tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post1135304104019723261..comments2024-03-18T08:38:01.678+00:00Comments on The Life And Opinions of Andrew Rilstone: Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger91125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-78623602122624495122009-03-14T07:46:00.000+00:002009-03-14T07:46:00.000+00:00With all due respect, no, it is not. RACISM (espec...<I>With all due respect, no, it is not. RACISM (especially in connection with slavery) is highly correlated with inequality. It is also something that varies widely from culture to culture, even down to Mr. Burrows "immutable" material base<BR/>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_democracy</I><BR/><BR/>It is not clear to me that you understand what the word "correlated" means. You still seem to be confusing the word with "caused by" which means something else entirely. Look the word up in a dictionary and I'll wait here until you get back.<BR/><BR/>Ready? Racial diversity is highly correlated with inequality. That's a fact. That may well be due to racism, of course. It is a more than plausible hypothesis. However, your link isn't doing that argument any favors since the article claims that Brazil, with its incredible racial diversity, is virtually immune to racism due to that very diversity. It is also one of the most economically unequal countries on the planet. Only Bolivia and a few African countries (Botswana, Central African Republic, and Sierra Leone) are worse with South Africa and a couple of Central American countries roughly equal to Brazil.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-4953317146749400532009-03-14T00:47:00.000+00:002009-03-14T00:47:00.000+00:00Mr. Stevens wrote:"What I said was that racia...Mr. Stevens wrote:<BR/>"What I said was that racial diversity is highly correlated with inequality. That's a fact."<BR/><BR/>With all due respect, no, it is not. RACISM (especially in connection with slavery) is highly correlated with inequality. It is also something that varies widely from culture to culture, even down to Mr. Burrows "immutable" material base<BR/>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_democracy<BR/>wich has little to do with my main point, that social darwinist politics tend to be everything else but "progressive" <BR/><BR/>"you're far too interested in trying to find an ideological box to stuff me into and inferring my beliefs and/or putting words into my mouth."<BR/><BR/>but us "european centrists" ALWAYS do that!<BR/>Actually, I am more interested in how much you & Mr. Burrows have in common. <BR/>you are, of course, even on over-long threads, & with "ahem" an actual life to take care of, free to spew forth any such words I might orally force upon you.<BR/><BR/>"Convince a bunch of workers to pool their resources and buy the means of production."<BR/><BR/>That happened in Sweden & Denmark, via the unions.<BR/>Of course, then the unions became horribly corrupt, in part because the politico-economic theories they were based on had very little to suggest about what to do next: assuming, as they did, that a better overall economy would automatically produce better theories. As it happens, they did not.<BR/>Rather as capitalism does not automatically lead to democracy.<BR/><BR/>"There are reasons why the poor and dispossessed fled Europe to come to the U.S."<BR/><BR/>Because they could steal things from Native Americans?<BR/>A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT thing from stealing things from Saxons, Cymri, large parts of Africa, etc, of course!<BR/><BR/>"But once that is removed, people find other things to discriminate on the basis of (like social class or educational attainment or whatever)."<BR/><BR/>Am certainly looking foreward to that happening: after all, discriminating on the basis of, say, education, is sometimes actually bloody relevant, not to mention a far older institution (not to sound Dawkinist, but there might be a connection there)<BR/><BR/>"The average black American has a higher per capita income (in purchasing power parity) than the average Swede (but with more inequality)."<BR/>"There's no question that I'd rather live in downtown Stockholm than downtown Detroit."<BR/><BR/>You give a very good argument against your own previous point? How very Platonic of you.<BR/>(Oh, & thanks for using the term, "Black American". An increasing number of visibly black US citizens are not really what one could call African American: some are x-European centrists, even)<BR/>In the meanwhile, Sweden has some horrible problems with confusing personal & state interests: not only the eugenics thing, but also intrusive measures such as prohibitionism (a movement started in Sweden), tax rates at over 100%, being arrested for talking to a women on the street, etc.<BR/>Please feel free to make sarcastic comments about the wonders of European Centrism/State Capitalism here.<BR/><BR/>"I think it can and should be arranged so that everyone gets better off and the inequality (in America, at least) shrinks."<BR/><BR/>Especially considering power imbalances, even economic ones, unfortunate results. Very large-scale mistakes being one, as should be obvious from our current situation.<BR/><BR/>"I find it very odd for someone who takes seriously the unfalsifiable speculations of political science (including unfalsifiable philosophical speculation like "there is no abstract knowledge"), but rejects Plato's arguments because his arguments are unfalsifiable."<BR/><BR/>Am suprised you have not written something along the lines of "My conjecture is what Marx was doing was articulating his own longing for the Ideas into some absolutly foundational form, pronouncing us forever cut off from grasping pure truth but instead trapped in a violent dialectic cycle" yet.<BR/><BR/>Mr. Burrows wrote:<BR/>"My point is that it’s not just a negative, that social conditions can actually make other thoughts more thinkable."<BR/><BR/>Thoughts certainly ought to be seen in context: Marxism (& even Communism) has been a valuable counterweight to Carlyles Great Men (a concept Prof. Lewis also opposed). <BR/><BR/>"Though the earlier-mentioned Guardian feature on UK Creationists described some very convoluted argument that the dinosaurs were taken onto the Ark but died off soon after."<BR/><BR/>Seems as if many UK Creationists are actually fascinated by the idea, & not just trying to support an idealized Victorian lifestyle?<BR/>Has one mentioned "Anno Mundi", by the way?<BR/>http://www.annomundi.com/history/index.htm<BR/><BR/>"‘Left’ therefore was and is a wing of capitalism, and should really be rejected by anti-capitalists."<BR/>"and still is"? Thats a suprisingly platonist, & also silly, statement.<BR/>There really ought to be a term for people that are not strongly opposed to theism, but still find it unlikely in the context of their other ideas, by the way: in contrast to those who actively want to replace theism with their own metaphysics, for example.<BR/>Call me enslaved to Monotheist paradigism, but dualism never really was my cup of tea.I. Dallhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03427385974208305067noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-53841865422011101322009-03-05T08:18:00.000+00:002009-03-05T08:18:00.000+00:00So has this peasant fellow just dropped by, or has...<I>So has this peasant fellow just dropped by, or has he been here all along not saying much? Because he seems to me a strange latter-day inclusion into the discussion. Previously we were talking about the American and British working classes, with me saying their degree of poverty should be measured relativistically. I can’t remember saying much about subsistence farming at all, though I suppose that may just be me getting on a bit. But for the record, as I consider most members of the British working class to be poor, I leave it to the reader to determine whether I’d start arguing a Bangladeshi smallholder to be privately wealthy.</I><BR/><BR/>This is what is known as a reductio ad absurdum. If we want to talk about British and American working classes, then it makes sense to talk about them relative to the middle and upper classes in the same country. However, my reductio points out that it's silly to say that we can <I>only</I> talk about wealth relatively. I am objectively better off than the peasant fellow even if he is the wealthiest member of his society and I am not.<BR/><BR/><I>So there may be times when they lose more money proportionately than everybody else, but of course in dollars-and-cents terms they’re still miles ahead. They may be giving up one of the holiday homes, while a working guy skips a meal. One is objectively bigger, the other counts for more. I’m not sure anybody’s about to start a whip-round for them.</I><BR/><BR/>Nobody disagrees with that. But the fact is that inequality as measured by the <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient" REL="nofollow">Gini coefficient</A> goes up in times of prosperity and goes down in times of recession. Modern recessions, anyway. I'm not convinced this was actually the case during the Great Depression and I'm not sure there's good data on the subject. (Deflation has the effect of making those who manage to keep their jobs wealthier.) If what we care about is not whether the poor are well off, but how well off they are relative to the rich, then recessions are a good thing.<BR/><BR/><I>Right... okaaaay. But intergenerational change is a fairly constant process, isn’t it? And more importantly, I don’t see how any of that negates my point. There isn’t some ‘pure blackbird’ because blackbirds have evolved over the centuries.</I><BR/><BR/>As Mr. Dawkins would be happy to tell you, evolution is stately and slow. It takes no leaps. Speciation takes thousands of years. Next you're going to be telling me that there is no such thing as society.<BR/><BR/><I>Here you’re making what I believe philosophers like to call a category error. I’m talking about a theory but a principle, like Occam’s Razor. As it’s really a modification of the Doubting Thomas principle you earlier doubted, I’m not surprised you refute it. But I persist in my notion that he who advances a theory must argue for it, not the other way round. It’s quite legitimate to say “an ideal table? Why should I buy into any of that then?”</I><BR/><BR/>If you're just talking about Platonism, then I agree that Occam's Razor applies. (Of course, Occam's Razor is not infallible, having been spectacularly wrong on an occasion or two.) As I've often said though, while skepticism is good and valuable, one cannot be a skeptic "all the way down."<BR/><BR/><I>The alternative is the conceptual houses of cards we’re all used to. The internal logic of philosophical theories is often tight, the cards are all perfectly in the right place to support the next one, and so they can reach heights. But the problem is their lack of foundations. If there’s no reason to accept their basic premises then the whole lot can fall in a single swipe.</I><BR/><BR/>Of course, I am arguing that it is your own premises which are vulnerable. You begin with a materialist premise which is purely intuitive, as Quine at least was refreshingly honest enough to admit. What I am asking for is simply a nominalist explanation for mathematics. Let us assume that sets do not exist. Can mathematics be rederived? Right now, the answer is that only a small fraction of mathematics can be rederived in this manner. So far, Godel and Russell, et al., are still triumphant, despite many fine minds (such as Hilbert's) trying to defeat them.<BR/><BR/><I>Surprised to read this for two reasons. First, out of the main ethnic groups in the US, only one is missed out (Latinos). So I’m surprised at the changes if compared to whites and Asians – put rather bluntly, who else is there to be compared to?</I><BR/><BR/>Latinos are a very large ethnic group. 68% of Americans are non-Latino white, 15% are Latino, 12.5% are African American, and 5% are Asian American. What I was pointing out is that if you look at African American income compared to 100% of the population (which <I>includes</I> both African Americans and Latinos), the numbers look much better than if you're just looking at African Americans compared to the 68% white non-Latino or 73% white/Asian population. The number given above for per capita U.S. income is a 100% figure which includes blacks and Latinos. Just trying to avoid you're being misled by the numbers.