Neurath's Boat

Reductionism and History

For some reason I've been doing a bit of tilting at windmills, posting comments to a couple of discussions of biblical history here.  Really, it is hard to know where to begin with people who have such strange standards of evidence.  In the present instance, of course, there is also their apparent blindness to how non-standard their treatment of ancient source material is, and to how differently they treat pro-Christian vs. other sources.

Of course, there may be an element of deceit, or at least indifference to truth; I admit I find it very hard to resist such suspicion in the case of Lydia McGrew.  But there are less extreme and more respectable biblical scholars who nonetheless share unusual standards of evidence.  Thus, I think it's worthwhile to ask why such unusual standards of evidence are inappropriate.

Obviously, the argument cannot be any appeal to authority, and in the present context any very direct appeal to the success of more orthodox historical standards is likely to be little more than that, as our main measure of success in investigating history is producing results acceptable to orthodox historians.  Nor is it the case that the advantages of one kind of approach to evidence over another are obvious in this area.  There is certainly no canonical list of acceptable evidence and appropriate evidence weights to consult to decide such issues; indeed, discovering new kinds of evidence and new ways of looking at things is one of the most important engines of intellectual progress.

I think the analogy of science is instructive.  Kuhn is especially famous for having noted the evolving nature of standards and evidence in science; a Kuhnian paradigm is so-called because it centrally involves paradigm cases of observation and measurement, paradigms of evidence gathering and evaluation.  If Kuhn were right in the extreme claims he sometimes made that choice of paradigms was subjective, irrational, and independent of evidence, then it would be hard to criticize the biblical historians for adopting the approaches they do.  But Kuhn was not right about that.  Though the standards for evaluating paradigms are different from the standards of evidence evaluation internal to paradigms, they are not automatically irrational.

One of the most important such standards is fit with other successful theories.  It is for this reason that I am an advocate of reductionism and unity of science ideals generally; reductionism is a quest to find the logical relations between theories, so that inconsistencies can be exposed, since inconsistencies show, as always, that there are problems somewhere.

This is a basic problem for the paradigm employed by those like McGrew; one of the more easily described features of the paradigm is that reports of miracles in ancient sources are regarded as comparable to other kinds of reports in ancient sources.  A paradigm which treats those different kinds of reports as equivalent does not fit with our scientific theories (a point made by Hume, of course).  Thus, the standard paradigms employed by mainstream ancient historians, paradigms which give no weight to the possibility that miraculous reports are accurate (and for that matter lower than usual credence to the possibility that they are distortions of actual events and higher than usual credence to the possibility that what they report has no similarity to anything that actually happened) are better than the paradigm employed by McGrew.

I am not entirely certain what her view of these matters is.  Sometimes she writes as if she thinks it's an unreasonable bias to expect historical claims to be scientifically plausible.  It is hard to know how to respond to that.  Oddly, she and her allies do sometimes write as if theological soundness is relevant to evaluating historical claims; this seems to be a recognition that fit with external theories is important, though of course theological paradigms do not fit well with successful scientific theories either (nor do they show any of the other usual marks of successful paradigms).  But sometimes she writes as if she thinks she's just using obvious standards, or as if she's using the same standards as ancient historians use generally.  If that is truly what she believes, it is again not easy to know how to respond to such an extraordinary view.

Citation

This article interacted with a few other thoughts to inspire me to post something.  I found it interesting that it was put in terms of women over-citing, rather than in terms of men, especially senior people in their field, under-citing, because I think the latter way of describing things would be more accurate.  Our modern citation practices are a huge aid in locating errors.  Ancient history is a hobby of mine, and of course one of the biggest problems in knowing what's going on in pre-modern events is that prior to the modern period (really, prior to Gibbon), the practice was to virtually never mention one's sources.  Thus, while many ancient sources no doubt describe what they thought happened (not that there weren't deliberate frauds, but they were surely in the minority), it's rarely possible to distinguish what they might have seen themselves, what they were told by multiple, reliable sources, what they were told by few, unreliable sources, and what they constructed using plausible guesswork based on clues surrounding the event.  And even the sources who are most reliable themselves were not necessarily equally reliable in deciding who else to trust, and of course their biases could influence their guesswork.  Thus, nearly all ancient sources need to be treated with considerable skepticism.  Fortunately, modern historical practices track this; modern historians use mountains of citations, so it's easier to tell how strong the evidence for a particular claim is.  Further, if some new evidence, perhaps a new archaeological find, definitively shows that some ancient account or other was more or less reliable than previously believed, it's relatively easy to figure out when modern historians were relying on that account.

It's still important in modern times and in other fields, though.  To take an example from philosophy that I'm very familiar with, Nietzsche's citation practices were horrible.  Fortunately, since he is a modern figure, we know much more about him and about the sources that were available to him than was the case with the ancients, and so it's possible to use that to better assess some of his claims, but that really isn't an ideal substitute.  Consider his use of etymology and claims about language generally.  Nietzsche was a brilliant classical philologist.  His claims about Greek and Latin seem to be nearly always true; even when he disagreed with his contemporaries, or expressed an opinion on a matter where there was no established view, more recent work more often than not has come around to something close to what Nietzsche thought.  But he talks about languages other than Greek and Latin, and his claims about other languages are much less reliable.  It seems clear that he got them from his various colleagues, philologists working on other languages, and they were generally not as brilliant as he was, and anyway he may have misremembered ideas which he might well have just gotten in conversation.  But it's a problem that you need to know so much about Nietzsche to know how to evaluate his claims about languages; you shouldn't have to know the biography of every author you read.  And knowing that Nietzsche is unreliable concerning languages other than Greek and Latin still doesn't help you evaluate individual claims he makes about, say, sanskrit, or the "Ural-Altaic"[1] languages.  Had he mentioned what his sources were on such claims, it would be easier to evaluate their accuracy (and, indeed, had he gone back to consult the sources himself again, he might have discovered some errors where he just misremembered things, or noticed that his source wasn't very confident about one of the claims he wanted to cite).

