Catching up on reading

Alun Politics, The Past 2 Comments ,

My thanks go to Duane Smith who sug­ges­ted read­ing Philo­sophy and Archae­ology by Mer­rilee Sal­mon in a com­ment last year. My first reac­tion was that it was a bit dated. Well it was bound to be, it was pub­lished in 1982. But I think the reason I had that reac­tion is that des­pite it lack­ing any­thing on post-processual approaches, after a quarter of a cen­tury it’s still a good book.

There’s use­ful mater­ial on the dif­fer­ences between Laws of Phys­ics, and Laws of Bio­lo­gical and Beha­vi­oural Sci­ences and this is expli­citly then related to the idea of Laws of Archae­ology. It’s the fact she takes the time to draw the links clearly and dis­cuss the cri­ti­cisms that makes the book read­able. That’s not as com­mon as it should be in archae­ology. Quite often I find the best advoc­ates for an idea are people who cri­ti­cise that idea, because they make the con­cepts clear when they try and show how wrong they are.

It is about Big Laws, which are out of fash­ion at the moment. How­ever, one paper this reminds me of is Richard Bradley’s Archae­ology: The loss of nerve in Yof­fee and Sherrat’s Archae­olo­gical The­ory: Who Sets the Agenda? Brad­ley argues (if I remem­ber cor­rectly, it’s hid­ing from me on a book­shelf some­where at the moment) that along with a retreat from laws of beha­viour, archae­olo­gists have also shied away from any­thing big.

I half agree with Brad­ley. His examples are of aston­ish­ingly trivial things inflated with import­ance. This is where I’m regret­ting not find­ing the book as I can’t recall a spe­cific example. I think he laments the amib­i­tions of stu­dents who do some­thing like the Archae­ology of Spoons in the inter-war years for a thesis. That’s not so much of a prob­lem for me, if it deals with big ideas. I think his com­plaint might be more groun­ded when archae­ology stu­dents hide in small top­ics and nar­row hori­zons. I have seen people sneer at gen­eral the­or­ies as being evid­ence of delu­sions of grandeur. At this level I’d say that it is import­ant to have an idea of why you’re doing the work and what it means to other people.

So I’d agree with Duane that the chapter on The­ory Build­ing in Archae­ology is use­ful read­ing. It’s the chapter I’ll pho­to­copy when I’m back in the build­ing tomor­row and read again. If you keep your­self focussed on what you want to explore and why then it is pos­sible to cre­ate gen­eral social the­or­ies or obser­va­tions, so long as you also acknow­ledge the lim­it­a­tions of the res­ol­u­tion of these obser­va­tions. And des­pite not men­tion­ing Inter­pret­ive Archae­olo­gies, Phe­nomen­o­logy and so on, it remains rel­ev­ant because the basics of cre­at­ing a good argu­ment haven’t changed. Even the most ardent relat­iv­ist backs up their argu­ments with cita­tions, which sug­gests there’s com­mon logic. I think even if ulti­mately you dis­agree with it, the sec­tion on Gen­eral Assump­tions, Com­mon Sense Hypo­theses, Induc­tion and The­or­ies would be use­ful in sharpen­ing your the­or­et­ical tools.

So my thanks again to Duane as I’ve def­in­itely learned some­thing. Though I’ll still need to read it a few more times to fully under­stand it as I’m a slow thinker.

Lord Percy / Prof Fuller: Spot the Difference

Alun Politics 3 Comments , ,

The Black Adder: The Queen of Spain’s Beard

Percy: My Lord…
Edmund: Yes, what is it?
Percy: You know, they do say that the Infanta’s eyes are more beau­ti­ful than the fam­ous Stone of Galve­ston.
Edmund: Mm! … What?
Percy: The fam­ous Stone of Galve­ston, My Lord.
Edmund: And what’s that, exactly?
Percy: Well, it’s a fam­ous blue stone, and it comes (points dra­mat­ic­ally) from Galve­ston.
Edmund: I see. And what about it?
Percy: Well, My Lord, the Infanta’s eyes are bluer than it, for a start.
Edmund: I see. And have you ever seen this stone?
Percy: (nods) No, not as such, My Lord, but I know a couple of people who have, and they say it’s very very blue indeed.
Edmund: And have these people seen the Infanta’s eyes?
Percy: No, I shouldn’t think so, My Lord.
Edmund: And neither have you, pre­sum­ably.
Percy: No, My Lord.
Edmund: So, what you’re telling me, Percy, is that some­thing you have never seen is slightly less blue than some­thing else you have never seen.
Percy: (finally begins to grasp) Yes, My Lord.

