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My Lenten reading for the morning was James Clifford on Hall’s articulation theory. About which, the less said, the better, except that looking at cultures as assembling components moment by moment removes the wrongly stated problem of “authenticity.” As so often, Clifford’s discussion paraphrases plainly where other summaries obfuscate, or focus on aspects of the theory that are not relevant to the present discussion.
Wrongly stated problems is the point I want to touch on briefly. The so-called “soft” sciences often quarrel over terminology because language is part and parcel (why both, I wonder? why not just part?) of what they do.
The hard sciences (particularly hard for those of us not inclined to adequate numeracy) presumably do not have this problem. However, the soft sciences are given to gloating at the blindness of the hard sciences to the cultural presuppositions that underpin their endeavors; this all too easily turns into a muddle, even among those who aren’t falling back on Gödel but are instead looking at the social origins of models of the physical world.
And indeed, much of any science is fairly unambiguous, just as everyday physical reality is fairly unambiguous; the interactions involved in any physical transaction are sufficient in number to make it statistically improbable that there will be a genuine anomaly in the entire life span of the universe. And lower mathematics rests on foundations that ensure that there is a right way and a wrong way to do things; only in the higher regions do things reach a pass that looks dicey to ignorant outsiders (but looks like something else to those who understand what they are actually doing).
To a large extent, the sciences are self-correcting without conscious awareness of the nature of the self-correction, even if what happens is not always explained rightly by other academic disciplines, either. There is, for example, a huge amount of cultural baggage in the uses of the “not even wrong” formulation, as regards the appropriate limits of investigation and methods of carrying out research, and every once in a while someone reformulates the parameters, to stretch that word’s metaphoric use once again.
I am bloviating on this topic in hopes of getting an indignant response from someone, but also because, once one gets the arrogance of particular disciplines out of the way, and their tendency to invent ridiculous verbal formulations to give their hypotheses the status of the hard sciences, the hypotheses of the soft sciences really are useful for getting a handle on things that most intelligent people know, but do not know that they know. It is particularly difficult to string together a set of working hypotheses without using the fake technical language, however, because even if you stop to say “I am being rigorous” and spell out why, it sounds like you are spinning out truisms.
I, of course, am at most spinning out truisms, and sometimes not even that. Sometimes I am, indeed, not even wrong. But the people I most admire are doing something more substantial than that.
That said (which is how I usually get to the anecdotal part of my posts, a rhetorical move to the multi-topic type of post that irritates juggzy enormously), I want to bloviate for a bit on my usual topic of genuine anomalies, which may be empirically verifiable as existing, and seeming anomalies so embedded in histories of self-deception that they may be impossible ever to straighten out.
I came round to this topic from Clifford via thinking about the overwhelmingly statistically probable events of everyday life. The standard example is putting your finger on a hot stove. But then we have the culturally specific phenomenon of firewalking, which always involves glowing coals or heated rocks. It suddenly occurs to me that it would be interesting, and possible, to have firewalkers stroll across a succession of suitably reinforced hot stoves and see if they can replicate the feat.
I have read only one newspaper story about this and it may have been total fiction, but I can believe that there is in India an annual gathering of Atheist Firewalkers who combat superstition by running across the coals chanting “No god! No god! No god!”
There was, in this morning’s New York Times, a story by Noritmitsu Omishi about the priestesses of Miyako Island. They are getting harder to recruit because of improved health care, rising affluence and the attractions of an urban lifestyle. The end is in sight for traditional culture because it no longer supplies meaningful answers to local questions and resources to meet local needs.
But the story contains one of the standard tales (told by a leader in Oura village) of a road through a sacred spot that was stymied a decade ago by repeated equipment breakdowns and unusual worker illness, until the road was finally built around the sacred spot instead of through it.
I am not aware of stories like this from the United States, where the usual response to threats to a sacred spot is a cease-and-desist lawsuit by guardians of the site. But a recent news story about popular beliefs in Iceland contained structurally identical tales to the one from Oura (including one in which a building’s construction was completely going awry until a traditional seer explained to the presiding presences that their rock would be put back where it was once the construction was finished), and of course Toby Green’s book contained anecdotes by colonial authorities regarding similar problems of having to move the local presiding spirits before a path-blocking boulder could be dislodged.
So this is clearly a cross-cultural set of tales that I hope someone has documented properly, including levels of verifiability versus rural legends (except in Iceland, where the legends are urban). Given the anomalies of construction, I would not be surprised if a good many of the stories were absolutely true. There could be thousands such stories and it would demonstrate nothing, because there are no ways to exclude enough variables to prove or disprove the effect of unseen forces on mechanical equipment, unless the forces are magnetic, let us say, or Murphy’s Law verifiably at work. You simply have the kind of operating anomaly that happens on any construction job, and since no one documents transient anomalies in daily life, there is no way to work out statistical probabilities (even then, simple variables of maintenance and the particular physical qualities of the jobsite make such probabilities impossible to calculate).
