Oxford University Press's Blog, page 329

Werner Herzog’s hall of mirrors

Werner Herzog turns 75 this September and remains as productive as ever. More than a filmmaker – he directs operas, instructs online courses, and occasionally makes cameo appearances on television shows including Parks & Recreation and The Simpsons. He has been directing films for nearly six decades, and he released three feature-length films within months of each other in 2016. One should, of course, avoid speaking in terms of Herzog’s “late” period insofar as one cannot predict the future. His most recent works may, in the end, come to be associated with a “middle period.” In trying to make sense of them, one might prefer to ask whether Herzog’s style has matured.

On the one hand, his nearly seventy films are astonishingly diverse. They are set in places as far removed from one another as Alaska, Antarctica, the Himalayas, and Peru. On the other hand, Herzog continues to devote himself to the same set of themes and concerns as he did in his earliest works. Apocalyptic thought, to take one example, remains a frequently recurring preoccupation. In many of his films, humans are identified as the temporary inhabitants of this planet—a sentiment indicated by the epigraph on screen at the beginning of his renowned Fitzcarraldo (1982): “The forest Indians call this land Cayahari Yacu, the land in which God was not finished with creation. Only after the disappearance of man, they believe, will God return to finish his work.” This epigraph repeats the folkloric beliefs attributed to native Peruvians in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), and it can also be linked to the Mayan creation myths that are read into the voiceover narrations of one of his very first films, Fata Morgana (1969).

This same theme is no less evident in Herzog’s latest films, such as Salt and Fire (2016), which he wrote and directed, based on a short story by Tom Bissell. Set and filmed in Bolivia, Michael Shannon plays Matt Riley, an eccentric CEO who has a fascination with anamorphic works of art and a pet parrot capable of quoting aloud from Ecclesiastes. The film’s turning point comes as Riley brings a scientist named Laura Sommerfel, played by the popular German star Veronica Ferres, to Uturuncu, a dormant volcano, where he abandons her along with two partially blind boys. He explains to her that when Uturuncu erupts humankind will vanish as a species. Riley, like many of Herzog’s characters, envisions our disappearance from the Earth. Herzog’s mise-en-scène encourages us to envision it as well.

The film’s variations in tone and strangely stylized performances vexed its viewers, and more than one critic ranked it among the director’s worst films. Yet, the film is not all that different from those that preceded it: the vast salt flats that constitute Salt and Fire’s visual centerpiece resemble the Antarctica on display in Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (2007), and aerial shots of unpeopled landscapes resemble the footage of Kuwait Herzog included in Lessons of Darkness (1992). This feature film trades on viewers’ memories of Herzog’s other films, turning the body of work into a tapestry with themes that appear and reappear. Many auteurs rely on recurring motifs, but moments of self-citation are rarely so explicit.

The same is true of Herzog’s documentaries in which his style as an interviewer is readily identifiable. In Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (2016), Herzog’s familiar intonation seems to offer the viewer a contract: certain documentary conventions will be disregarded, and a special set of rules applies. The patterns in which cameras move down corridors or linger too long on scientists’ faces all are recognizable from films such as Encounters at the End of the World, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), and The Wild Blue Yonder (2005). At this point in his body of work, a number of these shots have been seen before, and, to those familiar with his filmmaking, aspects of Lo and Behold may feel a bit like, as the critic Nick Pinkerton in his review for Sight & Sound called it, “Herzog by the algorithm.”

The remains of the ship used in Fitzcarraldo. Dr. Eugen Lehle, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Apart from the fact that Lo and Behold and Salt and Fire were released in the same year, the two are also connected through the appearances of the scientist Lawrence Krauss. In Salt and Fire, Krauss plays a fictional role: he is Riley’s right-hand man, and he speaks in elliptical maxims such as, “The noblest place for a man to die is the place he dies the deadest.” In Lo and Behold, however, he appears as himself, a cosmologist from Arizona State University, who rhapsodizes apocalyptically about what would happen if the planet were subjected to a solar flare substantial enough to disable the internet. Krauss envisions modern civilization’s collapse, and says that he prefers to make predictions on the grandest scale possible—in eons rather than decades. It is no surprise that Herzog was drawn to Krauss. In terms of apocalyptic standpoints, the two of them are kindred spirits.

Herzog has had a career-long fascination with envisioning humanity’s end, and with a type of science fiction that looks back to an age before ours—a time prior to what we now call the anthropocene—in order to find clues about what is to come. But the real signature of the mature Herzog is his capacity to draw on, retool, and revisit his earlier work. He has built for himself and for us a hall of mirrors. The question remains whether all of this self-citation acts as an obstacle to new ideas.

Featured Image credit: Werner Herzon in Venice, 1991. Gorup de Basanez, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons .  

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Organ Donation Week: A reading list

In light of Organ Donation Week (4-11th September 2017), we have drawn together a collection of articles around the same theme. Our reading list includes articles and chapters which inform, showcase, and discuss the latest research, key issues, and cases of interest in organ donation.

The collection offers a sample of the breadth of content available on this topic – from principles of organ donation, to the impact of donor age and health, a look back on ten years since the first face transplantation, and much more.

Hover your cursor around the interactive image below to reveal details of each item, and click to read more. The collection will be free to read until 1 December 2017.

