If-Then Knots ---------------------->

Dumsfeld

Our "leaders" continue to think of the WoT in terms of strained historical analogies.  These kinds of analogies make sense as rhetoric for speeches and elections.  Certainly, a good campaign strategy is to make your opponent seem like an "appeaser."  But you have to wonder if these guys are even capable of attacking terrorism on its own terms.  Even as their analogies become strained to the point of breaking and their metaphors breath their last breaths, they're sticking to their slogans.  (A nice article in Slate.)

They just can't seem to think outside of their slogans.  This is a very dangerous thing.  Terrorism is a tactic that can be employed by different groups to different ideological ends.  In WW2 there were pretty specific groups, nation-states, that were our enemies.  In the Cold War we opposed the spread of an ideology.  We mis-stepped when we lumped all groups conforming to that ideology together.  The paradigm example is Vietnam.  Although both the Chinese and the N. Vietnamese espoused similar (though different) socialist ideologies they were millenial enemies due to thousands of years of Chinese rule over Vietnam.  McNamara himself says this was a major miscalculation, lumping all commies together, if you watch the film "Fog of War." 

Now we are in another stage, but instead of looking forward and making a real strategy our leaders are living in the past.  Of course, they do have a strategy for the midterms. . .

Knowledge Without Belief

UPDATE: (11/26/06) I've got Williamson's view wrong below.  He allows that belief is necessary for knowledge but still not conceptually prior.  The example he uses that puts this clearly is that anything red is necessarily colored, but we don't understand the property of being red through the property of being colored.

In the book we're reading for my epistemology seminar, "Knowledge and its Limits," Timothy Williamson denies that belief is "conceptually prior" to knowledge.  That is, he doesn't think that we should be analyzing knowledge as a kind of true belief. 

Usually philosophers have thought that knowledge is something like "justified true belief."  (Edmund Gettier's "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge" introduced a class of counterexamples called Gettier problems and a search for a fourth condition).  You can get true belief by a lucky guess but that wouldn't be knowledge.  You need something further like reasons, justification, or warrant, they've argued.  Because of this, analyses of justification have been central to epistemology rather than analysis of knowledge itself.  If knowledge is a composite concept (ie, analyzable into components like "belief," "truth," and "justification") then discussion of the components becomes central.  But if knowledge is a simple, unanalyzable concept then we need to make that concept itself central to our epistemological inquiry.

Well, my first reaction reading the introduction was that obviously belief at least is necessary for knowledge.  Why?  Belief is necessary for knowledge if knowledge entails belief.  Let's say X believes that p if X thinks p is the case.  Isn't it clear that you can't know anything that you don't think is the case?  Can you know, for example, that Chicago is east of Iowa City and not think it the case that Chicago is east of Iowa City?  That just doesn't sound right.

Then I started chewing on a counter-example to the necessity of belief for knowledge.  Here it goes, the Low Self Esteem Spelling Champ (LSE Champ):

Richard is stricken with severe self doubt.  Richard enters a spelling bee.  Each time he is given a word he thinks to himself about how it could be spelled.  He's studied Latin roots and all the sorts of things spelling bee champions use and these are the things he reflects on.  However, because of his self doubt he never believes that the spelling he comes up with is correct.  In fact, if he weren't on a timer Richard would haver indefinitely without ever spitting out an answer because he never believes that any particular spelling is correct.  But he is on a timer so he finally just spits out the spelling that he does not believe is correct but which is the product of his reflection.  Much to Richard's surprise, he wins the spelling bee.

Richard doesn't believe p, where p is some particular proposition about the spelling of some particular word, but he knows p.  That's at least an appealing intuition about what is going on in this case and it is enough to get me into Williamson's book without thinking the project just has no motivation.  Another intuition might be to say that Richard is just irrational and believes both p and not-p.  I don't find that to be all that appealing because we should take Richard at his word if he says he never believed that any of his spellings were correct.  Finally--this has the most appeal to me--we might save the idea that belief is necessary for knowledge by making a distinction between knowing how and knowing that.  That is, I'm inclined to say that Richard in fact does not know that each word is spelled a certain way, yet he knows how to spell each word.  The distinction would be between having a belief and having an ability and might make sense of the LSE Champ case without abandoning belief as necessary for knowledge.  In any case, Williamson's book looks fascinating and I'm excited to read it.