So it is a matter of faith that says that there are no presiding presences. They are not there because, well, we know that such things do not exist, just as there are no rocks in the sky. But of course belief that they are there is also a matter of faith. The question of rocks in the sky is a red herring (a mixed metaphor in which I delight), a standard trope used to show the blinkered vision of the Enlightenment. Nobody, but nobody, believes that meteors are hurled by deities, even if it sometimes looks like somebody is aiming for a place when two or more of 'em knock off mailboxes and crash into people's living rooms in a decade or so. So there is no competing faith claim against which reason is defending itself, just a too-hasty declaration of a physical universal by the eighteenth-century philosophes. (Which ones? Is this story, too, an urban legend?)
The problem that hinders us that it is all too easy to turn superstitious in turn once one encounters a genuine mystery. It’s as rational a response as can be, on a subconscious level (which is where most embedded rules of reason work, anyway): if that turned out to be true, better assume the rest of it might be true, and don’t mess with the parts where they say something is gonna come getcha. This does not follow logically, of course, but I am constantly amazed at how people who were working assiduously on excluding the variables suddenly decide to walk away just in case. (Of course, as in Wade Davis’ book on Haiti, there are sometimes unexplained deaths involved.) Green doesn't care to perform further experiments with his unaccountably operative objects of power.
My favorite part of the Miyako Island story, left unglossed by the writer, is the presence in the secret shrines of masks “that, experts say, originally came from Papua New Guinea.” Papua New Guinea? well, the islands of Okinawa were occupied by the United States military for a very long time, and in 1945 some of the soldiers were presumably fresh from the Pacific campaign...but then there were the whaling ships a century earlier...and the Dutch before that.... It is so easy to make up a just-so story that I hope the anthropologists have done more than identify the origin of the masks in question.
...Oh, and for people who like my posts about coincidences, I wrote the foregoing concluding paragraph, then decided it was time to fact-check this post before embarrassing myself.* So I opened my browser to Yahoo (where LiveJournal comments are forwarded to my mail). The lead story of the hour was “The Science of Fairy Tales: Experts explain how moments from favorite stories could have really happened.”
But to be scrupulously fair, the original paragraph was only the opening sentence before I realized that the remark needed to be glossed, so the "just-so story" part comes from a standard comment in previous posts about hypothetical explanations. It is the coincidence of topic, not the just-so story part, that made me LOL.
The post had considerably more literary merit when it just ended with the sentence and then the paragraph about the Yahoo home page, but that is not how I do things. To the despair of the writers among my readers.
*The syntactic ambiguity is intentional.
Wrongly stated problems is the point I want to touch on briefly. The so-called “soft” sciences often quarrel over terminology because language is part and parcel (why both, I wonder? why not just part?) of what they do.
The hard sciences (particularly hard for those of us not inclined to adequate numeracy) presumably do not have this problem. However, the soft sciences are given to gloating at the blindness of the hard sciences to the cultural presuppositions that underpin their endeavors; this all too easily turns into a muddle, even among those who aren’t falling back on Gödel but are instead looking at the social origins of models of the physical world.
And indeed, much of any science is fairly unambiguous, just as everyday physical reality is fairly unambiguous; the interactions involved in any physical transaction are sufficient in number to make it statistically improbable that there will be a genuine anomaly in the entire life span of the universe. And lower mathematics rests on foundations that ensure that there is a right way and a wrong way to do things; only in the higher regions do things reach a pass that looks dicey to ignorant outsiders (but looks like something else to those who understand what they are actually doing).
To a large extent, the sciences are self-correcting without conscious awareness of the nature of the self-correction, even if what happens is not always explained rightly by other academic disciplines, either. There is, for example, a huge amount of cultural baggage in the uses of the “not even wrong” formulation, as regards the appropriate limits of investigation and methods of carrying out research, and every once in a while someone reformulates the parameters, to stretch that word’s metaphoric use once again.
I am bloviating on this topic in hopes of getting an indignant response from someone, but also because, once one gets the arrogance of particular disciplines out of the way, and their tendency to invent ridiculous verbal formulations to give their hypotheses the status of the hard sciences, the hypotheses of the soft sciences really are useful for getting a handle on things that most intelligent people know, but do not know that they know. It is particularly difficult to string together a set of working hypotheses without using the fake technical language, however, because even if you stop to say “I am being rigorous” and spell out why, it sounds like you are spinning out truisms.
I, of course, am at most spinning out truisms, and sometimes not even that. Sometimes I am, indeed, not even wrong. But the people I most admire are doing something more substantial than that.
That said (which is how I usually get to the anecdotal part of my posts, a rhetorical move to the multi-topic type of post that irritates juggzy enormously), I want to bloviate for a bit on my usual topic of genuine anomalies, which may be empirically verifiable as existing, and seeming anomalies so embedded in histories of self-deception that they may be impossible ever to straighten out.
