Well- In response to your question about is there anything we have learned in this class that would help us make an informed decision in this upcoming election.  (Not inlcuding years of graduate economics).  Well, it may be easier to answer what not to do.  Do not look for a set of ideals we affirm and use our educational resources to self-rationalize the validity of such an action.  Do not look to commercial media outlets for information.  (Maybe mpr is okay).  Do take into account the bias that may be a part of your news sources.  Do refer to the criteria of adequacy whenever someone makes a claim.  Do remember that the best offense is a good defense- when avoiding bad information.  Do take into consideration what paradigm we are a part of and account for our economic normal science accordingly.  (Beware of those who do not suppport this current best way of describing our state of economics.)  Help anyone....

Objective knowledge is hard to sit with. It is based on so many aspects of the definitions. I have come to believe from this class that knowledge is just the bases of what your mind undoubtfully can believe to be true. Yet for the knowlege to be objective it has to carry no history or be independent of experience. So how can we say any knowlege is actually objective and not subjective? I also beleive that we can learn about or gain a knowledge about a culture/society with out actually living the experience as long as you consider their views with a non bias approach, which would be objectively looking into the topic.

For you to objectively look at a topic you literally have to conciously tune out your own beliefs form what I have come to believe. Because our brains are automatically wired to go toward what we know.

Wow...This class has been great! Not really what I thought it would be based on but I have learned alot and am very happy to have been apart of this class.

From Peter Druckers classic management book, The Effective Executive, 2006:

"..the effective decision does not, as so many texts on decision-making proclaim, flow from a consensus on the facts.  The understanding that underlies the right decision grows out of the clash and conflict of divergent opinions and out of the serious consideration of competing alternatives."  (p. 143)

If you shelter yourself among others who agree with you, is it therefore likely that your worldviews, perspectives, thoughts, and decisions will become more restricted and less informed?  

There's an election coming up.  We'll have to choose a new governor for the state of Minnesota, and we'll have to vote for state and federal legislators.  Let's suppose that we want to vote for the candidates who will do the most to improve the economy -- to create conditions which will get the unemployment rate down and produce good-paying jobs for everyone who wants to work.  There are other issues to worry about, but let's just stick to that one, and see if we can figure out who we should vote for, if that's our primary issue.

The Republicans are telling us that they will create jobs by cutting (or at least not raising) taxes and by getting rid of regulations that are needlessly hindering businesses.  Part of their message is that government cannot create jobs (because the dollars it spends to create those jobs are either taxed or borrowed out of the private economy, so more government funded jobs just means fewer privately funded jobs) and that the economy suffers mainly from excessive taxes and regulations. (In other words they are advocating "supply side economics".)  Here in Minnesota they want to balance the state budget (which is several billion dollars in the red) purely by cutting spending.  At the Federal level they want to extend the Bush administration's tax cuts and cut (unspecified) spending.

The Democrats are telling us that we need to use government money to put people to work improving our infrastructure, educating our children, and investing in energy efficiency and in alternative energy technology (so-called 'green jobs'). [details]  Part of their message is that the economy is suffering mainly from insufficient demand.  (Businesses aren't hiring because they don't think they will have customers if they expand production.) So we need more government stimulus to get things going in the right direction again.  (They are advocating Keynesian economics.)  They want to balance the state's budget largely by raising taxes on the rich.  At the Federal level they want to let Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy expire, keep the cuts for the middle class, and borrow more  money in the short run.  They would try to get the Federal budget back into balance only after the economy revives.

So we have starkly contrasting diagnoses and starkly contrasting prescriptions for our economic woes.  Do we have the tools to figure out who's got the right medicine and who's selling snake oil?  Is there a truth here to be discovered?  Can we discover it (without spending years in graduate school studying economics)?  Can anything we've learned in this course help us?

Does anybody know why the fonts keep changing in my longer entries?  When I look at the HTML there are no tags that would be accounting for it, but I can't seem to put together a long entry (where I'm cutting and pasting from various places) without ending up with different fonts coming in more or less at random

I've been thinking about how to wrap things up as the end of the semester draws near..  First, in this post, I want to say a bit about how the press let the American public down during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.  Then, in another post I want to raise a question about how we should make up our minds who to vote for in the election coming up in November.

Part of the story we like to tell ourselves about the way our democracy works is that the press is supposed to function as a 'watchdog' and to provide a critical counterweight to the government. But it seems to me that the media did not provide much resistance to the Bush Administration's effort to 'sell' the war in Iraq to the American public. The case for war was made to the American people and to the world with a lot of very scary claims about the 'gathering danger' of Iraq -- including the possibility that Saddam Hussein would give a nuclear weapon to terrorists who would use it to blow up an American city. As we have subsequently learned, the evidence for most of their claims was much shakier than they led us to believe. And for the most part the US media simply relayed these claims to the American people, without much analysis and certainly without giving anywhere near the same kind of prominence to the views of people (many of whom had excellent credentials) who had a different view of the nature of the Iraqi threat and what would be the best way to deal with it.

The fact that, as David Kay put it, "We were all wrong" about Iraq's possession of chemical, biological, and (especially) nuclear weapons and the fact that the war in Iraq has been much more difficult and costly than the Bush administration predicted has led some in the media to re-examine the way they did their jobs in the period before the war.   The New York Times apologized to its readers here.    But the Washington Post had a more interesting account of how they got it wrong:

An examination of the paper's coverage, and interviews with more than a dozen of the editors and reporters involved, shows that The Post published a number of pieces challenging the White House, but rarely on the front page. Some reporters who were lobbying for greater prominence for stories that questioned the administration's evidence complained to senior editors who, in the view of those reporters, were unenthusiastic about such pieces. The result was coverage that, despite flashes of groundbreaking reporting, in hindsight looks strikingly one-sided at times.

"The paper was not front-paging stuff," said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. "Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?" ...

As reporter Karen DeYoung put it: "We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power. If the president stands up and says something, we report what the president said." And if contrary arguments are put "in the eighth paragraph, where they're not on the front page, a lot of people don't read that far."

The Post helps us to understand one of the most problematic features of the American media system: the way it functions all too often as a mouthpiece for the US government by giving statements from high government officials automatic credibility and (usually) front page display, while giving critical and dissenting voices much more skeptical treatment and less prominent placement. But I don't think it's just the current administration that gets this kind of treatment -- it's the political establishment more generally.  If there had been prominent Democrats vigorously dissenting from the Bush Administrations claims, I think the press would have given them prominent coverage.  (A big part of the failure of the press and the political system to challenge the Bush administration's erroneous assumptions about Iraq had to do with the fact that the Democrats chickened out, intimidated by the fear of being labeled unpatriotic.)  And now, certainly Republican critics of the Bush administration get plenty of air time and newspaper space. 

This leads to the problem discussed by Neil Levy in one of the readings for Assignment #7:  that 'balanced' coverage can be just as misleading as 'one-sided' coverage.  That's because 'balance' is often amounts to a lazy reporting of what various people say, with little or no effort to figure out who is telling the truth.  Levy argues that this has seriously undermined the public's understanding of the global warming issue.  The "He said, she said" model of balance gives global warming skeptics a level of prominence in the media that is out of proportion to the scientific credibility of their point of view.

If the media are going to serve us well, it seems they are going to have to try to tell us not just what the administration in power want us to hear, and not just what the party out of power says in 'rebuttal'.  They are going to have to try to discover the truth.  In my ideal world, that would be one of the main functions of journalism: to identify and consult people with real expertise and to pass their expert opinions on to those of us who don't have time to find out for ourselves. Sometimes this happens. But it takes time and effort to develop enough knowledge of an issue to figure out who the real experts are. Lazy or ignorant reporters can end up passing off shills as experts and thereby leave us confused or misled.

Is there any chance they will be up to the job?  (Will their bosses let them do that job?)

I've been thinking about this paradigm-shifting stuff.  And what I really know or don’t know, and why, and how it has all changed over time.  Have I gone through any paradigm shifts?  I don't recall any specific monumental "aha" moments, but things have changed.  As a kid, I was very idealistic, and very naïve.  I believed that almost everyone was good and had enormous potential, that "right" should and would triumph, and I believed in absolute truths.  There was a certain way things should be done and that most people saw it the same way that I did.  Now, I view the world a mass of widely differing opinions and I define "truth" and "knowledge" as the specific principles or ideas I've made a personal commitment to, rather than universal constructs.  I am still naively optimistic.  I am wondering if anyone else has noticed any major changes?  Of if you have your own definition of truth, or reason(s) for believing in your knowledge?  It would be nice to get final thoughts from people.  

Very good point Todd, I think that when people are asked what's really important to them, alot of their daily habits and activities probably wouldn't match up with that vision very well. For example, people might broadly say the most important thing in life for them is to make the world a better place, to be a good Christian/Muslim/Jew, to be a responsible and thoughtful citizen, etc. But if we carefully look at what we do during each day is much of it lining up with whatever core values we may hold? Or are most people just hypocrites?

Yesterday, I posted a response to Gwen's post on her understanding of Fay's readings. Unfortunately, I had been having a difficult time understanding Fay's interpretation of Relativism and Multiculturalism. My belief is that my mis-understanding of Fay stemmed from my preference for Kuhn's SSR and my apparent ease of understanding his views. However, I decided to use Descartes method of demolishing everything completely (especially my views) and start again at the very beginning of Fay's Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science to fully understand what Fay is Actually stating. Well, I am almost done with the book with a whole new perspective on the philosophy of social science. From my understanding of the book, Fay provides the readers with a view of social science, one that seeks to learn and understand the differences of people. I feel he provides a REAL way of understanding and accepting our cultural differences while appreciating belief systems unlike ours. My A-Ha moment happened near the end with Fay's description of the dynamic character of social science and the synergistic character of genuine multicultural interaction, "Engage, question, and learn" rather than simply, "Recognize, appreciate and celebrate difference." (p. 241)

Paul makes an interesting, or perhaps painful, observation about the disparities between what we think is important to us and what actually consumes our days.  I think this is true for many (most?) people.  Is this an epistemological wake-up call?  Does it mean we really do not think these things are important?  When I consult for various businesses and leaders tell me what is important to them or what their priorities are, I simply respond, "Show me your budget.  Then I will tell you what your priorities are."  There is something refreshingly revealing about how we spend our time and money.  In fact, a good budget analysis (of time or money) can serve as a call to action!  Perhaps, we just got caught up in things.  Maybe we should make an adjustment and do one thing next week (lol.) that will involve something important. 

It is so much easier reading and understanding Fays material (over Kuhns) but he does evaluate claims that hold similar paths. I do appreciate how he always seems to pick the good out of the theory. I believe he does a really good job on stating his belief but also not being bias to others views as well.

I have shared lots of his viewed throughout my life.

 

I am sorry for I have not been very active in the posting on the blog for this class. All of the post are so well constructed and full of informative information so I comment on some but just read and learn from most. Your post are full of so much informative information!!

Fay seems to do a great job of being open-minded, careful not to get trapped in black and whites. He seems to reject true Nomologicalism and Historicism with the basic assumption that they are just to direct and leave no flexibility or shades of grey. I feel he does a great job with criticizing and analyzing all concepts of an issue, i wonder if this is common or he faces scrutiny for being on the fence with issues...something i believe is not a bad thing especially when we discuss a topic as dynamic as relativism.

People act on what is important to them… as they see it.  What’s important to you?  Can you list the top five most important things you believe in?  Go ahead, do it!                On this list be very general as in ‘Making an income’ and ‘Marital Bliss’ (they may seem the same, they’re not, just very closely related, however) or ‘Having Quality Family Time’ or ‘Concerns with global climate change’ or ‘The Progressive Movement within Politics’.                MY IMPORTANCE LIST:  1-Ensuring a source of income. 2-Marital Bliss. 3-Having Quality Family Time. 4-Continuing my education toward a degree. 5-Concerns with Global Climate Change.  Dang nabit! I can’t include the progressive movement within politics, however it is important to me… or is it?                 Now list the top ten things you do.  These should be the specifics.  Leave out preparing your food, sleeping, and your toiletry habits.  List the impact stuff on your life… the stuff that takes time and energy.                 MY DO LIST: 1-Getting through two classes for summer school.  2-Keeping current with unemployment and dislocated worker program.  3-Planning a short vacation for the time between summer and fall semesters. 4-Enjoying the company of my wife, when we can (bicycle rides and walks) 5-Watching a DVD (down time with netflicks), we don’t watch TV (except PBS every so often).  6-Spending time with our adult children and our grandkids.  7-Get-togethers with close friends, BBQ’s and rendezvous’ at the pub 8-Taking my chronically ill mother to regular doctor visits. 9-Doing household stuff: budget & bills and upkeep of our older home (yard work & house repair).  10-Try to keep current with news (online and radio).               I guess what I am trying to show is that I am doing the stuff of life that is closest to my existence.  While I care about climate change and politics I do nothing about it.  Oh yeah, I vote.  However, I don’t get involved in grass roots politics (this is where the beginning of change starts).                 I believe, for the most part, I am an average American.  Do I act on what I believe?  What I act on, the stuff I spend most of my time with, is centered within the proximity of my closest self-interests.  The far reaching interests don’t even come into my top ten list.   I just don’t have time for them!  Would any more education change this?