And from the cur­rent Times Higher Edu­ca­tion Sup­ple­ment:

…New­ton presen­ted his math­em­at­ical phys­ics as the divine plan that was impli­citly writ­ten into the Bible. He clearly thought he had got into God’s mind. In con­trast, Dar­win pur­sued the hum­bler path of Wil­liam Paley’s ana­logy of nature’s order being like a watch found on a beach, which implied the exist­ence of a watch­maker. Unfor­tu­nately, the fossil record revealed to Dar­win only a lot of broken half-watches, noth­ing that could have been pro­duced by a God worthy of human respect. Darwin’s humil­ity remained, but his faith disappeared.

In today’s sec­u­lar cul­ture, Dar­win is more read­ily embraced than New­ton as a sci­entific icon although New­ton remains unques­tion­ably the greater sci­ent­ist. The Amer­ican Museum of Nat­ural His­tory has an exhibit devoted to Darwin’s life that includes a recon­struc­tion of his home. This is not sur­pris­ing. Darwin’s bio­graphy pro­jects the polit­ic­ally cor­rect image of a Chris­tian who loses his faith through sci­entific inquiry. We are unlikely to see a sim­ilar exhibit for New­ton because his life teaches that the Bible can provide a sure path to great science.

I don’t recall Darwin’s the­ory being strongly built on fossil evid­ence. In fact it has a chapter where he talks about the paucity of fossil evid­ence. Equally I don’t recall the Bible being a primer on basic math­em­at­ics, so I’m not con­vinced that Newton’s tale would be one of the Bible being a sure path to great sci­ence. At the end of his life New­ton either turned from the Bible to fail at alchemy, or else the Bible’s chapters on alchemy are in error, or as a third option, Fuller is in error and the Bible is irrel­ev­ant to Newton’s sci­entific success.

Fuller goes on:

Con­trary to pop­u­lar accounts, Dar­win never provided a mech­an­istic account of evol­u­tion because he lacked a cred­ible the­ory of genet­ics. Indeed, by the time The Ori­gin of Spe­cies reached its 50th birth­day in 1909, Darwin’s the­ory was itself close to extinc­tion. It could offer only “just so”

The pop­u­lar accounts that I’ve read say that Dar­win failed to provide a mech­an­istic account of evol­u­tion, and instead tried to argue for blend­ing of attrib­utes. I’m not aware of any evid­ence that Darwin’s the­ory of Des­cent with Nat­ural Selec­tion was on its way out before the Mod­ern Syn­thesis with Mendel’s Genet­ics. Can any­one sug­gest some help­ful read­ing to plug that gap?* Mendel’s work was re-discovered in 1900 (Steve Jones Almost Like a Whale 1999 p144). While the import­ance to evol­u­tion was recog­nised there wasn’t agree­ment on exactly how that mech­an­ism worked. The dis­cus­sion was rather vig­or­ous and, I think the first paper to fully syn­thes­ise the two didn’t appear till 1918 but there were argu­ments aplenty before them. Indeed, argu­ments on the details of mech­an­ism con­tinue to this day, so I’m not quite sure how “close to extinc­tion” is an accur­ate descrip­tion. I would have thought a the­ory close to being dis­carded would have been ignored rather than debated.

I have to admit Fuller’s argu­ments are pretty con­vin­cing so long as you don’t actu­ally exam­ine the evid­ence. As a res­ult I’m not that bothered about his opin­ion per se. What is inter­est­ing is the ques­tion “How does this stuff get published?”

Incor­rect ideas are pub­lished all the time. The really inter­est­ing ones are the ones that people are still arguing are wrong dec­ades later. If you’re writ­ing on pre­his­toric Europe then Gor­don Childe, who I think has been argued by vari­ous people to be wrong on almost every spe­cific detail, is a good place to start. He may be wrong, but he’s inter­est­ing, intel­li­gent and a thought-provoking depar­ture point to dis­cuss what may have happened in pre­his­toric Europe. If you want to argue that Childe was wrong about some­thing you have to do quite a bit of work to show it. Fuller’s argu­ments on the other hand, when he presents them in clear lan­guage seem to be plainly erro­neous, irrel­ev­ant or both. And these are not dif­fi­cult things to show. If it’s not depth of thought, intel­li­gib­ilty or inter­est­ing­ness that’s the reason for suc­cess in soci­ology then what is?

