold and maintain standards of behaviour both inside and outside school that are appropriate given their membership of an important and responsible profession” (page 22). The manifest danger of these words is that they would leave a teacher open to disciplinary action because he or she got drunk, attended sado-masochistic clubs or did any one of a range of other things which were perfectly legal but which would attract the disapproval of the more censorious members of our society. This is an appalling interference with liberty. If a teacher drinks to the extent that it affects the quality of his or her teaching, then he or she can be disciplined for that failure, with no need to refer to his or her private life. If, like Professor Unrat, he or she develops a taste for Der blaue Engel, that should not be the authorities' business, even if the students turn out to be there too, or are peeping through the window.

The bossy turn of mind of the authorities, and their disregard for the value of liberty, is revealed by two quotations in the report of the story in the Times on 19 December 2008. Sarah Stephens, Director of Policy at the Teaching Council, said: “It [the draft code] gives greater clarity about what it means to act as a role model, and about a teacher’s conduct outside the classroom”. Keith Bartley, the Chief Executive of the General Teaching Council, said that teachers could be found guilty of unacceptable conduct without breaking the law – for example by belonging to a party that held racist views. He also said “We’re saying to teachers that, as individuals, they have to consider their place in society. There’s a sense that this [code] has to reflect society’s expectations of the people to whom we commit our children”.

Astonishingly, the code also goes on about the value of diversity and of non-discrimination (on page 14). Presumably only diversity of acceptable types is to be valued.

The second example comes from the Daily Mail, on 19 December 2008. Bob Singh, a shopkeeper in Port Talbot, received a visit from a police officer who warned him that some of the jokes he had for many years included on leaflets advertising special offers might be offensive. According to the police, he was “instructed to withdraw the leaflets”. The examples of jokes given in the newspaper were not very subtle, but only the most ridiculously sensitive person could find them offensive. In any case, it is simply not the police's job to instruct people to withdraw leaflets. I have a lot of respect for the police, but not when they act as the parish censor. If only the officer had stopped to ask himself “What about freedom of speech?”, or even, to put it in legalistic terms, “What about Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights?”. At least the article drew people's attention to the wonderful Campaign Against Political Correctness, www.capc.co.uk

Assisted suicide, respect and control

2008-12-10T22:43:00.001Z

A programme on the assisted suicide of Craig Ewert at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland was broadcast tonight. The reactions of some opposed to assisted suicide were interesting.

The BBC quoted Dr Peter Saunders, director of Care Not Killing, as saying: "The danger is that we start to believe in a story that there is such a thing as a life not worth living". The BBC also quoted Lady Finlay, a professor of palliative care, as saying: "This programme ... perpetuates a myth that, somehow, to have a good death you have to end your own life and that is just completely untrue". These comments share a reluctance to accept that individuals can think clearly and make up their own minds in ways which we should respect.

Take Dr Saunders' comment first. It is obvious that there are some parts of lives that are, to the individuals concerned, not worth living, for example the last weeks of some illnesses. He clearly does not want us to believe that those parts of those lives are in fact not worth living. But if it is true, we should believe it. The only way to make it untrue is to say that the individual's judgement as to whether his or her life is worth continuing should not be accepted, because the individual must be failing to see that his or her life is worth continuing.

Lady Finlay's comment assumes that if someone chooses assisted suicide, that must be because he or she does not realise that there are other ways for him or her to have a good death. That only follows if we do not accept that someone could reasonably choose assisted suicide when there were alternative routes to a good death. But why should we not accept someone's choice of assisted suicide? There are, for some people, greater evils than immediate death, even if the deferral of death would not bring great pain. It is not for the rest of us to tell someone that his or her priorities are mistaken.

I see this theme of lack of respect for the decision of the individual as connected with a comment one sees occasionally, that some people fear debilitating illness, and will opt for suicide, because they have an exaggerated desire for control and independence. They may have a stronger than normal desire for control and independence, but why should they not? It is not for anyone else to say that someone's desire for control and independence is stronger than it should be.