Featured image credit: Photo by sasint. CC0 public domain via Pixabay. 

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What drives displacement and refuge?

Global refugee numbers are at their highest levels since the end of World War II, but the system in place to deal with them, based upon a humanitarian list of imagined “basic needs,” has changed little.

In this excerpt from Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World, authors Paul Collier and Alexander Betts explain the cause and effect of mass violence, a far too common pre-cursor to refugee crises and global displacement.

People seeking refuge are not fleeing poverty, they are fleeing danger. The flight for refuge happens when a society ceases to provide security for its people. For one reason or another, it falls into violent disorder. During the decade 1935– 45 Europe fell into such disorder. The rise of fascism made Germany dangerous for Jews, and triggered a civil war in Spain. An analogous ideology in Japan supported an invasion of China. Each of these events created huge civilian dislocations. Then the Second World War ravaged entire regions. But the dangers that have produced the current vast refugee problem have had very different origins.

This, indeed, is the first big awkward fact about mass violence: many different circumstances can bring it about. Violent societies are analogous to Tolstoy’s unhappy families: they each become violent in their own way. They are best defined by what they are not: safe for ordinary people.

No society is completely safe. In the United States black men face a heightened risk of being shot by the police; in Saudi Arabia adulterous women are at risk of being stoned; in Russia it would be unwise to denounce President Putin. Each of these is reprehensible, and a worthy focus of concern. In some cases, when individual risk is severe and targeted, people may need to seek asylum. But, for the most part, this is not what is driving the flight to refuge – it is vital to distinguish mass violence from such manifestations of individual insecurity. Mass violence is rare; insecurities are pervasive. A failure to delineate mass violence properly would drive us to seek ‘solutions’ in the construction of some imagined idyllic society: idealized versions of Sweden or Montana according to taste. The desperation that leads people to abandon their homes to seek refuge is too serious a phenomenon for such romanticism. So our focus is on the circumstances in which a society collapses into mass violence; not those in which awful things happen to some people.

Even with this tourniquet around the problem, mass violence has numerous causes.

The traditional source of violence is inter- state conflict. The violence that dislocated civilian life in China in the 1930s, Russia in the 1940s, and Korea in the 1950s happened because of invasions from hostile neighbours. Hence, one condition for security is that a country be sufficiently strong militarily to protect itself from invasion by foreign enemies. Many countries may not even have such enemies.

Refugee children from Syria at a clinic in Ramtha, northern Jordan from DFID – UK Department for International Development. CC-BY-20 via Wikimedia Commons.

If mass violence is not brought from abroad, it must originate at home. Such disorder is unusual and only comes about if two very different sources of internal security both fail at the same time.

The most attractive source of internal security is legitimacy. Most states, whether democratic or not, have sufficient legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens for people to be willing to comply with the rules. Those states whose legitimacy is accepted by a large majority of citizens need far fewer resources in order to enforce their rules. Britain can get by with a small and unarmed police force; North Korea needs the capacity for state violence against individual citizens to be so substantial as to be a constant reminder.

Yet, despite lacking legitimacy, North Korea has not collapsed into mass violence. Kim III maintains order in the same way as Kim II and Kim I: by brute repression. Brute repression threatens mass violence against citizens: were there to be an uprising, people would probably be slaughtered in their thousands, but the threat is latent. It is so awful, and so credible, that it does not need to be used.

Evidently, what matters for domestic security is the extent of state legitimacy relative to the capacity of the state for coercive force. All states need some coercive force because no government, however inclusive and responsive, wins universal acceptance. All societies include recalcitrant oddballs who regard their grievances as licence for violence. On conventional criteria, Sweden in the 1980s is about as close as any state has ever come to Earthly perfection. But this did not prevent its Prime Minister, Olof Palme, from being shot dead in the street. Both legitimacy and coercive force reduce the risk of collapse into mass violence, and so there is a trade- off. A state can maintain the security of its citizens with very little coercive force if it has high legitimacy, or with very little legitimacy if it has sufficient coercive force.

In delineating the conditions for security we have also delineated its antithesis: fragility. A fragile state is a poor country marked by weak state capacity and legitimacy. There is a striking correlation between levels of fragility and levels of displacement. Fragile states are those that have no defence against mass violence. They are not invariably beset by mass violence: but each is a house of cards.

Fragility is the single most salient cause of displacement around the world today. Even factors that may become increasingly common drivers of flight like climate change and natural disasters are only likely to cause mass cross- border movements if they affect fragile states. When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans it did not require people to leave the United States. In contrast, when the earthquake struck Haiti many people fled to the neighbouring Dominican Republic because they could not find a domestic remedy or resolution to their situation.

Our opening question, however, was not ‘which states are fragile?’ but ‘why has mass violence increased?’ In effect, why might exposure to fragility have increased despite the wide diffusion of global economic growth?