Speak­ing as a non-sociologist*, it would appear there’s no qual­ity con­trol in soci­olo­gical peer-review. That doesn’t mean that all soci­ology is rub­bish. On the con­trary there’s some inter­est­ing mater­ial. Rather it means that if you want to know what the good mater­ial is, the last per­son you should ask is a soci­olo­gist. It would also sug­gest that if everything does go wrong I can move to War­wick and become a sage of sci­ence without hav­ing to do dif­fi­cult stuff. Instead I can argue that someone’s work that haven’t really read is less sci­entific that someone else’s work that I haven’t read.

…and finally. The intro­duc­tion says:

Steve Fuller argues that intel­li­gent design shows how the Bible has been a power­ful spur to science…

Well, I sup­pose he does, but he doesn’t provide any evid­ence that intel­li­gent design is the least bit sci­entific. He does seem a little intent on trash­ing his own repu­ta­tion.

* Update: Jonathan Badger and Bob O’H cor­rect me on the eclipse of Dar­win­ism in com­ments 3 and 5. Bur­idan under­stand­ably skew­ers the para­graph “Speak­ing as a non-sociologist…” in com­ment 7. I could pre­tend that the first half of that para­graph was satir­ical, but the real­ity is that it was typ­ing without enga­ging the brain. As the say­ing goes: “When arguing with a stu­pid per­son, make sure they’re not doing the same.”

Everything I know about Bourdieu I learned from a T-Shirt

Alun Life No Comments , ,

Bourdieu

“Noth­ing is sim­ul­tan­eously freer and more con­strained than the action of the good player. He quite nat­ur­ally mater­i­al­ises at just the place the ball is about to fall, as if the ball were in com­mand of him — but by that very fact, he is in com­mand of the ball.”

Pierre Bour­dieu

It’s TAG this week. If I were going then this is what I’d be wear­ing. Or more likely one of the oth­ers from Philo­sophy Foot­ball.

The Little Professor is being Critical

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The Thinker
Le Pen­seur. Photo by Mark Paciga.

There have been two inter­est­ing posts on the sub­ject of the­ory in lit­er­at­ure stud­ies, but which are prob­ably rel­ev­ant to many of the social sci­ences. The Little Pro­fessor has a long but reward­ing post Crit­ical which tackles an art­icle by Lind­say Waters in the Chron­icle of Higher Edu­ca­tion Lit­er­ary Aes­thet­ics: the Very Idea. The ori­ginal is access­ible for a fee of $45. For those of us who don’t think in dol­lars — that’s just over twice as much as the com­plete works of Wil­liam Shakespeare (leather bound). But hope­fully the pre­view of the art­icle makes the point clear.

Try­ing to fig­ure out what’s up with Amer­ican lit­er­ary schol­ar­ship — I mean the writ­ing com­ing out of col­leges that relates to lit­er­at­ure — is dif­fi­cult. This stuff can­not be under­stood by the norms of healthy lit­er­ary cri­ti­cism as it has been prac­ticed from Aris­totle to Helen Vendler.

Ever since it became pro­fes­sional and, for the most part, lost touch with the read­ers who have fostered the little-magazine cri­ti­cism that reaches back to The Spec­tator, today’s aca­demic schol­ar­ship has become sep­ar­ated from its ground­ing: It is no longer con­nec­ted to the very medium that gave it rise, literature.

I recom­mend read­ing the whole of the Little Professor’s response but her reply to this:

At the risk of sound­ing like Ophelia Ben­son (not, I’d add, that I con­sider that at all a bad thing): “norms”? Which “norms”? What sort of his­tor­ical nar­rat­ive eas­ily encom­passes every­one from Aris­totle to Vendler?

The obvi­ous answer is “a shonky one”.
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Faith and Atheism

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But­ter­flies and Wheels has an entry on Alistair McGrath, author of Dawkins’ God try­ing to get to grips with his concept of “faith” (see here for my view of his book). A com­ment on the entry made me laugh:

Funny that when people (even reli­gious people) want to insult sci­ent­ists, they com­pare them to a priest­hood, or say that sci­ence is just another reli­gion. How is it no-one who wants to insult priests accuses them of being just another bunch of scientists?