While I am, as the above line of argument suggests, in favour of assisted suicide's being available, I do respect the desire of many doctors to have nothing to do with it. Indeed it could well be better for our confidence in the medical profession if doctors and nurses were statutorily excluded from involvement, rather than being allowed the choice. That should not be a problem. All that is needed is to supply a dose of the preferred substance which will definitely be strong enough, and which can be administered by the unskilled.

Finally, it is very hard to have any sympathy with the comment made by John Beyer, director of mediawatch-uk: "This subject is quite an important political issue at the moment (a Bill is being brought forard in the Scottish Parliament by Margo MacDonald MSP and there is a consultation currently running on End of Life Policies) and my anxieties are that the programme will influence public opinion". Lots of people make comments on this issue, with a view to influencing public opinion. The broadcaster has contributed to the debate by confronting us with an example of assisted suicide. All such evidence is grist to the mill of the debate. People will consider what they have seen and heard, and will make up their own minds. It really is the most appalling insult to all of us to say that we should be shielded from certain potential contributions to the debate, with the implication that we cannot stand back and think for ourselves.

Civil Service impartiality

2008-12-03T23:22:00.000Z

The Damian Green affair rumbles on. This is Gus O'Donnell, Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, speaking on 2 December at the Civil Service Diversity and Equality Awards ceremony:

"All civil servants serve the Government of the day. We are politically impartial and our actions are governed by the Civil Service Code. Political impartiality means we must serve the Government, whatever its political persuasion, to the best of our ability, no matter what are own political beliefs. To quote from the Code, this means acting 'in a way which deserves and retains the confidence of Ministers, while at the same time ensuring that you will be able to establish the same relationship with those whom you may be required to serve in some future government'."

There was no official connection with the Green affair, but his decision to touch on this topic, in a context in which it looks pretty incongruous, can hardly have been a coincidence.

I find Gus O'Donnell's words disturbing. They could be read as favouring impartiality. But they could just as easily be read as favouring utter, fawning partiality, doing the bidding of ministers to the extent of protecting their reputations even when those reputations deserved to be lost, until the next election, then showing the same partiality to the new government, even though its political stance and its policies might differ radically from those of the outgoing government.

In practice, ministers' reputations are indeed looked after far too carefully by civil servants. I agree that ministers, having got themselves elected, should take policy decisions. But such decisions should be on their own heads, and for them to justify. While civil servants should advise on the options and implement the chosen policies to the best of their ability, the presentation and defence of those policies should be left entirely up to ministers and their political parties. And when leaks happen, ministers should not be shielded from the consequences of disclosure of the truth by their civil servants.

I would therefore favour a much tougher understanding of Civil Service impartiality. It should mean that civil servants will provide ministers with a limited service of advice and implementation, and nothing more. Impartiality should mean impartiality every day, not a mere readiness to change loyalty come the next election. Only then could we justifiably refer to Northcote and Trevelyan, and at one remove to Plato, with the implication that we were carrying on a proud tradition.

Government spin and bad logic on the arrest of Damian Green

2008-12-01T13:12:00.000Z

Ministers have been busy saying that last week's raid does not indicate a police state, because it would be a police state if ministers directed investigations, and that did not happen. It is true that we would be in big trouble if ministers directed investigations, and it may be true that there was no ministerial involvement in this case. But it does not follow that the UK is at no risk of becoming a police state. The official line is an attempt to slip bad logic past us, in the form of denying the antecedent. There are other ways in which we could slide into a police state.

One way, directly relevant to this case, is to allow the police wide discretion which can all too easily be abused so that police officers can act against things which they happen not to like. The "misconduct in a public office" offences are like that. So is section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, which has been used to punish people selling shirts which said "Bollocks to Blair" and to threaten with prosecution people holding up placards saying "Scientology is a Cult" outside the City of London headquarters of the Scientologists. The police can take control and act improperly when they are too little controlled by the law, as well as when they are too much controlled by ministers.

The arrest of Damian Green

2008-11-28T18:13:00.000Z

Today we read of the arrest of Damian Green, an opposition politician, on suspicion of conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office and aiding and abetting, counselling or procuring misconduct in a public office. The alleged misconduct appears to be the leaking of Home Office documents connected with immigration and other matters.

