Tolerance from the other side

On the religious side, there are those who manage to harmonize with the non believers, and those who respond aggressively. Naturally, I’m more sympathetic to the former.

I often encounter believers whose religiosity is sustained by two guiding motifs: one is the mystery of internal experience and the external cosmos; the other is love. For them, their deepest sensibilities guide their understanding of their religion, and their scriptures are far less important than their personal faith. That’s consonant with my own sense of what it is to be here alive, in this place, in this time and together.

The mystery motif impresses me with its poetry. I don’t dismiss it as mere poetry. There’s more to life than just truth — there’s also sensibility. How we approach inner and outer experience cannot be rationalized: those who are lucky enough to be able to suspend rationality or consistency far enough to be able to believe in a deity, are open to a profound and exalting sensibility of a cosmos shot through with beauty and meaning.

I describe it as poetic because it overlooks the bitter injustice and brutality of the natural and human world. For my part, if there is a god, then I deplore him or her. Mickey Mouse could have done a better job with creation from a moral point of view. At least MM has a conscience and shame and tries to fix his messes. Behemoth and Leviathan notwithstanding, the still small voice has a lot to answer for, and no sophistry is clever enough to satisfy the integrity of my notion of justice. But as poetry, the adoration of a deity is almost enough to melt craggy inconsistencies into a placid release from truth. Those who can buy into it are truly lucky. A long list of inspiring religious music testifies to it.

Love is an appealing place to begin a moral view (though not to libertarians), but dwelling on love is double-edged. Love is wonderful by definition, I venture. But it is not our only nature, and therein lies a danger of denial. For a while I worked for a church (I made my living briefly as a vocalist). The environment struck me as, above all, a ground for cultivating hypocrisy. All this pretending to be loving, denying every genuine mean sentiment, shocked me. It really shocked me. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never been in a social circumstance where denial and hypocrisy was so readily and easily assumed. It seemed to me that the prostitutes who lived in my neighborhood in the LES back in the 80′s were far more honest, decent and real than anyone in their Sunday suits and dresses (except when the occasional male functionary in the church would privately out with a racy or frankly obscene joke).

Humans have a lot of dark emotions. Understanding them is useful, but it just doesn’t work to repress them or deny them. If they lead to harm, avoiding those consequences should be the responsibility of the state, not morality.

That said, I am much readier to listen to believers who base their morality on love, than those who base it on some scripture. I find fundamentalism appalling and threatening: certainty is an approach to battle.

My Proudest Moment (and the problem with Dawkins)

One of my proudest moments:

A religious student in one of my linguistics classes challenged Darwinian evolution as “just a theory.” For a moment I thought I’d try to explain that the theory of evolution is scientific because it could be wrong, whereas Creationism is not scientific because it can never be wrong, but I realized that even if I spent the rest of the hour explaining that conundrum of falsificationism, they’d come away thinking that science is false and Creationism is necessarily true, so I’d not only be digressing from class topic, but it would be counterproductive.

Instead I suggested that the difference between the millions of years of evolution that resulted in the complexity and usefulness of natural language, on the one hand, and on the other, the clumsy strictures of standard languages, are exactly like the difference between god-given perfection and the imperfect creations of the human hand: helicopters, extraordinary as they are, crash; dragonflies don’t. The theory of evolution is the scientific way of explaining what in religion is called the god-given.

Thereafter whenever I mentioned evolution, I’d parenthetically add, “or in the discourse of religion, the god-given.” Not only did this make her happy, it allowed her to appreciate fully the content of the course without further objection. Here were two opposing theories which now seemed to work together, harmoniously, if not perfectly. It was as if theoretical swords had been turned to plowshares. And that is a desirable result overall and in itself.

When Dawkins calls atheists “brights” he does nothing to sway his opponents, he merely insults them. The religious may be irrational, but they are not stupid. And, after all, we are all irrational, no matter how smart: there is no reason to strive to live; there is no reason to enjoy pleasure; there’s no reason to know truth. There’s no questioning first motives or desire or rationalizing them. Dawkins should understand this, since he knows he’s just vehicle for a selfish gene of no final value.

It’s too often forgotten that the Catholic Church promoted science throughout the Middle Ages until the Church became defensive during the Counter-Reformation. The battling between science and religion leads to pseudo-scientific religious theories like ID which, it seems to me, waste everyone’s time. The whole conflict needs a touch of Dao.

third place

Is there a place for a third truth value?

There are two uses for a third truth value: one is the ontological trash bin; the other uncertainty. They are worlds apart.

The trashbin is filled with sentences like “The present king of France is bald” (Russell’s example), “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously ” (Chomsky’s), “The a book left,”  “Did you stop beating your wife?” asked of someone who never beat his wife or doesn’t have a wife. Generally, these sentences fail in some presupposition: there is no king of France, nothing can be both green and not, a thing can’t be designated as the particular and not particular,  you can’t spot beating your wife if you never did.

Dumping these sentences into a third category of neither true nor false seems harmless to me. It doesn’t have any adverse consequences for logic and has the advantage of dealing simply with presupposition failures. If such a sentence is neither true nor false, its negation with also be false. If there were an operator (like negation which takes a true sentence into the other truth value: false) that took true sentences into meaningless sentences, then logic would have to be restructured with far greater complexity. But since there is no such operator — there are too many ways for a presupposition to fail — there’s no reason to worry about this third value. It is logically inert.