Update

Well, I've been pretty busy so not alot of posting.  My partner Beth and I are settling into our place in Iowa City.  Last week was TA training for "Philosophy and the Just Society" and classes start Monday.  This blog will move in a slightly new direction.  I want to keep doing posts on climate change, with an interest in the paranoid theories about scientists conspiring to harm the US economy that are so popular on the right.  I'll also still comment from time to time on things that catch my attention in other parts of politics.  However, I think I'll be posting less frequently, longer, and with more of a philosophical than an "issue of the week" focus.  Likely, there'll be much about Plato, Rousseau, Hobbes, and Mill (which are the authors we're reading in the course I'm TA).

Global Warming Tipping Point?

According to the worst of the worst case scenarios, we're too far gone to prevent disruption of human life because of our CO2 emmisions.  But I'm talking about a tipping point in the political opposition to climate science (personified by Sen James Inhofe, who the Reps made CHAIR of the Environment and Public Works Committee, and his paranoid conspiracy theories).  It seems that Pat Robertson doesn't need a weatherman to see which way the mercury's going.  When anti-science fundies admit we need to cut our emissions, a political tipping point has been crossed. 

Certainly, he's a little late to join the consesnsus and likely is trying to position the religious right to not be too damaged politically by the consequeces of their decades of anti-science activity.  His choice of the word "convert" is interesting; those of us who are evidence-based don't tie our identity so tightly around our beliefs that we have to undergo radical personal change just to believe an overwhelmingly supported scientific theory, but it's nice to have a "convert."  Now, let's apply that fine American "get'r'done" attitude to achieving dramatic reductions in our emissions.  Maybe it's not too late.

Biofuels the Answer?

SciamBlog is skeptical on Biofuels.  Of course, you get the agribiz lobby plus heartland populism behind it and all of a sudden it's a "solution" for energy independence.  It's not unlike how you get developing ANWR as a "solution" when there is nowhere near enough oil there to offset our foreign dependency just because of the oil lobby and Alaska jobs populism.

We need to get serious.  A real national energy plan will focus on conservation.  I don't care if you do it by CAFE or by carbon taxes, we need to start to limit free atmospheric disposal of CO2.  The "flexfuel" stuff coming out of Detroit right now is bullshit.  We need radically better fuel economy from cars, and we need public policy that gets us there: whether by making gas reflect its "true cost" or by mandatory economy standards (btw, I just sent a letter to Pelosi on her stupid pandering promise of "lower gas prices" in the "Six for 06" plan she's hawking--cheaper crack for addicts?).

Next, we need a combination of new domestic energy sources emphasizing scalable renewables like wind and solar, but including cleaner coal (with carbon sequestration enforced under new source review standards--do your job EPA) and nuclear.  We need to be environmentalists, but we also need to be pragmatic and prioritize.  That means cutting the anti-nuke dogma for greens.  It means we need to get America on board with a comprehensive plan that both addresses both energy independence and global warming; that may mean sacrificing conservation interests for development of domestic coal while demanding that carbon sequestration be included under new source review standards and sound mining practices.

We need to face some facts here.  (1) Our greenhouse emissions are much, much more costly than we can immediately perceive.  (2) Dependence on foreign energy sources is a national security issue.  (3) No matter what, we are entering an era of higher energy costs.  With sound public policy we can put modernity on sustainable footing and restore energy abundance after only a brief high-cost transition.  With poor planning we'll get stuck over a barrel with no alternatives to maintain the basis of the American economy.  Unfortunately, I'm not so sure that public policy is being guided by sound science: not with the Dems (judging from the ethanol pandering) and especially not with the anti-science Reps continuing to believe that owning a Hummer is an inalienable right and that climatology is a socialist plot.

Interesting Stuff

Mali the model?; a memorial for Murray Bookchin (and another); Brian Leiter comments on "Bush's Authoritarian Project" (see my own post on this); I love Pandora (by which I discovered the band Parts and Labor); Alan Dershowitz says "civilianity" comes in degrees, agreeing with Ward Churchill; this is interesting (science, I think, is a graveyard for metaphors, or maybe just "normal" science); the Trib tracks oil to its source; and, the assault on Lebanon in context.