There is as yet no sign that any of the leaks imperilled national security, and every sign that they were merely intensely embarrassing to the Government. If a civil servant did leak them, that civil servant would have been in breach of his duty, although he might not have committed misconduct in a public office because there is a public interest defence to that offence.

We will have to wait for more information on what was involved in this case. But as things look at the moment, it does make a very strong case for changing the rules so that all Government documents are made publicly available when that would not give the game away to criminals or terrorists. (I am against publicising methods used by the armed forces, the security services and the police, or how our weapons work, or the names of our spies.) There was nothing wrong with the documents already mentioned by the press coming into the public domain. Any civil servant who leaks such material, and any MP or journalist who publicises it, should not be prosecuted for anything at all. We need to be defended against the folly and abuse to which all governments are prone, and there can be no surer defence than our being able to see what they are up to. Plato had some funny ideas about government, but in saying that the guardians should go about their business in a way that was open to all to inspect, and in the interests of all, he was absolutely right (Republic, 416-420).

Anonymous officials

2008-11-02T20:32:00.000Z

Every now and then, we hear that a Government spokesman said something, or that an official did something or other. The civil servants in question are hardly ever named. When internal papers are released, for example the papers on tax changes made in 1997 which affected pension funds, the names of the civil servants are blotted out. We see the same sort of thing at a local level, when we hear that "a police officer" or "a social worker" did something or other.

One justification for this anonymity is that ministers, who are very public figures, are the ones who are responsible to Parliament for what happens in their departments and for the decisions taken by the Government. But that is a pretty thin justification now that ministers do not resign when their departments blunder. They do not really take responsibility.

I propose that the press should do away with this polite anonymity. It should not be "A Ministry of Defence spokesman said that equipping our troops properly was a priority" but "Fred Smith, a Ministry of Defence spokesman, said that ...". Fred might not be happy about this. He might say that he was only a mouthpiece, repeating what he had been told to say. That would be true, but if his name was out there, he might be more reluctant to put out waffle behind which the big chiefs could hide. They might be forced by their own spokesmen to be straight with us. That would be a good thing.

Likewise, if it was not "a police officer" or "a social worker", but a named individual, the thought in the mind of each such person that he or she would become known as the person responsible might encourage him or her to act with common sense. Most such people act with common sense anyway, and we should be proud of them. But a few get it so badly wrong that they must have a very odd view of the world, and we should know who they are. We pay their wages.

Likewise, enquiries into mistakes should name those responsible. The Poynter report on HM Revenue & Customs' loss of data discs related to child benefit referred to official A, official B and so on. Perhaps it had to be so in order to get the officials to co-operate. But it should not have been so. A, B and C are real people, some of whom goofed.

Finally, I can see no reason why the public at large should not be told the names of officials working on each policy development project. Sometimes one or two names are revealed, usually as contact points for consultation document responses. But if people whose wages we are forced to pay run policy development exercises which go nowhere, or which go in odd directions, we should know who they are.

Sex in public

2008-10-16T19:40:00.000+01:00

As a couple in Dubai get sentenced for getting a bit frisky on a beach, the Association of Chief Police Officers in the UK is in the news because one of its members is working on guidelines for the policing of public sex in the UK. The story is here.

It looks as though the police approach is perfectly sensible. Their job is to enforce the law as it is, not to moralise or to enforce some other law which does not yet exist. If the BBC report is accurate, the guidelines include reasonable ideas on how to enforce the law in an efficient but sensitive manner.

Bizarrely, Dominic Grieve, Shadow Home Secretary, is quoted as saying that the ideas are unacceptable (in the BBC story, link above), while here he is arguing that it is unacceptable for local authorities to snoop on us. Dear Dominic, do you want the authorities interfering in our lives to enforce all of their petty rules, or not?

Sadly, one option does not appear to be under widespread discussion. This would be to change the law so that sex in public was always allowed, and was not a matter for police action. Obviously public nudity would need to be made fully legal, and not subject to charges of outraging public decency, breach of the peace or anything else, at the same time.