After reading Tom's 7-14 post, I was stunned by the study that stated by watching different news sources your actually knowledge will vary.  Most interesting, the more you watch particular sources, the more your actual knowledge degrades.  Specifically, the more you watch FOX, the dumber you get.  Wow, I previoulsy expected different news sources to have a slant to their reporting.  But, I also thought that if you were dilligent enough, you could decipher the facts from the frill.  This has given me more to think about in choosing where we would want to get our information. 

All this political chat… I have understood that 20-25% of people are dyed in the wool conservative and another 20-25% is dyed in the wool liberal.  You ain’t gunna change em.  That leaves 50 -60% who fall somewhere in the middle… and yes you are right that has been the battleground for political power.           I believe the question comes down to does this group of ‘moderates’ act on what they know?  Are they swayed by mass appeal?  Are they duped by deceptive media games?  Do they act on habit?        Sad thing about it is too much information gives paralysis due to info overload and too little… well there have been plenty of people acting from the deficit mode for some time now.           Are we asking ourselves what can be done about this?  Is it simply education?   

I was just curious what other people thought about the questions we had to answer on our last assignment about Kuhn's view of science. If science doesn't gradually bring us closer to an objective view of reality, or to Truth with a capital T, then what is its point? Why should kids want to become scientists when they grow up? Why should the government fund research? All these serious questions come up if we accept Kuhn's unique view of science.

Very interesting thoughts Todd, I probably would have guessed that it wouldn't even be possible to govern or do anything at all with a governing style like Lincoln's! But perhaps I just think that way because I've been brought up in this heavily "partisian" world, where it often appears that reconciliation between liberals and conservatives is impossible. It probably is true that it would be better to keep people who differ from you in your cabinet, even if only to get more points of view on issues. And maybe you're correct that partisianship is even worse than relativism and could be compared to a disease. You could probably make a good case for it. It divides people, usually into 2 or 3 warring camps, that routinely demonize each other at the other's expense. This in turn creates an "us versus them" mentality (false dichotomy?) in which the only way to "win" or to do good is to defeat the other party. This in turn takes the main focus of politics off of demanding social issues that need our attention to petty squabbling between parties.

Actually Jerry, I think it's a pretty large group of people in the US who consider themselves "moderates" or people who don't just vote according to party lines on all elections. It seems like there are decent sized groups of people we can very generally call "liberals" or "conservatives" too, but in most elections it seems that these smaller groups spend most of their time courting the larger "moderate" group.

In all are readings and discussions I am left with a few thoughts.

People believe different things and are unlikely to change those views even when presented with conflicting data. In the political realm, there seems to be about equal amounts of people who consistently are liberal or conservative with a smaller group changing its vote every election. How else would we continually flip between a republican and democratic president. So who is really running this country? My thought is that it is that small group. But who are they? Are we to assume they are Rational? Do they carefully monitor various news sources to gather enough data to make a sound rational decision? Or are there decisions based on other reasons?

At age 47 I am still relatively new to the area of political behavior. Did not give it much attention for many years. So my voting decisions were most likely not based on rational ideas, but more based on how the economy was (or how I thought it was). I wonder what affect, in any, does the battle between liberal and conservative media really have on voter behavior.

If the Democrats lose in the upcoming midterm elections, does that mean we want Republican control again? How can we change our minds so quickly? Or is this just some pattern that has been going on for many years.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/conflicting-signs-for-midterm-elections/

President Lincoln had a ridiculous assortment of personal tragedies in his life and many thought he had significant psychological demons: depression, introversion, etc.  It is a wonder he could govern.  But, one thing he mastered that no politician even attempts (to the same degree) today is that he incorporated his rivals in his government.  And not just in ceremonial positions - in his inner circle, his cabinet.  There is a great book, Team of Rivals by Doris Goodwin, that details how Lincoln assembled people whose world views conflicted heavily with his and with his other appointments.  (The tome is nearly 800 pp plus another 200 pp of footnotes and index, so not a quick read!)  It was his deliberate and calculated abandonment of partisan comforts that allowed him to see, understand and thoughtfully weigh options in a time of significant turmoil.  He rejected the comforts of agreement and agreeable people in favor of better solutions.  I believe partisanship is one of the great mental and ethical diseases of our time.  Is it even worse than relativism? 

The study that Prof A posted (July 14) is startling, but I guess not all that surprising.  My experience is, for the most part, the people who listen to any message are the people already in the choir.  I am blessed with both conservative and liberal friends.  It is easy to talk with either about topics or reports that support their ensconced beliefs.  If I present either group with evidence that the "other side" is making a good point, they attack the evidence without really considering it.  I will note that on things that I would consider "facts" (like the 3 Iraq war misperceptions in Prof A's July 14 posting), my conservative friends dispute "facts" more than my liberal ones.  But they both "spin" the report with equal vigor.  I don't like this about either group.

Hi All, sorry to be MIA.  I was away taking a course in Virginia, where they had the temerity to make us work late into the evening every day.  I have been reading the blog, but found no time to post.

 

On the question of "citizens epistemology", I admit my own internal conflicts.  I believe it is important to have well-justified beliefs and some level of commitment to them.  At the same time, I believe it is crucial to possess an open, inquisitive mind.  Every belief is subject to review when evidence comes along to give reason for that review.  The difficulty is to "see"  the evidence in a sufficiently unfiltered way so I notice it is actually challenging my world view and I need to reconcile something.  All along, I think we can develop principles of thinking, of behavior, of ethics, and so on that we might keep throughout.  Although, even these might require constant adjustment and sharpening.  Reconciling is work and perhaps my subconscious chooses the path of least resistance.  I know sometimes it is easier to just agree rather than take issue with someone.

As anyone would have guessed, it appears that propaganda has reared its ugly head yet again. The decision of Andrew Breitbart, a conservative website blogger, to post a video clip of a speech given by Shirley Sherrod, a Dept. of Agriculture employee who is African-American, to the Local Georgia Chapter of the NAACP depicting her as a racist who did not give her all to a white farmer facing foreclosure. The video clip, which inevitably aired on several media outlets, was misleading, incomplete, and fabricated. Unfortunately, the video clip was deliberately taken out of context creating a mass media fact twisting hailstorm. I'm appalled (along with countless other Americans) that the video was not watched in its entirety before being tossed out to the media vultures. Moreover, Sherrod was asked to resign her position with the Dept., publicly humiliated and was condemned by the N.A.A.C.P. for a politically correct speech held in front of one of their local chapters. Now that the frenzy is in full swing, the original video in its entirety has been aired and apologies to Sherrod are flooding in by the truckload. When will these media outlets research the facts of a story before spreading misleading information? What will it take for the public majority to stand up against and denounce political media opportunists?

Here's a post I wrote a few years ago that may or may not be helpful in answering Ann's most recent question:

Kuhn thought that the main value of his work was that it showed the importance of paradigms (and of revolutionary changes in paradigms) in science. He considered it fairly unremarkable that paradigms shaped peoples' perceptions in other areas of human thought and action (like art and politics). But, as he points out in the last few pages of the Postscript, other people have been excited by the idea that paradigms play an important role in our lives. (There is a good example of this way of thinking about paradigms at http://www.ee.scu.edu/eefac/healy/kuhn.html

I think it's worth considering this idea in connection with 'citizens' epistemology'. As a beginning, here are two simple points: First, people are influenced by their training, education, and experience (peer groups, role models, culture, etc, etc.) and, as a result, they come to see the world in particular ways. (These can be fairly specific -- people's ideas about marriage or war, for example -- or they can be more global -- the sorts of outlook we characterize as liberal or conservative, for example.) Second, these 'outlooks' or 'paradigms' or 'conceptual frameworks' (or whatever you want to call them) structure people's perceptions of the social world, so that people who confront (in some sense) the same information come to very different conclusions. (Of course, if we take Kuhn seriously, we will want to put that second point differently: since paradigms shape perception, it isn't really the same information.)

Some examples:

First, from the realm of 'expert' knowledge, an article, on the op-ed page of the 3/27/2004 New York Times, suggests that the Bush administration didn't see 9/11 coming because its key players were adherents of an outdated (or was it always wrong?) paradigm. According to that paradigm, terrorists can only do serious damage when they are sponsored by states, so Al Qaeda could not be seen as a serious threat, except insofar as it might be supported by a 'rogue state' like Iraq. Like one of Kuhn's anomalous cards, the threat from Al Qaeda didn't fit their expectations and couldn't be seen for what it was. If you want to read the whole article it's here. (The term 'paradigm' is used explicitly three times in the article. I've put those sentences in bold type.)

As I taught a classroom version of this class during spring semester of 2004, we discussed 'citizen's epistemology' in connection with some of the events that were unfolding then: the hearings held by the 9/11 commission (especially the dramatic testimony of Richard Clarke and Condoleeza Rice) and the developments in Iraq. I was struck then, as I am still, by the extent to which people perceived these events in ways that supported their preconceptions. Critics of the Bush administration found Clarke (who had been a leading counter-terrorism official under both Clinton and Bush) to be a very credible person who made cogent criticisms of the administration's policies and competence. Administration supporters saw him as a disgruntled former employee trying to get back at his old boss and sell his book. Bush's critics saw Rice's testimony as evasive, heavily scripted, and as "raising as many questions as it answered" (to use a stock phrase), whereas supporters of the President saw the same testimony as a masterful rebuttal of the administration's critics. When the administration finally released the August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing, the critics saw it's references to possible airplane hijackings and to terrorist cells in the US as pretty clear evidence that the Bush administration was "asleep at the wheel" prior to 9/11, whereas Bush supporters saw it as a summary of vague and outdated intelligence that required no actions beyond those already underway. Finally the developments in Iraq (most notably: an increase in anti-US violence and in US casualties, the takeover of several towns by Shiite militias loyal to Moqtada Sadr, unexpected resistance to the efforts of US marines to enter Falluja and apprehend the people who desecrated the bodies of four Americans on March 31, the inability and/or unwillingness of Iraqi police and military personnel to assist the US forces, and signs of growing cooperation between Sunni and Shiite factions) -- these developments were seen by some as a major setback for the US, and often as a sign that US efforts to create a decent regime in Iraq were now so far off-track as to be virtually doomed. Bush supporters, again, had a drastically different view: most of Iraq is at peace, most Iraqi's support the American efforts, the insurgents are a small group of 'thugs' or 'terrorists' who will soon be defeated, and the big picture still looks good. Differences of this kind led one observer, Juan Cole, who is a Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Michigan, to talk about "two-party epistemology."

[Update, 2010:  We might add to these examples the divergent opinions people have about the current situation in Iraq.  Conservatives/Republicans tend to think that the troop build up undertaken by President Bush in 2007 (the so-called 'surge') "worked"  and that the US will soon be able to pull out of Iraq and leave a fairly stable and friendly regime behind.  People on the left (like me) see a dysfunctional Iraqi political system still torn by irreconcilable differences that will probably erupt into a bloody crisis as soon as the US troops are gone and think that the most likely outcome of the whole episode (invasion and aftermath) is an expansion of Iranian influence in the region, not anything like a 'win' for the US. (Here's a nice overview by Thomas Ricks.)  Some conservatives agree with the critics on this issue, by the way, for example: Diana West.]

It is tempting to say about these political differences what Kuhn says about scientists who have different paradigms: that people with different political paradigms (or is it just different political allegiances?) are "living in different worlds." If you stay, as most of us do most of the time, in just one of those worlds, then your world seems like the only real world (any sensible person would see it your way), and the partisans on the other side seem almost crazy. Is there any hope of rational discussion between the inhabitants of these different worlds? Can we even imagine what it would be like to be on the other side of the divide? Is there any hope of figuring out which view is closer to the truth? (Or should we follow Kuhn in giving up on the idea that we can get "closer to the truth"?)

I think the simplest way to think about this connection is "what if Kuhn's notion of paradigms within scientific communities (which he claims make them live in a completely different world) were true about other things as well?"

In response to Jonathon and Ross, I actually seem to agree with Kuhn, for the most part. In regards to his paradigmatic shifts and how the world becomes entirely different and how you are no longer able to view the world in the same light as you once had, I found it helpful to relate it to human relationships. For example, if you met a new person and this person was kind and caring and always helpful when you needed a hand. Later, however, say you found out that this guy was only friends with you because he wanted to date your sister. Then, at least for me, all his actions must be viewed with this new information, which will then distort your perception of the actions on his part. His previous helpful behaviors now seem to hold an ulterior motive and you can no longer view him as just simply a kind and nice guy. Not to say that he isn't, but rather, he's not just being kind and nice to you for the sake of being kind and nice to you. I'm not sure if this does justice to what Kuhn seemed to be implying to me, and I am more than open to any criticism you guys may have and how I have gone about interpreting Kuhn's paradigmatic shifts.

