Philosophy

There is a universal distinction in Indo-European languages between knowing about a fact and knowing personally, between

1 wissen (saber Spanish, savoir French, scire Latin) and

2 kennen (conocer, connaître, cognoscere).

“Science” from scire “to know” is analytic. The root meaning of “science” is to “cut up,” so it is about knowledge by analysis, not synthesis. In fact the word “shit” in English comes from that same root, because excrement is “cut off” from the body.

Enlightenment rationalists used experiment and reason, both of them in an impersonal non-commital sort of way, being suspicious of the mystical– divorcing as it were “experiment” from “experience.” They had important axioms: Truth should be able to be interpersonally verified, and the universe is knowable because God is good and wouldn’t deceive our senses and reason. But truth without Truth led to deism and onward down to atheism.

“I cut open the body and I can’t find the soul.”

“Did it ever occur to you that the very cutting destroyed the soul?”

Micah Tillman reminded me again of this distinction in his blog today, where he comments on the familiar fact that pisteuo in Koine Greek means both faith and faithfulness.

1. faith, of the mind, analytic, held at arm’s length intellectually;

2. faithfulness, of the deeds, synthetic, embraced personally. “Cognoscere” is to about “personal knowledge,” to use Michael Polanyi’s term, and personal commitment.

Contrast Jesus before Pilate:

1 truth, academic, according to Pilate;

2. Jesus the Truth, personal.

Hear C. S. Lewis in his essay “Is Theology Poetry?” in Weight of Glory: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen:”

1. “not only because I see it” (analysis and experimental observation), but

2. “because by it I see everything else” (commitment).

Michael Ward has a great new book, Planet Narnia, about C. S. Lewis’s childrens’ stories. (A great review by N. T. Wright is here. ) In Planet Narnia Ward tells us that C. S. Lewis distinguished between

1. looking at a beam of light; and

2. looking along a beam of light.

(The C. S. Lewis quote is here in context.) Don’t just analyze the light; allow the light to serve its telos.

I was already prompted to think about this over the past weekend even before Micah’s blog entry. My first prompt was reading a fresh accurate translation of Exodus 20:3Exodus 20:3
English: World English Bible - WEB
3?You shall have no other gods before me.

:

“Thou shalt have no other gods between your face and Mine.”

The Hebrew for “before me” also means “in my face.” The traditional translation imagines (analytically) gods lined up along a line. Elohim is first; all the others rank distant seconds. This new more personalistic translation (thank you Thom Gardner) suggests that even in the Ten Words, God intended personal relationship not just legalistic obedience.

My second prompt was yesterday while I was listening to the Easter sermon at my church–a sermon on Romans 10:9Romans 10:9
English: World English Bible - WEB
9?that if you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

, the very verse I was reading when I first trusted Jesus. There you have the 1-2 punch:

1 believe in your heart that Jesus resurrected (faith), and

2 confess with your mouth (faithfulness).

In my Ph.D. dissertation in 1979, I reviewed the artificial intelligence (AI) literature to find out how proponents of “strong AI” would ever bridge the gap between “knowing about” and “knowing personally.” The best that they could come up with– the best that they still can come up with 30 years later–is that personal knowledge is “precompiled” knowledge. But precompiling “X causes Y to die” into “X kills Y” does not bootstrap us nearly far enough up the “information pyramid” from mere data to wisdom:

As St. Agustine says, “believe that you may know.”

Get Wisdom. You can only get it by personally being committed to Him, for Wisdom is a person, not a proposition.

American literary figure David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement address in 2005 said–and I concur–”Everybody worships.” One cannot read his speech without thinking that he had life almost figured out. Yet he committed suicide. The London Times said that he had friends. I wonder if any of them told him that he should follow his own advice and worship Jesus or YHWH.

Here’s an excerpt:

[I]n the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Who or what do you worship?

Jonathan Haidt gave an incredible talk for TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) in March entitled “The Moral Mind.” It’s about five foundations for morality necessary to make society work, rooted in our innate genetic makeup, gathered by Haidt and his colleagues from many places, including their web site.

Haidt is a liberal caught on the horns of a dilemma.  Here are the five foundations of morality that he and his colleagues identify in their research:

1. harm/care
2. fairness/reciprocity
3. ingroup/loyalty
4. authority/respect
5. purity/sanctity

Haidt points out that the last three are conservative values.  Liberals propose that we “celebrate diversity” contra 3, propose that we “question authority” contra 4, and propose that we “keep your laws off my body” contra 5.  The intellectually honest thing to do upon discovering these findings about the foundations of morality would be to champion the benefits of conservatism.