We have after all come a long way in enhancing freedom to be expressive in public over the past century, and the world has not fallen apart. We can look at extremely repressive societies like that in Saudi Arabia and laugh, at least when we are not crying at the savage oppression of the female half of the population. Perhaps in a few decades, people will look back at us and laugh, for the same reason.

Fudging evolution

2008-09-11T21:24:00.001+01:00

Michael Reiss, Director of Education at the Royal Society, recommends giving space to creationism and intelligent design in science lessons, here.

He does not suggest that such theories might be correct, nor that they should be put on a par with evolution. His point seems to be that those who come to the subject with such views need to have those views respected, otherwise they will be unreceptive.

As a matter of educational psychology, he may have a point. But this must not detract from the fact that evolution has trumped the alternatives as comprehensively as round-earthism has trumped flat-earthism. Should we respect the views of a student who brings a flat-earth view to a geography lesson?

I fear a deplorable fudge. Reiss suggests seeing creationism “not as a misconception but as a world view”. But creationism and intelligent design are mere hand-waving which contribute absolutely nothing to our understanding of life-forms. We must face the need to say to some students “If your religion leads you to reject evolution, then there is something deeply wrong with your religion. It does not merely make a factual mistake on this point. It also encourages a wilful disregard of evidence”. To fail to say that to the student would be to evade the central issue.

A Bill of Rights for the UK?

2008-08-10T10:19:00.000+01:00

A joint Parliamentary Committee has just published a report proposing a UK Bill of Rights. The report is available here, and the evidence here.

Parts of the report are steps in the right direction, and some good points are made. Sadly, some of the proposals are weak. The need to balance rights, the scope to limit rights to the extent that such limits can be "demonstrably justified in a society based on the values of liberty, democracy, fairness, civic duty and the rule of law", and the scope for express Parliamentary override, would for example give just as much scope for the right of freedom of expression to be cut down as is given by the corresponding Article 10 of the European Convention, available here. We would still be a long way from the plain and noble words of the US First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances".

The inclusion in the proposal of social and economic rights such as the right to housing, education and healthcare is just a muddle-headed example of the positive liberty which Isaiah Berlin rightly identified as a step on the road to tyranny. Such things are important, but they are not a matter of liberty. Astonishingly, Berlin is not mentioned at all in the report, and is only mentioned once in the evidence (on the page numbered Ev 126), and then only in passing. Locke and Mill also get a single mention each, in the same place. I conclude that the authors of the report paid little heed to the history of the idea of liberty, which is unfortunate because a recognition of that history would have stiffened the backbone of the report considerably. One can only hope that lively debate will lead to a plan of action which will be a considerable improvement on the report.

Art and philosophy

2008-07-18T21:42:00.000+01:00

The Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin has, until 10 August, an exhibition by Anna and Bernhard Blume called Reine Vernunft. It consists of photographs of people trapped in geometrical structures of wood, representing the subject trapped in space. There is an example here and another one here. It would be difficult to find an exact isomorphism between the contents of the pictures and the contents of Kant’s philosophy of space. Some odd bit of one or the other would stick out somewhere. But that does not matter. The exhibition is fun.

I like the idea that such exhibitions can be more than fun. There is a sense in which a work of art can embody a philosophy, perhaps something which cannot be said but which can only be shown. Such a work would not be recognised as a work of philosophy in a university. One needs words for the sake of univocality, certainly for cross-cultural univocality, and to facilitate engagement in debate. But a work of art can prompt the response appropriate to good philosophies of the human condition, the response “Yes, that is how it is”.

Berlin is the place for such works. The best summary I know of the absurdities of life is in the Gemäldegalerie. It is Die niederländischen Sprichwörter by the elder Breugel, which can be seen here. It shows people doing literally all the silly things we have turned into proverbs (pearls before swine and the like), but which we sometimes do all too close to literally ourselves.