Ann is asking some good questions. (Here and here.)  I've been reading assignment 4 papers today, so I know that some of you understand Kuhn well enough to take a stab at answering them.  How about it? 

Meanwhile, here is Dan Drezner (of Foreign Policy magazine and Tufts University) on how to tell which research papers are worth heeding:

In response to Jonathan, I agree with you that Kuhn's special concept of a paradigm seems to be a very slippery one at least; and a possibly self-contradictory one at its worst. My problem with this concept seems to be very similar to yours. He says that when a paradigm shift happens, the scientists are all of a sudden living in a different world, at least in some sense. But this is where I think he wiffle-waffles and loses alot of people. In WHAT sense does he mean they live in a different world? Physically? Intellectually? He never really says or bothers to clarify this, which I think is one main reason many people fail to belive him.

As I read chapter 8 of Weird Things, I was struck by the connection made between the conceptual schemes and Kuhn. I spent a lot of time digesting Kuhn for the last assignment and the connection did not even remotely cross my mind when I read about conceptual schemes. Even after reading how Schick and Vaughn make the connection, I do not get it.  If anyone out there has a better understanding of this and pities me enough to try to explain, I would really appreciate it!

Very interesting to go through the battle between Kuhn and the authors of "How to think About Weird Things". I really did enjoy reading Kuhn and, for the most part, he made sense to me. However, reading Fay and Schick and Vaughn seemed to put my perspective in a new view. It became increasingly apparent to me that Kuhn's theory contradicts and undermines itself drastically. If the paradigm we were in determined everything that we did in fact observe, then it would be impossible to see anything else,which would make it impossible to even shift into a new paradigm. I think Kuhn's theory is too subjective here and does not succeed. Any comments?

... or so someone says in a comment on this post on Matthew Yglesias' blog  (another of my regular reads). 

The context for this remark is a discussion of the role of journalists in our current 'hyper-partisan' media environment.  The question being discussed is whether it is a worthwhile use of journalistic resources to try to rebut lies and misinformation put out by politicians, pundits and advocacy groups or whether it is better to just report what the various parties are saying and hope that your readers/watchers/listeners can figure out what's true.  Here's the full comment:

I guess I understand why someone might not want to spend all their time and energy swatting down lies, half-lies, and personal vested interests masquerading as principled convictions.

But that noble and important task is needed today more than ever because there is a crisis of epistemology in this country. It’s necessary to rely on the reporting of others to ever learn much of anything about any subject. Nobody has the time or energy to fact check everything they hear. But with the emergence of conservative columnists, Fox News, industry spokespeople and Astroturf organizers all dedicated to the mission of deliberately misleading their audiences, it’s becoming harder and harder to know what to believe.

The last three sentences of this comment provide a pithy statement of the problem of 'citizen's epistemology' as I see it.  We have to rely on other people for most of our information, but many of those people are not trustworthy.  And if you don't share the commenter's opinion that most of the distortion is coming from the conservative side of the political spectrum, then the problem gets harder.  (It gets harder because then you have to take seriously the possibility that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh might be right when they tell you to ignore the 'liberal mainstream media', which would otherwise seem to be a mostly reliable source of reasonably fair-minded reporting, and ignore the 'liberal college professors', who would otherwise seem to be a mostly reliable source of expert, science-based knowledge.)

Is Fox News "deliberately misleading" its audience?  It's hard (as I keep saying) to discern people's motives.  But here's something to think about:

In the summer of 2004 the cartoon strip "Doonesbury" spent a week hammering Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Network. My favorite strip is this one:

The study in question, I think, comes from The Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland.  The particular study I have in mind is "Misperceptions, The Media and The Iraq War". The study is summarized here. The full report is here. (PDF)

The focus of the study was to look at the number of Americans who had one or more of three "misperceptions". The misperceptions were identified as such by the people who conducted the study on the grounds that they were "demonstrably false, or were at odds with the dominant view in the intelligence community." These misperceptions were that:

- Evidence has been found of significant cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaeda
- Weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq
- World public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq

(You can read the study to find out how the authors came to the conclusion that these three beliefs were false.)  The study found that most Americans had at least one of these misperceptions (In fact, nearly 1/4 of the population believed that the Iraqis had actually used chemical or biological weapons against American soldiers during the war.) It also found, unsurprisingly, that people who had these beliefs were more likely think that the war had been justified and more likely to say that they intended to vote for President Bush in the next election. It also found that there was a strong correlation between people's primary source of news and the presence of one or more misperceptions, as follows:

 

	FOX	CBS	ABC	NBC	CNN	Print Sources	NPR/ PBS
None of the 3	20%	30%	39%	45%	45%	53%	77%
1 or more misperceptions	80%	71%	61%	55%	55%	47%	23%

 

The most interesting finding, from my point of view is the following: "While it would seem that misperceptions are derived from a failure to pay attention to the news, overall, those who pay greater attention to the news are no less likely to have misperceptions. Among those who primarily watch Fox, those who pay more attention are more likely to have misperceptions. Only those who mostly get their news from print media, and to some extent those who primarily watch CNN, have fewer misperceptions as they pay more attention."

Let me underline that point: If you get your news from television, watching more and paying more attention does not improve your knowledge. If you watch Fox it actually degrades your knowledge (by making you more likely to believe false things.

I agree with you Nick, I think our society definitely emphasizes having lots of technology and fancy gadgets over being informed and knowledgable about what science can tell us about the universe, which probably does contribute to the "all about me" attitude many Americans have. While this attitude certainly does drive growth and innovation in technological fields such as video games, phones, and the like, it probably doesn't drive too many people to become scientists or researchers in fields other than these either.

Taking a stab at Paul's questions:

I wouldn't say that principles of inquiry depend on actions.  I would say that actions often depend on beliefs -- in the sense that what we do depends on how we understand the circumstances in which we are acting, the values at stake, etc., etc.  Which is to say that beliefs typically have consequences for behavior.  (Does it even make sense to think that there could be a belief that made no difference whatsoever to how a person would act?  Maybe not.  But I don't think we need to answer that question.  It's enough to notice that beliefs generally do make a difference.)  Since our beliefs typically guide our actions, we can ask (as Clifford did) whether we are believing responsibly.  As the title of his essay implies, there can be an ethics of belief as well as an ethics of action.  When people jump to conclusions (base their beliefs on flimsy evidence or fallacious reasoning) or indulge in wishful thinking we can (and do) say that they have no right to believe as they do.  It sometimes follows that they have no right to do what their beliefs lead them to do -- but that's a separate question.
 
It seems to me that the main lesson we should learn from the material we have studied about cognitive biases is that it is a lot harder to be a responsible believer (to earn one's right to believe through honest inquiry) than you might think it is.  It is not enough, for example, to look for evidence for your beliefs.  You also need to take seriously the possibility that you are under the influence of confirmation bias and are noticing the the evidence that supports your belief while ignoring (or failing to seek out) the evidence that contradicts it.  And similarly you need to become aware of the other cognitive biases and take steps to avoid them. 

If we were some kind of ideally rational machines instead of human beings, then these efforts would be unnecessary.  But we are human beings, and we need principles of inquiry that work for us, not for robots or Vulcans. 

Cognitive biases afflict human inquiry in all areas, I think -- in science and in business as well as in politics  and the paranormal.  Scientists are no more immune to these tendencies than the rest of us.  This is part of what Kuhn is telling us.  The anomalous card experiment he discusses in Chapter VI is an early contribution to the study of cognitive bias.    The subjects in that experiment saw what they expected to see, and Kuhn insists that scientists do this too.  But in science there are practices that permit anomalies to be perceived (eventually) and new ways of thinking to emerge and become dominant.  Even if individual scientists stubbornly cling to their paradigms and even if whole scientific communities can suffer from a kind of 'group think', the effort to make scientific ideas precise and testable, the presence of rival groups with different ideas, and the replacement of older scientists by younger ones permits progress to be made.  But if Kuhn's account is anywhere near right, then even our best practices of inquiry are far from algorithmic -- they are not the sort of practices that permit questions to be answered by mechanical computations.  They involve interpretation and therefore the possibilty of multiple interpretations.  Good principles of inquiry have to be good for coping with these difficulties.  I think this means that they have to include a social dimension.  I am unlikely to figure things out all by myself. (Descartes' solitary meditations are not a good model for rigorous inquiry.) My ideas need to be tested against others' experiences and interpretations.  I need not only principles to guide my solitary reflections but also principles to guide me in my interactions with other inquirers.  (One of the things I like about Brian Fay's book is that he works out an approach of this kind.)  But this is tricky.  We need to acknowledge the existence of multiple interpretations without losing our ability to distinguish between better and worse interpretations.  Or perhaps I should say: I hope we can find a way to distinguish between better and worse interpretations.   Fallibilism, yes; relativism, no.

In response to the 'my kind of guy' heuristic Tom describes in his recent blog let me express sadness.  I do not think that this idea is new to us, perhaps newly thought about, but pervasive in our daily lives.  The imput that creates deciding factors in our decisions is highly suspect.  Voting is a decision that we may want to mark off more than likability for extending a candiate our support- but think about all the more common activities that we use this criteria in guiding our decisions.  More often our vote is represented by the dollar than the ballot box.  We spend our money most easily and often when we feel comfortable with the person attached to the transaction.  We make concessions in quality and cost at times for the personal comfort factor.  This is my thought on how this idea extends in to other areas of our lives. 

What is more important in our world today?  Does the answer to this question in one way (say technology for example) have a detrimental effect on the other (science)? 

I think technology is viewed by a large majority of people as the driving force of the "advanced world" of 2010.  The age of corporate industries has produced new lines of products every few months for people to desire to make the old ones obsolete (e.g. computers, cell phones), and our media (so much of which is dominated by advertisements) create the sensation for chasing these items with more and more fervor as technology presents them new modes and outlets to inundate us with (e.g. Twitter, Facebook/YouTube advertisements). 

Also, I see a link between this “rivalry” between technology and science and the differentiation between anecdotal evidence and scientific evidence we previously read.  I think technology creates a here-and-now, “me-first” impression on people to sway them to think that technology innovation rather than scientific investigation is the more pressing need.  Similarly, those who find anecdotal evidence more appealing than scientific evidence ignore the subjective and unreliable limitations of our personal experience to focus on an individual aspect of understanding rather than the more universal, “big picture” mentality offered by objective, scientific evidence.   

 

I have been pondering the threads on education and most informed/most biased for a couple of days now                 So, in an individual’s continued learning and the quest to knowing more, that is learning more facts, having more breadth, and the means to use it, would gives us a better chance to be critical thinkers (by way of having more to draw from to question and understand any argument), could it also be seen as also providing more tools to firmly argue your own set beliefs?  Certainly how someone uses their knowledge is an important aspect of this discussion.  Does this come down to the question of personal motives?  Or is it a question of personal disposition?  That is some people have a disposition toward openness while others draw close their circle, possibly because of fear.  What motivates us to act on anything we ‘know’ or wish to believe?  As Tom pointed out it is very difficult to know the motives of other people.   Does our own self interest weigh its heavy hand to influence from what facts, breadth, and means we will employ to state and act out for our own best interest?  I believe that once we start to talk about how people act on their beliefs (based on knowledge, faith, or otherwise) we are getting into the realm of ethics and morality.  Tom, is this true, is morality the actions we take based on what we believe?                      Now if that is true, what is the relationship of bias to morality?  Tom, this is where I am starting to find confusion.   I get the idea of ‘bias’ having an influence on how we perceive things, from the way this blog thread has proceeded I get the impression that we are talking personal/political agendas and doesn’t this start to move toward ethics and morality… that we are acting on our beliefs?  I thought, in this class, what we were studying is the principles of inquiry: ways we know.  I didn’t realize that we were studying the psychology of why and how people act with what they ‘know’.                 In the readings for asg #5, Fay lays out a very reasonable argument as to why there are so many ways to see the same event.  That is, the facts (low-level theoretical entities) are dependent on conceptual schemes that organize our factual descriptions… perspectivism.   I believe, that this is saying that while we all have a similar framework to see reality, our descriptions of reality are dependent on perspective and reality is never directly seen as it is.   So now I get why there are a multitude of ways that people see reality and thereby construct their own reality.           This blog thread has also led me to ask: does everyone have to think alike?   The quick response, of course is: no, of course not, but I find that all of our discussions in life are about convincing others to see reality the way each one of us do individually.  Actually, I have come to find it quite interesting (and frustrating) that people think so differently.   The very fact that people do think so differently is a benefit to all of us, it does give us a chance to see something from another viewpoint.                    Tom, how closely do the principles of inquiry (what we are studying) depend on actions and moral consequences?  Could you elaborate on this question?  Thanks!   