<BR/><BR/><I>Also, I’m surprised the figure is so high. Could this be one of those meaningless mean things?</I><BR/><BR/>No. On the contrary, they look even better if we compare medians since the (very) rich whites no longer pull up the white mean to such a large extent. While the black middle class is prosperous, there are very few Bill Gateses or Warren Buffetts to pull up their numbers quite as extremely. (See below for more on this.)<BR/><BR/><I>Or more simply, could it just be a skewed survey? A quick net trawl revealed it to be $14,263 in Texas (though that’s from 1999).</I><BR/><BR/>Texas is not a microcosm of the United States. (Its total income is lower than the U.S. average and blacks are worse off relative to the rest of the population than they are in the country as a whole.) I wasn't able to find out what the same site and source would claim was the overall GDP per capita for the state of Texas at the time since the site is so terrible, unfortunately.<BR/><BR/><I>Another Wikipedia page divides by ancestry and gives the highest majority-black point of origin (Nigeria) at $18,838 while ‘Blacks in comparision with other races’ is second-from-bottom at $11,833. (This again is from 1999.)</I><BR/><BR/>Now this one is better. You misquoted it, though. It doesn't say "Blacks in comparison with other races," but "Blacks in <I>combination</I> with other races." Blacks alone were at $14,437. Whites alone were at $23,918. If you go to the Census Bureau, you'll find that Hispanic/Latino is $12,111 using the same methodology. Digging into those numbers, though, it does appear that the number is closer to 70% rather than 80%. Looking back at my calculations using the U.S. Census Bureau's own site, I note that I was actually comparing medians, rather than means which (for the reasons given above) make them not strictly comparable. I note also that the Swedish Institute of Trade study was comparing medians rather than means, while I gave means above from my Wikipedia source. (This is better, of course, since median is a more meaningful figure.) Their figures had U.S. median household income at $39,400 with black households at $30,200 and Swedish households at $26,800. But this was also back in 2002. It's quite possible, of course, that Swedes have pulled ahead by now. Any time you're looking at these things, you're looking at a snapshot. Perhaps Sweden was more badly hit by the 2002 downturn than the U.S. was and, of course, since 2002 the U.S. dollar has gone into rapid decline (though I'm relieved to see it's back ahead of the loonie). So, now that you've forced me to defend the numbers, I'm not convinced that I can still make the above statement. It's <I>close</I> to true, but it probably isn't quite true any more.<BR/><BR/>Of course, African Americans on the whole are far wealthier than Sweden, since there are so many more of them. If African Americans seceded, they'd be the 12th wealthiest nation on Earth.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-19265477647667512852009-03-03T18:17:00.000+00:002009-03-03T18:17:00.000+00:00Previously we were talking about the American and ...<I>Previously we were talking about the American and British working classes, with me saying their degree of poverty should be measured relativistically.</I><BR/><BR/>Wow. Well, at least <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman" REL="nofollow">the latest Nobel economics laureate</A> has written <A HREF="http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf" REL="nofollow">a paper</A> which might give us a start towards accomplishing that...Phil Mastershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12533451060065715833noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-79499950899378930282009-03-02T14:31:00.000+00:002009-03-02T14:31:00.000+00:00I’m talking about a theory but a principle, like O...<I> I’m talking about a theory but a principle, like Occam’s Razor.</I><BR/><BR/>Umm... make that I’m <I>NOT</I> talking about a theory but a principle, like Occam’s Razor.<BR/><BR/>(Doh!)Gavin Burrowshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-32239126588466178162009-03-02T14:26:00.000+00:002009-03-02T14:26:00.000+00:00Yes, I am going to argue that a person who lives i...<I>Yes, I am going to argue that a person who lives in subsistence agriculture, scratching out a living with no idea where his next meal is coming from and death constantly lurking in the shadows, is objectively worse off than I am, even if in his society he is tied for the best off person in that society while I am very, very far away from being the best off modern American. I leave it to the reader to determine which of us is correct</I><BR/><BR/>So has this peasant fellow just dropped by, or has he been here all along not saying much? Because he seems to me a strange latter-day inclusion into the discussion. Previously we were talking about the American and British working classes, with me saying their degree of poverty should be measured relativistically. I can’t remember saying much about subsistence farming at all, though I suppose that may just be me getting on a bit. But for the record, as I consider most members of the British working class to be poor, I leave it to the reader to determine whether I’d start arguing a Bangladeshi smallholder to be privately wealthy.<BR/><BR/>Incidentally, for all this talk of “death lurking in the shadows”, many of the problems today come from small farmers having little economic power, so being pushed onto poorer and poorer land. Subsistence farming may be a hard life, but it doesn’t follow that all the associated problems are <I>intrinsic.</I><BR/><BR/><I> But I would point out that economic times like these (recessions), where everybody gets worse off, but the rich are hardest hit (as they are) are worse than boom times, where everybody gets better off, but the rich gain more (as is also the case).</I><BR/><BR/>This argument will probably stand you in little stead in Britain, where there’s currently a huge fuss over the pension funds of bank execs. (With Fred Goodwin of RBS taking an almost totemic importance in the public mind.) To be fair, execs do now draw much (often more) of their pay from shares rather than salary. (The reason was more to dodge tax than make pay performance-related, in many cases when they failed to hit the targets to release extra shares they just moved the targets instead.) So there may be times when they lose more money proportionately than everybody else, but of course in dollars-and-cents terms they’re still miles ahead. They may be giving up one of the holiday homes, while a working guy skips a meal. One is objectively bigger, the other counts for more. I’m not sure anybody’s about to start a whip-round for them.<BR/><BR/><I> It says that at least some of our concepts are based on genuinely real things actually existing in reality.</I><BR/><BR/>‘Based on things’ is fine by me. The concepts (as separate from the things) having a discrete existence from us isn’t. (But we’ve probably done this to death by now.)<BR/><BR/><I> It is not a constant process of change. It only changes intergenerationally, a crucial distinction</I><BR/><BR/>Right... okaaaay. But intergenerational change is a fairly constant process, isn’t it? And more importantly, I don’t see how any of that negates my point. There isn’t some ‘pure blackbird’ because blackbirds have evolved over the centuries.<BR/><BR/><I> The first point seems obviously false to me. (How would we go about testing that theory?</I><BR/><BR/>Here you’re making what I believe philosophers like to call a category error. I’m talking about a theory but a <I>principle,</I> like Occam’s Razor. As it’s really a modification of the Doubting Thomas principle you earlier doubted, I’m not surprised you refute it. But I persist in my notion that he who advances a theory must argue for it, not the other way round. It’s quite legitimate to say “an ideal table? Why should I buy into any of that then?”<BR/><BR/>The alternative is the conceptual houses of cards we’re all used to. The internal logic of philosophical theories is often tight, the cards are all perfectly in the right place to support the next one, and so they can reach heights. But the problem is their lack of <I>foundations.</I> If there’s no reason to accept their basic premises then the whole lot can fall in a single swipe.<BR/><BR/><I> I'm not quite sure what the mechanism would be. I suppose it would be that, while racism is the basis of society, nobody cares what social class you came from so long as you're white. But once that is removed, people find other things to discriminate on the basis of (like social class or educational attainment or whatever).</I><BR/><BR/>One thing we’ve been guilty of so far, which is common when discussing social mobility, is to confuse two concepts. ‘Social mobility’ often suggests transferring classes, for example going from working as a labourer to becoming a manager. But not everybody is going to go from working to middle class by definition. It’s as least as, and probably more, important to raise conditions for all the guys who <I>don’t</I> get promoted to manager – decent pay, sickness benefits and all the rest of it.<BR/><BR/>But it doesn’t follow that those conditions will rise universally across the class. Sectional groups may win them in one workplace alone, in fact they may even win them <I>at the expense of</I> other groups. The bosses may calculate they can afford sick pay for the more skilled workers, who they most want to retain, provided they keep the clamps down on the unskilled.<BR/><BR/>Hence the middle classes do not see the (at least initially) small number of black people entering their class as a threat. But the privileged white workers conceivably do.<BR/><BR/>(In South Africa in the Twenties, the Communist Party reportedly decided that the ‘more advanced’ white workers were the ones to recruit from, so campaigned and even organised strikes on the slogan ‘Workers of the world, unite for a white South Africa’.)<BR/><BR/><I> African-American per-capita GDP is about 80% of the total population per-capita GDP (though lower than that if compared to whites only and much lower if compared to whites and Asians combined)</I><BR/><BR/>Surprised to read this for two reasons. First, out of the main ethnic groups in the US, only one is missed out (Latinos). So I’m surprised at the changes if compared to whites and Asians – put rather bluntly, who else is there to be compared to?<BR/><BR/>Also, I’m surprised the figure is so high. Could this be one of those meaningless mean things? Or more simply, could it just be a skewed survey? A quick net trawl revealed it to be <A HREF="http://txsdc.utsa.edu/maps/thematic/sf3/sf3_15b.php" REL="nofollow">$14,263 in Texas</A> (though that’s from 1999). Another <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._per_capita_income_by_ancestry" REL="nofollow"> Wikipedia page</A> divides by ancestry and gives the highest majority-black point of origin (Nigeria) at $18,838 while ‘Blacks in comparision with other races’ is second-from-bottom at $11,833. (This again is from 1999.)<BR/><BR/><I>you're probably talking to the only American over 30 not living in New York who doesn't know how to drive</I><BR/><BR/>Currently jobhunting (again), and forever having to explain that, yes, I’m over Forty but, no, I don’t own a car or a mobile phone. But I live reasonably centrally, and can easily bus or even walk to work, while parking round here is a nightmare. Also, I don’t have children or dependents so I can comfortably live in the more compressed space that comes with living centrally. (And I don’t have a mobile cause I hate the stupid ringtones...)Gavin Burrowshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-33885330196127912942009-03-01T23:42:00.000+00:002009-03-01T23:42:00.000+00:00My point was of course that it only made any sense...