MemberlistThe Library Index  FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   RegisterRegister   ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 
The role of belief in knowledge (APPLIED EPISTEMOLOGY)
Reply to topic Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4, 5  Next
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

I assume anyone observing these exchanges would suppose I was being highly pedantic. And they would be right at the pub quiz level. But when it comes to, say, handing out government environmental grants to counties on the basis of the length of their coastline or calculating the direction of two countries' borders for the purpose of dividing their coastal waters, it matters. Lebanon and Israel have just agreed theirs under American pressure -- you can guess who got the lion's share, so maybe it is pedantic.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Here is a tiny wisp of straw in the wind. This bloke I constantly lock horns with on medium.com (in usually quite a friendly way) posted this up

Animals Can Make Elements
According to the winner of an “Ig Nobel” prize, that is! https://medium.com/@johnwelford15/animals-can-make-elements-8eba363ba56b

The Ig Nobel prizes are awarded every year to scientists and others whose work is so bizarre or downright absurd that it deserves to be brought to public attention. The awards are made at Harvard University, and it is surprising just how many recipients actually turn up to be generally mocked for their efforts.

You've probably heard of this and, if you are like me, probably gave it no thought.

One such prize was awarded (in his absence) in 1993 to Louis Kervran, who had come up with the theory that living creatures could perform nuclear fission and fusion within their own bodies. This would explain, for example, how chickens produce the calcium needed to make eggshells — they combine atoms of potassium and hydrogen, apparently.

My fencing partner then went on to describe the theory (it involves atomic numbers and is quite beyond me and, I suspect, him) and concluded the piece in terms we can all understand

Louis Kervran was convinced that these processes are going on all the time, but “official” science had always made the mistake of looking for chemical processes in “dead” matter and not living organisms. If only they had looked at animals they would have seen these transformations taking place all the time. In his book “Biological Transformations”, Louis Kervran failed to explain exactly how this happens. According to him, it just does. An Ig Nobel prize was never more fully deserved!

I took up the cudgels:

This is typical of an academic reaction to something which challenges the academic mind set. It may be wrong, it may be poorly argued (though I bet it wasn't), it may even be mildly out to lunch, but it is not worthy of this kind of supercilious mockery. See here for another place where nuclear fusion/fission is going on unnoticed by the vacuous careerists of the Ivy League https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPWH9xh_Jy0

that last being the YouTube of SCUM theory. So far, routine. But then a surprising thing happened. The bloke himself clapped my riposte to his own post! Just my pointing it out was enough to make him realise it maybe 'was not fully deserved'. And in another couple of hours, ten others did too. And this in a very obscure corner of the Medium empire.

I doubt if any of them watched the YouTube but it does demonstrate that quite ordinary people are able to countenance that Harvard & Co are not necessarily the last word when it comes to deciding who shall be forever fruitcake. Something to build on.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

An instructive example of the difference between belief and knowledge was illustrated by a recent exchange I had on medium.com. It became increasingly obvious that our respective positions could easily have been reversed, i.e. me arguing his position and he mine. I'll put it here in its entirety since it ended with an unusual twist. I'll dispense with quote boxes for ease-of-reading

John Welford
St Govan’s Chapel is a tiny stone building (20 x 12 feet, 6.1 m × 3.7 m) perched in a ravine in the cliffs overlooking the sea at St Govan’s Head, Pembrokeshire, Wales. It is believed to date from the 5th century. Nobody is quite sure who St Govan was. Some people believe that he was a disciple of St David, while others that he was a thief who became a convert. There are also theories that he was actually a woman who was the wife of a 5th century chief, and even that he was King Arthur’s knight Sir Gawain who spent the rest of his life as a hermit after Arthur’s death. [There was more in this vein.]

Mick Harper
The Govan chapel is about as fifth century as I am. [I had not in fact heard of it but felt safe enough from general principles.]

John Welford
The expression "dates from" can be used to cover a multitude of circumstances! For example, there are many churches and cathedrals that "date from" Anglo-Saxon times when all that can be said reliably to belong to that period are a few stones down in the crypt!

Mick Harper
No, John, 'dates from' means 'dates from'. The only thing that can reliably be said about churches that date from Anglo-Saxon times is that no churches date from Anglo-Saxon times.

John Welford
How about St Martin's Church, Wareham, Dorset, which I have visited? Most of the current building was put there in around 1030, and there have been later alterations. That seems to make it an Anglo-Saxon church in my book, dating from the 11th century.