After reading Kuhn chapters 2 & 3, I have questions and I am hoping someone can shed some light. In chapter 3, he says there are 3 problems for factual scientific investigation having to do with determining which facts matter, matching facts with theory, and the articulation of the theory. He says these are problems for both the experimental and theoretical aspects of science. When he says these are 'problems' for normal science, is he saying these are challenges of normal science? I am not exactly clear what he means when he says that these 3 problems 'exhaust the literature of science' either. Is it just that there is much to be found within the literature of science dealing with these problems? On a more basic note, can anyone talk about the definition and uses of paradigm?

One aspect of political belief could be related to physiology, at least according to this article http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=112246 on the National Science Foundataion website.

Andrew Sullivan's blog (one of several I try to skim daily) steers me to a couple of items of interest:

1. Here Sullivan ponders the firing of various media personnel, most recently Octavia Nasr, CNN's Middle East editor -- fired for an impolitic Tweet (http://www.businessinsider.com/the-real-issue-2010-7).  Is he right to see a pattern of enforcement of ideological conformity?

2. Here he notes some recent discussion of the difficulties of deciding which experts and which studies we should pay attention to when we try to figure out what's going on in the world. He refers to these posts:

Ezra Klein of The Washington Post says, "Fairly few political commentators know enough to decide which research papers are methodologically convincing and which aren’t. So we often end up touting the papers that sound right, and the papers that sound right are, unsurprisingly, the ones that accord most closely with our view of the world."

In "Confirmation Bias in Policy Debate" Will Wilkinson of the libertarian Cato Institute agrees that it is difficult:  "This is one of the reasons I tend not to blog as much I’d like about a lot of debates in economic policy. I just don’t know who to trust, and I don’t trust myself enough to not just tout work that confirms my biases."

And this leads me to cast my eye over Wilkinson's blog and find:

3.  "Ignorance and Ideology" , a rumination on the ignorance of the masses and the dogmatism of the relatively well-informed, which might make one think that democracies are doomed to bad policies and disastrous decisions.  Here is a quote relevant to our previous discussion: 

[Phillip] Converse’s most disturbing and under-remarked finding is that the relatively well informed compensate in dogmatism for their greater knowledgeability. …

The selective (constrained) ideological perception and retention displayed by the well informed would seem to confront us with a Hobson’s choice. We can either be ruled by a mass of ignoramuses or – to the extent that the ignorant public takes its cues from relatively knowledgeable elites, or is simply ignorant of the policies that elites enact – we can be ruled by a coterie of the doctrinaire.

Following the link to the source for this quote I find:

4.  "Popper, Weber, and Hayek: The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance ” (PDF), by Jeffrey Friedman. This is a long scholarly paper, and I have not had time to read it all yet.  But it looks to have a lot of illumination to offer on our subject of 'citizen's epistemology'. 

Noting that political scientists have long known that most people are shockingly ignorant of basic political facts, Freidman says:

one of the “research traditions” in political science—the tradition of public-opinion research—has accumulated an ocean of findings about political ignorance that are potentially lethal to the pro-democracy normative consensus in political science, in economics, and in our culture at large. As John Ferejohn (1990, 3) has put it, “nothing strikes the student of public opinion and democracy more forcefully than the paucity of information most people possess about politics.” Indeed, public-opinion researchers sometimes seem to compete with each other to come up with the best adjective to describe the breadth and depth of public ignorance: is it “jaw-dropping” (Luskin 2002, 4)? Or merely “astonishing” (Converse 1975, 79)? In one instance, two out of three Americans failed to recognize the Bill of Rights when it was read to them (Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991, 15). At any given time, about one in four don’t know who the vice president of the United States is (Luskin 2002, 6). Two in five were found to believe that Israel is an Arab nation (ibid.). Meanwhile, “the most commonly known fact about George [H. W.] Bush’s opinions while he was president was that he hated broccoli. During the 1992 presidential campaign ... 86 percent of the public knew that the Bushes’ dog was named Millie, yet only 15 percent knew that both presidential candidates supported the death penalty” (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996, 101).

Whether the topic is the absence of weapons of WMD in Iraq; who is on the Supreme Court; which side Russia led during the Cold War (Page and Shapiro 1992, 10-11); or the meaning of such elementary concepts in political discourse as liberalism and conservatism (Converse 1964), the public’s political ignorance is so immense that one cannot help wondering how effective democratic politics can be at achieving good ends, and at avoiding the inadvertent achievement of bad ones.

Friedman describes a couple of theories that are supposed to reconcile us to these facts.  One is the theory that voters' ignorance is "rational ignorance."  People recognize (correctly) that it is very unlikely that their vote will be the deciding vote in an election, and they decide (rationally) that time and energy invested in becoming well-informed voters is time and energy that is wasted.  They rationally decide to tune out and leave politics to others.  They may tune in again if things get bad in a way that drastically impacts their own lives, but otherwise, they'll stay tuned out.  Friedman argues that this is not a satisfactory theory:  lots of these badly informed people do vote, do care about politics and elections, and do have strong opinions about political affairs. But their opinions have been formed in the absence of even the most basic knowledge of the facts.

Another comforting theory says that voters may be ignorant of basic political facts, but they are able to make reasonably good decisions about who to vote for by deploying 'heuristics' -- mental shortcuts that steer them towards one candidate or another.  One such heuristic is what Converse called "the nature-of-the-times" heuristic.  If I look around and things seem to be going well, I vote for the incumbents.  If things seem to be going badly, I vote to throw the bums out.  The problem with this rule, is that the current office-holders may have little responsibility for the whatever is producing 'good times' or 'bad times'.  Right now, for example, most observers expect the Democrats to lose a large number of seats in Congress next fall, because many voters will look around, see high unemployment and slow economic growth, and vote against the mainly Democratic incumbents.  But it is at least possible (some would say probable) that these economic conditions are mainly the fault of the policies of the previous administration and have been made worse by the refusal of Congressional Republicans to go along with the Democrats' efforts to address the problems. (For example, it is clear that, if the Democrats had not been prevented by Republican filibusters in the Senate from bringing their preferred bills to a vote, the government would have done much more to stimulate the economy last year, and would be doing more now -- extending unemployment benefits, sending aid to state governments so they don't have to lay off government employees, funding more work on infrastructure projects, etc.  If the Democrats' Keynesian economic theories are correct, as most economists believe, then this would do a lot to bring down unemployment and stimulate economic growth.)  This may or may not be true, but the 'heuristic' theory tells us that voters aren't trying to find out whether it is true.  They are 'reasoning' in  more simple way.  Their heuristic doesn't even consider the possibility that current problems may be left over from previous administrations or may be caused by forces beyond the control of the government.  As Friedman points out, this is actually an instance of a logical fallacy, traditionally called 'post hoc, ergo propter hoc' and called 'false cause' in our textbook.  There is no reason to think that voters who are using this kind of mental shortcut will get what they want from their political choices.

Another heuristic is what we might call the 'my kind of guy' heuristic. (I just made up that name, but Freidman describes the pattern).  Voters absorb media stories and images that persuade them that particular politicians either are or aren't 'their kind of guys (or gals)'.  Friedman relays a story told by Richard Popkin in his book The Reasoning Voter:  When Gerald Ford was running against Jimmy Carter in 1976, he stopped at a restaurant in Southern California and tried to eat a tamale without removing the corn husk wrapper.  This evidently persuaded many Hispanic voters that he was not their kind of guy.   More recently, George W. Bush scored points with the same community by displaying some familiarity with their culture and language.  And it became a cliche that one of the reasons for Bush's victories over Gore and Kerry was that they seemed 'stiff' and 'elitist,' and he seemed like 'somebody you would like to have a beer with.'  But this sort of mental shortcut seems to me to be a very near neighbor of the 'plain folks' propaganda technique, not a helpful way to identify the politicians most likely to represent your interest or your values.

There's more good stuff in Freidman's article, but that's enough for now -- I need to mow the lawn!

Joshua has made some very astute proposals for why college-educated people might be further ensconced in their own "parties" beliefs.  They probably do self-select as to what and who they read and they also self-select the groups they hang out with - which might also harden their positions on political topics.  I have known there is a positive correlation between higher education and atheism.  This discussion makes me want to examine that further and see if it hold true for more highly educated Republicans as well as Democrats.

It would be nice to think that education makes us more circumspect.  Perhaps it has that initial impact, but then we use new skills to increase our confidence in what we believe - and this might drive us further from positions that we do not like.

I think the study cited by professor Atchison is very interesting, because it is quite contrary to what alot of people probably think, and at least what i thought anyway. the most "politically informed" people (such as all those "politcal experts" on the news) are also the most likely to cling to their party lines despite evidence against it (such as the best-informed Republicans saying the budget deficit got worse during Clinton's first term when it went down by 90%, or the best-informed Democrats saying similar things about Reagan).

what interests me too is why this is the case. you'd expect the most politically informed people around to admit that yes, the other party actually did a decent job of reducing the deficit this term or of passing such and such a bill (even though they will always say their party could've done even better). Does it all come down to self-interest? do they know the opposite party in power did a decent job, but just dont want to admit it because it will make them look bad?

To answer Tom's question regarding education and rationalization, yes it is true that education increases one's ability to rationalize and defend one's prejudices but more importantly, education provides a necessary framework for intellectual thought by enhancing one's knowledge of the world and political affairs. I am not at liberty to state beyond a reasonable doubt that you must be educated to understand these affairs, but it would be difficult to critically asssess the claims of some Political figures without it.  But, I am sure we can all agree that the acquisition of a higher education,  does not guarantee the acquisition of intellectual integrity ( I understand the term Tom used was intellectual discipline however for the purpose of this entry I use this term loosely) nor does it guarantee that the educated will be able to discern truth from propaganda. As a seeker of truth and knowledge, it is truly amazing to listen to some of the Public Officials I have helped become elected into office as it would seem at certain times, when the economical mood is satisfactory, Integrity seems to flow like the Nile and at other times, integrity and intellect have been replaced with old ideologies and partisan biased slandering. One thing I know for sure, it is essential to maintain an open, yet critical mind when deciphering truth from propaganda when it pertains to those we have/have not elected to represent our intellectual views.  

Yes I do believe that getting an education can assist you in being able to rationalize and defend prjudice against your points. I am taking an intro class for Law and we were told that for the 3 years of education for the JD we would use socratic classroom instructions.

There are so many different aspect and points that we are taught while in school. Different forms of learning, talking and even forms of munipulation.

So with that said I defend the "elite, other people, politicians". What if they are only doing as they were taught. They react as they are taught we must always keep in mind that they go home at night and it is just a job to them just as we hold our positions. I believe they can carry intellect just as a "normal person"and in a since intellect is a natural operation of our brains it just requires a sense of decipline to make it respond with a high performance. So maybe they just dont ahve the decipline function up and running.

Eevry level of our learning reflects on some different aspect of our lives.

Hi Jerry Although I did not find the comment distrubing I think you make a great point.

 I dont believe the United States public school system was ever created to formaly educate one into any elite position of the government or society. Being a former private and public school attendee I can say that the learning curriculums were totally different. Once I transfered to a public school I was well advanced when compared to another student in the same grade. This was an advantage for me.

I think that the public schools were actually created to give the industrial workers a better understanding and training in field work. I think that we are educated way earlier than the age of twelve on purely what we are told is true with the trust of our knowledge in the hands of our teachers and textbooks. I think that this continues until we are nearly finish or finished with high school. Some philosophers say that we are educated once we learn to think for ourselves.

I fear I sparked this recent discussion of the relative epistemic virtues of educated elites v. common people by asking, at the end of my last post, "But is there any reason to think that us regular folks have a lot of intellectual discipline and integrity?  Enough to avoid the effects of confirmation bias and the rest? Does anyone?"

But the contrast I was talking about was not 'common folks' vs. the educated.  It was "high-level politicians" vs. everybody else.  The article I was discussing, by Jonathan Chait, had alleged that integrity and intellectual discipline were in short supply among high level politicians, and that this accounted for their ability to change their policy views to benefit their political ambitions without noticing that that's what they were doing.  Now, it seemed to me that there was a danger that we would see this claim as something that applied only to politicians (who are, after all, widely held to be slippery people without much integrity) and not seriously consider that the rest of us (i.e., non-politicians) may also be prone to adjusting our beliefs to suit our political allegiances.  So that was the question I wanted to raise.  It had nothing to do with commoners vs. elites, smart vs. dumb, or educated intellectuals vs. ignorant masses, or anything of the kind. 