<I>My point was of course that it only made any sense to define poverty any way other than relativistically. Andrew’s suggestion seems to be that there is some universally applicable ‘poverty line’, so if you go from two to three points above it this is all to the good, even if some other bugger is bouncing from twenty to forty points. There may not be a causal connection between the two, in the sense he is not bound by the one to think the other, But there is, I think, an association.</I><BR/><BR/>I wholly agree with Mr. Burrows here (which may surprise him). Yes, I am going to argue that a person who lives in subsistence agriculture, scratching out a living with no idea where his next meal is coming from and death constantly lurking in the shadows, is objectively worse off than I am, even if in his society he is tied for the best off person in that society while I am very, very far away from being the best off modern American. I leave it to the reader to determine which of us is correct.<BR/><BR/><I>Anyway, even if we were to accept the supposition that these are the two most credible alternatives (an increasing wealth gap or everyone getting poorer), I can’t go along with it for reasons already stated.</I><BR/><BR/>I don't actually believe that those are the two most credible alternatives. I think it can and should be arranged so that everyone gets better off and the inequality (in America, at least) shrinks. I can, for example, point out many, many policies which are giveaways to the rich. But I would point out that economic times like these (recessions), where everybody gets worse off, but the rich are hardest hit (as they are) are worse than boom times, where everybody gets better off, but the rich gain more (as is also the case). If the people who claim to prefer lessening equality to gaining wealth were consistent, recessions should be welcomed by them.<BR/><BR/><I>In a minute someone is going to ask what happens if a tree falls down with no-one around! I would argue precisely the opposite way up. That species designation lies in our observations and nowhere else. These thoughts, I concede, come from our observations of the world and are not mere mental constructs. (Let’s not substitute Berkelyism for Bulverism.) But while I argue these thoughts are shaped by the world, you seem to the arguing the opposite.</I><BR/><BR/>Here, however, you are 100% misunderstanding me. Our thoughts are indeed shaped by the world. That has been precisely my argument. These "concepts" that we have actually exist in the world (at least sometimes) and are not just mental processes. Mathematics is not just a game with arbitrary rules. It is shaped by the world. This is why the view is known as "realism." It says that at least some of our concepts are based on genuinely real things actually existing in reality.<BR/><BR/><I>Besides which, do I detect an element of pre-Darwinism here? As we all know, species are not universals, fixed and immutable, but in a constant process of change. In a similar way, pure shapes (such as triangles) rarely exist in nature. We take a continuum of shapes and assign them into these categories to make our lives easier.</I><BR/><BR/>It is not a constant process of change. It only changes intergenerationally, a crucial distinction. (Lamarckism argued it was a constant process of change.)<BR/><BR/><I>My point about Plato was that a theory that can’t be tested is automatically bested. Inocculating yourself against evidence means you can be at most merely speculating.</I><BR/><BR/>The first point seems obviously false to me. (How would we go about testing that theory?) And claiming that an argument which is not empirically testable is "innoculating yourself against evidence" is just an insult, not a serious argument. It is true that philosophical arguments normally can't be tested empirically (which is why philosophy hasn't spun them off to science as they did, say, the whole of science, once "natural philosophy"), but that doesn't mean they are indefeasible. A better argument can defeat them, provided you actually produce one.<BR/><BR/><I>Ignoring for a moment that your ‘apart’ is a fairly sizeable one, could this not be a causal relationship rather than an exception clause? Other racial groups were freer to move because there was one that was always going to be static. In a similar way, the most vehement defenders of Apartheid in South Africa were the poor whites. (The Terrablanchists.) The wealthy whites concluded apartheid could go and they’d still keep their money and influence, which is of course exactly what happened.<BR/><BR/>(Incidentally, what dates are you thinking of? Up to the Civil Rights era?)</I><BR/><BR/>The studies I've seen which purport to show that U.S. social mobility has declined usually claim the decline started in the early '70s. Your theory is not entirely implausible. I am considering how one would go about testing such a theory, but it is certainly a fact that at about that same time, poor white men began to see their incomes stagnate which would seem to me to be a necessary occurrence if your theory was correct. I'm not quite sure what the mechanism would be. I suppose it would be that, while racism is the basis of society, nobody cares what social class you came from so long as you're white. But once that is removed, people find other things to discriminate on the basis of (like social class or educational attainment or whatever). Sadly, I find this plausible, human nature being what it is.<BR/><BR/><I>As someone who still owes you a couple of references from earlier threads, it is cheeky for me to ask but... do you have a reference for that? Sweden is a very wealthy nation, though it’s true prices and taxes are high. (Presumably what you’re referring to by invoking PPP.)</I><BR/><BR/>Certainly. The source was a study done by the Swedish Research Institute of Trade in May of 2002. (So it may be out of date.) When I checked my source, I was slightly mistaken, however. They were actually comparing median household income, not per capita GDP, but it turns out the two are roughly similar. Unfortunately, I can't find it online.<BR/><BR/>You can check Sweden vs. the U.S. per capita income (PPP) at <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita" REL="nofollow">this Wikipedia article</A>. The U.S. is sixth in the world at $47,025 and Sweden is 16th at $37,526 according to the IMF. (The United Kingdom is 19th at $36,571.) African-American per-capita GDP is about 80% of the total population per-capita GDP (though lower than that if compared to whites only and much lower if compared to whites and Asians combined), so is roughly the same as Sweden's. You can probably confirm this by browsing around the U.S. Census Bureau's site and doing the math yourself. (Why don't other countries have such sources of information online? I have a really hard time getting good data for other countries of the kind which is readily available for the United States.)<BR/><BR/>I do not say this, by the way, to prove anything. (I mostly say it because it surprises people.) The number one country in the world is Qatar and second is Luxembourg. This does not prove that Qatar's social system should be emulated by the rest of the world. Purchasing power parity takes prices of a market basket of goods and services into account rather than the spot currency exchange rate, but the figures are pre-tax numbers, so taxes are not accounted for. But they also don't include such things as government services, crime rates, inequality, percent under poverty, etc. There's no question that I'd rather live in downtown Stockholm than downtown Detroit. Also, as you could point out, this just means that U.S. blacks can, on average, buy (slightly) more stuff, but one could easily argue that you <I>need</I> more stuff in the U.S. This is prima facie plausible. You mentioned cars, for example (which amused me, since you're probably talking to the only American over 30 not living in New York who doesn't know how to drive), but it is certainly plausible that a car is a necessity in the U.S., but not in Sweden. Also, there is always the argument that the Swedes have simply chosen leisure over productivity, accounting for their lower GDP. This is also a plausible theory.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-22499093110680394582009-03-01T13:32:00.000+00:002009-03-01T13:32:00.000+00:00A casual observer (we any such left) might be wond...A casual observer (we any such left) might be wondering what possible point there could be to all this debate about whether triangles pre-exist us or when exactly green stops being green. Let me tentatively suggest it lies here, when Andrew says...<BR/><BR/><I>A future where everybody is equally worse off is preferable to a future with inequality? This seems counter-intuitive to me, but I have no idea how I could go about arguing you out of that position.</I><BR/><BR/>My point was of course that it only made any sense to define poverty any way other than <I>relativistically.</I> Andrew’s suggestion seems to be that there is some universally applicable ‘poverty line’, so if you go from two to three points above it this is all to the good, even if some other bugger is bouncing from twenty to forty points. There may not be a causal connection between the two, in the sense he is not <I>bound</I> by the one to think the other, But there is, I think, an association.<BR/><BR/>Anyway, even if we were to accept the supposition that these are the two most credible alternatives (an increasing wealth gap or everyone getting poorer), I can’t go along with it for reasons already stated.<BR/><BR/><I> It seems hopelessly anthropocentric. The species felis silvestris catus does not cease to be a species when humans aren't around. They will go on breeding with each other (and with no other species) even if we aren't there to observe it. </I><BR/><BR/>In a minute someone is going to ask what happens if a tree falls down with no-one around! I would argue precisely the opposite way up. That species designation lies in our observations and nowhere else. These thoughts, I concede, come from our observations of the world and are not mere mental constructs. (Let’s not substitute Berkelyism for Bulverism.) But while I argue these thoughts are shaped by the world, you seem to the arguing the opposite.<BR/><BR/>Besides which, do I detect an element of pre-Darwinism here? As we all know, species are not universals, fixed and immutable, but in a constant process of change. In a similar way, pure shapes (such as triangles) rarely exist in nature. We take a continuum of shapes and assign them into these categories to make our lives easier.<BR/><BR/><I>I've probably mentioned before where I think Descartes went wrong. Some doubts are unreasonable, so Descartes' project was mistaken from the beginning. I also entirely reject the criteria of certainty or infallibility as an appropriate barometer of knowledge. The Doubting Thomas Principle, in a universal form, is itself surely open to doubt (in fact, I'll flatly call it false). Rational doubt arises contextually when arguments or evidence are determined to be defective or insufficient.</I><BR/><BR/>You did. But unless I’m misconstruing your point, this seems to me to be misconceived. The Doubting Thomas principle means a credible theory must stand it’s own against known and reasonable doubts. This does not mean that doubts are counted as the winning hand purely for existing. If I said I doubted Descartes because those Froggies just like to go on, the doubt would have failed to engage with his theory and Descartes would win. (Everywhere with the possible exception of the Daily Express). My point about Plato was that a theory that can’t be tested is automatically bested. Inocculating yourself against evidence means you can be at most merely speculating.<BR/><BR/><I>Unfortunately, it seemed principally to lead to the rise of fascism</I><BR/><BR/>Well, of course! I always thought the contemporary anti-Nazi artist John Heartfield <A HREF="http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/images/h2/h2_1987.1125.8.jpg" REL="nofollow">put it best.</A> In a (not particularly) recent TV doc ‘The Nazis, A Warning From History’ an old guy, then a banker, looked back on events. At the time he’d assumed that, with so many out of work, people would flock to either Communism or Fascism. As a banker, he concluded Fascism was better. I can’t remember if he personally then started funding them, but that was a main source of their income. This also explains Fascism’s pseudo-revolutionary character. (Of course this is not to suggest that the workers’ movement was otherwise free of problems.)