The other strategy — using the third value for uncertainty — seems to me appealing in some ways, but has many adverse consequences. It levels necessary truth to mere truth. It’s also not clear whether the category of uncertainty means simply possibility or epistemic possibility. And it leaves the imagination bereft of conceptual fancy — possible worlds like ours, but different.

That’s not to say that there aren’t problems with conceptual possibilities — Nelson Goodman and David Lewis troubled at length about how such worlds can be consistently imagined. Bivalent modality in possibly worlds has a gross failure in that all necessary truths seem to have the same possible world meaning — true in all possible worlds. Possible worlds are too coarse-grained to distinguish those truths. (But leveling all necessary truths is not as bad as leveling all necessary truths and mere truths together.)

Looking at Kratzer’s lumping problem, or the ill fit of the material conditional with natural language, I get the impression that logic is in its infancy. Beginning with Frege there has been rapid innovation in logic. Unlike technology, which responds with increasing rapidity to a fiercely competitive market, logic hasn’t found its market value, so its progress will seem slow in comparison — unless someone can discover a logical structure that solves AI challenges better than the Aristotelean models.

possible or not

Is it possible to swim the Atlantic?
An ex neighbor points out that if “possibly” doesn’t imply also “possibly not” then how is “possibly” different from necessity? Doesn’t “Life on Mars is possible” mean “It’s also possible that there’s no life on Mars”? And doesn’t it also mean “Life on Mars isn’t necessary”?
Grice gave an answer to this question, and I’ve written about it elsewhere in this blog, but I think there’s more to be said and I want to try to sort all of them out.
Suppose Goldbach’s postulate is possibly true. Suppose someone proves it. Now it’s necessarily true. Is it no longer possibly true?
My neighbor says no. I think Lukasciewicz agreed with him.

Sam Harris and the middle class virtue

Sam Harris has been pushing human well-being as a universal goal of morality, without seeing the glaring weaknesses of that assumption. First, he’d have to bite the bullet that human ignorance and illusion might serve our happiness and well-being better than knowledge and understanding.

dismal complaint

Naked Capitalism posts an interview The New Priesthood, with Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist who currently heads the Department of Economic Policy at the University of Athens, in which he criticises economics as self-reflexive and unfalsifiable because economists won’t commit to factual prediction of the economic weather.

Whatever troubles the field, his criticism can’t be it.

Aymara, trivalence, competing satisfaction and modality

In his monograph on the trivalent logic of Aymara, Ivan Guzman de Rojas sets out to show that a trivalent logic can reach conclusions unavailable to bivalent logic. I want to tease out the import and accuracy of this extraordinary claim, and try to understand its significance for modal logic.

Consider two circumstances: p) there’s smoke; q) there’s fire.

language and logic, English and Aymara

Following up on the last post –

If English were incapable of expressing ternary logic, then Aymara could not be described in English. It does not seem too contentious, then, to conclude that any natural language, like English, Spanish (Rojas’ original) or Aymara, can express any known logic. The means will no doubt differ: analytic languages would express notions of uncertainty with word-morphemes (like “might”); agglutinative and inflectional languages should express them with affixal morphemes.

The notions seem to drive the languages, not the other way around.

Aymara

I see that Wikipedia’s article on ternary logic references Aymara “a Bolivian language famous for using ternary rather than binary logic.” Aside from the vaunted adjective “famous,” I am skeptical of the claim that Aymara uses a ternary logic rather than binary, skeptical also of the presupposition that natural languages use a particular logic rather than another logic, and skeptical as well of the implicature that other languages use only binary logic, infamously or otherwise.

Much of the excitement over Aymara derives from a monograph written  in the 1980′s by an engineer and machine translation pioneer, Ivan Guzman de Rojas, who observed that Aymara indicated in its inflections the degree of certitude of its respective assertions. He takes these as logical operators, just as “not” can be taken in English as a negation operator: in English, “not” takes a true statement into a false one, and a false one into a true one. E.g.,

snow is white =>True;  snow is not white =>False

snow is green =>False; snow is not green =>True

Aymara, however, also uses an inflection that takes a true statement into a neither-true-nor-false statement. This shows, he claims, that Aymara uses a third truth value, neither-true-nor-false, which is used for uncertainty.

He says, further, that the ternary logic allows the Aymara people to derive logical conclusions that are not available in binary logic, and that the Aymara people think differently from people who are limited to binary logic.

It may already have occurred to the reader that English does have exactly such an operator, “might”:

snow will fall;  snow will not fall; snow might fall

that is, “might” takes an assertion or its negation into an uncertainty.

Does this mean that English has a third truth value? Well, yes and no.

fun with Gödel

There’s an easy answer to this question, but if you replace c) 60% with 0%, then you get a liar paradox, a Gödel-type statement — it has no numerical answer and can only be evaluated outside its terms.

http://flowingdata.com/2011/10/28/best-statistics-question-ever/

Gödel, btw, once proved Anselm’s ontological argument, the argument that proves god exists. His version, so far as I can tell, removes all modality in Anselm’s argument, and I think that’s why it works. It’s a complicated version, but I think that even extremely simple, non modal versions work too, e.g., if “god” by definition is that which nothing is greater, then whatever is greatest is that thing. This version works for any model in which there is at least one object. So if nothing exists, then it doesn’t prove anything, but since something patently exists, we can safely assume that there is a greatest thing.