In fact there is some reason to think that education can make things worse.  (Sorry!)  In a fascinating paper called "It Feels Like We're Thinking: the Rationalizing Voter and Electoral Democracy,"(PDF)  by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels of Princeton University, some data is presented about how people's perceptions of the state of the economy are influenced by their political allegiances.  Roughly, people tend to see economic growth and the budget deficit as worse than they really are when their political opponents are in charge of the government, and as better than they really are when their side is in charge.   For example, a survey from 1996 found that more than half of Republicans thought that the budget deficit had gotten worse during President Clinton's first term, when, in fact, it had declined by more than 90%.  Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to say that the economy had gotten worse. (By most measures it had improved.)    (In other papers, Bartels reports similar results in relation to Democrats perceptions of the economy during Reagan's second term.)

OK.  Nothing too surprising so far.  But Bartels and Achen also looked at the effect of different levels of political information on these partisan biases.  As you might expect, the accuracy of people's perceptions of the budget deficit and the economy tended to increase as their overall level of political information went up. (Level of political information was measured in a fairly standard way by asking respondents to identify various prominent political figures, say which party was in control of Congress, and the like).  But there was a drop off in the ability to see the improvement in the economy among the best-informed Republicans. And for both Republicans and Democrats, partisan identification seemed to have it's most pronounced effect on the best informed respondents.  Bartels and Achen also cite some research by Danielle Shani, which finds a similar effect.  Shani writes, "political knowledge does not correct for partisan bias in perception of ‘objective’conditions, nor does it mitigate the bias. Instead, and unfortunately, it enhances the bias; party identification colors the perceptions of the most politically informed citizens far more than the relatively less informed citizens”

(Shani's paper, "Knowing Your Colors: Can Knowledge Correct for Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions?" is available here.)

Of course, political information is not the same thing as education, but I'd bet there's a strong correlation.  And here's a report of another study that looked specifically at college education as a variable.  A Pew Center poll about global warming found (not too surprisingly) that Democrats are more likely to believe that global warming is happening and is caused by human activity than Republicans are.  But the differences are much greater among the college educated. Among those who have not graduated from college 52% of Democrats and 31% of Republicans have that view.  But among college graduates the percentage for Democrats goes up to 75, while the percentage for Republicans goes down to 19.   Whatever your own views about global warming, I think you have to wonder, why would the more educated people be farther apart on this issue than the less educated people?    It is, after all, a scientific and not a political or ideological issue. Whatever science really is telling us about this, you would hope that more educated people would be better able to comprehend and evaluate that science.   Could it be that more education simply increases your ability to rationalize and defend your prejudices?

Hi Ross.  Frankly, I think all people are "common folk" - no matter what education they have.  Education can improve knowledge, skills, and critical thinking abilities - that is why businesses reward degrees; it is not just the fancy piece of paper.  I hope to nudge my own reading, writing, thinking and hard skills (eg math), a little further down the road by taking classes.  But!!!!  I have learned countless important lessons from people who have never set foot in college.  One of the most articulate and literate people I know has never been to college.  Though, as a single mom, she paid for both her daughters' educations because she sees the value and advantage that a degree brings them.  I know that some people who never go to college begin the game far ahead of me, can dance circles around me intellectually, and that I will never catch them.  (I also know some people with PhDs that sometimes amaze me - not in a good way.  lol.)  Still, I am only the captain of my ship, and I see my job as navigating that tug as best I can.

 

On a humorous note, I can't resist appending this:  Dan Cole hosts a show on KFAN called the "Common Man Progrum (sic)."  At the beginning of the show, he plays a classic clip from Paul Harvey about the common man.  Dan does this to mock himself.  It's pretty funny.  (Also worth noting, that Cole is actually "uncommon" when it comes to sports radio hosts.)   Any way, the text of Paul Harvey's clip, embedded in a short, but interesting, blog piece on our schools can be found here:  (the actual audio clip is much better, but you'd probably have to listen to KFAN to hear that)   http://doneasasociety.blogspot.com/2005/01/americas-biggest-educational-challenge.html 

This blog piece is a short rant about the tension and disconnection between our schools and competition, work, reality and what it means to be common.

Hi Paul.  You make some excellent points.  I am not sure we disagree.  I was not intending to change the discussion, but perhaps I was talking about a different side of the same tree - or maybe I was just muddling my words - it would not be the first time.  When I say intellectual integrity, I mean commitment to the part of the code which says something like "I should not ignore evidence that is presented to me."  I am bound to let my intellect (poor as it is) examine whatever I encounter and not just dismiss it because I don't "like" it.  Of course, as you have pointed out, integrity does imply a pre-existing code or set of principles (another "definition").  I agree.  I was trying to say the commitment should be to principles rather than specific political positions.  I think we agree on this also.  I did not mean for my phrase "intellectual integrity" to signify intellectualism at all.  By intellect, I simply mean someone's mind.  Sometimes that mind is fuzzy; which I instantiate not infrequently.

this is an interesting discussion about the ability of "regular/common" people's ability to detect bad reasoning. but I think we need to ask ourselves what exactly do we mean by a "common" person? from the way this discussion has been going, it seems like we mean someone that is not that "educated" or someone without much knowledge of logic and logical fallicies. but I think this might be creating a somewhat false dichotomy of the "intellectuals/educated/people with college degrees" vs. "common/regular/people without college degrees"

This has been an interesting discourse on integrity and intellectual discipline.  However, Todd, you have shifted the discussion by changing the word order of our discussion.  I hate to get critical here, but it does significantly alter the discussion.  Our original discussion was on ‘integrity and intellectual discipline’ not ‘intellectual integrity’ as your response has stated.  The discussion on the issue of integrity was about how, as Tom had pointed out in his posting, that the Republicans have flip flopped their economics position from the last administration (when they held power) to the new administration (now that the Democrats hold power).  And while I will continue to be critical, I mean nothing personal by it, but, by changing the word order you have misrepresented what was originally stated (sort of the ‘Straw Man’ argument we learned in lesson 3).            The definition of integrity is about ‘adherence to a code’.  If your code is to be open and accepting of new ways to see the world around you (as we hope the brightest minds in our society would be willing) this is in my mind is also the way I would want the world to be (no matter how jaded my glasses are, I hope for this kind of mindset).  But, integrity does imply some preexisting code, often a code of ethics, and when we make association to and identify with a group or a circle, we accept their code.  We are found to have integrity when we adhere to their code and through this our acceptance by and with that group become stronger.  Those that rebel get ostracized or have something happen to them that is far worse.   If you join the military your code is military honor and there is a strict protocol and order to that way of life, when ordered to do… you obey or suffer the consequences.            Intellectual integrity, on the other hand, is adherence to the code of intellectualism which does strive for the discovery of truth within knowledge.  This, however, is not what we are discussing.  Intellectual discipline, here in our discussion, is meant to say and question whether  we (even us common folk) have the skills of critical thinking that can see through the loosey-goosey arguments that lack consistency.

Hi Jerry.  Yes, it is more than a little scary how much teachers and schools can impact young minds.  I happen to believe that much (most?) important basic psychological formations and mechanisms are done, done!, by age 2.  Still, there is a lot of knowledge to be added to the machine - knowledge which will come from our environment.  I went to 10 different schools before I graduated High School (Army brat).  They were all different.  Some great teachers and some not so great.  They all impacted me in ways I am aware of and ways which I am not aware of, but which still impact my actions.  I do believe that many students believe what they are told and do not challenge.  I had a chat with a student in another class yesterday and said she needs to challenge the author of her text if she does not agree with something.  But, that her challenge should not just be a rant.  It should be a well-argued response.  Who knows?  She might be the next "authority."  : )  Thanks!  Todd

Hi Paul!  You raise some great questions about how we "qualify" people to perform civic duties.  I did not mean to imply that agreement on moral, ethical, religious, or other grounds was any part of my fantasy IDI score.  My point was only that our or our circle's beliefs could and would be scrutinized by any and everyone and that we would be open to what others (in our circle or the world at large) might have to say.  For me, integrity is not "reliability to the cause, adherence to a code" - I would call that loyalty.  For me, intellectual integrity is the willingness to give up anything when I have been presented with sufficient reason (according to my own scales and measurement).  In short, integrity is my willingness to admit I was wrong about something if I am presented with evidence if that.  Unfortunately, or fortunately, It happens a lot!!!  lol.  Great questions!  Todd

Hi Kara!  Yes!!  I agree that there are multiple forms of intelligence.  Howard Gardner describes seven dimensions:  Spatial, Linguistic, Logical-mathematical, Kinesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, and Naturalist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences ).  Also, Perkins speaks of neural, experiential, and reflective intelligence (http://otec.uoregon.edu/intelligence.htm ).   Both these pages are quick reads.  So, IDI scores should include a social/historical/current events component in addition to critical thinking and things like that.  Thanks!  Todd

"But science students accept theories on the authority of teacher and text, not because of evidence"  from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions page 80.

 

Anyone else find this statement by Kuhn disturbing? Although somewhat controversial, Jean Piaget thought that it took until around age 12 for kids to be able to have then ability to generate abstract propositions, multiple hypotheses and their possible outcomes is evident. Based on this, teachers could tell kids under the age of 12 whatever they want and most would believe.

Is there any reason to think that us regular folk have a lot of intellectual discipline and integrity?  …enough to avoid the effects of confirmation bias and the rest?            Integrity is reliability to the cause, adherence to a code.  Intellectual discipline is the focus and self-control in the pursuit of knowledge.  Implied in a way, I understand how we could think that there is a morality associated to either of these virtues but is there?  Are we beginning to discuss moral and ethical issues with the actions coming from the knowledge we have attained?            My cause may be much different than yours.  Among my peers my integrity may be unquestionable.   What I come to know may be in direct conflict with your understanding, yet my intellectual discipline may be the envy of all in my circle.  Can we test for these things as in what Todd has suggested as some IDI score?   Who would set the moral meter and frame the question? …and for sure someone/group would be left out of consideration.              If I can attach myself to your cause and it means my financial future is more secure, well, the small shift in moral posture may not be seen as a shift at all.  Since there is so much to know, and so many counter-arguments (legitimate or otherwise) to what some would want us to know or not believe, it would be just as easy to understand the knowledge that comes easiest to justify my position.           Thankfully, there is the freedom of speech, thought, and belief in this country.  To what extent and/or for how long we will have them is another debate, but, we can debate differences, probably never come to common agreement, but we do have these freedoms if we chose to use them.           To answer the question on whether us regular folk have enough integrity and intellectual discipline… well, yes,  just enough to be in good stead with our own circle.  And, for the most common of us out there that’s as much as we care to strive for… just to be satisfied and happy in our own circle.   We just don’t care to look too long or too deeply at things that make us uncomfortable.

Interesting article- most have us have made comments at some point that have supported this way of thinking.  Usually in an attempt to make sense out of a horrible situtation.  Perhaps to show empathy.  However, what comes around does not go around equally.  Just this past weekend I was downtown at the Pride events and was wittness to a random act of violence.  I have no idea of the circumstances leading up to this event.  The common discourse afterward was about how she's gonna get it.  Bad karma, and so on.  Independent of this situation, there had been various conversations throughout the day that were setting off alarms- as to what is knowledge.  Point being, as we have all been activly engaged in sharpening our skills and being more critical in determining what and how we know- we may be more easily recognizing these dangerous was of thinking. 

I agree with you Todd, I think intelligence and schooling are very much required in a republic like ours where we each have an indirect say on how our government is run (by electing our officials). But it seems like that when we use "intelligence" in this way, we simply mean having good analytic/logical skills. And while I think this is definately an important skill for people to have, and perhaps the mark of an "educated/highly schooled" person, there are probably other important types of intelligence too. People often make the distintion between "book smarts" (academic) and "street smarts" (perhaps more practical?), and maybe there is some truth to this distinction. These days people also speak of "emotional intelligence", the ability to connect with other people, and they often put it on par with the other types of intelligence when it comes to how important it is in life.

In the recent posting by Prof A, he asks, "Is there any reason to think that us regular folks have a lot of intellectual discipline and integrity?  Enough to avoid the effects of confirmation bias and the rest? Does anyone?"  I believe we do have intellectual discipline and integrity.  But, it is perhaps only a 50 or so on a scale of 100; I will call this the "IDI score".  This is better than 25, but not as good as 75 and perhaps 75, as a population average, is a practical limit on a group of humans.  I am fine with that, but clearly a 50 can cause problems - I often typify this set of problems by remarking that people know the answer before they have heard the question.  Knowing the answer before hearing the question is a hallmark of the lack of intellectual discipline and integrity.  We need better IDI scores in a democracy where citizens make a lot of decisions, on a daily basis, which have direct impact on how the society functions and how the culture develops and replicates itself.   