<BR/><BR/><I>I do have much more sympathy with worker's control than I do with command economies... Certainly, I'd rather live in Tito's Yugoslavia, organized something along the lines you're talking about, than I would in Stalin's Russia or Castro's Cuba.</I><BR/><BR/>The workers’ occupations not being enough for me, you may not be surprised to hear that Tito’s Yugoslavia isn’t either. However, it is true it was a more egalitarian place than Stalin’s Russia. It’s a cruel irony of history that the breakup of Yugoslavia caused so much more bloodshed than the fall of the Soviet Union.<BR/><BR/><I>There is quite a lot of evidence that the U.S. had considerably more social mobility than Europe for decades, perhaps centuries (apart, of course, from various oppressed racial group</I><BR/><BR/>Ignoring for a moment that your ‘apart’ is a fairly sizeable one, could this not be a causal relationship rather than an exception clause? Other racial groups were freer to move because there was one that was always going to be static. In a similar way, the most vehement defenders of Apartheid in South Africa were the poor whites. (The Terrablanchists.) The wealthy whites concluded apartheid could go and they’d still keep their money and influence, which is of course exactly what happened.<BR/><BR/>(Incidentally, what dates are you thinking of? Up to the Civil Rights era?)<BR/><BR/><I>The average black American has a higher per capita income (in purchasing power parity) than the average Swede (but with more inequality).</I><BR/><BR/>As someone who still owes you a couple of references from earlier threads, it is cheeky for me to ask but... do you have a reference for that? Sweden is a very wealthy nation, though it’s true prices and taxes are high. (Presumably what you’re referring to by invoking PPP.)<BR/><BR/><I>The interpretation of such studies is often highly suspect and ideologically tinged, but outright fraud rarely occurs. And this was just a survey which doesn't leave much room for interpretation. (However, I raised possible doubts because of the variable of how the questions were asked. It's possible that the question could be phrased in such a way in which all leftists in Europe, but only rich leftists in the U.S. would be inclined to answer in a certain way.) </I><BR/><BR/>Well exactly! The court bar on ‘leading the witness’ does not apply to polls.Gavin Burrowshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-88193297537796979462009-02-28T06:28:00.000+00:002009-02-28T06:28:00.000+00:00Oh, by the way, I'd also say that I find it very o...Oh, by the way, I'd also say that I find it very odd for someone who takes seriously the unfalsifiable speculations of political science (including unfalsifiable philosophical speculation like "there is no abstract knowledge"), but rejects Plato's arguments because his arguments are unfalsifiable. Especially given the rigor of analytical philosophy compared to political science generally.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-70582732435054920712009-02-28T06:02:00.000+00:002009-02-28T06:02:00.000+00:00I could see this slipping into a pedantic argument...<I>I could see this slipping into a pedantic argument about categories (“what defines a moon’?” etc), but I think my point is a wider one. There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to take abstract knowledge from concrete observation, but we need to acknowledge that this is a process we humans do so is subject to human foibles and limitations.</I><BR/><BR/>As I said earlier, I am an immanent realist. This position is also called "a posteriori scientific realism" (as I now give the third or fourth different name for it, which include "moderate realism" and "in re realism"). Immanent realists believe it is the job of science to tell us what universals actually exist. (I would argue that, on certain metaphysical questions, it is also the job of philosophers.) I do wholly agree with you that <I>sometimes</I> what appears to us to be a universal is not, in fact, a universal. Take, for example, jade. We might think there is a universal "jadeness" by which a mineral is jade. But science tells us that there are two different chemical compositions (jadeite and nephrite) which we call jade since they appear to share the properties of "jadeness." Therefore, there is no universal "jadeness." Jadeite and nephrite are individually real, but jade is not a proper mineral category. We thought it was, but it turns out it's just a concept. <BR/><BR/>The reverse can work as well. In some species, especially of birds and fish, the males and females look so different from each other that it would never naturally occur to us that they fall under the same species. E.g. the peacock and the peahen, though there are better examples. There is a species of deep sea fish in which the females are <I>enormously</I> larger than the males. The male attaches himself to the female and lives parasitically off of her, doing nothing but providing her with sperm while she provides him with nutrients (and, I think, even circulates his blood for him). Even if seen together, the male would appear to be just some form of parasite until scientists could tell us that, in fact, they are of the same species. Once we discover that they are of the same species, we discover that they do share a universal in common even though it is no part of our concept of them ab initio.<BR/><BR/>The view you came close to expounding, but didn't quite, is, I believe, "concept nominalism." This is an easy trap to fall into. Some apparent universals really are just conceptual (How many planets are there? It depends on your definition.) It is easy to be lulled into thinking that <I>all</I> universals are simply concepts. There are a few problems with it. 1) It seems hopelessly anthropocentric. The species felis silvestris catus does not cease to be a species when humans aren't around. They will go on breeding with each other (and with no other species) even if we aren't there to observe it. 2) The direction of explanation appears to be backwards. Triangles fall under the concept of triangle <I>because</I> they are triangles. They don't get to be triangles because they fall under the concept. 3) There is also the problem of "backdoor realism." Bertrand Russell's argument for realism over nominalism was that the nominalist claims that when he speaks of something as a frog, he means only that it resembles other frogs and not that there is such a thing as frogness. To which Russell replied that resemblance is a relation - a universal, and the nominalist turns out to be just as realist as the realist.<BR/><BR/>This is all to say that, of course, I agree with you that we should be careful about what universals exist and what don't. You'll be hard-pressed to find anyone (not a professional philosopher) who's more careful about it than I am. Most importantly, I believe that one should go where the best argument lies and not be biased one way or the other. Whereas I think you're actually arguing that we should reject all universals out of hand until we are absolutely forced to accept them. I think this goes too far in the opposite direction. For what it's worth, colors are a commonly used example of universals in philosophy. You might have noticed that I have deliberately avoided using colors as universals, since I'm not sure they actually are universals. (There are serious boundary problems.)<BR/><BR/><I>Three points! First, I wouldn’t use the term “made to” for reasons already described.</I><BR/><BR/>Fair enough.<BR/><BR/><I>Second, I adhere to the Doubting Thomas principle. “But why should I assume that?” seems a perfectly appropriate initial response to me.</I><BR/><BR/>I've probably mentioned before where I think Descartes went wrong. Some doubts are unreasonable, so Descartes' project was mistaken from the beginning. I also entirely reject the criteria of certainty or infallibility as an appropriate barometer of knowledge. The Doubting Thomas Principle, in a universal form, is itself surely open to doubt (in fact, I'll flatly call it false). Rational doubt arises contextually when arguments or evidence are determined to be defective or insufficient.<BR/><BR/><I>And lastly but not leastly, we’re not at all comparing like with like because Darwin assembled material evidence for his theory. Plato’s meanwhile seems specifically designed to fall into the category of ‘undisprovable’. (“But I can’t see this Ideal Table.”; “Aha, that’s just my point!”) But what’s undisprovable is also ipso facto unprovable. Hence with him I tend to look for more material underpinnings, to what can be taken as concrete. (As said earlier, though, my real point about Plato is that this is a doctrine which is still with us.)</I><BR/><BR/>To clear up a bit of pedantry first, what is undisprovable is <I>not</I> also ipso facto unprovable. "There exists a frog" is undisprovable, but easily provable. All I have to do is produce a frog. <BR/><BR/>More seriously, again this expresses a desire for certainty or infallibility (even after saying that the strength of science is that its knowledge is provisional, i.e. it is <I>not</I> certain or infallible). It is easy to see the arguments against Platonism - empirical philosophy and the unwillingness to admit the existence of anything we can't sense (the pull of which is particularly strong on me, as I hope is clear - although empiricists tend to be ontologically inconsistent, granting the existence of things such as "quarks"), worries about whether Platonism is consistent, and worries about whether it is ontologically extravagant. The difficulties of nominalism, though, are just as grave. I do believe that "social constructionism," the strong kind which invalidates all scientific knowledge, naturally flows from nominalism and, besides that, it just seems silly. There are such things as qualities which particulars can have identically in common as any fool can see. (Numbers being an obvious example. But also mass, length, etc.) And, thus, I split the baby with my immanent realist view which seems to solve all the problems of nominalism without creating the problems of Platonism. But, if you put a gun to my head and asked me what my doubts about immanent realism were, it would be that I sometimes think it might be too nominalist to explain the world, not too Platonist.<BR/><BR/><I>A pedant writes - that would prove they died out not that they changed/ (Though of course dinosaurs did evolve massively, having millennia in which to do so.)</I><BR/><BR/>Nobody thought that dinosaurs proved evolution. However, they called into question the staticity of species. <I>Some</I> species clearly had gone extinct, thus Darwinism becomes more plausible.<BR/><BR/><I>Slightly confused now. Weren’t we talking about a ‘thought experiment’ which postulated that inequality could be acceptable if everyone’s living standards were simultaneously rising? I was responding to that, and basically saying ‘no’. In fact, I’ve mostly avoided even comparing the UK to the US so far, and tried to concentrate on what to me is the domestic example. Don’t say you’re confusing me with Dagonet? (Into that box with you, dammit!)</I><BR/><BR/>Ah, I didn't realize that you were responding "no" to my thought experiment. I find that strange, to say the least. A future where everybody is equally worse off is preferable to a future with inequality? This seems counter-intuitive to me, but I have no idea how I could go about arguing you out of that position.<BR/><BR/><I>While all previous historical examples are, I am the first to say, inadequate, they’re not non-existent! One might be the wave of factory occupations after the First World War. The subsequent wave in Spain in the Thirties is better known but the first was more widespread, it’s not unreasonable to call it a global wave. Not only does this fact bring the numbers of participants up, it also means it wasn’t tied to just one country or set of local conditions.