Philosophy, science and excitement

2008-05-30T23:47:00.000+01:00

In a pub a few days ago, I made a bold claim (as one does). We were discussing the differences between philosophy and the natural sciences. I ventured that the method of working of most academic science was not that different from the method of working of most academic philosophy. People seek to establish small, well-defined results through a painstaking examination of the evidence. The difference is that in philosophy, the evidence is not so well-defined, nor so independent of the experimenters, as in the natural sciences. Evidence in philosophy consists largely of our pre-theoretical intuitions, and of our reflections on hypothetical cases which are designed to elicit those intuitions or to put them under pressure. We are therefore neither surprised nor distressed when different philosophers hold contradictory views, and we do not assume, although we may hope, that decisive experiments to resolve such contradictions are just around the corner.

If minute and painstaking work in philosophy does not produce the goods in the way that it does in the natural sciences, should we carry on doing philosophy in this way? Might we not be better off with grand and radical philosophies? Excited though I am by the prospect of living to see the next Descartes or Nietzsche, I think we should keep the minute work going. One cannot first resolve to produce something radical, and then produce it. One has to have something worthwhile to say first. And the minute work provides a reality check, by threatening the swift demolition of castles in the air through exposure of contradictions in their foundations. Having said that, rather more bold claims in print, clearly proclaimed rather than as one often finds having to be inferred from a criss-cross reading of the text, would be stimulating.

Museums and politics

2008-04-15T16:06:00.000+01:00

In the British Museum this afternoon, I came across an exhibition of Mao badges, all nicely polished up. The Museum chose to be neutral on the historical context, saying neither good things nor bad things about Mao. But he was one of the most foul and murderous dictators of all time, right up there with Stalin and Hitler. It would be hard for a museum to stage a similar exhibition about either of those two without providing a bit of context.

This set me wondering about the responsibilities of museums, especially in the light of last year's exhibitions on the slave trade, which did not give much prominence to the large-scale trade that had gone on within Africa for hundreds of years. And there was an exhibition on Soviet and Fascist art and architecture of the 1930s and 1940s at the Hayward Gallery and then in Barcelona and Berlin in 1995-96, under the title "Art and Power", which Time Out chose to describe as "pernicious".

I would not want to drag museums into politics, but nor would I exclude them from politics. Perhaps museums should simply encourage people more directly to go and find out about the historical context for themselves. After all, the Internet makes that easy enough. Any one site may not be authoritative, but it is easy to find a wide range of conflicting views. There is a lot to be said for articulate debate and disagreement. Apart from anything else, it is a great antidote to conformist political correctness.

Tai Chi and reality

2008-03-09T22:55:00.000Z

This afternoon I went to a talk by a Tai Chi teacher. It was billed as philosophical, but it was not philosophical in any western sense, nor even in many of the eastern senses. The teacher’s central claim was that there was something beyond plus and minus, beyond yin and yang, which he had discovered. He did not say, but I think he was implying, that we could discover it too.

I do not accept his claim, or at least I do not feel inclined to search for this thing myself. If this thing beyond is a state of the person (and I am deliberately not saying whether we should break that down into a state or mind and/or a state of body), its realisation will be in the form of a disposition of molecules and the route to it will be some form of conduct, whether actions or inaction. That much, we can leave to the scientists to explain. If we are asked to see it in non-scientific terms as part of the route to it, that is just practical psychology. If we are asked to see it in non-scientific terms because that is the best way in which its nature can be conveyed, that is not problematic either. When we are invited to picture elementary particles and their interactions in a given way, we are invited to think of them in a way which does not correspond very closely to the way they actually are, but that does not matter.

Can we go further? Could this thing beyond be a reality that was beyond the reach of science? The teacher obviously thought that it was. In a discussion afterwards, someone asked me whether I rejected the claims made because they were not scientific. I saw that my criticism should not be put in those terms. I am happy to say that the beauty of a Mozart symphony is real, meaning the beauty itself, not the brain states which hearing the symphony induces, even though the beauty as such is not the sort of thing in which scientists would traffic. My criticism is that the thing of which the teacher spoke could not have even that sort of reality. The beauty of a work of art depends on its having a certain articulation. That of which the teacher spoke was without form, and void.