Featured image: The Sahrawi refugees – a forgotten crisis in the Algerian desert, by the European Commission DG ECHO. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

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“The law is my data”: The socio-legal in environmental law

When I left practice to start my PhD, I was made to do a master’s degree in research methods as a condition of my doctoral funding. The ‘made’ in that first sentence is wholly intentional. I was quite clear, and quite vocal, that I had no interest in, and no need to study, methods. I knew exactly what form my PhD was going to take: an analysis of EU chemicals regulation using a new governance lens. I didn’t need to know about interviews, or ethnography; I was frankly lost in the advanced modules on statistics; and when we came to talk about autoethnography I thought it hilarious that something so personal, so reflective could be considered ‘research’. Of thirty or so students on the programme, I was the only one based in a law school. Everyone else was housed in the social sciences. I still vividly remember a painful Q&A with a lecturer who had asked me in front of the wider cohort what the ‘data’ was for my PhD. “The law is my data”, I replied. He looked bemused. “And how do you analyse that data? Is it some form of textual analysis?” he asked. “I guess”, I said. The classes on social theory equally left me scratching my head. “Don’t worry”, a friend in the law school said to me, “Whenever anyone says to me that they are a Bourdieusian I tell them I am a DrWhovian.” A decade on and I have come to realise what a wonderful, and very valuable, experience that research degree was. And those who know my writing will realise that I now love to start off a piece with a personal anecdote and so have somewhat come full circle in this regard. Autoethnography rules.

Looking back, it is clear that I was bringing with me to my research degree the arrogance of a city lawyer who had never considered ‘method’. I didn’t understand, for example, that what many of us loosely call a ‘black letter’ approach is a craft which comes with its own internal rules and techniques. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about my research degree and my recent body of work on corporate lawyers (which draws on interviews, surveys, and Bourdieu… but not Dr Who), and how I might put the skills and approaches I’ve learned into practice with my environmental law research. To help, I’ve had my nose buried in the 1999 monograph by Bridget Hutter, A Reader in Environmental Law, in which she pulls out a cross-section of socio-legal work on environmental law from the 1970s onwards. As Hutter sets out, a socio-legal approach to environmental law might be characterised by a focus which is upon law in context (as opposed to a purely doctrinal ‘law in books’ approach), and/or which brings to bear a range of theoretical perspectives “within and across disciplinary boundaries” and/or which interplays theory and empirical data (interviews, surveys, ethnography, etc). Framed in this way it is easy to see much of the socio-legal in environmental law scholarship, and many environmental law scholars would I imagine, think of themselves as taking a socio-legal approach to their work.

For Earth Day 2017, the Journal of Environmental Law made available a number of papers from the journal which take a variety of socio-legal approaches (some empirical, some theoretical, some both). This wonderful work, and work like it, is causing me to ask myself how I might develop an agenda for my own future environmental law scholarship which generates and uses empirical data, wrapped in a strong theoretical lens, to explore, exploit, and evaluate environmental laws. In looking around for inspiration, it has seemed to me that while there are pockets of brilliant socio-legal environmental research, this sub-field is still somewhat lacking. In their 2009 paper, ‘Maturity and Methodology: Starting a Debate about Environmental Law Scholarship’, Fisher and others comment that, ‘it can be seen that there is relatively little environmental law scholarship published in law journals with a national or socio-legal focus.’ They go on to add that, ‘The latter is surprising considering that some of the ground breaking socio-legal work has been in the environmental area.’ Eight years on and it seems to me that the overall state of socio-legal environmental scholarship is nascent. Why then is this the case? And why, in particular, is there so little environmental law scholarship which is routed in data (qualitative or quantitative) other than the law? Can it simply be the lack of capacity in empirical legal research in the UK (highlighted by the Nuffield Inquiry on Empirical Legal Research in 2006, and much discussed if not really actioned since that date)? Or is something else going on?

How many of us have PhD students whose ‘method’ is simply a replica of the work we, as supervisors, do?

My recent thinking has also caused me to reflect on what and how we teach students of environmental law, and whether we are inculcating in the generations of future environmental law scholars a flowering of inquisitive modes about, and approaches to, environmental law problems and solutions. How many of us have PhD students whose ‘method’ is simply a replica of the work we, as supervisors, do? And, if so, what does that then mean for the future of the field of environmental law?

As, I hope, is now apparent, I have come a long way in my views on ‘method’. And I am fully committed to the potentially transformative value of empirical socio-legal environmental law scholarship: in putting to test assumptions about the law and the world in which it operates; and in exploring how the law works (or does not work) in environments away from appeal courts and legislatures.

Featured image credit: ‘White Wooden Rectangular Table’ by  Pixabay. CCO Public Domain via Pexels .  

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The conceptual evolution of mass and matter [excerpt]

From plants and animals to stars and galaxies, all material is made up of matter. But what is matter, exactly? In the following shortened excerpt from Mass, Jim Baggott explains the history behind our modern understanding of matter and speculates on the potential discoveries of the future.

We learn in school science class that matter is not continuous, but discrete. As a few of the philosophers of ancient Greece once speculated nearly two-and-a-half thousand years ago, matter comes in “lumps.” If we dig around online we learn that we make paper by pressing together moist fibers derived from pulp. The pulp has an internal structure built from molecules (such as cellulose), and molecules are in turn constructed from atoms (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen).

We further learn that atoms are mostly empty space, with a small, central nucleus of protons and neutrons orbited by electrons. You might have also learned that protons and neutrons are not the last word on this subject. Particles thought to be the ultimate building blocks of matter or (more likely) whose internal structures are presently simply unknown are referred to by scientists as “elementary.” According to this definition protons and neutrons are not elementary particles. They are composites, assembled from different kinds of quark, held together by gluons.