</I><BR/><BR/>Unfortunately, it seemed principally to lead to the rise of fascism. I do have much more sympathy with worker's control than I do with command economies. I'm not at all convinced it could work for capital diversification reasons and it seems inevitable that it would be uncompetitive with a more dynamic economy. (But then if you don't care about raising living standards, this won't bother you at all.) I wonder why there aren't more experiments along these lines. Convince a bunch of workers to pool their resources and buy the means of production. (Capital diversification is probably the obvious answer, though.) Certainly, I'd rather live in Tito's Yugoslavia, organized something along the lines you're talking about, than I would in Stalin's Russia or Castro's Cuba.<BR/><BR/><I>In my (somewhat limited) experience there’s a tendency in American culture to confuse class with caste. At least after the over-ruling of segregation laws, there are no formal bars to social mobility. A poor black kid from the Projects of Detriot whose Dad is in jail can apply to be a merchant banker if he chooses. The point that in practical terms he’s somewhat unlikely to get the job seems to pass this logic by. But before I sound all anti-American, I’d say such attitudes are increasingly widespread over here.</I><BR/><BR/>To defend my countrymen's (perhaps) false belief, even those people who argue that there is no more social mobility in the U.S. than in Europe agree that this is a new thing. There is quite a lot of evidence that the U.S. had considerably more social mobility than Europe for decades, perhaps centuries (apart, of course, from various oppressed racial groups). There are reasons why the poor and dispossessed fled Europe to come to the U.S. in the 19th century and their descendants became middle class (or even rich, such as the Kennedys). Even in more recent times, every group has improved greatly in real income over the last 30 years except one which has stagnated, that group being white men without college degrees. Women, blacks, and other minorities have made enormous progress, whether due to socially liberal policies or for other reasons. The average black American has a higher per capita income (in purchasing power parity) than the average Swede (but with more inequality).<BR/><BR/><I>It was a simple point, really. Poor leftists don’t commission surveys because poor folks don’t. Those things cost money.</I><BR/><BR/>Oh, sure, but you also were doubting that they were leftists at all with the implication that ideology determined their results. Whereas I thought that the results were, prima facie, fairly plausible since it accords with my own experience with poor leftists in this country. For what it's worth, fraud is actually pretty rare in these sorts of sociological studies. The <I>interpretation</I> of such studies is often highly suspect and ideologically tinged, but outright fraud rarely occurs. And this was just a survey which doesn't leave much room for interpretation. (However, I raised possible doubts because of the variable of how the questions were asked. It's possible that the question could be phrased in such a way in which all leftists in Europe, but only rich leftists in the U.S. would be inclined to answer in a certain way.)Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-18599399422978990482009-02-27T18:37:00.000+00:002009-02-27T18:37:00.000+00:00When I say that all scientific knowledge is about ...<I>When I say that all scientific knowledge is about universals, I mean that it is about characteristics or qualities such as "mass," "energy," "acceleration," "genes," "humans," etc. It doesn't refer to just one particular entity (though, of course, it also refers to particulars which instantiate the universal), but to classes of entities, i.e. universals...<BR/><BR/>... Mostly because your theory is now, in my opinion, perfectly obvious. If we move from "socially constructed" to "socially filtered" or any other terminology which no longer denies validity to such knowledge, then I think just about everyone would agree with that.</I><BR/><BR/>Here I go sticking two quotes from you together again. I am now about to employ the philosophical argument that goes “nyah nyah nyah, rubs off me and sticks to you”, as chiefly practised in English school playgrounds in the early Seventies. For it seems to me that your first point is itself perfectly obvious! It’s perfectly true that science does try to generalise knowledge as much as it feasibly can, and that doesn’t induce in me much of a feeling to act like the villagers in the Frankenstein films.<BR/><BR/>This is perhaps echoing my earlier reply to Mr. Rilstone about the role of individual psychology in history. My intention is not to go from one extreme to the other, and I accept the existence of what’s technically known as ‘the middle’. My point is that to my mind the stick has been pushed too far one way.<BR/><BR/>Perhaps consequently, I think I continue to find ‘socially filtered’ too weak a term.. It suggests that this is merely a matter of certain thoughts being struck out, like round thoughts in a world of square holes. My point is that it’s not just a negative, that social conditions can actually make other thoughts more <I>thinkable.</I> If it has overly deterministic associations for some, let’s just add a rider dispelling those.<BR/><BR/>One example might be colour. It’s not that different cultures might have different conceptions of colour, though of course they do. It’s that colour in actuality is merely part of a spectrum, a continuum between shades which we find it convenient to divide into ‘colours’. Plus of course colour does not lie inherently inside an object, but is dynamically created, following the pattern of light falling upon it. This is something we know but (mostly) prefer to gloss over. It’s handy for us to think of colours as universal constants. (“I drive a blue car”, etc.) But they’re not. They’re colours because we say so.<BR/><BR/>But even (to return to your maths argument) were we to take something like the moons of Mars... You might say that Mars had two moons before humans had the ability to see them. I would say, while there may well have been those lumps of rock orbiting Mars, their ‘twoness’ comes out of a process of interaction with us observing them. Of course our observing didn’t <I>physically</I> change those lumps of rock, but that doesn’t alter what I’m saying. The fact that we count to two so readily in our heads can obscure to us that that’s what we’re doing, but we are.<BR/><BR/>I could see this slipping into a pedantic argument about categories (“what defines a moon’?” etc), but I think my point is a wider one. There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to take abstract knowledge from concrete observation, but we need to acknowledge that this is a process we humans do so is subject to human foibles and limitations.<BR/><BR/><I>it's no longer enough to say "Plato's theories clearly were meant to prop up the existing property rights regime" and thereby falsify his theories. Since we can agree that it is possible for Plato's arguments to both have that effect and still be true, then you still have to do the hard work of refuting Plato.</I><BR/><BR/>Three points! First, I wouldn’t use the term “made to” for reasons already described. Second, I adhere to the Doubting Thomas principle. “But <I>why</I> should I assume that?” seems a perfectly appropriate initial response to me. And lastly but not leastly, we’re not at all comparing like with like because Darwin assembled material evidence for his theory. Plato’s meanwhile seems specifically designed to fall into the category of ‘undisprovable’. (“But I can’t see this Ideal Table.”; “Aha, that’s just my point!”) But what’s undisprovable is also <I>ipso facto</I> unprovable. Hence with him I tend to look for more material underpinnings, to what can be taken as concrete. (As said earlier, though, my real point about Plato is that this is a doctrine which is still with us.)<BR/><BR/><I> The important thing about dinosaur fossils is that they could be clearly shown to be from an extinct species (the bones could not fit any existing species), thus evolution.</I><BR/><BR/>A pedant writes - that would prove they <I>died out</I> not that they <I>changed/</I> (Though of course dinosaurs did evolve massively, having millennia in which to do so.)<BR/><BR/>Couldn’t you just say they drowned in the Flood? Though the earlier-mentioned Guardian feature on UK Creationists described some very convoluted argument that the dinosaurs were taken onto the Ark but died off soon after. (With associated mental images of the Diplodicus being pushed up a narrow gangplank, or the T Rex being told God doesn’t want him to eat any of the other animals.) Perhaps they didn’t want to portray Noah to be remiss in following God’s instructions.<BR/><BR/><I>I see where you're coming from, but in order to compare societies (whether in different times or in different spaces), we have to compare their material well-being to each other.</I><BR/><BR/>Slightly confused now. Weren’t we talking about a ‘thought experiment’ which postulated that inequality could be acceptable if everyone’s living standards were simultaneously rising? I was responding to that, and basically saying ‘no’. In fact, I’ve mostly avoided even comparing the UK to the US so far, and tried to concentrate on what to me is the domestic example. Don’t say you’re confusing me with Dagonet? (Into that box with you, dammit!)<BR/><BR/><I> Now, of course, if there has never been a socialist country, then clearly I'd have a very difficult time showing that such a system works less well</I><BR/><BR/>While all previous historical examples are, I am the first to say, inadequate, they’re not non-existent! One might be the wave of factory occupations after the First World War. The subsequent wave in Spain in the Thirties is better known but the first was more widespread, it’s not unreasonable to call it a global wave. Not only does this fact bring the numbers of participants up, it also means it wasn’t tied to just one country or set of local conditions.<BR/><BR/>You could look at other examples. The Zapatistas are very fashionable among the young people, so I hear.<BR/><BR/><I> The Italian, Alberto Alesina, has written a book which claims that the reason for the discrepancy is because Americans are greater believers in social mobility, which stops the poor from being made unhappy by inequality. He believes their belief is untrue and there is no greater social mobility in the U.S. than in Europe.</I><BR/><BR/>In my (somewhat limited) experience there’s a tendency in American culture to confuse class with caste. At least after the over-ruling of segregation laws, there are no formal bars to social mobility. A poor black kid from the Projects of Detriot whose Dad is in jail can <I>apply</I> to be a merchant banker if he chooses. The point that in practical terms he’s somewhat <I>unlikely</I> to get the job seems to pass this logic by. But before I sound all anti-American, I’d say such attitudes are increasingly widespread over here.<BR/><BR/><I> How much experience do you have with poor American leftists? Because I have a great deal and I don't find this finding particularly difficult to believe.</I><BR/><BR/>It was a simple point, really. Poor leftists don’t commission surveys because poor folks don’t. Those things cost money.<BR/><BR/><I> he may not what you would consider a leftist.</I><BR/><BR/>No, he probably is. The political terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ come from the post-Revolutionary French Parliament. ‘Left’ therefore was and is a wing of capitalism, and should really be rejected by anti-capitalists. (I expect everyone’s had enough of my political definitions by now...)Gavin Burrowshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-22242251868340192822009-02-27T07:44:00.000+00:002009-02-27T07:44:00.000+00:00Apologies for asking another facetious question, b...<I>Apologies for asking another facetious question, but how would you label the argument that Blackpool is real?