There are many other cases where Nietzsche's lack of careful citation makes his work more confusing and difficult to interpret than it needs to be; he mentions Paul Ree explicitly once in a while, but someone who doesn't know Nietzsche's biography well is unlikely to realize how frequently Nietzsche's references to English psychologists or English philosophers are filtered through Ree, who was a huge Anglophile and a close friend and major influence of Nietzsche's.  When Nietzsche attributes something to English philosophers that doesn't seem to fit any of the famous ones, it's usually something Ree believed (and perhaps interepreted some of his English sources as supporting).  Similarly, it is normal to dismiss Nietzsche's comments about women (and they are eminently dismissable, for the most part), but anyone speculating about why he says what he does about women, and how it relates to the rest of his philosophy, should probably be aware of Lou Salome's theories on the subject of women.  Salome influenced Nietzsche's views on the subject of women not merely by being a woman he knew well (as most scholars are aware), but also by being a theorist on the subject he considered insightful (a fact fewer seem to have recognized, no doubt partly because so few read Salome these days).

[1]  One of the mistakes Nietzsche copied from his philologist friends; in Nietzsche's time, scholars thought what they called the "Ural-Altaic" languages constituted a fairly closely related family.  Modern linguists do not generally think the Uralic languages are closely related to most of the Altaic languages, and there is apparently some skepticism about how closely the Altaic languages are related to one another.

Terrible views of great thinkers

Today I stumbled across a book called A World Without Jews, by Karl Marx.  It's pretty horrible stuff.  It occurs to me that I can't think of really horrible stuff written by any of the thinkers I greatly respect.  Of course Schopenhauer's stuff on women is terrible, but I don't have that much respect for Schopenhauer.  Heidegger was a Nazi, but I also think he was a terrible philosopher.

On the other hand, I have heard that, for example, Frege had some pretty disturbing views.  I don't know if he published any of them.  I can't think of anything published by the thinkers I love which is comparably disturbing.  But my memory is probably being selective; I would prefer not to remember such things.  I wonder what I'm forgetting.

Class Warfare

I assume most of those who are reading this have noticed that while the Republicans accuse any Democrat who speaks on economic issues of class warfare, they have themselves been engaged in an aggressive policy of enriching the already rich at the expense of the poor.  This has led me to think a bit about the history of philosophical discussions of the seemingly never ending class war.

One infrequently commented upon place in which the class war is discussed is in the writings of Nietzsche.  Nietzsche is famous for presenting his contrast between what he called the master morality and the slave morality.  They do end up roughly corresponding to morality as the rich would like the rules to be, and morality as the poor would like the rules to be.  But Nietzsche hardly ever mentions money.  His tendency to ignore money is a little bit odd, given what I'm sure some of his sources are.

I expect one of the primary sources of the great classical philologist's ideas has to have been Plato.  In Republic, we see a sophisticated attack on the master morality.  But Plato makes money central to his argument; the first spokesman for the moral theory Plato seeks to undermine, Cephalus, is notable almost exclusively for being wealthy.  Further, the theory of Cephalus that money is equivalent to virtue is one of Plato's main targets.  The argument Thrasymachus and eventually Glaucon and Adeimantus take up exploits the contradiction between the beliefs of Cephalus that being rich and being honest both are part of being good.  It is evident to all that one can become richer by being dishonest under the right circumstances, so since being rich equals being good, Thrasymachus argues that we should really think it is dishonesty that makes us good.

Further, the emphasis on money is not just present in the first book and a half.  More than two thousand years before Marx, Plato makes a very big deal of the importance of class struggle.  He argues that his ideal republic will effortlessly win in a conflict with any Greek rival, because in every city in Greece apart from his ideal republic, there are really two cities.  There are the rich and the poor, and they are ever ready to go to war with one another.  So all the republic needs to do to have an overwhelming advantage over any rival city is to make an alliance with one of the perpetually warring factions against the other.

Plato, in what is perhaps an over-reaction, seems to try to resolve the contradiction between saying wealth is good and saying honesty is good by ditching both; his philosopher-kings are supposed to not care about wealth, but are also supposed to freely lie for the good of the state.  However, the important point is that money is quite central to the discussion in Plato.  Why does it not appear in Nietzsche?

The innocent explanation would be that wealth is only important to the extent that it is a source of power.  Nietzsche certainly talks a lot about power, so it could be argued that he is simply concentrating on what is more fundamental.

However, there is another explanation, which reflects less well on Nietzsche.  Recognizing the degree to which master morality is morality as the wealthy would have us see it would involve seeing that the master morality is quite widespread in modern times.  While Nietzsche does not claim that the master morality has died out, he writes as if the slave morality were dominant in the modern era.  Further, while he is not an enthusiast for the master morality, almost all of his most pointed criticisms are directed at the slave morality, perhaps for this very reason that he saw the slave morality as dominant.  However, if the master morality is interpreted as morality according to the rich, it becomes apparent that it is still far more powerful than Nietzsche seems to have recognized.  It is not clear why Nietzsche didn't recognize this, but it seems to stand as one of his larger mistakes.