Okay, so things are a little more complicated than we might have supposed. But surely all we’re really seeing here is successive generations of scientific discovery peeling away the layers of material substance. Paper, card, plastic; molecules; atoms; protons and neutrons; quarks and electrons. As we descend through each layer of matter we find smaller and smaller constituents.

This is surely hardly surprising.

A computer-generated image of a Higgs interaction. Following a collision of two protons, a Higgs boson is produced which decays into two jets of hadrons and two electrons. The lines represent the possible paths of particles produced by the proton-proton collision in the detector while the energy these particles deposit is shown in blue. Credit: “CMS Higgs-event” produced by The European Organization for Nuclear Research. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

But then, just as surely, we can’t keep doing this indefinitely. Just as the ancient Greek philosophers once speculated, we imagine that we should eventually run up against some kind of ultimately fundamental, indivisible type of stuff, the building blocks from which everything in the universe is made.

And it doesn’t seem to require a particularly bold leap of imagination to suppose that, whatever it might be, there can be only one fundamental type of stuff. Or, at least, one fundamental type of stuff would seem simpler, or neater. The rest—electric charge, something called color charge, flavor, spin, and many other things besides—would then just be “dressing.”

What we have discovered is that the foundations of our universe are not as solid or as certain and dependable as we might have once imagined. They are instead built from ghosts and phantoms, of a peculiar quantum kind. And, at some point on this exciting journey of discovery, we lost our grip on the reassuringly familiar concept of mass, the ubiquitous m that appears in all the equations of physics, chemistry, and biology.

To the ancient Greek atomists, atoms had to possess weight. To Isaac Newton, mass was simply quantitas materiae, the amount or quantity of matter an object contains. On the surface, there seem no grounds for arguing with these perfectly logical conclusions. Mass is surely an “everyday” property, and hardly mysterious.

When we stand on the bathroom scales in the morning, or lift heavy weights in the gym, or stumble against an immovable object, we pay our respects to Newton’s classical conception of mass. But when a single electron passes like a phantom at once through two closely spaced holes or slits, to be recorded as a single spot on a far detector, what happens to the mass of this supposedly ‘indivisible’ elementary particle in between? Einstein’s most celebrated equation, E = MC², is utterly familiar, but what does it really mean for mass and energy to be equivalent and interchangeable?

The so-called “standard model” of particle physics is the most successful theoretical description of elementary particles and forces ever devised. In this model, particles are replaced by quantum fields. Now, how can a quantum field that is distributed through space and time have mass, and what is a quantum field anyway? What does it really mean to say that elementary particles gain their mass through interactions with the recently discovered Higgs field? If we add up the masses of the three quarks that are believed to form a proton, we get only one per cent of the proton mass. So, where’s the rest of it?

And then we learn from the standard model of inflationary big bang cosmology that this stuff that we tend to get rather obsessed about—so-called “baryonic” matter formed from protons and neutrons—accounts for less than five per cent of the total mass energy of the universe. About twenty-six per cent is dark matter, a ubiquitous but completely invisible and unknown form of matter that is responsible for shaping the large-scale structure of visible galaxies, galaxy clusters, and the voids in between. The rest (a mere sixty-nine per cent) is believed to be dark energy, the energy of “empty” space, responsible for accelerating the expansion of space time.

How did this happen? How did the answers to our oh-so-simple questions become so complicated and so difficult to comprehend?

Although it’s very unlikely that the way we interpret the nature of matter and the property of mass will get any easier to comprehend anytime soon, we can be reasonably assured that we don’t yet have the whole story. The standard model of particle physics is an extraordinary achievement, but it is also riddled with explanatory holes. There’s an awful lot it can’t tell us about how the physical world is put together.

Physicists at the end of the nineteenth century famously thought they’d got it all figured out. Now we know better. We’ve since learned an awful lot, but we’re also very aware of what we don’t know and can’t explain. If we dream of a destination where we have ultimate knowledge of everything, then I doubt we’ll ever get there. But I’m also convinced there’ll be much to see—and much still to learn and enjoy—as we make the journey.

Featured image credit: “Andromeda Galaxy” by Adam Evans. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons .

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Two paradoxes of belief

The Liar paradox arises via considering the Liar sentence:

L: L is not true.

and then reasoning in accordance with the:

T-schema:

“Φ is true if and only if what Φ says is the case.”

Along similar lines, we obtain the Montague paradox (or the “paradox of the knower“) by considering the following sentence:

M: M is not knowable.

and then reasoning in accordance with the following two claims:

Factivity:

“If Φ is knowable then what Φ says is the case.”

Necessitation:

“If Φ is a theorem (i.e. is provable), then Φ is knowable.”

Put in very informal terms, these results show that our intuitive accounts of truth and of knowledge are inconsistent. Much work in logic has been carried out in attempting to formulate weaker accounts of truth and of knowledge that (i) are strong enough to allow these notions to do substantial work, and (ii) are not susceptible to these paradoxes (and related paradoxes, such as Curry and Yablo versions of both of the above). A bit less well known that certain strong but not altogether implausible accounts of idealized belief also lead to paradox.