Mick Harper
Without wishing to move the goalposts too far, eleventh century is more Danish and Anglo-Norman than Anglo-Saxon. Is Edward the Confessor and his Westminster Abbey 'Anglo-Saxon', other than technically? Something earlier would be required. (Not that I am accepting 1030 as the date for St Martin's, Wareham for one minute.)

[So far, so good. I am ahead on points though, I would imagine, John Welford thinks he is ahead on points. What the attendant medium.com audience thought is open to question but mostly, I would think, on his side.]
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

John Welford
Err... anything prior to 1066 is - by definition - Anglo-Saxon! Why not accept the date? Is there something you know that historians of the period do not?

Mick Harper
I'll tell Canute you think he's Anglo-Saxon by definition. And yes, I know things that historians of the period do not know. It's all in Revisionist Historiography, remember? [I had previously offered to send him a review copy -- he is quite influential on medium.com -- but he had not taken me up on my offer.]

John Welford
Mick, You know perfectly well what I meant - I would not consider the armies of Emperor Claudius to be Anglo-Saxons either! (One might also point out that the people who built churches (etc) in England while Canute and his sons were in charge had not turned into Danes while they did so!)

Mick Harper
You've lost me, I'm afraid. My position is that there are no Anglo-Saxon churches. If you come across one, let me know and I'll change my position.

John Welford
I simply want to know what would count as an Anglo-Saxon church in your eyes? I grew up within cycling distance of St Martin's at Wareham - my father actually took a service there once (he was a Methodist local preacher at a time when the local Methodist church was being refurbished) - and I can tell you that there is not single person in East Dorset who does not accept that this is an Anglo-Saxon Church!

Mick Harper
I have family in Dorset, John, and while I am prepared to heed their advice on the growing and preparation of root vegetables, I am disinclined to overthrow decades of research into ecclesiastical history on their say-so.

John Welford
Mick, I still don't know what you are getting at - just when do you think the "Anglo -Saxon" churches were built, and what is your evidence?

Mick Harper
I don't know how many ways I have to spell it out, John. I do not believe there is such a thing as an Anglo-Saxon church. It's no use asking me for evidence of something that doesn't exist. Every time someone claims the existence of one, I inspect their evidence and find nothing. Did you not watch last week as Alice Roberts failed to find the Mercian queen's monastery at Cookham? It didn't stop her saying, "It must be there." No wonder she's the Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Birmingham.

[You will note that if my position was the orthodox one, John would have believed it unhesitatingly. If I had been putting forward the orthodox case, he would have regarded it as crackpot. The 'evidence' allows for both possibilities. But then...]
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

John Welford
So what do you think is the origin of St Martin's Church? Are you saying that its date is later than the one given in all the history books based on ancient records and architectural evidence?

And what about all the other well-attested examples? St Paul's at Jarrow? St Laurence's at Bradford-on-Avon (which has had no subsequent additions or rebuilding)? St Peter 's at Bradwell-on-Sea? What is most notable about these buildings is their very different style from later ones built under the Normans. These early features match well with examples in parts of Continental Europe from where the Anglo-Saxon settlers derived, bringing their traditions with them.

Mick Harper
John, I have written three books on or pertaining to these questions, I hardly feel able to answer them in this restrictive medium. (Ha!) First of all, there are no ancient records. All we have are are much later documents that purport to be copies of contemporary accounts. Second of all, there is no architectural evidence. Merely ‘things’ that are claimed to be of Anglo-Saxon origin.

It is preposterous to say they 'match examples from where the settlers derive' when we don’t know where that is. Even were we to make a guess, we certainly don’t know what their traditions were unless you can point to some Anglo-Saxon speakers who were building churches somewhere in Continental Europe before the eleventh century. Can you? Be honest, John, no more waffling.

John Welford
Mick, would you like to give me the details of these books?

Mick Harper
The History of Britain Revealed (Icon, Cambridge 2006), aka The Secret History of the English Language (Melville House, New York 2008), Meetings with Remarkable Forgeries (Urquhart Press, London 2020), and Revisionist Historiography (AEL, London, 2022). The Megalithic Empire (Nathan Carmody, London 2012) also has material that is relevant but not directly so. Don't give up the day job! [He is a retired librarian.]

John Welford
Mick, OK - I am more than happy to look at your evidence and make an unbiased assessment of it, hence I have ordered two of the items you mention. I'm not prepared to fork out 35 quid for the third one, though! My biased view is that your ideas are just plain crazy, but I always believe in giving opposing views a fair crack of the whip - even if I end up not changing my mind!
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

The interesting thing from an AE perspective is how rare it is that people will go to the bother of, as it were, seeking out the source material. Of course we can be entirely confident that if John really does plough through (presumably) THOBR and Forgeries, it will not have the slightest effect on his thinking. Plenty of people have done so and confirmed in their own minds that the theories being advanced are crackpot.