</I><BR/><BR/>I once had a conversation with a gentleman in which I gave him a primer on all sorts of various philosophical positions. These included Platonic realism, immanent realism, moral realism, direct realism, indirect realism, plus many other positions which don't include "realism" anywhere in their names. He eventually refused to believe that there were so many philosophical positions labeled "realism." If there was a genuine debate about the ontological status of Blackpool specifically, I have no doubt that the supporters of Blackpool's reality would be called "Blackpool realists."<BR/><BR/><I>Isn’t it fundamental to science that all knowledge is provisional? It’s like when Creationists home in on the first word of the theory of evolution... “you see? Even they admit it’s just a theory!” It might well be possible to question the whole basis of scientific thought, of course. But the notion that our knowledge is in itself ever-evolving and never ‘finished’ seems to me a good one. (Disclaimer: Physicists have sometimes spoken of a Theory of Everything. But a) no-one’s ever delivered on this and B) they were still talking of a Theory of Everything, leaving the door open for a Better Theory of Everything a bit later.)</I><BR/><BR/>I think I have confused you by introducing terminology without defining it. A "universal" is what particular things have in common, namely characteristics or qualities. They are repeatable entities which are instantiated in many different particular things. When I say that all scientific knowledge is about universals, I mean that it is about characteristics or qualities such as "mass," "energy," "acceleration," "genes," "humans," etc. It doesn't refer to just one particular entity (though, of course, it also refers to particulars which instantiate the universal), but to classes of entities, i.e. universals. I am saying nothing about whether scientific knowledge is provisional or eternal.<BR/><BR/><I>For this and other similar reasons, I believe it’s only meaningful to measure poverty as the differentiation between rich and poor within a society, and not in some absolutist term. This argument has nothing to do with ‘the politics of envy’, as Thatcher famously called them.</I><BR/><BR/>I see where you're coming from, but in order to compare societies (whether in different times or in different spaces), we have to compare their material well-being to each other. You appear to be saying that it's impossible to compare economic systems because we can't do a controlled scientific experiment. To a certain extent, of course, this is perfectly true, but I reject the argument that we can learn <I>nothing</I> from such comparisons.<BR/><BR/>I do generally agree with your examples. In the previous thread, you might recall that I mostly used such situations as North Korea/South Korea, West Germany/East Germany, etc. They're still not controlled experiments, but when they diverged, they had roughly similar cultures and resources. Now, of course, if there has never been a socialist country, then clearly I'd have a very difficult time showing that such a system works less well and we are left at an impasse especially since I'm not very interested in the theories or ideologies behind political science. I am principally interested in analyzing the empirical evidence.<BR/><BR/><I>I was partly citing Darwin because you still seemed half-convinced (apres Lewis) that anyone who suggests knowledge is socially constructed is really simply claiming it’s wrong. Which of course I’m not in this case. Knowledge can be socially constructed and still be valid. (Not going to use a loaded term like ‘right’.) As ultimately all knowledge can be said to be socially constructed, this is probably just as well.</I><BR/><BR/>You're perfectly correct about my view here. If you concede that knowledge can be valid, then we no longer have a disagreement. Mostly because your theory is now, in my opinion, perfectly obvious. If we move from "socially constructed" to "socially filtered" or any other terminology which no longer denies validity to such knowledge, then I think just about everyone would agree with that. However, the weapon has been removed from the arsenal in that case. It's no longer enough to say "Plato's theories clearly were meant to prop up the existing property rights regime" and thereby falsify his theories. Since we can agree that it is possible for Plato's arguments to both have that effect and still be true, then you still have to do the hard work of refuting Plato. Whether Adolf Hitler's daddy was mean to him might be interesting from a psychological standpoint, but no longer touches his ideas.<BR/><BR/><I>Not heard this before. Didn’t geology itself weigh against the ‘young earth’ theory by then? </I><BR/><BR/>The important thing about dinosaur fossils is that they could be clearly shown to be from an extinct species (the bones could not fit any existing species), thus evolution. The 'young earth' theory was still fairly respectable at this time. Their theory for explaining the geological problems was "catastrophism," that cataclysmic events of unknown origin caused the strata to change. It was in retreat by the time of Darwin (particularly due to the influence of Charles Lyell), but still not falsified. That wouldn't happen until radiometric dating was developed in the early 20th century. The strata alone does not provide conclusive evidence.<BR/><BR/><I>While we all tend to take up the studies which suit us and question the methodology of the ones that don’t, I’m betting here that survey wasn’t made by rich leftists. (And we can probably be fairly certain that it wasn’t poor leftists.)</I><BR/><BR/>They certainly aren't poor. Two are professors at Harvard and one at Imperial College. (Interestingly, none of the three professors is American by birth. One is Italian, one is Argentinan, and the third is a New Zealander.) The Italian, Alberto Alesina, has written a book which claims that the reason for the discrepancy is because Americans are greater believers in social mobility, which stops the poor from being made unhappy by inequality. He believes their belief is untrue and there is no greater social mobility in the U.S. than in Europe. On the other hand, he's also written a paper called "Why the Left Should Learn to Love Liberalism" so, while he does identify as a leftist (and, indeed, a rich leftist), he may not what <I>you</I> would consider a leftist. I was unable to get as good a handle on the political beliefs of the other two authors.<BR/><BR/>You're creeping into Bulverism there, though. How much experience do you have with poor American leftists? Because I have a great deal and I don't find this finding particularly difficult to believe.<BR/><BR/><I>Racial diversity causing inequality & all that</I><BR/><BR/>I certainly never said that racial diversity causes inequality. Read my above comment more closely. What I said was that racial diversity is highly correlated with inequality. That's a fact. Saying that "racial diversity causes inequality" or "inequality causes racial diversity" is purely speculative. When I say "correlated," please do not mentally substitute "caused." When I say correlated, I do so for a very good reason. Were I to speculate on a reason, it would be that it's likely easier to attain social cohesion if your society is homogeneous such as Denmark or Japan. (The most equal societies in Africa - Mauritania, Tanzania, and Algeria - are the least racially diverse. Bolivia and Brazil, amazingly diverse populations, have some of the highest inequality rates in the world.) This is probably true regardless of whether the more economically successful group is in the majority or in the minority. But that's just speculation.<BR/><BR/><I>Plus you keep on acting as if I do not exist.</I><BR/><BR/>I actually find you very funny most of the time, Dagonet, but you're far too interested in trying to find an ideological box to stuff me into and inferring my beliefs and/or putting words into my mouth. You insist on seeing both Mr. Burrows and myself as archetypes and it really should be crystal clear by now that we are not.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-25483877906147413242009-02-26T16:51:00.000+00:002009-02-26T16:51:00.000+00:00"I don't think "Darwinian theory can..."I don't think "Darwinian theory can be said to be socially constructed so Darwin did bugger all" follows any more than ""Darwinian theory can be said to be socially constructed so must be wrong.""<BR/><BR/>Why, neither do I: though I am wary of implications that other kinds of society would discover other, equally valid biological systems.<BR/><BR/>The presence of superficially similar theories, that (most of all) people wanted to be true (for reasons both utopian & traditional) has been a decided disadvantage to evolutionary science, rather than a benefit. Of course, you might consider that one of insidious "ideology"s violations of matter: in wich case I would (with reservations for furter ideological implications) agree.<BR/><BR/>As for biological determism, the compitition with fundementalism seems obvious. Other than objectivism, what else has "capitalist" ideology got?I. Dallhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03427385974208305067noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-20430238534131731522009-02-26T16:03:00.000+00:002009-02-26T16:03:00.000+00:00Dagonet said:That aside, what makes Darwin so diff...Dagonet said:<BR/><I>That aside, what makes Darwin so different from his own time (Though not, possibly, "the greatest biological observational scientist in history") was that he viewed evolution as a technical matter rather than one of general conjecture</I><BR/><BR/>I don't think "Darwinian theory can be said to be socially constructed so Darwin did bugger all" follows any more than ""Darwinian theory can be said to be socially constructed so must be wrong."<BR/><BR/>If Darwin hadn't devised the theory of natural selection, we can be fairly certain some other bugger would. (And in fact did.) But Darwin did most of the research and the methodology, so I'm happy for him to have his due.<BR/><BR/><I>Wonder if the fundementalists are "really" so worked up about evolution because they see it as an fellow right wing ideology, & hence competion?</I><BR/><BR/>The two groups <I>should</I> be rivals, but I'm not sure how much they are in practice.Gavin Burrowshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-74633594454513338062009-02-26T09:46:00.000+00:002009-02-26T09:46:00.000+00:00Mr. Stevens:Sorry about the "heartless capita...Mr. Stevens:<BR/>Sorry about the "heartless capitalist" meme, but you DO insist on saying things such as "For one thing, I am in general very skeptical that a lack of money is the real problem in poor communities." I suppose its all part of the "capitalist-Darwinist fetisch for progress & poor people just being born that way" idelogical framework? Racial diversity causing inequality & all that<BR/>Plus you keep on acting as if I do not exist.<BR/>Mr. Burrows: sorry about the "evil Stalinist, Lysenkoist even" meme, but you DO insist on calling me a "state capitalist" (or just "capitalist", now, so you & Mr. Stevens seem to agree on that point), wich, though worringly slave-owning, technical & objective sounding, fortunatly seems at base materialistic.<BR/><BR/>That aside, what makes Darwin so different from his own time (Though not, possibly, "the greatest biological observational scientist in history") was that he viewed evolution as a technical matter rather than one of general conjecture (due to influence from feudal rural life, possibly)<BR/><BR/>Mr. Burrows wrote: "Sweden was a particularly egregious case, but it was practised in the UK and US as well."<BR/>Sweden was particulary bad due to being state capitalist: they were afraid the Welfare Society would mean Survival Of The Unfittest. That it would actually mean "Survival Of Those Most Fit For A Welfare State" is something a lot of us still do not quite grasp. Indeed, it seems to me that one of the greatest threats to evolution as a scientific theory is our apparent need to turn it into a life philosophy or a political system.<BR/>Wonder if the fundementalists are "really" so worked up about evolution because they see it as an fellow right wing ideology, & hence competion?