That leaves the reality of myth. The characters and other elements in myths, including many religions, are real for the believer. But I do not think that the teacher could lay claim to that kind of reality for the thing about which he spoke. The reason is that he started by describing, or failing to describe, the thing directly. Myths start as stories, characters in a world. Only in later generations do we analyse them and explain what they are really about. A story cannot have the real presence of a myth if it was deliberately constructed from the beginning as a way to give substance to something of uncertain status, or at least it cannot have that real presence for anyone who is aware that it was constructed for that purpose. A decoded myth is no longer a myth, but a metaphor.

Rowan Williams and Shariah law

2008-02-09T10:43:00.000Z

The Archbishop of Canterbury has opened up a debate on a possible place for Shariah law within, or alongside, British law. There are two separate questions. First, what are the arguments for and against having different legal systems within the same country? Second, what should we think of the particular example of Shariah law, given its nature?

On the first question, it strikes me that there is a lot of merit in having a single system, applicable to everyone. Within it, one can have different systems of arbitration which people involved in, for example, a commercial dispute can choose. Indeed, that happens now. Most commercial disputes that get as far as a formal hearing before an independent party are settled by arbitration, rather than by the courts. But commercial disputes have the important feature that they do not necessarily involve our deepest values or feelings. Resolving a commercial dispute can be like solving any other technical problem. In that respect, they are unlike disputes which fall within the area of family law. It would be very dangerous to extrapolate from the success of commercial arbitration to other areas. In particular, once the passions are stirred, the processes of choosing, and accepting as appropriate, an arbitrator with a particular way of approaching disputes, take on a new colour. It is much less obvious that all parties will be genuinely free in making their choice. And once children are involved, we cannot think of them as choosing or accepting a given arbitration process. We can easily think that a given process would be appropriate, by identifying a child as Christian, Muslim or whatever. But children have not on the whole made free and informed choices of religion. In truth, there is no such thing as a Christian or a Muslim child, only a child of Christian or Muslim parents. So I would confine arbitration which can bind the parties to cases where the issues are financial, rather than being issues of life and love. Of course there is a role for non-binding arbitration practically everywhere in the area of civil, as opposed to criminal, law. It shades into friendly advice. If we were not able to resolve most of the issues between us by discussion and compromise but always litigated, society would grind to a halt.

Turning to Shariah law in particular, there are areas where we have already made accommodations, in particular tweaks to the tax system to handle transactions that are in substance payments of interest but in form something else. Those tweaks strike me as harmless. The transactions might well be chosen by non-Muslims, because of the ways in which they distribute risk. Equally, the tax system is tweaked to accommodate securitisations and various types of derivative. Again, we are in the emotionally boring world of commerce.

The proposal is of course to go further, and in particular to move to family relationships. Here there is an enormous danger, which runs very deep. The Islamic tradition is to accord separate roles to men and women - as is the Christian tradition, to some extent. This is a disastrous starting point. You can accord all sorts of rights and honour to women, but if you identify them as a separate group from men, the rot has already set in. The racial segregationists of the southern United States relied on the doctrine of "separate but equal", which meant nothing of the sort. We must join the Muslim women of Ontario who saw off the threat of Shariah there and set ourselves firmly against any role for Shariah law in resolving disputes that involve personal relationships. The problem is not that all of the doctrines of Shariah law are wrong. As in any legal system, some are good and some are bad - although Shariah does have an ample share of bad doctrines. The problem is that the starting point, the basic vision of society as comprising two separate groups with different roles, is totally antithetical to the individual liberty of all people and to equal opportunity for all people to shape our society.

The squaddie's gasper

2008-01-24T21:45:00.000Z

Matthew Parris, writing in today's Times, has an anecdote about a soldier waiting for a train, having to enjoy his cigarette in the rain because it is now against UK law to smoke in a public space that is under cover. My immediate reaction was that this was not right for a guy who might be on his way to be shot at in Afghanistan.

On the one hand, we expect laws to apply to everyone, or at least for any exemptions to be based on obviously relevant facts - as when police drivers can break the speed limit in an emergency. Being a soldier is not in itself enough to exempt you from a law on smoking in public places. On the other hand, I would want to let the soldier enjoy his smoke wherever was most comfortable for him.