Only people that are temperamentally disposed to anti-orthodoxism to begin with are impressed. Such is life.
Send private message
Grant



View user's profile
Reply with quote

I used to think it was about intelligence, but if you are intelligent the sensible strategy is to sign up to orthodoxy and use your brain to improve your position in life. The people who fought orthodoxy were awkward buggers who either:
- lived at a time when the orthodoxy hadn’t been established
- had a private income

Nowadays even the private income doesn’t help
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

I agree with everything you say except

Nowadays you don't even need a private income
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

A good lesson in AE is presented here https://medium.com/@myukrainness/my-ukrainian-granfather-is-pro-russian-here-is-why-a6e86d48fd3d Too long but the gist comes early. It simply doesn't occur to the writer that somebody can hold different opinions from herself quite legitimately, despite her making it perfectly clear that the other person has far more knowledge and far greater analytic powers than she does.

Mind you, I totally agreed with her but that was wearing my non-AE hat.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

John Welford:
You played cricket? I therefore envy you greatly! I was not allowed to play at school - I made the mistake of being out first ball in my first games lesson and was condemned to "rounders" for ever afterwards - and the opportunities to play in later life never came along. I can claim to have played in four cricket matches during my lifetime and never achieved my ambition of actually scoring a run! (Needless to say, nobody ever bothered to teach me how to play!)

Mick Harper:
This is more significant than you might think. Everyone is assumed to know how. And of course most (boys) do -- apart from everyone discovering for the first time that cricket balls are actually hard, and hurt. After that you wend your way to -- in my case -- the second eleven without being instructed about anything of the finer points. Imagine the same policy being adopted for, say, maths.

Rocket scientist: I can do long division.
Employer: Excellent. Here's your desk. The rocket's that big shiny thing over there.

John Welford:
I did plenty of bashing a ball around in our garden with my dad and playing games in the "rec" with friends, but the Grammar School attitude - and not just with sport - was that you had to show immediate promise to be encouraged to develop further.

I suppose the Games staff did have a problem - there were only two of them for the whole school, and the team sports sessions had to cater for a complete year group of around 70 kids. They could only supervise so many and the rest had to look after themselves unsupervised. In the winter that meant cross-country runs (not a lot of running got done!), and in summer one option was tennis - which meant I always got landed with the kid whose chief delight was to bash the ball as far into the middle distance as he could, so we spent most of our time looking for it on the neighbouring heath!

Mick Harper:
You raise another vital point. You have an eagle eye for these things. Why were there so few games staff and why were they adopting teaching methods that did not in fact 'teach' but rather put everybody off? Or put it another way

What has proved more important in the life of you and your classmates: games or not being able to speak French?

Since you are always an advocate of the status quo, I am sure you will feel there is nothing much wrong with the present curriculum. It is well-known that learning and then forgetting how to speak French trains the mind.

John Welford:
And I always thought I was such a radical! The school curriculum has certainly seen some huge changes since my time - and yours. My A-levels were in English, History and Geography - one of my great-nieces is currently taking hers - in Art, Photography and Textiles! Yes - Art was available as an option at Poole Grammar, but hardly anyone did it. I did O-level French at the age of 14 - I am always amazed at how much I retained! The same goes for German and Latin, taken a year later - none of my language grades being all that good.

Mick Harper:
Everyone thinks they are a radical. In this they are sadly mistaken, as instanced by the rest of your reply. But it is never too late...
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

A significant AE point was broached during and subsequent to a recent family Zoom. We were having a spirited discussion about the Hundred Best Books (dealt with elsewhere on the site) when I pointed out that English literature dominates all others in world terms. This wasn't my idea and I thought it was pretty uncontroversial. Nevertheless someone immediately jumped down my throat either because they thought I was being a Little Englander or because it was me (I get short shrift generally from my family).

To find out which it was, we embarked on a lively correspondence in which the down-the-throat man tacitly conceded there was some merit in the proposition, without conceding it and without once reflecting that he had rejected it with derision within a millisecond.