Haidt concludes instead that we rise above the liberal-conservative divide, beyond “us and them,” beyond “right and wrong,” even beyond “true and false.”  These sound like an oriental world view beyond all dichotomies, but they also sound strangely like the big tent of liberalism in contrast to the very foundation of values that Haidt’s research identifies as essential to a well-functioning society.

Noam Chomsky of MIT (political über-liberal as well as a world-class linguist) faced a similar problem.  He originally believed in a Lockean blank slate mind, but the more he studied children’s language acquisition, the more he rejected that in favor of his “innateness hypothesis.”

To say that language or morality is innate is not to say that it is God-given, but you shouldn’t miss Haidt’s use of the word “miracle” in describing the moral mind.  Haidt says that evolution led to this genetic situation.  Which is to say, Haidt has no idea what led to this genetic situation.

I applaud Haidt’s call to reject self-righteousness, which is a common failing of conservatives like me.  I also applaud Haidt’s providing another example of the self-defeating nature of liberalism, apparently unintended.

I told my friend Pastor Dan that I was pleased recently to discover that there are three Hebrew words for love: dod, ra’aya, and ahava, corresponding roughly to eros, philia, and agape in Greek, or sexual love, friendship love and selfless love in English. And even more recently I was pleased to discover that the noun “the good” in Hebrew, tuwb, also means “the beautiful”; while the adjective “good” in Greek, kalos, also means “beautiful.” I owe the latter observation to David B. Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite which I mentioned briefly in an earlier blog.

Those were two beautiful thoughts.

Dan’s reply surprised me. “Hebrew doesn’t have as large a vocabulary as Greek.” I narrowed him down to what he meant: “Hebrew roots in the Hebrew Bible are fewer than Greek roots in the New Testament.” With that I agreed. Hebrew is a very productive language. Just a few roots (stems, base forms) give you a large vocabulary. It is as if as soon as you learn the Latin stem “-fer” (to carry) you already know all these English words: transfer, confer, refer, prefer, and infer.

Almost. You have to infer that “infer” means more than “carry in.”

But what if Dan meant (I’m jus’ sayin’), “Greek is better for doing philosophy in than Hebrew because Greek has a richer vocabulary”?

Hogwash.

This is a misunderstanding of the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis, even if we assume that we think (only) using language. The Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis claims that because languages differ between cultures, monolinguals in those cultures think differently. I disagree. (Actually I even disagree that we think only using language. We think non-linearly; language is linear.)

More precisely, I claim, some things can be said simply in one language that must be said in a roundabout way in another language. But they can be said. No matter how many Inuit (Eskimo) words there are for snow—to use a shopworn example—, we can modify the single English word for snow to express them all: powdery snow, crunchy snow, wet globs of snow. No matter how many words there are for the color indigo (dark blue, Messiah Blue, hexadecimal 4B0082, or Pantone® Matching System 295), they denote the same thought.

Of course they don’t connote the same thought. Pantone is a proprietary color space, so “Pantone 295″ has legal connotations. To a colorblind person like me indigo connotes “the color that looks like blue to me but other people whom I trust say it’s not.”

Dan is my wife’s older brother’s daughter’s husband. I bet in Inuit there’s a single word for that.

1. Why don’t we feel the rotation of the earth or its revolution around the sun? The common answer since Galileo has been to say that we can’t tell the difference between uniform motion and rest. But that’s obviously nonsense, because neither the rotation nor the revolution is uniform motion, since constant speed in a circle is still (vector) acceleration. The right answer is that our non-uniform motion is so small that we can’t feel it because of the limitations of our senses. Moral: Ya can’t always trust your senses.

2. An investment firm told me, “Let our company manage your funds, and we’ll see to it that they are invested in a diversified portfolio as a hedge against any one kind of investment letting you down.” In my heart I replied, with no courage to say it out loud, “But if diversification is so good, why should I trust your company with all my funds? I need a diversity of investors.” Moral: Ya can’t always trust other people’s senses.

[First entry newly added 03Nov2008]

For Mathematics

Dave Richeson

Dave is a colleague of mine at Dickinson College, the author of a new book, Euler’s Gem, about mathematics accessible to the scientific generalist. His blog is entertaining and informative.

For Philosophy

Micah Tillman

One of my former students offers interesting insights on philosophy, linguistics, theology, and his personal life. G. K. Chesterton says that angels fly “because they take themselves lightly.” This blog flies. A day without Tillman is … well … a day without Tillman.