Harry

Cruel, but funny.

There’s also the Car­ni­val of the God­less out this week. This time there’s some pos­it­ive stuff up as well as god bash­ing. That’s some­thing that should make it worth brows­ing. Con­stant neg­at­iv­ity can get a little wearing.

Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life by Alistair McGrath

Alun Politics 4 Comments , , , ,

Dawkins God
Dawkins’ God at Lib­rary Thing.

I bought this book last week to read on the train back to Leicester. I thought to get it as I thought it would be nice to read some­thing neg­at­ive about memes. Most of the books I’ve read on memes are pro-memetics, but so far I haven’t been fully con­vinced. The front cover also prom­ised that it would be a chal­len­ging read:

In this remark­able book, Alistair McGrath chal­lenges Dawkins on the very ground he holds most sac­red – rational argu­ment – and dis­arms the master.

Fran­cis Collins, Dir­ector of the Human Gen­ome Pro­ject.

On the back cover are some other good quotes:

A tour de force
Simon Con­way Mor­ris, Cam­bridge University

A dev­ast­at­ing critique

David N. Liv­ing­stone, Queen’s Uni­ver­sity, Belfast

A won­der­ful book…This is schol­ar­ship as it should be – informed, feisty and ter­rific fun. I can­not wait to see Dawkins’ review of Alistair McGrath’s critique.

Michael Ruse, Flor­ida State University

I wish I’d got that book. That book sounds like fun. The book between those cov­ers was rather limp in com­par­ison. McGrath closes his book by say­ing the dis­cus­sion barely scratches the sur­face of Dawkins’ claims and that much more work needs to be done. So it’s depress­ing when the final quote on the back from the Times Higher Edu­ca­tion Sup­ple­ment reads:

McGrath has writ­ten a bril­liant book, and it is dif­fi­cult to think that his expos­i­tion of Dawkin’s writ­ings and their reli­gious implic­a­tions will ever be bet­ter stated, explored and criticized.

It’s not an awful book but it’s patchy.
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Shopping for Philosophy II: This time it’s personal

Alun Politics 4 Comments , ,

The Road to Hell
Is this where I lose the plot?

One reason for reject­ing crit­ical the­ory as used by many archae­olo­gists is that I can­not take it ser­i­ously. A help­ful book I read was Intel­lec­tual Impos­tures by Sokal and Bric­mont. Not because it gave me an excuse to ignore a large body of work, but rather because it gave me the con­fid­ence to be able to say that some of this stuff was inco­her­ent. It wasn’t a blanket rejec­tion of philo­sophy. Around the same time I was get­ting inter­ested in Singer’s work, because I could see what the prob­lems he wanted to solve were. And any philo­sopher that has to have an armed guard must be doing some­thing right. But by and large I’ve been able to com­fort­ably ignore much mod­ern the­ory not simply because it’s bad, but worse – it’s irrel­ev­ant. I sup­pose with Ophelia Ben­son skew­er­ing crit­ical the­ory and with the launch of Theory’s Empire*, a book I haven’t read yet, I could fos­sil­ise in my views with no real injury. Indeed yes­ter­day I showed that it would be par for the course in archae­ology to select a the­or­et­ical school and squeeze snugly into it.

It would be a little dull though and rather paro­chial.
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Shopping for Philosophy

Alun Politics, The Past No Comments ,

critical theory
A pre­ma­ture obituary.

Occa­sion­ally I have com­mu­nic­a­tion trouble. I have a naïve tend­ency to take things at face value. For instance I thought that archae­olo­gists who built their ideas around Foucault’s ideas had actu­ally read Fou­cault. It turns out they’ve read Fou­cault in trans­la­tion. Fair enough, philo­soph­ical French is a little dense, there’s noth­ing wrong with read­ing it Eng­lish for archae­olo­gical pur­poses. It turns out that this isn’t quite what some people mean by in trans­la­tion. They don’t read Fou­cault at all. They read what other archae­olo­gists said about apply­ing Fou­cault to archae­ology.
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Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction by Catherine Osborne

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This is pos­sibly the best VSI I’ve read so far. It’s an example of the VSI series at its best. My own read­ing the Preso­crat­ics has ten­ded to be from a his­tor­ical per­spect­ive. You start with the Milesian Triad, then Pythagoras and the dif­fer­ence between east and west and so on. This leads to a view of philo­sophy as an inev­it­able rise to sci­ence, which I’m not happy about. It’s neither inev­it­able nor, really, sci­ence. Cath­er­ine Osborne throws out this chro­no­lo­gical approach and instead focuses on the prob­lems that the Preso­cratic philo­soph­ers tackled.