<BR/><BR/>No wonder Dawkins gets frustrated sometimes.I. Dallhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03427385974208305067noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-19585182599122513952009-02-25T12:09:00.000+00:002009-02-25T12:09:00.000+00:00Phil Masters said:I'm not sure that "influenced by...Phil Masters said:<BR/><I>I'm not sure that "influenced by the social and intellectual environment" is quite the same as "socially constructed", is it?</I><BR/><BR/>If ‘constructed’ is too strong a word for you, ‘influenced’ seems too weak a one for me. I was actually using it instead of ‘constrained’ in the sense it has a positive association – of something being built up that wasn’t there previously. That said, I’m not too hung up on the term itself. I think earlier we had ‘filtered’. <BR/><BR/><I>One I like is the idea - possibly not confirmed, but certainly consistent with what I know - that Newton was able to come up with a working theory of gravity because he had a taste for rather barking Hermetic/alchemical magical ideas, which allowed for the possibility of action at a distance. There were apparently plenty of scientists at the time who had firmly discarded all that magical mumbo-jumbo, and for whom Newtonian gravity was therefore quite offensive. (No, that's not to say that gravity is magical action at a distance. But explaining the causal mechanism is certainly a pig, even post Einstein.) Newton didn't have such problems, and cracked the problem</I><BR/><BR/>Not quite sure which way round you mean this. You could certainly take it as a counter-example to my notion, that Newton was (to coin a terrible term) ‘thinking outside the box’ of contemporary science. He was of course shovelling concepts in from <I>another</I> box, but to my mind that still counts!<BR/><BR/><I>One can also find Marxists who'll tell you that application of the Marxist dialectic enabled Soviet science to achieve wonderful things, and who can wheel out illustrations. Actually, those illustrations may well be valid, I'd guess; thinking in dialectical terms (and maybe obsessing on class relations or something) may well be a useful approach to some problems</I><BR/><BR/>The only way I can imagine this to be true would automatically be true of <I>all</I> science, Hegel’s notion that knowledge came from interaction and experimentation not passive contemplation. Scientists have pretty much taken one side over that one, I think. Even I don’t think quantum mechanics benefits from class analysis too much!<BR/><BR/>Of course some liked to argue that all this proved Marxism <I>was</I> a science, as full of ilalienable laws as much as physics. Some people say very silly things indeed...Gavin Burrowshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-50052100704994007162009-02-25T00:47:00.000+00:002009-02-25T00:47:00.000+00:00There are psychological experiments which show tha...<I>There are psychological experiments which show that people, perhaps even the majority of people, really will punish themselves so that other people don't receive undeserved rewards, but such decisions certainly seem irrational to me.</I><BR/><BR/>When we're talking about human happiness, I'm really not sure that rationality has very much to do with everything. Well, one might be able to construct a rational and coherent theory of scientific psychology that covered the subject well enough, but I bet it'd be extremely complex and non-intuitive, and I don't think it's really been done yet. Meanwhile, expecting simple economic rationality to maximise happiness for anyone (let alone for everyone, in some Benthamite fashion) looks to me like a non-starter.<BR/><BR/><I>Knowledge can be socially constructed and still be valid.</I><BR/><BR/>I'm not sure that "influenced by the social and intellectual environment" is quite the same as "socially constructed", is it? Because one can have lots of fun finding examples of knowledge being so influenced without getting deep into subjectivism.<BR/><BR/>One I like is the idea - possibly not confirmed, but certainly consistent with what I know - that Newton was able to come up with a working theory of gravity because he had a taste for rather barking Hermetic/alchemical magical ideas, which allowed for the possibility of action at a distance. There were apparently plenty of scientists at the time who had firmly discarded all that magical mumbo-jumbo, and for whom Newtonian gravity was therefore quite offensive. (No, that's not to say that gravity is magical action at a distance. But explaining the causal mechanism is certainly a pig, even post Einstein.) Newton didn't have such problems, and cracked the problem.<BR/><BR/>One can also find Marxists who'll tell you that application of the Marxist dialectic enabled Soviet science to achieve wonderful things, and who can wheel out illustrations. Actually, those illustrations may well be valid, I'd guess; thinking in dialectical terms (and maybe obsessing on class relations or something) may well be a useful approach to some problems. Doesn't make Soviet science all that and a bag of chips; it just means that some intellectual environments are good places to tackle some problems.Phil Mastershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12533451060065715833noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-88662867252477848792009-02-24T18:30:00.000+00:002009-02-24T18:30:00.000+00:00Andrew Stevens said...It's called realism because ...Andrew Stevens said...<BR/><I>It's called realism because it's realism about universals, i.e. the argument is that universals are real</I><BR/><BR/>Apologies for asking another facetious question, but how would you label the argument that Blackpool is real?<BR/><BR/><I>Indeed, all our scientific knowledge is about universals.</I><BR/><BR/>Isn’t it fundamental to science that all knowledge is provisional? It’s like when Creationists home in on the first word of the theory of evolution... “you see? Even they admit it’s just a theory!” It might well be possible to question the whole basis of scientific thought, of course. But the notion that our knowledge is in itself ever-evolving and never ‘finished’ seems to me a good one. (Disclaimer: Physicists have sometimes spoken of a Theory of Everything. But a) no-one’s ever delivered on this and B) they were still talking of a <I>Theory</I> of Everything, leaving the door open for a Better Theory of Everything a bit later.)<BR/><BR/><I>A thought experiment. We have two possible futures we can choose from. In one of them, we will all be equally miserable. In the other, every single person will be better off than in the first possible future, but some people will be better off than others. Which possible future should we choose? You seem to be suggesting we should choose the first. I choose the second.</I> <BR/><BR/>An example might make my meaning clearer. In Britain it’s much more common for working class people to have cars now than it was (say) forty years ago, which might seem to suit your argument. (They may not have yachts or limousines but at least they now have <I>cars,</I> dammit!) But cars are increasingly becoming something little short of a <I>necessity</I> today. You may well need a car to get to work, possibly just to get to the shops. And of course all the associated costs (petrol, MOT etc.) are still there. So how much is the car a boon and how much a bind? At the very least, it’s not straightforward.<BR/><BR/>For this and other similar reasons, I believe it’s only meaningful to measure poverty as the differentiation between rich and poor within a society, and not in some absolutist term. This argument has nothing to do with ‘the politics of envy’, as Thatcher famously called them.<BR/><BR/><I>To go a bit further on the evolution bit, there were many evolutionary theorists before Darwin. Lamarck is probably the most famous, but he was by no means the only one. (Darwin's grandfather Erasmus, for one, anticipated Lamarck.) Darwin is famous for "inventing" the Theory of Evolution only because he came up with the correct mechanism (as did Wallace contemporaneously.</I><BR/><BR/>Your correspondence with Phil Masters over this is interesting, but seems to stray from my original point, that for evolution to be devised as a theory it first needed to be thinkable, that knowledge isn’t just about empiricism but must also be socially constructed. Yet in your remarks above you seem to be close to agreeing with me, that evolution evolved piecemeal from several different sources.<BR/><BR/>I was partly citing Darwin because you still seemed half-convinced (<I>apres</I> Lewis) that anyone who suggests knowledge is socially constructed is really simply claiming it’s wrong. Which of course I’m not in this case. Knowledge can be socially constructed and still be valid. (Not going to use a loaded term like ‘right’.) As ultimately <I>all</I> knowledge can be said to be socially constructed, this is probably just as well.<BR/><BR/>(Nor, incidentally, do I think it does down Darwin’s contribution. If the theory had become <I>thinkable</I> he was still the main one who <I>thought</I> it – assembled the greatest amount of evidence and developed the theory etc.)<BR/><BR/><I>And, yes, dinosaur fossils being found and identified from extinct species in the early 19th century was probably another important catalyst for the theory.</I><BR/><BR/>Not heard this before. Didn’t geology itself weigh against the ‘young earth’ theory by then? <BR/><BR/><I>I know of at least one survey which purported to show that the only people who are made unhappy by inequality in the United States are rich leftists, while both leftists and the poor are unhappy about inequality in Europe, but I don't know how accurate that study is either.</I><BR/><BR/>While we all tend to take up the studies which suit us and question the methodology of the ones that don’t, I’m betting here that survey wasn’t made by rich leftists. (And we can probably be fairly certain that it wasn’t <I>poor</I> leftists.)Gavin Burrowshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16347163260510316959noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-89717154155582310982009-02-24T17:21:00.000+00:002009-02-24T17:21:00.000+00:00To draw a fine but sometimes crucial distinction, ...<I>To draw a fine but sometimes crucial distinction, the significant thing for Darwin is not that losers die, it's that winners reproduce. (Somewhat tautologically, even, in that the Darwinian definition of a winner is a creature which reproduces.) Obviously, the first requirement for this is not being dead... But sexual selection, for example, probably doesn't work very well in an ultra-Malthusian environment, where everyone is too busy contending for food to worry about the prettiness of anyone else's tail feathers.</I><BR/><BR/>Even more finely, it's that winners experience greater differential reproductive success (which covers both). I do see where you're coming from, but recall that Darwin obsessed over the peacock's tail principally because his original theory couldn't account for it. Darwin wrote, "The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick" which caused him to develop the theory of sexual selection. Darwin's full theory is certainly richer and more robust than the simpler theory inspired by Malthus, I agree.<BR/><BR/><I>I believe that the technical term there, by the way, is "Fallacy of the Excluded Middle". And given that, I seem to recall (and yes, I'd have to dig around to verify this), it's been suggested from sociological surveys that societies with lower levels of inequality are happier and less stressed than those with more of it, answers to a less loaded version of the question might not be as clear-cut as all that.</I><BR/><BR/>The thought experiment was not meant to give an answer to anybody's question about economic systems. The point of it was to show that "a more equal society" cannot be <I>categorically</I> more important than a wealthier society, as Mr. Burrows seemed to be suggesting. Indeed, if anything, it seems like it <I>ought</I> to be the other way. Another thought experiment: you are offered 10,000 pounds more a year by a mysterious benefactor. But he will only give it to you if your neighbor, who is already wealthier and better off than you are, is given 50,000 pounds more a year. Would you really turn it down? There are psychological experiments which show that people, perhaps even the majority of people, really will punish themselves so that other people don't receive undeserved rewards, but such decisions certainly seem irrational to me.