 

If we are to move from 50 to 75 IDI score, how can that be done?  Despite the real impact of the media, which is often negative, schools are the common access point to the population's development of reasoning skills.  A fundamental social purpose of schooling is to increase our individual IDI scores in order to increase the population average.  Unfortunately, as with most things, the study of philosophy or critical thinking/reasoning is self-selecting.  The people taking it seriously and those not taking it seriously are inversely related to those who could stand to benefit the most.  (sidebar: We certainly also need some folks who are in the low 90s IDI scores, the more the better, which is rarified air to be certain.  It would be great if we could develop a test for this capacity that people could take just like an ACT exam. )

 

On a systems analysis viewpoint, it is important that real critical thinking be part of the rubric for all educational curriculums:  math, science, English, philosophy, business, art, theater, sales, and so on.  This skill and the commitment to intellectual integrity should be a discipline that imbues all coursework at all levels of schooling; from K-grad school.  But, the skill is not the only issue.  The Dalai Lama has said intelligence and schooling are very important, but a pure heart and good motivation are more important.  A smart person without these virtues is more dangerous than someone less capable.  He makes a good point.  Thanks!  Todd

With regard to knowing how others feel, the word "know" has many different meanings.  It is unfortunate we do not have a different word for each meaning.  For example, "knowmeu" for direct experience of similar situations that others have had:  "I knowmeu how you feel."   

 

And then "knowinfo" - as in know that people usually go through Kubler-Ross' 5 stages of grief when they experience a loss ( http://www.memorialhospital.org/library/general/stress-the-3.html ).  Conflating these versions of know often gives rise to discussion or argument, which is really about definition of terms rather than real disagreement.  Know is not like "love" which also has myriad different meanings, but we can usually approximate the meaning from the context.  (Though sometimes we have to clarify, eg. "I love you, but I don't love you."  Don't you hate being the recipient of that one!) 

 

As for knowing how someone feels, I do not think people can legitimately say, I know how you feel.  This is because the speaker's experiences, background and perspectives on death, life, etc. are often dramatically different from the other persons.  For me to say I know how you feel implies I experience the world (at least somewhat) the same way that you do.  While this seems empathetic, it either makes the other person's feelings seem "common" and accessible to just about anyone; or it makes me special because I can share the feeling.  Either way, it seems a problematic remark to someone having a bad time of it.

 

Prof Atchison raises a question on the "knowinfo" form of knowing as it pertains to psychological research, I do not believe a psychologist would have to share an experience in order to study loss or grief.  This would perhaps even cloud that research.  Of course, this is the "knowinfo" form of knowing that the researcher is cataloging.  Thanks!  Todd

My name is Todd and I am a classmate, but have not been on the blog yet.  I hope to make up for that the rest of the term.  I have read the entire blog and found it very interesting. There are some great minds, diverse backgrounds and great questions being asked.  I will jump in with a couple comments.  For simplicity and clarity will separate them into two following posts.

Jonathan Chait of The New Republic makes an interesting point today (well, technically, yesterday).  Riffing off a question raised by Steve Benen of the Political Animal blog at The Washington Monthly (Benen says, "It's unpleasant to think about, and I really hope it's not true, but it may be time for a discussion about whether GOP lawmakers are trying to deliberately sabotage the economy to help their midterm election strategy"), Chait points out that Republicans are currently voting unanimously against policies they favored when a President of their own party was in the White House:

The party fervently embraced the logic of Keynesian stimulus in 2001, when the underlying rationale was very weak, and fervently opposes it now when the underlying rationale is quite strong. If you were a principled opponent of Keynesian economic theory, you ought to have been more opposed to stimulus in 2001 than now, but very few Republicans were. Ezra Klein has another example today, of Republicans who favored an airline bailout in 2001. Most Republicans also supported a financial bailout in 2008. They just oppose bailouts when Democrats hold power.

But Chait doesn't buy the idea that Republicans are intentionally trying to make the economy worse in order to win more votes next November (though lots of other people think this is obviously their strategy).  He thinks they are just operating with the sorts of cognitive biases we have been studying:

Establishing motive is always very hard to prove. What's more, the notion of deliberate sabotage presumes a conscious awareness that doesn't square with human psychology as I understand it. People are extraordinarily deft at making their principles -- not just their stated principles, but their actual principles -- comport with their interests. The old Upton Sinclair quote -- "It is difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it" -- has a lot of wisdom to it.

I don't think many Republicans are actually trying to stop legislation that might help the economy recover because they know that a slow economy is their best route to regaining power. I think that when they're in power, consequences like an economic slowdown or a collapsing industry seem very dire, and policies to prevent this are going to sound compelling. When you're out of power, arguments against such policies are going to sound more compelling.

I'm not excusing their behavior. You can resist that kind of mental trap -- it just takes a lot of intellectual discipline and integrity. I don't think you're going to find a great deal of that sort of intellectual discipline and integrity among high-level politicians.

It's this last bit that really interests me.  Chait thinks we can resist "mental traps" with "intellectual discipline and integrity," but, sadly, high-level politicians lack these characteristics.  But is there any reason to think that us regular folks have a lot of intellectual discipline and integrity?  Enough to avoid the effects of confirmation bias and the rest? Does anyone?

yeah im not sure exactly how a news company decides what to put in the news, but i'd imagine that they do actually have some sort of fact-checking group of people to make sure the stories are at least somewhat close to accurate. but then again, being accurate and concise probably doesn't sell nearly as well as being sensational and dramatic, so therein lies the tension-ridden problem for media bias

What are the chances that someone is actually applying the measure of bias within the media? Someone has to control what is and isnt releasd. Anyone ever worked at a News Broadcast Company? I would liek to know who writes what and what has to be said.

Something I have been thinking about in relation to the readings on bias and propaganda we have had over this past unit is how the media creates and directs news- not just reports it.  A simple way to look at this in motion is by either following sports or the weather.  I am a sports news junkie, and it is fascinating to see how the story spins from one day to the next.  Just a couple examples.  Anyone watch the NBA finals?  Remember when the Celtics defeated the Cavs and suddenly Lebron James was in serious trouble.  Was he ever going to able to lead a team to the finals?  Could this hurt his free agency?  In 24 hours the media view on him turned 180 degrees.  Favre- hero or zero?  The news seems to report in attempting to create results/direction for its consumers.  Weather- yes it is important to know if serious weather is coming our way.  But the reporters bring it to a point of terror, and are usually partially wrong.  Two different examples- similar outcome.  Report do not direct.  This can translate into more important issues.  Just though these would be easy examples.

Paul ~ I own a book written by Shelley Tayor titled " Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind" in which she states, that none of us is in touch with absolute reality and we can't possibly know what forces beyond our control would affect our lives. Because of this fear that has no actual basis, we construe future events that promote happiness and success than one that portends failure. Many believe in Shelley Taylor's theories of positive illusions in dealing with physical illness and stress. It would only makes sense that we create positive illusions to help us cope with our everyday environment. But, does that mean if we are inappropriately happy then we have created such an inappropriate world of positive illusions, we can never experience reality? Moreover, does it mean if we destroy these illusions, then we are destined to find life bleek and miserable which will inevitably lead to depression?

in response to Jonathan, i agree that the propoganda technique i encountered most often when watching the news or reading the paper was the appeal to Fear. It was all over the place, but yes especially on more political (perhaps biased?) news shows like CNN, MSNBC, Foxnews, etc. Conservative shows blast Obama as a socialist/communist/fascist plotting to take over the country any day now, so we must act quickly (and vote Republican next election). Liberal shows attack conservatives in much the same way by appealing to their audiences worst fears. If the conservatives gain anymore power in Congress or are allowed to filibuster the next bill we're trying to pass, all hell will break loose and it'll be complete anarchy.

Tom in your blog on  – Cognitive Bias and Practical Epistemology –        Near the end you speak of what makes people happy isn’t that they necessarily have true beliefs but having convenient falsehoods to support their image of the world.               I would like to add to this by a research paper I had come across when doing a search for a paper I was writing for a psychology class I had taken.  The research paper was by Shelley E. Taylor and Jonathon D. Brown and is title ‘Illusion and Well-Being:  A Social Psychological Perspective on Mental Health’.                In trying to summarize the paper it said…  That most people have illusions about their own stature and always feel they are on upper half of what they deem to be important factors in their own mind, even if it isn’t true.  That what most people accept to believe is bent to fit their need to support already existing opinions.  And not so surprising is that this helps us feel better about our lives.  As you have pointed out, it would seem that in covering for our own happiness we will misconstrue reality to fit our need.                 As for what to do about this… well the report did say that the people they found to have the best grasp of reality were those that were clinically depressed.  Huh?  I guess illusion keeps us happy and reality just gets us depressed.  Are we really as messed up as all of that?

seems to me that following the news networks here recently for our assignment propaganda in the form fear seems to be everywhere. I started out watching the local news but really didn't see it until I started really paying close attention to the shows on the political networks such as MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN. If you pay close attention its everywhere. For example on MSNBC's countdown show with Keith Olberman, they were giving Sarah Palin a hard time (as Keith likes to do), and the picture they show of here has the oil spill in the background with flames shooting out and a look on Sarah Palin's face as if she is portraying an "I don't care attitude". It is almost comical the way they do that. Wondering if anybody else saw anything similar to this. 

My wife and I just saw ‘The Men Who Stare at Goats’ last eve.  Most humorous!  And right up the paranormal alley we have been studying.  I thought the movie played well to the weirdness of the psychic beliefs of people in juxtaposition with the Iraq war.  But what is even funnier is that the US military actually had a program like this.

I've been coming across some useful discussions of the sorts of cognitive biases that we read about in Chapter 5 of How To Think About Weird Things. Here's one -- a site by journalist David McRaney:

You Are Not So Smart 

Every few days McRaney puts up a post discussing a particular bias or psychological effect.  He's a pretty good writer and his explanations and examples (which sometimes come with videos) are clear and entertaining.  A few of my favorites:

Hindsight Bias  --  "I knew it all along!"

Misinformation Effect  --  Memories, so convincing, so wrong.
(Check out the video from "This American Life" near the beginning of this post.)

The Perils of Introspection  -- "Why do I feel this way?  I don't really know, but I can sure make something up!"

The Just-World Fallacy  --  "People deserve what they get"


Philosophy major turned big-time blogger, Matt Yglesias comments on these things from time to time.  For example:

Red Reality, Blue Reality  -- Regardless of the facts,we think the economy is doing better when our team is running the show.

Politics and Investment Bias  --  Even our investment decisions are skewed by our political beliefs.


Then there's Less Wrong: "A community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality"

It's not as reader friendly as McRaney's blog, but there are good posts from time to time, like these:

Your intuitions are not magic

In brief:  "People who know a little bit of statistics - enough to use statistical techniques, not enough to understand why or how they work - often end up horribly misusing them. Statistical tests are complicated mathematical techniques, and to work, they tend to make numerous assumptions. The problem is that if those assumptions are not valid, most statistical tests do not cleanly fail and produce obviously false results. Neither do they require you to carry out impossible mathematical operations, like dividing by zero. Instead, they simply produce results that do not tell you what you think they tell you"

The Tragedy of the Social Epistemology Commons

In Brief: "Making yourself happy is not best achieved by having true beliefs, primarily because the contribution of true beliefs to material comfort is a public good that you can free ride on, but the signaling benefits and happiness benefits of convenient falsehoods pay back locally, i.e. you personally benefit from your adoption of convenient falsehoods. The consequence is that many people hold beliefs about important subjects in order to feel a certain way or be accepted by a certain group. Widespread irrationality is ultimately an incentive problem."

But now, we need to do more than just marvel at the apparent irrationality of the human animal.  We need to think about how to deal with the fact that people (including, of course, ourselves) are prone to all of these sorts of bias and irrationality.  One clear result of all this research is that eye-witness testimony is quite fallible.  Perhaps our courts ought to be taking more account of this.  Another clear result is that our memories are fallible and, over time, are modified to fit what we want to believe about ourselves and others.   Perhaps we should keep this in mind when we get into arguments with our friends and spouses.  But suppose we want to do more, suppose we want to improve the quality of our thinking and the likelihood that our beliefs are true -- then what should we do?