I came round to this topic from Clifford via thinking about the overwhelmingly statistically probable events of everyday life. The standard example is putting your finger on a hot stove. But then we have the culturally specific phenomenon of firewalking, which always involves glowing coals or heated rocks. It suddenly occurs to me that it would be interesting, and possible, to have firewalkers stroll across a succession of suitably reinforced hot stoves and see if they can replicate the feat.
I have read only one newspaper story about this and it may have been total fiction, but I can believe that there is in India an annual gathering of Atheist Firewalkers who combat superstition by running across the coals chanting “No god! No god! No god!”
There was, in this morning’s New York Times, a story by Noritmitsu Omishi about the priestesses of Miyako Island. They are getting harder to recruit because of improved health care, rising affluence and the attractions of an urban lifestyle. The end is in sight for traditional culture because it no longer supplies meaningful answers to local questions and resources to meet local needs.
But the story contains one of the standard tales (told by a leader in Oura village) of a road through a sacred spot that was stymied a decade ago by repeated equipment breakdowns and unusual worker illness, until the road was finally built around the sacred spot instead of through it.
I am not aware of stories like this from the United States, where the usual response to threats to a sacred spot is a cease-and-desist lawsuit by guardians of the site. But a recent news story about popular beliefs in Iceland contained structurally identical tales to the one from Oura (including one in which a building’s construction was completely going awry until a traditional seer explained to the presiding presences that their rock would be put back where it was once the construction was finished), and of course Toby Green’s book contained anecdotes by colonial authorities regarding similar problems of having to move the local presiding spirits before a path-blocking boulder could be dislodged.
So this is clearly a cross-cultural set of tales that I hope someone has documented properly, including levels of verifiability versus rural legends (except in Iceland, where the legends are urban). Given the anomalies of construction, I would not be surprised if a good many of the stories were absolutely true. There could be thousands such stories and it would demonstrate nothing, because there are no ways to exclude enough variables to prove or disprove the effect of unseen forces on mechanical equipment, unless the forces are magnetic, let us say, or Murphy’s Law verifiably at work. You simply have the kind of operating anomaly that happens on any construction job, and since no one documents transient anomalies in daily life, there is no way to work out statistical probabilities (even then, simple variables of maintenance and the particular physical qualities of the jobsite make such probabilities impossible to calculate).
So it is a matter of faith that says that there are no presiding presences. They are not there because, well, we know that such things do not exist, just as there are no rocks in the sky. But of course belief that they are there is also a matter of faith. The question of rocks in the sky is a red herring (a mixed metaphor in which I delight), a standard trope used to show the blinkered vision of the Enlightenment. Nobody, but nobody, believes that meteors are hurled by deities, even if it sometimes looks like somebody is aiming for a place when two or more of 'em knock off mailboxes and crash into people's living rooms in a decade or so. So there is no competing faith claim against which reason is defending itself, just a too-hasty declaration of a physical universal by the eighteenth-century philosophes. (Which ones? Is this story, too, an urban legend?)
The problem that hinders us that it is all too easy to turn superstitious in turn once one encounters a genuine mystery. It’s as rational a response as can be, on a subconscious level (which is where most embedded rules of reason work, anyway): if that turned out to be true, better assume the rest of it might be true, and don’t mess with the parts where they say something is gonna come getcha. This does not follow logically, of course, but I am constantly amazed at how people who were working assiduously on excluding the variables suddenly decide to walk away just in case. (Of course, as in Wade Davis’ book on Haiti, there are sometimes unexplained deaths involved.) Green doesn't care to perform further experiments with his unaccountably operative objects of power.
My favorite part of the Miyako Island story, left unglossed by the writer, is the presence in the secret shrines of masks “that, experts say, originally came from Papua New Guinea.” Papua New Guinea? well, the islands of Okinawa were occupied by the United States military for a very long time, and in 1945 some of the soldiers were presumably fresh from the Pacific campaign...but then there were the whaling ships a century earlier...and the Dutch before that.... It is so easy to make up a just-so story that I hope the anthropologists have done more than identify the origin of the masks in question.
...Oh, and for people who like my posts about coincidences, I wrote the foregoing concluding paragraph, then decided it was time to fact-check this post before embarrassing myself.* So I opened my browser to Yahoo (where LiveJournal comments are forwarded to my mail). The lead story of the hour was “The Science of Fairy Tales: Experts explain how moments from favorite stories could have really happened.”
But to be scrupulously fair, the original paragraph was only the opening sentence before I realized that the remark needed to be glossed, so the "just-so story" part comes from a standard comment in previous posts about hypothetical explanations. It is the coincidence of topic, not the just-so story part, that made me LOL.
The post had considerably more literary merit when it just ended with the sentence and then the paragraph about the Yahoo home page, but that is not how I do things. To the despair of the writers among my readers.
*The syntactic ambiguity is intentional.