<BR/><BR/>The sociological studies you mention may or may not be accurate. Inequality is highly correlated with poverty. (China and Mexico are more unequal than, say, the United States, one of the more unequal of the rich Western democracies. Japan and Denmark are the least unequal societies.) Inequality is also highly correlated with racial diversity. (But there is at least one non-racially diverse, rich society which has fairly high levels of inequality, that being Hong Kong.) So there are lots of confounding factors; it's hard to isolate just inequality by itself and decide what effect it has on happiness.<BR/><BR/>I know of at least one survey which purported to show that the only people who are made unhappy by inequality in the United States are rich leftists, while both leftists and the poor are unhappy about inequality in Europe, but I don't know how accurate that study is either.<BR/><BR/>Of course, we also tend to look at income when measuring inequality and it's not clear that this is correct. Consumption seems to be a better measure of equality or inequality and consumption is generally much more equal than income is.<BR/><BR/>However, this is not to laud inequality. There is evidence that greater inequality is correlated with lower social cohesion. The direction of causation is unclear, but there is an intuitive force to the idea that greater inequality causes less social cohesion. I could certainly accept that there might be a thought experiment which someone could design where I'd choose less inequality even though it meant that the worst off were even worse off, but it's much harder to design than the thought experiments I've suggested. (Perhaps one where the poorest were worse off by one penny while the richest were worse off by billions of dollars.)Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-31956460594224578722009-02-24T08:49:00.000+00:002009-02-24T08:49:00.000+00:00To draw a fine but sometimes crucial distinction, ...To draw a fine but sometimes crucial distinction, the significant thing for Darwin is not that losers die, it's that winners <I>reproduce</I>. (Somewhat tautologically, even, in that the Darwinian definition of a winner is a creature which reproduces.) Obviously, the first requirement for this is not being dead... But sexual selection, for example, probably doesn't work very well in an ultra-Malthusian environment, where everyone is too busy contending for food to worry about the prettiness of anyone else's tail feathers.<BR/><BR/><I>A thought experiment. We have two possible futures we can choose from. In one of them, we will all be equally miserable. In the other, every single person will be better off than in the first possible future, but some people will be better off than others. Which possible future should we choose?</I><BR/><BR/>I believe that the technical term there, by the way, is "Fallacy of the Excluded Middle". And given that, I seem to recall (and yes, I'd have to dig around to verify this), it's been suggested from sociological surveys that societies with lower levels of inequality are happier and less stressed than those with more of it, answers to a less loaded version of the question might not be as clear-cut as all that.Phil Mastershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12533451060065715833noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-90538133348378605312009-02-23T17:07:00.000+00:002009-02-23T17:07:00.000+00:00Just to clarify what I mean since I don't think I ...Just to clarify what I mean since I don't think I was very clear.<BR/><BR/>You say:<BR/><BR/><I>But a Malthusian environment could generate, say, Lamarckian evolution just as easily as Darwinian, if Lamarckian evolution happened to work.</I><BR/><BR/>Well, yes. But the Lamarckian mechanism does not <I>need</I> a Malthusian environment. A simple environmental change and "soft inheritance" would cause evolution even without competition for resources. The Darwinian mechanism <I>requires</I> a Malthusian environment and this is the key distinction.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-7752509560925594092009-02-23T15:45:00.000+00:002009-02-23T15:45:00.000+00:00Malthus's essay certainly leads to the correct mec...Malthus's essay certainly leads to the correct mechanism. It was Malthus's insight that competition for natural resources causes losers to die which led <I>both</I> Darwin and Wallace to natural selection. (Had it occasioned the idea in only one of them, I'd be more inclined to agree with you that it wasn't that significant.) I certainly don't disagree that Malthus was only an inspiration for Darwin's work and Darwin certainly did all the important and tedious work necessary to support the theory (which is why Wallace was happy to yield precedence to Darwin on the theory).<BR/><BR/>And, yes, dinosaur fossils being found and identified from extinct species in the early 19th century was probably another important catalyst for the theory.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-28684372081474393962009-02-23T09:15:00.000+00:002009-02-23T09:15:00.000+00:00It was Malthus who suggested the correct mechanism...<I>It was Malthus who suggested the correct mechanism to both men.</I><BR/><BR/>Umm, really? I confess that I haven't read Malthus in the original, but I never understood that there was <I>anything</I> in his work that would have lead to the concept of natural selection of variations. What he described - and what Darwin certainly acknowledged as crucial to his development of evolution - was the idea of a highly competitive environment - the situation that forces evolution to occur. But a Malthusian environment could generate, say, Lamarckian evolution just as easily as Darwinian, if Lamarckian evolution happened to work.<BR/><BR/>I think that Darwin got the crucial <I>mechanism</I> mostly by virtue of being a Victorian country gentleman who could and did watch dog and cattle and so on being selectively bred for specific features. (His correspondence with pigeon fanciers is apparently vast.) Of course, plenty of other people could observe that, but Darwin happened to be possibly the greatest <I>naturalist</I> - the greatest biological observational scientist - in history. Malthus did give him reason to realise that a species would end up operating in a competitive, increasingly selective environment, while the Beagle voyage (and the gardens of Down House, and all the stuff with beetles from Cambridge) gave him detailed first-hand experience of the sort of thing that people like Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin had picked up from the scientific flowering of the eighteenth century - an awareness of the sheer diversity of life, its complexity and peculiarities and a need for an explanation. Meanwhile, the geological parts of that flowering made the idea of an old Earth look likely, and turned up all those dinosaur fossils to allow the possibility of species extinction.<BR/><BR/>Actually, I believe that at least one scientist had come up with a complete theory of evolution by natural selection some time before Darwin and Wallace, and had published it in the appendix to a forestry manual or something. It just wasn't noticed. People were becoming aware that some kind of evolutionary theory was, frankly, necessary; Erasmus Darwin sketched the outline, Lamarck offered a mechanism that didn't fit the facts. Describing the correct mechanism in detail, with a huge volume of supporting evidence, needed hard-working observational naturalist/theoreticians like Darwin and Wallace - otherwise, and especially before Mendel, it would have just looked like another free-floating idea with no particular value.<BR/><BR/>But Malthus was surely just one small input to Darwin's accomplishment. The fact that Darwin could and did describe and discuss the basics of sexual selection shows that he was thinking far beyond the simplicities of Malthusian emiseration as a source of selective pressures.Phil Mastershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12533451060065715833noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-55308476965409659112009-02-23T07:34:00.000+00:002009-02-23T07:34:00.000+00:00To go a bit further on the evolution bit, there we...To go a bit further on the evolution bit, there were many evolutionary theorists before Darwin. Lamarck is probably the most famous, but he was by no means the only one. (Darwin's grandfather Erasmus, for one, anticipated Lamarck.) Darwin is famous for "inventing" the Theory of Evolution only because he came up with the correct mechanism (as did Wallace contemporaneously). It was Malthus who suggested the correct mechanism to both men.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-29857051355060668472009-02-23T07:05:00.000+00:002009-02-23T07:05:00.000+00:00I did stumble upon Armstrong during my rather rudi...<I>I did stumble upon Armstrong during my rather rudimentary Googling. So the ideal table doesn’t lie in some superior realm but is somehow inherently inside the sum total of the actual tables, like a kernel inside a nut?<BR/><BR/>(I have to admit calling all these forms of ‘realism’ amuses me. It’s like the way in Britain private schools are called ‘public schools.’)</I><BR/><BR/>It's called realism because it's realism about universals, i.e. the argument is that universals are real. The questions about universals are:<BR/><BR/>1) Do universals exist?<BR/>2) If not, why does it seem as if they do? (I.e. why do we have words and ideas referring to them and knowledge seemingly about them. Indeed, all our scientific knowledge is about universals.)<BR/>3) If universals do exist, does their existence depend upon particulars?<BR/><BR/>If you answer no to 1, you are a nominalist and must answer 2. If you answer yes to 1, you are a realist and must answer 3. If you answer yes to 3, you're an immanent realist and if you answer no to 3, you're a Platonic realist (sometimes called a transcendent realist).<BR/><BR/>The book I would recommend on the subject is Armstrong's Nominalism and Realism. Perhaps someone else reading this thread can suggest a modern nominalist. David Lewis's early stuff, might be the best defense of nominalism, but since he later abandoned nominalism for modal realism, I am hesitant to suggest it. Quine, while a realist about abstract objects, was a nominalist about universals generally.<BR/><BR/>It has been suggested that the current debate between scientists and those who believe in the social construction of science is due to an unstated nominalist metaphysical view held by the social constructionists and an unstated realist view held by the scientists. Because they don't even realize that this is what they are debating, they tend to shout past one another.<BR/><BR/><I>I have to say this sounds like a circular argument. They got to know more about biology in the 18th century by knowing more about it? There was enough info around to deduce natural selection well before Darwin, that’s simply without doubt. Why did this theory arrive (in not one but two places) when it did?</I><BR/><BR/>Oh, that's easy. Thomas Malthus.<BR/><BR/><I>Even our current market-oriented government concedes that the only meaningful measure of poverty is relative. Absolute measures end up as arbitrary. A poor person in the UK might not be as poor as a poor person in Bangladesh, but that point would only become relevant were he to move here. Hence the only sensible way to measure poverty is in the gap between the rich and the poor. This has increased exponentially in the UK. In the Seventies, a company director earned on average ten times the average wage. Now it is something like a hundred times.</I><BR/><BR/>A thought experiment. We have two possible futures we can choose from. In one of them, we will all be equally miserable. In the other, every single person will be better off than in the first possible future, but some people will be better off than others. Which possible future should we choose? You seem to be suggesting we should choose the first. I choose the second.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.com