With the blog site not accessible I wrote this offline and it got a bit long, sorry.            So taking what we have been studying in chapters 3 & 4 of Weird Things, I am pondering these thoughts in light of global climate change.   The basic arguments (as I see it)…           Argument #1:   A) Actual data over the past century has shown an increase in atmospheric CO2.  B) Retrospective analysis of ice core samples show that probably at no other time has CO2 levels been as high as it is now.  C) Human activity within the past century used fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate for energy to drive technological leaps for humankind.  Conclusion #1: The increase of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere is probably due human activity.  (an Inductive Argument).            Argument #2:  D) Actual data over the past couple of centuries have shown that the Earth’s average temperature is rising.  E) Longer warm periods may be contributing to a trend of earlier springs and later falls.  F) Climate change is when significant changes occur to sustained weather patterns over a period of time.  Conclusion #2: The Earth is most probably going through a period of global climate change.  (an Inductive Argument)           Argument #3:  G) Computer modeling of the Earth’s atmosphere shows that CO2 significantly contributes to the average temperature rise.  H) Computer climate modeling demonstrates catastrophic changes to the various climate regions on Earth.  I) Actual climate changes in various regions have demonstrated fatal outcomes for sensitive ecosystems.  Conclusion #3: CO2 is most probably associated to climate change that has fatal implications to sensitive ecosystems. (an Inductive Argument)          Summation: Human activity has most probably increased CO2 in the atmosphere which has contributed global climate change and the demise of sensitive ecosystems.             I believe the argument for global climate change would be categorized as a Hypothetical Inductive Argument.  Much of the argument depends on retrospective evidence with a hypothesis developed from contrived computer models (that are constructed from Analogical Inductive methods).  It would seem that what most environmental scientists agree upon is strong probability based on an inductive argument.  Schick and Vaughn say that an inductive argument can’t be considered valid only either strong or weak and much of their discussion on induction argument is about how it can be misleading and deceiving.            Based on the inductive argument it appears that no one can know, not even the experts, on the cause and effects of global climate change.  The best that can be said is that they believe that there is a strong likelihood that global climate change is caused by human activity.   Even with a preponderance of experts agreeing, when an argument is stated as a ‘strong likelihood’ it seems to not carry as much urgency as compared to a deductive argument based on physically valid premises, such as an argument based on, say, an oil eruption in the Gulf of Mexico.  It seems that the conclusions, because they are inductive in nature, are extremely vulnerable to counterargument and confusion, by appeal to authority, the masses, and to the person.                   What can we know about global climate change?  Or can we only believe this?   The evidence can be questioned because it is not totally objective and our experts can only say, with any certainty, that they believe this to be a strong probability.                Any thoughts on this?

well yeah, the psychologist might "know" in a different way, but thats because you basically just defined knowing as experiencing something first hand. so if you're only using this definition of know, the psychologist won't really "know" anything about you at all

very late, so short response.... No way is the one studying the steps of grief have the same knowldege as the one experiencing it first hand.  This is what I thought the exception factor was about.  (Fay).  Empathy is the one factor that can "elaborate" on the particular experience.  You might know it in the way as "to define and describe", but not as one knows who lives the experience. 

I've been very interested in the discussion around knowing and feelings of loss.  It's a fertile set of examples to reflect on -- but, also, I was having my own experience of that kind.  A few weeks ago a car crash in rural Wisconsin took the life of a 16-year-old boy to whom I am related in a complicated sort of 'modern family' way (he was my sister's ex-husband's step-son).  I didn't know the boy well, but his death devastated a number of people I do know well (including his parents and my nieces and nephew).  So I found myself confronting the same sort of questions that some of you were reporting: do I really know what these people are going through?  Can I say, "I know how you feel?"  Are my own experiences of loss comparable enough to theirs to serve me as a model?  I was especially awed by the obviously profound grief of the boy's mother and step-father.  I tried to imagine how I would feel if one of my own teenage sons had been killed, and it seemed to me that I just could not really comprehend it.  In the end I could not honestly say that I knew how they felt.

Now I want to tie this back to Fay's discussion a bit:  Fay emphasizes the way that our experiences are shaped by our social and cultural groups and also by our particular life-history and experiences.  He concludes that, if we define knowing (a person) as "having the same experiences as (that person)", then we don't know anyone, not even ourselves. (Re-read pp.12-15 if you can't remember how he makes his case for this claim.)   And even similar experiences may be hard to identify.  What if I had lost a child?  Would my experience necessarily be that similar to the experience of my friends in Wisconsin?  What if my child had died after a long illness?  Would that change the character of the loss from what it was in this case (a sudden and unexpected accident)?  Those parents have some spiritual beliefs that are very different from mine -- does that alter the character of their thinking and feeling about the death of their son?  They live in an intensely supportive small community where virtually everyone they meet as they go about their daily lives knew their son and knows of their loss.  How different is that from the experience of a grieving big-city-dweller, surrounded by people who neither know nor care?  And, finally, these people are just very different in temperament and personality from me (and from each other, for that matter) -- how does that affect the quality or nature of their experience of loss?  As Fay argues on pp. 16-17, the only way to answer these questions would be to compose detailed descriptions of our respective experiences and than compare them.  We can't just assume that some particular kind of event or some particular aspect of our history or identity is sufficient to make our experiences similar.

But the more important issue in the context of this class (which is about inquiry, not empathy -- or, better, about empathy only to the extent that it is necessary for good inquiry) is whether having the same or similar experiences is actually an important aspect of understanding or 'knowing' about something.  Perhaps the following question can bring the issue into focus:  Suppose I was a psychologist and I wanted to study the way people respond to loss of a loved one (perhaps I had a theory about the stages of grief or some such thing).  Would I necessarily have to have suffered my own similar losses in order to carry out that study?  Would my own personal experience of loss  be necessary in order to inform my inquiry? Or would there be, perhaps, a danger that my personal experience of loss might get in the way of my inquiry, unless I was careful not to assume that others' experiences were similar to my own?

(Ross raises a similar question in a comment you might have missed, here .)

We will come back to these issues, by the way, when we consider 'women's ways of knowing', later in the semester.  The authors of that book contrast a masculine style of 'separated knowing' with a feminine style of 'connected knowing'. They claim, among other things, that women students are poorly served by institutions of higher education that downgrade personal experience in the way that Schick and Vaughan (and other scientifically minded people) do.  I am sympathetic to the impulse behind this idea.  But personal experience really does have all the problems identified in Chapter Five of "How to Think...", doesn't it?  (More about that later.) 

Schick and Vaughn talk about how the memory will reconstruct an instance in the past from a different perspective.  The example given in the book is how our memory of an instance of sitting down in the past is often seen in our minds from a perspective of looking at ourselves as if on television, rather than from the perspective we actually encountered while sitting down. 

I wonder if this is more of a result of our society being engrained with the phenomenon of television or if this is just how the mind operates constructively.  If we were living a thousand years ago, would our memories still work in this way when visualizing ourselves in a past moment?

In response to Ross... I think that he states you can know yourself in the way that even though you are constantly changing with the passing of time, you can have similar experiences that can relate you to the previous you.  As his example of the two mothers suffering the loss of a child from very different backgrounds may know each other better than someone that is more "like" them not experiencing that loss.  Similar experiences are more important than like backgrounds in knowing someone.  Maybe?

i agree, and when you think about it, it's kind of odd that we can often know other people better than we can know ourselves. i mean, if your own self is constantly changing and is always t+1, can you really ever know yourself?

Sorry to hear of those of you that have had to deal with loss of a family member or loved one.  It really made me think of our readings in Fay's chapter on the discussion surrounding how we can know someone, or ourselves.  The common phrase of "time heals all wounds", is often used in dealing with grief.  This is a good example of how Fay stated that our knowing ourselves is affected by time.  As he states that how you know yourself at t, is different than how you know yourself at t+1, and so on.  Our experiences change how we know ourselves, and through time we gain experiences.  Also, the perspective that we acquire when we are able to "step back" and see the big picture we can see illustrated in this example.  This reinforces the idea that we can know others, sometimes better then themselves.  Sometimes others can know us better with the wide lens in which they view us. 

It has been a very difficult week, and our discussion on the topic of whether we can know how someone feels or even say that we know how they feel has become a reality for me.  My brother in-law passed away most unexpectedly last week in a motorcycle accident.  He left behind my sister and two sons ages 19 and 13.  I too have lost my father, but this during the time while I was an adult with children at home.  When at the funeral while talking with my nephews I had to say to them, honestly, that I did not know what they must be going through and yet I could feel their pain and grieving for I too went through a similar experience of loss of someone deeply close to me.  The difference is that I was never 13 years old and to see this loss through those eyes.  Especially with my knowledge of what his future could be, if for him his father were still alive... this sense of loss is… well… lost on me.

I think I can see where both of you are coming from. On the one hand, I sympathize with Gwendolyn in that I, too, find it difficult to say to someone "I know what you're going through" when I haven't had the same experience myself, but at the same time, I think what Ross is getting at is that we can attempt to understand what that person might be feeling. For example, the death of a parent would generally vary in impact than the death of a pet. However, knowing how one felt when one's pet had died, one can imagine that suffering the death of a parent would be much worse than losing a pet. Similarly, as the readings had mentioned about mothers losing their children, I think it would be difficult for most of us who have experienced the death of a loved one to be able to relate fully to the mother who has lost a child. So, while we are able unable to describe exactly what the mother must be feeling, we are able to empathize with her, in that we know that what the mother is going through must be worse than what we had been through.

I agree with you Gwendolyn that we do have the ability to connect with other people and their experiences in perhaps an unexplainable way, but then later on you said that you choose to never say "I know how you feel". But I'm curious about that because when we connect with people in that mysterious way (perhaps over having been through similar experiences in the past), don't we have to at least be implicitly saying "I know how you feel" or "I know I'd be feeling really bad if I just went through something like that"? Don't you have to be implicitly saying this when you try to empathize with someone else's situation, even if you never explicitly say so?

It is really interesting that we are reading about the logical and physical possibilities of UFO's and so happen there have been rare sightings around the Minneapolis/Saint Paul Airport/Ft.Snelling area through out the month of May.  

Fryes claim on "being one to know one" is very sujective and I don't know if I really agree with him. But I do believe you have to be able to think, feel, and connect in an unexplainable manner to actually know how someone is feeling. I made this theory in my head when I was younger. When someone ahs lost someone or whatever the situation may be and I have not had an hands on experience within that situation I choose not to say "I know how you feel". Because if I have never experienced the situation how can I possible "know" how you feel. I can hold my own emotion to the situation but never the same as another persons. 

Just got done reading Brian Fay's chapter one on if its true that "it takes one to know one". I believed this statement is somewhat ignorant and after reading Fay my opinion is only reinforced. If it takes one to know one nobody can know anybody. Everyone is different, everyone has their own experiences, perspectives, and upbringings. Although it is true that an upper class white man may not be able to fully understand a lower class minority, to say that the two are completely on different wavelengths, incapable of understanding each other to even a slight degree, is potentially dangerous. As Fay says, it is basically saying that nobody can know anybody. It is a good read and Fay is very good about using real life examples which always help me to understand some of these philosophical works. 

I just finished reading ‘Weird Things’ chaps 1, 2, and 5, lots of info!  Whew!  I guess I knew already that are actions are based on our beliefs.  But, when our beliefs are placed within all the various ways we can get it wrong, well, it is no wonder there are a multitude of ways people go about living their lives.               After chapter five, I am thinking, it is no wonder with all the many ways we can be duped and even fool ourselves… and while there are ways we can do the ‘reality check’ but they aren’t the most reliable unless administered with the full force of scientific discovery… that most of us just take the easy path a little too much of heuristic simplicity.            Do we really understand what is important to us anyway?  Is there a base level of knowledge needed or required?  What I mean to ask is at what point is what we need to know really what is critical for us to have in our hip pocket so we can live and let live?  I am sure that this question is based on my heuristic tendency to simplify.  But it seems that maybe in this complex world we have created we now have to really move beyond the ‘appeal of ignorance’ as Schick and Vaughn have stated.

As I was reading Martin Gardner’s forward I decided to research more about him. I am better able to understand someone’s ideas if I have some contextual background information. (As a side note I think Descartes’ first meditation was about stripping away those contextual properties that limited his work to his own time period.) The first thing I discovered was the Gardner recently passed away (May 22^nd). He had a pretty long life. Made me wonder about the lives of other philosophers. Seems like spending a vast amount of time and energy pondering philosophical questions would take a toll on the human psyche. Is there a high rate of suicide among philosophers? I do not completely trust the accuracy of Wikipedia, but here is the best list of philosopher deaths I could find. Found it interesting very few had the fate that Martin Gardner did. Most either committed suicide or were killed due to their ideas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_of_philosophers

If this were a more normal course in epistemology, we might spend the next few weeks exploring possible answers to the kind of global skepticism that Descartes generates in his first meditation. (If this idea appeals to you, you might want to take the class I am teaching in the fall called 'Early Modern European Philosophy.'  In that course we read the rest of the Meditations, learning how Descartes solved his problem and how other thinkers tried to solve or avoid it.)  But I've always found the sort of philosophical problem raised by Descartes rather unengaging. There is a family of problems that have a common abstract form: Since all I really know (or directly experience) is X, how can I claim to know anything about Y? Some examples (with their traditional names):

"The problem of the external world" -- Since the only things I directly experience are my own sensations, and these could be produced by a variety of causes (including some sort of virtual reality machine, as in The Matrix), how can I claim to know anything at all about the world outside my mind? How do I even know that there is a world outside my mind?

"The problem of other minds" -- The only thoughts and feelings I directly experience are my own. The only evidence I have about other people's thoughts and feelings is their behavior (including their verbal behavior). But this evidence is not at all conclusive (people can pretend and lie, I might be fooled by a real-seeming talking doll or robot). So how do I ever know what anyone else is really thinking or feeling? How do I even know that other people have experiences that are in any way similar to mine? How do I know that they have experiences at all? (Descartes writes, near the end of Meditation 2, "If I look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I have just done, I say that I see the men themselves, just as I say that I see the wax; yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal robots? I judge that they are men. " - Bennett's translation) Perhaps I am the only conscious being in the world, and all the 'people' I meet are really robots (just behavior, no 'inside', no consciousness).