The AE point is that people can, they think, process a complex idea and reject it without more ado if it makes them angry for any reason. Since new ideas tend to upset people, this happens quite a lot. The general syndrome is summed up in HistRev

Academics are institutionally torpid. Maybe they weren’t when they started out, maybe they aren’t in real life, but they soon learn to be during working hours teaching teenagers the same thing year after year. With students a captive audience and colleagues pre-disposed to go along, any natural polemical skills academics possess soon atrophy. You will be met with dogged resistance but no flair for creativity or improvisation. Or curiosity. Definitely not curiosity. In thirty years presenting new ideas I have never had so much as a nibble from an academic. They can’t all have been out to lunch. The ideas, I mean.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

But there is a more important AE point. When two people of the same intelligence, with the same cultural background and conversant with the same facts of the case, but are at total variance as to who 'won' the argument, what conclusions are we to draw? Speaking for myself, I decided in this case either

(a) you'd need to be clinically insane not to see it or
(b) in the grip of some underlying factor that prevents you seeing it.

The problem is this applies to me as much as it does to my opponent so how do I go about finding out which of us it was and what was the reason?

We can rule out insanity, I've known both parties all my life and I feel sure I would have noticed. If the underlying reason is overweening arrogance about our own perspicacity, then I certainly can't rule that out in his case. But nor in my own either. There is no help in appealing to third parties. As we know with academics, every academic in the world will take the other person's side because they are in the grip of an underlying factor, i.e. being academics.

In this present case, it would be because they all love him, they all hate me, so would all take his side. Actually, this being a family situation, they would all say, "I thought there was a lot to be said for both your arguments" but only because they know such namby-pamby verdicts make me froth with rage and lash out in all directions.

In the end, I have long decided, the only solution to this dilemma is to assume you are always right and the world is always wrong. Except the men in white coats really would come for you if that ever got known. But in the meantime it is a great intellectual asset.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

A mildly odd thing happened yesterday. I was scrolling through the stories medium sends me daily on a semi-random basis, one of which was

Three Art Terms That Will Change the Way You Look At Paintings
Learn the meanings of Rückenfigur, Staffage and Festaiuolo Christopher P Jones

He's quite a well known (non-academic) art expert and since I'd never heard of any of these things and wanted to drop them into dinner party conversations, I started ploughing through it. I was nodding away sagely until I got to the last section

Festaiuolo Finally, we have the fascinating figures known as festaiuolo. In art, festaiuolo refers to those occasional characters who look directly out from paintings — breaking the fourth wall, as we might say today.



Fra Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation provides a good example. The painting is divided into two distinct halves: on the right side is the Angel Gabriel delivering the message of Mary’s divine conception. On the left side are two attendant angels, one of which turns his head away from the internal action and outwards to the viewer.

I was sort of familiar with this and thought I'd show off my erudition but, you know, modestly

Mick Harper on medium wrote:
Is it true that a festaiuolo is often the artist himself in Renaissance paintings and the artist's mistress/model in nineteenth century French works?

and got back

Christopher P Jones on medium wrote:
Interesting thought! There are some examples of Renaissance self-portraits as festaiuolo, such as the famous Raphael in his The School of Athens — but I don’t think it can be counted as a rule, in either case.

This entirely flabbergasted me. I thought the Renaissance thing was well known though I had rather taken a punt about the nineteenth century broads. But how did either thought get into my head? I'm not exactly overflowing with knowledge about fine art and since the dude didn't refer to it in his piece, it must be insignificant.

I can only assume that my brain registered some passing reference (maybe to the Raphael) and stored it away because it was significant.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

This is the first comprehensive attempt to grasp an elusive but vital piece of our island history. Britain has always relied on shipping, and wherever there are ships there are shipwrecks. Wherever there are wrecks there are tales of wrecking Sonorous BBC4 voice-over for "In search of the Wreckers"

Vital, no less. The programme went on to point out, what I have pointed out elsewhere on the site, that there is not a single known example of 'wrecking' in British history. That is, the practice of luring ships onto land in order to loot them. Looting shipwrecked ships is not just known it is absolutely standard practice. On British coasts and every coastline that's ever had ships off it and human beings on it.

Why am I raising this here? It is the difficulty of persuading people that 'wrecking' is just a unicorn myth. Except it isn't. People don't believe in unicorns, they do (fervently) believe in wrecking. And will for evermore because of an AE principle:

People do not start from a tabula rasa, they start with a brain encumbered with myths.

In order to remove a myth it is not sufficient to point out there is no evidence for it because ... there is no evidence for it not existing either! If we could ever solve this we'd be really on our way.
Send private message
Grant



View user's profile
Reply with quote

Also we like feeling superior to other people, whether they are foreigners or our ancestors or even our own people, witness the hatred of Brexiteers or Trump supporters.

Any myth which plugs into this is halfway to acceptance
Send private message
Display posts from previous:   
Reply to topic Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4, 5  Next

Jump to:  
Page 3 of 5

MemberlistThe Library Index  FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   RegisterRegister   ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 


Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group