The puzzles involve an idealized notion of belief (perhaps better paraphrased at “rational commitment” or “justifiable belief”), where one believes something in this sense if and only if (i) one explicitly believes it, or (ii) one is somehow committed to the claim even if one doesn’t actively believe it. Hence, on this understanding belief is closed under logical consequence – one believes all of the logical consequences of one’s beliefs. In particular, the following holds:

B-Closure:

“If you believe that, if Φ then Ψ, and you believe Φ, then you believe Ψ.”

Now, for such an idealized account of belief, the rule of B-Necessitation:

B-Necessitation:

“If Φ is a theorem (i.e. is provable), then Φ is believed.”

is extremely plausible – after all, presumably anything that can be proved is something that follows from things we believe (since it follows from nothing more than our axioms for belief). In addition, we will assume that our beliefs are consistent:

B-Consistency:

“If I believe Φ, then I do not believe that Φ is not the case.”

So far, so good. But neither the belief analogue of the T-schema:

B-schema:

“Φ is believed if and only if what Φ says is the case.”

nor the belief analogue of Factivity:

B-Factivity:

“If you believe Φ then what Φ says is the case.”

is at all plausible. After all, just because we believe something (or even that the claim in question follows from what we believe, in some sense) doesn’t mean the belief has to be true!

There are other, weaker, principles about belief, however, that are not intuitively implausible, but when combined with B-Closure, B-Necessitation, and B-Consistency lead to paradox. We will look at two principles – each of which captures a sense in which we cannot be wrong about what we think we don’t believe.

The first such principle we will call the First Transparency Principle for Disbelief:

TPDB1:

“If you believe that you don’t believe Φ then you don’t believe Φ.”

In other words, although many of our beliefs can be wrong, according to TPDB1 our beliefs about what we do not believe cannot be wrong. The second principle, which is a mirror image of the first, we will call the Second Transparency Principle for Disbelief:

TPDB2:

“If you don’t believe Φ then you believe that you don’t believe Φ.”

In other words, according to TPDB2 we are aware of (i.e. have true beliefs about) all of the facts regarding what we don’t believe.

Either of these principles, combined with B-Closure, B-Necessitation, and B-Consistency, lead to paradox. I will present the argument for TPBD1. The argument for TPDB2 is similar, and left to the reader (although I will give an important hint below).

Consider the sentence:

S: It is not the case that I believe S.

Now, by inspection we can understand this sentence, and thus conclude that:

(1) What S says is the case if and only if I do not believe S.

Further, (1) is something we can, via inspecting the original sentence, informally prove. (Or, if we were being more formal, and doing all of this in arithmetic enriched with a predicate “B(x)” for idealized belief, a formal version of the above would be a theorem due to Gödel’s diagonalization lemma.) So we can apply B-Necessitation to (1), obtaining:

(2) I believe that: what S says is the case if and only if I do not believe S.

Applying a version of B-Closure, this entails:

(3) I believe S if and only if I believe that I do not believe S.

Now, assume (for reductio ad absurdum) that:

(4) I believe S.

Then combining (3) and (4) and some basic logic, we obtain:

(5) I believe that I do not believe S.

Applying TPDB1 to (5), we get:

(6) I do not believe S.

But this contradicts (4). So lines (4) through (6) amount to a refutation of line (4), and hence a proof that:

(7) I do not believe S.

Now, (7) is clearly a theorem (we just proved it), so we can apply B-Necessitation, arriving at:

(8) I believe that I do not believe S.

Combining (8) and (3) leads us to:

(9) I believe S.

But this obviously contradicts (7), and we have our final contradiction.

Note that this argument does not actually use B-Consistency (hint for the second argument involving TPDB2: you will need B-Consistency!)

These paradoxes seem to show that, as a matter of logic, we cannot have perfectly reliable beliefs about what we don’t believe – in other words, in this idealized sense of belief, there are always things that we believe that we don’t believe, but in actuality we do believe (the failure of TPDB1), and things that we don’t believe, but don’t believe that we don’t believe (the failure of TPDB2). At least, the puzzles show this if we take them to force us to reject both TPDB1 and TPDB2 in the same way that many feel that the Liar paradox forces us to abandon the full T-Schema.

Once we’ve considered transparency principles for disbelief, it’s natural to consider corresponding principles for belief. There are two. The first is the First Transparency Principle for Belief:

TPB1:

“If you believe that you believe Φ then you believe Φ.”

In other words, according to TPD1 our beliefs about what we believe cannot be wrong. The second principle, again is a mirror image of the first, is the Second Transparency Principle for Belief:

TPB2:

“If you believe Φ then you believe that you believe Φ.”

In other words, according to TPB2 we are aware of all of the facts regarding what we believe.

Are either of these two principles, combined with B-Closure, B-Necessitation, and B-Consistency, paradoxical? If not, are there additional, plausible principles that would lead to paradoxes if added to these claims? I’ll leave it to the reader to explore these questions further.

A historical note: Like so many other cool puzzles and paradoxes, versions of some of these puzzles first appeared in the work of medieval logician Jean Buridan.

Featured image credit: Water flowing by IK3. Public Domain via Pixabay .