"The problem of induction" -- All our predictions of what will happen in the future are based on our experience of the past. We assume that the regularities we have found in our experience so far will continue into the future, that the laws of nature will not change drastically overnight, for example. But what entitles us to make this assumption? The fact that things have been a certain way up until now does not prove that they will continue to be so. How do we even know that the sun will come up tomorrow?

OK. Enough examples. All these problems (and more like them) have been discussed at great length by modern philosophers. But, as I said at the outset, I have never been able to sustain much interest in them. They are all theoretical problems, not practical problems. No sane person doubts that we do know the sorts of things that these skeptical arguments are supposed to call into question. Even the philosophers who claim that these problems cannot be solved aren't skeptics in any practical sense. (They live and love and trust and hope much the way non-philosophers do.) For the most part I share the sentiment expressed by the great Scottish philosopher David Hume in the following passage (from his Treatise of Human Nature, 1739): "Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther. "  The question, "How do you know you are not living in the Matrix?" strikes me in just this way.  It is interesting as a sort of puzzle, but I don't for a minute think that I might actually be in such a predicament.

But there are practical problems about knowledge, too. Lately I have been thinking about a set of problems I like to call "citizen's epistemology." The central question is this: How can citizens in a society like ours come to know what they need to know in order to play the role they are supposed to play in a democratic society? As citizens we are supposed to choose representatives who will pursue policies that promote our interests and our values. (More ambitious theories of democracy might give us more demanding roles to play, but at least we ought to try to be reasonably well informed voters.) How can we hope to do this in a world saturated (as it seems to me) with lies and 'spin' and propaganda?

Part of the problem is that we get almost all of our information about public affairs (and, more generally, about what is happening in the world outside our direct experience) from the mass media. But we may reasonably wonder how reliable these media are. Even if we are not, strictly speaking, trapped inside a virtual reality like the folks in the Matrix, maybe we are largely trapped inside a view of the world provided for us by the mass media. Maybe our ideas about what is real and who is telling the truth are systematically distorted, because so much of our information comes from sources who have a vested interest in shaping our perceptions to serve their interests (or the interests of their owners).

(Click on the "Continue reading" link below to read an article by Frank Rich of the New York Times that explores this idea. See what you think.

Want more? Here's a link to an article from the left wing magazine "Counterpunch" making a similar argument: http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp09132003.html )

Another part of the problem comes from the sort of psychological tendencies described in Chapter 5 of How To Think About Weird Things (part of the next assignment for this class).  Even if the media presented a reasonably 'fair and balanced' picture of the world, all of us would be interpreting that picture through our own set of filters.  Confirmation bias, availability heuristic, seeing what we expect to see, etc. etc.would all be operating as we construct our understanding of the world -- leaving us trapped, to some extent, inside the 'matrix' of our own assumptions, prejudices and expectations.  I was recently reminded of an old song by Paul Simon, "The Boxer",  that makes the point quite simply:  "A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."  So even if it's hard to take the problem of global (or completely general) skepticism seriously, there are plenty of more specific sorts of skepticism that seem to me to be quite real and serious.  We'll be looking mostly at these more practical problems going forward.

Hi everyone,

My name is Nick, I'm a philosophy major, and I am graduating in August.  I love to think deeply about questions with unknown answers, as I think this creates the most interesting and challenging way to view the world around us.

This summer I'll be working two jobs and taking two classes.  My other class is Business Law.  I'm taking that course because I have been thinking of going to law school after Metro State and want to see if I like studying law enough to do it for three more years.

I look forward to a semester full of deep thinking and opportunities to learn a lot on this very interesting subject.  If anybody has any questions about the philosophy program here at Metro State through a student's perspective, I'd be happy to answer them. 

Thanks,

Nick 

 

My name is Jerry. I am married, have 2 daughters (1 in college, the other a junior in high school). Most of my work experience has been in the IT field - Database Administration and programming. I am currently a college instructor teaching mostly computer programming and sometimes psychology. This was the first summer I was not teaching a course so I thought why not take a course.

 

I found reading the meditations to be interesting but hard to follow at times. In the first meditation he says he cannot rely on his senses because they have deceived him at least once, but then later on he uses them to illustrate examples for why we should believe what he says or to make an analogy to support his line of reasoning.

And I think that Descartes' conclusion of 'I think therefore I am' is ultimately not very well founded, but I think that Descartes goes about as far as one can go in doubting things without going insane (or becoming a madman, as he would put it). If an evil demon were really totally deceiving us all the time (or we were really hooked up to the Matrix, or we were just in one long dream, or...), then we probably wouldn't know we were ever being deceived, and our own thinking that we were being deceived would just be another part of the demon's deception!

I had received an email commenting on my earlier posting.  I would rather post my response to the blog, however, thanks for your comments.            My post was an opening salvo, getting my feet wet with the first class discussion/blog.  I agree that getting down to the brass tacks is the meat of philosophy.  I find enjoyment in the speculation on abstract thoughts.   Sometimes in tangential thinking we find new ways that are relevant and practical to our everyday life.  I do emphasize ‘relevant and practical’, I search for meaning in the practical use of philosophy as it applies to my everyday life.           As far as whether dreams are reality and reality is a dream, a fun and interesting turn of phrase that gets one thinking.  How do you define ‘dream’?  Does Descartes even attempt to define what he means by a dream?  In scientific terms it is an active brain function that is measurable during REM sleep.  Dream analysis has been used in psychology as a way to understand neurosis.  Some see messages in dreams.  Some define a dream as what one wishes they will one day do.   Descartes lived in a different time, he did not have the tools of science.  He had been in a time still under threat of the inquisition and supreme church rule, albeit reformation was under way.  Descartes made some pretty bold steps to free the mind from the grip of church doctrine and open the door to objective thought and reason.           If by dream you mean the illusions that we live within that are inevitable with limited objective knowledge and our personal filter of perception, now there is some real meat to talk about.  This is why relativism is such an important concept to discuss.  If opinion is seen as just as valid as objective knowledge then the veneer of illusion becomes plywood.  If enough deception is painted as truth the plywood/illusion is built into sturdy homes where people feel safe to believe in and live within.          I believe Descartes may have been speaking to illusions of what is real when he spoke of dreams.  If we all lived in his day we would be heavily influenced by the superstitions of the church.  If a veneer of illusion was peeled back and say someone like Copernicus speculated that the Earth was not the center of the universe and Galileo saw the moons of Jupiter, well blasphemy!  Descartes saw the truth in these discoveries and wanted to peel away all those veneers of illusion, albeit a very tuff proposition for anyone.

My name is Ed Amey.  I am a philosophy major and will graduate this fall. 

On to discussion of Descartes.  I really like his give and take about dreams in the first mediatation, and I think the viewing of the matrix only adds to the questions about what is real and what is imagined.  Is anyone less certain about what is real in light of the meditations and the movie?

I have often wondered after waking up from a particularly realistic dream if it was tied to reality somehow, or in some different dimension.  For instance, dreaming you won the lotto then trying to remember the winning numbers but you cant (If you could remember, would you win?), or many other dreams which return as deja vu later in real life (if this is truly real life that is):).

This would be a great classroom discussion but as we can't do that in this format, any discussion or comments would be appreciated!

Looking forward to sharing ideas with you all.

Ed

I finally got the book by Fay, and just finished reading the introduction.  I read the relationship between hegemony and framework as the following.  Framework is a perspective, a sensibility, on how you look at the world.  He is saying that this framework is developed from re-enforcement by dominant social and political groups within a society.  This may lead us to problems in deciphering our understanding of another society- as he states "takes one to know one".

I think it is possible to have universal ethical beliefs- we need to ask the right questions.  I think it would be sad if no one could judge another group on their rightmess or wrongness of action.  Many examples come to mind.  Although I think we need to be mindfull of asking the right questions in order not to judge another society by our own standards, it may be possible.  One example to illustrate this point comes to mind.  I think that a universal standard that could be agreed upon is that all socieies place value on taking care of their young.  Our own framework developed through hegemony believes this at all costs.  It is re-enforced through societal norms and laws.  However, there have been other socities that have practiced infanticide.  We as a society may look at this in opposition to the universal we thought we agreed upon.  In deeper reflection, they are caring for their young as often times this is done to take care of the children they already have.  Just a thought that proceded from this first read. 

That's one thing I've never particularly understood about the seeming dueling Descartes.  Between his willingness to delve into the question of existence; and on the opposite side, how he squares that with an unquestioning faith in a specific god.  It seems that he derives so much of his belief system squarely from his own thinking, which is based in Christianity.  I'm not sure if I'm correct here, but it always struck me that he was locked into the Christian faith regardless of any philosophical thoughts that may run counter to that.

I did a little outside reasearch to the problem in which I was writing about a day or so ago and discovered the following.  Rene Descartes does address the skepticism about believing in an outside world.  He later, after his argument about the existence of God in the 3rd and 5th meditations, states that a benevolent God would not deceive him.  He states that the perceptions he gets are not willed to him and that God would not deceive him into falsely perceiving them.  And that supports the exsistence of an outside world.  I have not fully finished reading about this.  This is the quick short answer that I found through a couple different sources.  Just wanted to share in case this was vexing anyone else as it was me.  Comments are welcome.

Hi, I'm Jason,

Third semester at Metro with a major in Individualized Studies focusing on Labor issues, should be finishing in December. 

Between Kara's post, Paul's post and the readings, I was thinking quite a bit about existence.  I am personally coming to the conclusion that everything is inevitably 'a dream.' 

In relation to the coffee I currently have sitting on my desk, although it may exist in whatever the/a 'grand plane' may be, it only really has to exist in my thinking for it to exist (to me, which is really the only existence that we could understand).  Further over, even if it were a dream to me that the coffee exists, that coffee still exists to me. 

Even if something exists in a sleeping dream it still has an effect on my actions and my existence.  If you are in a fight or flight sequence in a sleeping dream, it still effects your body.  Hence, I don't understand why 'real life' should be considered any differently.

Continuing this line of reasoning, if I fully believe in the lack of existence of that cup of coffee, there would be no way in which I could interpret that cup of coffee being on my desk.

Jason 

Just finished reading Descartes' first two meditations.  Initial thoughts on summary are- "I think therefore I am".  That is the big revelation that is reached after all the back and forth questioning.  Are we supposed to believe that non-thinking things, or less thinking things don't exist unless we perceive them?  Or humans of diminished capacity cease to exist - unless there is a thinking thing able to recognize their exsistence?  As I stated, I just finished this reading and maybe more meditation myself would bring about clarity.  However- if anyone has insight into this dilemma feel free to comment.  However, I did enjoy his strategy at breaking down and questioning to gain certainty in knowledge.  I do think it important for people in general be more proactive in discovering their own beliefs.   

 I would like to start off with a comment, sorry if it is a bit winded.            I enjoyed seeing The Matrix, especially with reading the Descartes Meditations as background with the question of dreams and reality.  The Matrix is an excellent choice to introduce the philosophical question of what is reality.  I know I have had some quite vivid dreams that I would swear were seeming quite real, but, I did wake up and my lifelong reality set back in.               You really can’t escape the fact that there is a continuity of awareness in the reality of daily life that is not seen in dreams.   And if the argument is that the day in day out living is not real… well then try out an alternative… “To be or not to be – that is the question: … The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?”  Was Shakespeare a contemporary of Descartes?               With all due respect to Descartes, while life is pretty darn complex and there is plenty I wish were just a dream, a little skepticism goes a long way, and a lot of skepticism can get you hung up a bit on philosophizing about some pretty strange and unbelievable things.  And while there may be fun in this, at the end of the day your still living your own reality.               I agree there are some pretty unbelievable things of life, but give it a day or two, if you can, you will know whether it is real or not.  Somehow reality, if it is significant enough, will sink in.  If there is any doubt, then, drink the water and eat the food of your dreams and see how long that sustains your being.               Just some thoughts.

Hi,

   My name is Mindia Fillie. This is my 2nd to last semester at Metro State and I plan to purse a grad school. I am a mother of two children. The area that I am majoring in is Legal Studies. I enjoy going to the movies, going shopping and spending time with my family. I am a very simple person and love to meet new people. Well talk to everyone later Thanks Mindia Fillie

With regard to pages 1-8 in Fay's book, would someone be able to discuss the terms 'framework' and 'hegemony'? On the bottom of page 2, the writer says changing from one framework to another cannot be rationally justified. I guess I do not have a good enough understanding of the term 'framework' to understand why one cannot change.

Hi-  my name is Kara H and I am studying philosophy at Metro.  Hope to finish with a degree this upcoming fall.  This should be an interesting class in content.  It is my first completely web based class.  I look forward to working with all of you in this blogging assignment.  Should make for an interesting summer.