For Reformed Theology

Scott Moonen

I’ve just finished reading as much as my mind can hold of David Bentley Hart’s
Beauty of the Infinite It’s an Eastern Orthodox treatment of philosophy based on starting with the Trinity. (My mind could hold about 1/4 from various parts of the book this summer. More another summer.) Scott in similar fashion writes starting with God, only from a Reformed instead of Eastern Orthodox perspective. Both Hart and Moonen are more subtle than Foundationalist theology, which is explicitly the Reformed view of my mathematics professor colleague John Byl at Trinity Western University in Canada.

Scott’s blog is not updated often. Scott, like Micah, is one of my former students. Scott wrote his blog software himself, so it’s missing navigation aids like tags and topics, so from time to time I will link to specific parts of interest, as I did in my first blog below. I appreciate Scott’s thinking Christianly.

For Sexuality

Warren Throckmorton

Warren is a psychology professor at a sister institution of mine, Grove City College. Warren finds things that interest me in the area of sexuality and posts here even before I knew that the topic was in the air.

For Sociology

Jenell Williams Paris

Jenell is a colleague of mine at Messiah College. An articulate anthropologist, Jenell writes engagingly on sexuality, on raising young boys, on college teaching, on evangelical subculture, and on feminism.

For Computer Science

Gene Rohrbaugh

My colleague Gene Rohrbaugh collects for the convenience of his Computer Science students interesting links about the field. Not updated frequently.

“Platonicity” is a word coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his second book,
The Black Swan. It means the human tendency to find patterns. Putting it that way sounds good, but Taleb is critical of Platonicity. He contrasts Platonists with practitioners. He exposes the “ludic” fallacy, where one builds a mathematical model of something (as in Latin “ludens,” playing a game) but then believes the model–the rules of the game–too much. It’s another form of the fallacy of induction: All swans that I’ve seen are white, therefore all swans are white.

Some people undergeneralize. I always overgeneralize, so I needed Taleb’s book.

Hmm, that was probably an overgeneralization. I usually overgeneralize.

Taleb has been a practitioner–an options trader in the stock market–, and is now a college professor. So it is possible to profess mathematics as well as to practice it! Qua option trader, he gives the following advice for investing in stocks: 95% conservative and 5% on highly improbable “black swans.”

I used to call black swans “albino crows” when I discussed the fallacy of induction in my classes. (See, I did know what Taleb is saying, theoretically at least.) But Taleb is such a good historian that he knows that black swans were John Stuart Mill’s example as early as the 19th C. From now on, all albino crows are black swans. (Take that, W. V. O. Quine!)

Besides J. S. Mill, Taleb’s heros include Umberto Eco, Benoît Mandelbrot, David Hume, and Karl Popper. I’ll agree except for Hume, since I do believe in miracles, and I do believe in moral truths.

Taleb’s anti-heros are almost all economists who have won Nobel prizes, like Kenneth Arrow, Paul Samuelson, Robert C. Merton, and Myron Scholes. He spares laureate Herbert Simon, who extended George Zipf’s linguistic work on power laws to a broad array of phenomena. (This link in turn links to Simon’s 1955 article.) Taleb is very big on power laws.

Published in 2007, Taleb’s book cautions that Fanny Mae is so exposed to risk that it is “sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup.” (225 n.) For a moment I thought that this proved that Taleb’s book is sound: Fanny Mae is in trouble as I write! It proves no such thing. There I was falling for the inductive fallacy again.

Now that I’ve read the book, I see examples of it everywhere I look. You’d expect that of an overgeneralizer, wouldn’t you?

Theology. Between the premodern period and the current postmodern period, the Western world had a run of Protestant Platonicity in developing systematic theology instead of Biblical (narrative) theology. Gibbs and Bolger in their 2005 book
Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures
claim that this was spurred on by the printing press. They claim that worship for Protestants (my people!) became word-centered, linear, structured. I am reading this book now.

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Beware: Posmodernism plays loose with the idea of truth. I’ll blog about truth separately, but for now just two hints. First, in the Christian worldview, Truth is a Person, not a proposition. Second, in logic besides the inductive fallacy mentioned above, there is also a deductive fallacy, wherein the reasoning is airtight but the premises are false. See my friend Scott Moonen’s
blog on a proof for the non-existence of God for a nice illustration of this.

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Math. Besides championing the power law mentioned above, thanks to Taleb I’m more likely to be critical of assuming a normal distribution, or even a lognormal distribution. Or even further a Bayesian approach. I’m happy to say that my most recent professional publication tempers arguments about lognormal distributions and Bayesian reasoning with common sense.

Physics. Lee Smolin’s latest book,
The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and what Comes Next, is critical of the current state of Physics too enamored with Platonicity. I read that just before I read Taleb.

(h/t Both Taleb and Smolin were recommended to me by my good friend and polymath Curt Byers. Thanks!)