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How to Begin and End Paragraphs

We should pay more attention to paragraphs. I know that sounds obvious, but what I’m fretting about is the advice that beginning writers get to begin paragraphs with topic sentences and end with summary sentences.

Such a topic sandwich—filled in with subpoints, supporting sentences, and examples—lends itself to formulaic writing. This strategy of tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them can be useful for public speaking, where listeners don’t have a text to follow. But in written exposition, readers don’t need you to be quite such a tour guide. They can refer back to the previous text. They can read slowly when they need to, or skim or skip ahead when they get bored. And if you bore them, they will skip ahead.

Designing good paragraphs is not about talking people on a walk, but about treating them to an experience. So paragraphing is less about being a tour guide than it is about being the conductor of a symphony.

A paragraph can end in a sharp point, a pin-prick that wakes readers up and focuses their attention on what you’ve just written. Readers should think “Oh!” not “Yup.” (I tried to do that just before with the sentence “And if you bore them, they will skip ahead.”)

Sometimes good paragraphing is as simple as letting the start of one paragraph serve as the conclusion to the last, leaving readers hanging for half a beat. Raffi Khatchadourian does this in his essay “The Taste Makers,” writing about the flavor industry.  Khatchadourian tells readers about the confidentiality agreements that makers of food flavorings sign. The paragraph ends with an example of a company honoring the agreement even years later. Asked about their flavor development for Snapple, the Brooklyn-based flavoring company Virginia Dare “refused to discuss the matter.” The next paragraph opens with the broader point: “Such secrecy helps shape the story of our food.”  Had Khatchadourian ended his previous paragraph with that line, it would be a flat summary. At the beginning of the next paragraph, however, it sets the trajectory for the next part of the essay.

Another example comes from Dan Jurafsky’s The Language of Food. In one paragraph, Jurafsky explains the early technology of distillation, its perfection by Arabic and Persian scientists, and its geographic spread. The next paragraph opens with the sharper linguistic point that “All this history, of course, is there in the words.” Khatchadourian and Jurafsky let their examples sink in for a moment before telling us why they are significant.

A paragraph can end in a jump cut, an image or idea that occurs in a slightly different form later. Writer Louie Menand does this in his essay “Cat People.” Menand engages his readers in a literary analysis of “The Cat in the Hat.” “Every reader,” he deadpans, “will feel that the story revolves around a piece of withheld information,” where does the mother go, and why.  It is a story, he suggests of the “violation of domestic taboos.” The paragraph that follows segues neatly from literary analysis to Suess’s biography. Menand begins the paragraph with the sentence “The decision to turn ‘The Cat in the Hat’ on the trope of the mater abscondita is not without interest, coming, as it does, from a writer who chose his mother’s maiden name as his pen name.” The reader is hooked.

On occasion too, the best paragraphs are single sentences. In his book The True Believer, Eric Hoffer gives a long, complex discussion of the effect of mass movements on individuals. The explanation involves concepts like diminuation, the untenable self, and the burdens of autonomous existence. His next paragraph drives the point home: “The true believer is eternally incomplete, eternally insecure.”

We often read for information and for story. We sometimes pause to enjoy great sentences, fresh images, and lyricism. Let’s not ignore the humble—but noble—paragraph.

Featured image: “Writing” by OuadiO. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr .

 

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How to educate your child in the seventeenth century

The end of summer and beginning of autumn mean that children and young adults worldwide are heading back to school. While much has changed since the time of the seventeenth century, such as which children were allowed to go to school and which weren’t, and what they were taught there – one thing that has not changed is the worry a parent feels about their child getting the best education they can. In these series of excerpts from letters from the seventeenth century, we can see how ideas about education have evolved and changed in the past 300-some years.

John Locke to Mary Clarke [née Jepp] 1685 , on teaching dancing at home

“Girls should have a dancing master at home early: it gives them fashion and easy comely motion betimes which is very convenient, and they, usually staying at home with their mothers, do not lose it again, whereas the boys commonly going to school, they lose what they learn of a dancing master at home amongst their illfashioned schoolfellows, which makes it often less necessary because less useful for the boys to learn to dance at home when little: though if they were always to play at home in good company I should advise it for them too. If the girls are also by nature very bashful, it would be good that they should go also to dance publicly in the dancing schools when little till their sheepishness were cured; but too much of the public schools may not perhaps do well, for of the two, too much shamefacedness better becomes a girl than too much confidence, but having more admired than considered your sex I may perhaps be out in these matters, which you must pardon me.”

Instructions for the education of Edward Clarke’s children by John Locke, 1686 , on the proper way of teaching Latin

“When your son can read English perfectly, the next thing, of course, to be learnt is Latin, which however necessary I allow it to be, yet the ordinary way of learning it in a grammar school, is that, which having long had thoughts about, I can by no means approve of. The reasons against it are so evident and cogent, that they have prevailed with some intelligent persons you have known to quit the ordinary road, not without success, though the method made use of was not exactly that which I would have proposed. Mine in short is this: to trouble the child with no rules of grammar at all, but to have Latin, as English has been, without the perplexity of rules, talked into him. For if you will consider it, Latin is no more unknowne to a child, when he comes into the world, than English: and yet he learns English without master, rule, or grammar: and so ought he Latin too, if he had somebody always to talk to him in this language. When we so often see a Frenchwoman teach a young girl to speak and read French perfectly, in a year or two, without one rule of grammar, or anything else, but prattling to her; I cannot but wonder how gentlewomen have overseen this way for their sons, and thought them more dull and incapable than their daughters. If therefore a man could be got, who himself speaks good Latin, who would always be about your son, and talk constantly to him, that would be the true and genuine way of teaching him Latin…  ”

Wooden desk with apple by JJ Thompson. CCO Public Domain via Unsplash.