Is there a compromise available here? We could have exceptionless rules, but then have enforcers of rules who exercised common sense. It would be a risky approach, because you could not instruct the enforcers as to what exceptions to allow. That would amount to legislating the exceptions. It would also be risky because enforcers could start to exercise their personal preferences, either as to classes of people to let off or as to specific individuals to let off. We could soon slide into the rule of men, rather than the rule of law. But perhaps we should tolerate that to a limited extent, in trivial matters like the occasional cigarette. I fear that we are losing such flexibility. A "rules is rules" attitude is nothing new, but it is now encouraged from the centre with standards, guidelines, targets and boxes to tick.

Solstice reflections

2007-12-22T11:01:00.000Z

It is that curious time of year when London is open for frantic business, and then firmly closed for a day. Having particular days in the year when life is, however trivially, different gives a certain structure. To some extent, that structure is enforced in law with restrictions on the opening of shops on 25 December, or enforced in practice on many people by the withdrawal of public transport and the closure of public museums and art galleries. But the structure will not suit everyone. There are those who would rather there was no great build-up followed by national closure, either because they feel lonely or because they would rather not suffer clogged roads and airports. Christmas is not the only example, of course. Public holidays have similar, but lesser, effects.

So is it right that these things should be imposed, or should all laws setting out public holidays and special rules associated with them be abolished? I think the latter, on grounds of individual liberty, but there is a case to be made for the other side.

The case is that those who want the structure and the special days can only have them if most people join in. If there were no laws, many people would not join in. Traditions are not strong enough to do the same job. I remember that in the 1960s, all of the public holidays had a noticeable impact on daily life. Now, most of them do not apart from the large numbers of people travelling. So do we owe it to each other to continue to impose on ourselves the traditional restrictions, and to do so by law and by the withdrawal of public facilities given that this is the only effective method of imposition? I say no, but those who say yes do have a case.

Mad micro-management in further education

2007-11-23T15:34:00.000Z

Many lecturers in further education are now having to work their way through a new scheme of qualifications. The content is mostly sensible, although grossly over-specified, but the way in which these qualifications are being run is simply appalling.

Take the basic qualification, the PTLLS. Page 16 of this document

www.lifelonglearninguk.org/documents/itt/interim_information.pdf

prescribes 60 hours of learning, of which at least 30 must be guided (ie, in class). This prevents lecturers from completing the course more efficiently if they can. The content is very straightforward, and it would be easy to fit the whole course, including completion of the assignments, into ten hours of reading and writing, with no class time apart from observation of the lecturer in action.

The people behind this nonsense have gone far beyond those who argue that ends can justify means. They have decided to prescribe the means to achieve the end (a certain level of knowledge and skill), regardless of whether there are better means. Charitably, this reflects a culture of wasteful and controlling perfectionism that has long flourished in enterprises subsidised by the taxpayer.

Another example of the same culture can be found in the new professional standards:

www.lifelonglearninguk.org/documents/standards/professional_standards_for_itts_020107.pdf

This worthy 20-page document achieves little more than would be achieved by a postcard to lecturers which said:

Know your subject
Teach it well
Respect your students

But I think we knew that much already.

The digital republic of letters

2007-11-23T12:13:00.000Z

Blogging for the first time, I feel impelled to reflect on what blogging is doing to the world of learning - and plenty of academics are blogging now. It creates a worldwide agora, in which we can all flit from one corner to another to join in whichever conversations take our fancy. The new agora is not be a democracy in one sense. There are too many voices for all to get a hearing. But it is an (imperfect) democracy in another sense. At least some of the voices most worth listening to can be identified from blog statistics, although some of the less worthy voices attract large followings too.

What this exhilerating babble does not yet give us is a reliable mechanism for building up a canon of learning. Voices come and go, in stark contrast to libraries building up collections of respected and reliable books and journals. But we do not have to abandon that mechanism, and in any case it is not completely reliable - some bad work gets published and some good work does not.

We are trying out Socrates' lifestyle, conversing with everyone and not caring whether our words are preserved for posterity. When thinkers spend more time blogging than writing more traditional publications, the blog will really have arrived and philosophy will have gone back to its roots.