The cent­ral chapters Zeno’s tor­toise and Real­ity and appear­ance: more adven­tures in meta­phys­ics both explore the rela­tion­ship between thought and real­ity. If there is a com­mon theme in preso­cratic philo­sophy this is per­haps it. The chapters both show an infec­tious enthu­si­asm for the sub­ject. It’s a cliché to tell stu­dents that Clas­sics is a sub­ject with rel­ev­ance to the here and now, but these chapters do pro­pose prob­lems which chal­lenge people today.
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The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: And Ninety Nine Other Thought Experiments by Julian Baggini

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This is a dif­fi­cult book to read. No, that’s not right. It’s a dif­fi­cult book to read prop­erly. The book is a col­lec­tion of a hun­dred philo­soph­ical. The prob­lem itself may take up a page and there’s a follow-up dis­cus­sion of another couple of pages. The prob­lems are usu­ally witty and the dis­cus­sion enga­ging and it is a real page-turner. And that’s the prob­lem, because while the prob­lems are simple they do involve a pause for reflec­tion. Yet part of the joy of the book is find­ing some­thing weird in the mundane and there’s an eager­ness to see what the next prob­lem will be. How­ever, read­ing the book without think­ing about it would seem to be miss­ing the point.

The prob­lems are gen­er­ally taken from vari­ous philo­soph­ical clas­sics. The rail worker’s conun­drum appears pretty much as you’d expect it. The tree fall­ing in a forest though is re-worked with a twist that I won’t reveal because it would spoil it. That’s a bit of a prob­lem in dis­cuss­ing any of the prob­lems which would make excel­lent blog-fodder. Dis­cuss­ing the prob­lem would remove a lot of the reason for buy­ing the book. It’s rather like hav­ing a friend tell you that ‘Mousetrap’ is a bril­liant play to see because you’d never guess it’s the police­man who’s the mur­derer. So what I’ll do is grab an example prob­lem that’s already appeared in the Guard­ian.

Do you remem­ber hav­ing a rather dis­turbed night’s sleep about a month ago? That was the night I stole your brain. After land­ing my fly­ing sau­cer in your garden, I crept into your bed­room and sur­gic­ally removed your sleep­ing brain. I whisked it to my labor­at­ory back on Pluto and con­nec­ted it up to a super­com­puter run­ning a virtual-Earth pro­gram. This com­puter is cur­rently feed­ing into your brain the same pat­terns of elec­trical stim­u­la­tion that used to be pro­duced by your sense organs, when you still had some. So it seems to you as though you’re still on Earth. But everything you seem to observe around you, includ­ing this news­pa­per, is actu­ally vir­tual. You’ve been brain-snatched.

How can you tell this hasn’t happened: that what you’re exper­i­en­cing now isn’t virtual?

The other obvi­ous prob­lem is famil­iar to any­one who has read the Res­taur­ant at the End of the Uni­verse. Would it be moral to eat an animal that wants us to?

This does paint a pic­ture of a rather wry and arch philo­soph­ical read and in places it is. How­ever des­pite being an athe­ist Bag­gini gives a pretty accur­ate descrip­tion of hell in his prob­lem “When no-one wins.” This prob­lem, which is too unpleas­ant to describe, appears too early in the book. It’s raises issues that are worth think­ing about, but against the mild intro­duc­tion it opens doors to places that are extremely unpleas­ant. Other prob­lems raise the ques­tion of the use of tor­ture to pre­vent atro­cit­ies. Inter­spers­ing these with the fluf­fier prob­lems does keep the book sharp and keeps the focus on the import­ance of estab­lish­ing the truth of principles.

The icing on the cake is the lack of a bib­li­o­graphy. This would nor­mally be a bad thing, but in this case the source of the prob­lems is lis­ted as a cita­tion at the end of each descrip­tion. There is an index at the bad of the book to help you find half-remembered prob­lems and also sug­ges­ted cross-references between problems.

Friends and fam­ily can now prob­ably guess what they’ll be get­ting for Christmas.

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