James Tyrrell to John Locke, 1687 , on seeing his son off to school safely, and the daughter being sent off to live with a relative instead

“She much desired that Jemmy should be bred under your care; and therefore should be glad to know what encouragement you can give me of puting him to school at Utrecht to learne French and perfect his latine; and greek. if you know of ever a good Master there that takes boarders. I have thoughts of bringing him over the next spring or summer at farthest. and to stay in those parts till winter againe, to see him setled; and to enjoy your good company, one of the greatest satisfactions I propose to my self in the Journey. however whether I bring him over or not I intend to come over to you; and will then be out of your debt before I returne. this winter I shall not dissolve my Family: but intend it next spring and shall then put out my yonger son to school: and my daughter to a relation of my wives to be bred according to her last will.”

William Fitzhugh to Nicholas Hayward, 1690 , on his son learning foreign languages

“Sir This year I was designed to have sent home my eldest son to School there & did intend to request of your care of him & kindness to him, but accidentally meeting wt. a french Minister, a sober, learned & discreet Gentleman, whom I persuaded to board & tutor him, which he hath undertaken, in whose family there is nothing but french spoken which by a continuall Converse, will make him perfect in that tongue, & he takes a great deal of pains & care to teach him Latin, both which go on hitherto very well together”

 Featured Image Credit:  Book, read, reading, bookmark, and page by Ben White.  CCO Public Domain via   Unsplash.

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What hearing voices reveals about hallucination and speech perception

Hearing things that other people do not – in other words, an auditory hallucination – is something that approximately 5-15% of the population experience at some point in their lives. For people with a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia, the experience of auditory hallucinations can often be bewildering and upsetting. However, for some people unusual sensory experiences can be an important and meaningful part of their lives.

It is hard to estimate the exact prevalence, but a small minority of the general population regularly hear voices without any need for mental health support. In many cases these voices are experienced as supportive, meaningful, and in some cases spiritually significant. Such “non-clinical” voice-hearers describe voices that may act as a guide or friend, in some cases having been present for many years.

The existence of this phenomenon is important for a number of reasons. First, it has been used to argue for a continuum view of what are often considered psychotic experiences, suggesting that the dividing line between “clinical” and “non-clinical” experiences should be based on a person’s need for care, rather than the presence or absence of unusual experiences. Second, it highlights that distress is not a necessary part of hearing voices: some experiences may be distressing, others not, and some may become distressing depending on a range of other factors (including life circumstances, or how a person reacts to the experience). Finally, non-clinical voice-hearing offers an investigative and empirical opportunity: a chance to test models of hallucinatory experience away from the complex swirl of factors – such as medication use – that typically affect psychiatric research.

In a recently-published study, we used fMRI to scan the brains of a group of non-clinical voice-hearers. We aimed to test a recent theory of hallucination and perception that is based on the brain’s expectations and predictions about the sensory environment. It has been argued that our perceptions can be understood as a kind of prediction: a model we generate of the sensory world, based on prior knowledge and expectation, which is only updated when enough errors are noticed in how the “model” fits the world. It has been suggested that hallucinations may just be an extension of that idea: models of the world, driven by expectation and knowledge, that spot signal and meaning in the environment even when the underlying evidence might suggest otherwise.

In many cases such predictions might lead to false or inaccurate sensory perceptions. But in some cases – such as when the sensory world is ambiguous – a strong model or prediction may actually help us understand what is happening. An example of this is provided by sine-wave speech. Sine-wave speech is an artificially generated speech stimulus which is very hard to understand – and even to recognize as speech – until you are told to listen to it as speech, and ideally trained with a few examples of the sentences underneath. Once this happens, people often switch to a “speech mode” and are able to understand what is being said amidst the strange noise: their knowledge and expectation for speech changes and suddenly they can perceive the hidden meaning.

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Sine-wave speech examples provided by Stuart Rosen, University College London. Used with permission.

For people who regularly hear voices, we wanted to know how they would respond when listening to this form of ambiguous, disguised speech. We reasoned that, if their expectations and predictions of the world created voices, then they might also enable them to understand the hidden meanings in sine-wave speech. To test this, we played sine-wave speech to 12 non-clinical voice-hearers and 17 control participants (members of the general population with no history of voice-hearing) while they were in an MRI scanner. They were not told that any speech was present: instead we just asked them to listen out for a similar target sound that contained no speech at all. After the scan, we asked them if they had heard any words or sentences in the speech, and if so, if they could repeat any back to us. We then trained them to understand the speech, and scanned them again.

We found that the voice-hearing group tended to hear words and sentences in sine-wave speech before control participants could, and even before they were told that speech was present. 75% of our sample of voice-hearers reported hearing words in the stimuli (compared to 47% of controls), and when we asked participants to estimate when they noticed, voice-hearers reported that they had realised around 3–4 minutes earlier than controls (on average). In other words, the voice-hearers seemed to be able to spontaneously “tune in” to the hidden meanings in the sounds. Crucially, this was also reflected in brain activity: the brains of voice-hearers were better able to discriminate sine-wave speech that contained hidden meaning from sine-wave speech that was meaningless. This was found in two regions that have been linked to attention and monitoring skills: the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and superior frontal gyrus.

Our study has a number of limitations that need to be acknowledged. For example, this is only a small study because it is very hard to recruit non-clinical voice-hearers. We view this experiment as only a preliminary step in understanding how our brains might create something like a voice that others cannot hear. But what this work allows us to do is get closer to understanding how such experiences may develop from our everyday sensory perceptions; something that could happen to anyone, and not just someone with a mental health condition. More research of this kind will allow us to really understand the continuum of sensory experience: from clinical to non-clinical, hallucination to perception, imagination to reality.

Featured image credit: Hearing by GDJ. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

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Working class narratives in the twenty first century

With school getting back in session, today on the blog we are exploring how instructors are using oral history in the classroom. The piece below, from filmmaker and UCLA Lecturer Virginia Espino explores the power of oral history to connect students to their campus community, and to help them collaboratively rethink what working class identity means in the modern era.

What does it mean to be a member of the working class in the twenty first century? I posed this question to my students earlier this year when I taught a class in oral history methods for the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UCLA. I focused the course on the study and collection of working class stories as a way to uplift voices not often heard in an academic setting and to develop an archive of interviews that broadens our understanding of the working class as a diverse and multifaceted cross-section of our society.

On the first day of class I handed out index cards to each student and asked them to define working class in three words or statements. How we define terms such as “working class,” “middle class” and “upper class” exposes our belief system as well as how successful the media has been in constructing meanings for us. In order to teach working class history, I wanted to understand what the term meant to modern college students in one of the most ethnically and economically diverse cities in the country.

Photo courtesy of Virginia Espino.

The responses were what I might have predicted because they were views that I shared myself:  Living paycheck-to-paycheck; struggling to survive; exploited. But as I re-read through my student’s definitions, I was reminded of my own oral history interviews with the Chicana activist, Lilia Aceves She recalled that poverty meant something different to her growing up in 1940s East Los Angeles. She had a roof over her head and food on the table and imagined herself as well to do. “I didn’t know we were poor…I thought we had everything,” she recalled. Only as an adult did she understand that her family lacked the kind of material wealth one saw in popular magazines or on the big screen. “We always had a home, but in terms of the physical aspect of it you could see that we were the working poor.”

After the first session of class my primary teaching goal for the quarter evolved into using oral history methods to document the meaning working class individuals gave to their lives. I directed my students to enter the interviews with an open mind and to expect to have their assumptions challenged. In addition to capturing the life-history narrative I wanted them to focus on questions that explored how members of the working class understood their social and economic position. Did they view themselves as we did: poor, unskilled, and uneducated? What would they tell us about their lives if we took the time to listen? The results of their interviews were stunning, and several narratives stand out for how they help us to amplify our perception of U.S. “workers.”

Three students in the class chose to work together on an interview project that would explore the lives of three janitors in the University of California system. They developed an interview outline that would focus on the following research questions:

What is class-consciousness?
How is class structured in the United States?
What are the intersections between class and ethnic identity, and do these intersections influence narrators’ lived experiences?
What are the opportunities for, and barriers to, upward mobility?
What role does unionism and labor organizing take among UC janitors?

Each student was required to interview the same person twice in order to gain an authentic experience of the work oral historians do when approaching the life history. Returning to an interviewee for follow-up questions is the crux of a quality interview and often leads to a deeper dig into meaning and personal agency.  And for the student interviewers, it proved essential in providing them with ample time to develop trust as well as time to step back from the process for self-reflection and self-critique. The students identify as members of the working class, but soon realized they were bringing their own biases to the interview process – specifically, the assumptions they had about the people those who maintain the infrastructure of UC campuses. As stated in their project evaluation, they began their project with the belief that “janitors are poor and their job has low value…” They ended their project with a new awareness that janitors take pride in their work and want to be seen and appreciated by the students, faculty and staff who work alongside them.

As a class we learned the varied meanings of working class through the projects students executed. In a surprising revelation, the students learned that one of the janitors they interviewed held a college degree: Unable to find a job in her field she was force to take a position cleaning the UCLA campus to support her young family. Over the course of the quarter we were introduced to an Asian American student struggling to balance work and school. Her narrative forced us to reject the “model minority” stereotype that presumes Asian Americans float easily through school; her identification with the working class stemmed from her need to support herself through school, while many of her classmates receive unlimited parental support. And through an interview with a white male, we learned that the absence of jobs in the humanities has forced white college educated men to seek jobs in restaurants and department stores while struggling to maintain the lifestyle they desire. Taken together, these important narratives help us complicate what it means to be working class in the twenty first century.

Featured image: UCLA’s Inverted Fountain by Andrew “FastLizard4” Adam. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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