Horse Hockey

Speaking of underdetermination (which I was in my last post, in case you were wondering), I've been thinking quite a bit about the recent discussion by a panel convened by the National Academies regarding global warming. The so-called "hockey stick" data purports to show that the warming trend induced by human activity is clearly more significant than has often been admitted (the data are said to form a "hockey stick" curve because when graphed they show a very steady, level trend for a long time that suddenly curves sharply upwards, like the blade on a hockey stick).

The evidence is supposed to be valid for a period of more than 2000 years, even though actual temperature data are available for less then 500 of those years, but I don't think anyone seriously doubts that human activity has some effect on temperature data. Two things are in serious dispute, however. First, what is the nature and extent of that effect and, second, what normative conclusions follow from our awareness of that effect.

One is tempted to leave the first question to the scientists, but it is because of the way scientists famously mess up questions such as the second one that it is even more tempting to monitor their contributions to the first question as well. Scientists have a notoriously bad sense of what follows from what in a normative context, and very often it is what they think follows from what in a normative context that determines what they think follows from what in a purely empirical context. This is unfortunate, but it is not surprising, since this is probably true for most folks in most contexts: we are, after all, political animals.

In the case of this panel's study, some politicians have argued that the data was selected by the scientists themselves in such a way as to produce the effects that they themselves expected. Their response?

"I saw nothing that spoke to me of any manipulation," said one member, Peter Bloomfield, a statistics professor at North Carolina State University. He added that his impression was that the study was "an honest attempt to construct a data analysis procedure."

What did you expect him to say? "Sure, we cooked the books. Everybody does." He wouldn't have said that even if he had believed it. But of course he didn't believe that--he believed that what he did say was true. However, his mere belief doesn't actually make it true, and the selection and analysis of data in a scientific context is precisely one of those areas where scientists themselves are the least competent to make judgments such as the one this guy made. It is not really clear whether an outside observer could make such judgments either: science is one of those areas of human knowledge that fools us into thinking that there is such a thing as objectivity about observational data and the theories that attempt to explain them, but in this particular instance, Nietzsche was actually right about something--he famously wrote, in Beyond Good and Evil, that science is nothing more than one more interpretation, among many possible interpretations, of the world we observe. All interpretations are open to revision, especially those about which we are so sure as to be unable to see possible alternatives.

So it's worth keeping an eye on these reports--in some cases they may actually come close to the truth, but if the history of science teaches us anything at all, it teaches us that science itself is just a long sequence of theories and explanations being proved false. Why should any of these theories about the climate be exceptions to that long and invariable history?

WSJ on New Mass Translation

Diane at Te Deum laudamus, te Dominum confitemur has posted the text of Michael Foley's OpEd piece in the Wall Street Journal on the new Mass translation. It's worth reading.

Try Asking Martha Nussbaum a Challenging Question

I'm often intrigued by the ways in which folks interpret questions or arguments that challenge their own arguments or assumptions. In the field of philosophy, questions that appear "hostile" to casual observers are actually rather common, not because philosophers are a hostile bunch but because the main task of the philosopher, at least insofar as that task is understood by most Anglo-American philosophers, is precisely to challenge arguments and assumptions. Thus the questions are not intended to be taken personally, as affronts to a person's dignity, but as a professional (and, one hopes, disinterested) examination of a point of view.

So I was further intrigued when I read a story in today's Times Higher Education Supplement about women Lecturers in England, who feel very uncomfortable when they are asked challenging questions--especially when it is men who ask the questions:

Sara Mills, a professor of linguistics at Sheffield Hallam University, studied the attitudes of female and male academics to presenting papers after observing a normally "overbearing" female colleague go to pieces on stage.

She found stark differences in the way the sexes viewed public speaking and in their response to feeling nervous.

Professor Mills stressed that not all women suffered stage fright. But she said: "It is my contention that particular types of gender identity and preconceptions about the masculine nature of public speaking may be activated or challenged in the process of giving academic papers."

She found that women were more likely to freeze because they felt marginal within their university or expected their audience to be hostile in question-and-answer sessions.

She described the experience of one female colleague at a conference: "Male colleagues had aggressively asked her questions in a way that she felt aimed to destroy her argument. She felt personally undermined, and her confidence was so shaken by the experience that she subsequently felt very uneasy about giving papers at all."

I suppose it is entirely possible that some men ask questions for no other reason than to make somebody feel uncomfortable (I'm not all that sure that no women do this), but it strikes me as curious that this colleague of professor Mills felt that the questions she was asked were "aimed to destroy her argument." I'm not really at all clear on what would be wrong with that, if the argument is in need of being destroyed. This is what "hostile" questions are for, after all. Well, it made her feel "personally undermined", and that destroyed her confidence to the extent that she was uneasy about giving more papers.

The inference we are invited to draw, apparently, is that this feeling of having been personally undermined is a function, not of this woman's own psychology, but of the dynamic that exists between men and women in academia. My own experience has been rather different in this regard. I know plenty of women who, if you ask them a challenging question, will pretty quickly show you who is really wearing the pants in an argument. Mills grants that "not all women suffered stage fright", and she does not offer much evidence in support of her own inference other than the mere consistency of the data with her hypothesis, but this is a classic case of underdetermination if I ever saw one. A professor of linguistics (not psychology) offers an interpretation of observed behavior that purports to explain the psychological motivations of hordes of people on both sides of a public interaction. Although the story is not an implausible one, it is merely that: one plausible story among many.

Mills reports that male "respondents" did not feel the same anxieties, but we are not told how representative the sampling of male "respondents" is, or what their experiences had been like, or how they perceive the sexual dynamics in academia. We are offered only another guess: males feel differently "perhaps because public confidence is key to the construction of masculine identity".

Signs of Intelligence in England?

A story in today's Times Higher Education Supplement "reveals" (their term) the rather startling fact that there are some prominent academics in England who appear to subscribe to creationism or intelligent design (I wonder if they have folks like this guy in mind). I say "rather startling" because one of the things we've heard from such folks as Richard Dawkins is that belief in such things is principally an American phenomenon, thanks to the benighted fundamentalism that flourishes here but apparently nowhere else in the world, according to him. But according to THES:

Leeds University plans to incorporate one or two compulsory lectures on creationism and intelligent design into its second-year course for zoology and genetics undergraduates next Christmas.

At Leicester University, academics already devote part of a lecture for third-year genetics undergraduates to creationism and intelligent design.

In both cases, lecturers intend to present the controversial theories as fallacies irreconcilable with scientific evidence. But that these alternatives to evolution have been proposed for formal discussion has sparked concern among the UK science community.

David Read, vice-president of the Royal Society, said: "It would be undesirable for universities to have to spend a lot of precious resources teaching students that creationism and intelligent design are not based on scientific evidence. It is pretty basic stuff."

A Times Higher investigation has also discovered there are at least 14 academics in science departments who consider themselves creationists. They argue the world is thousands not billions of years old and believe Noah's flood explains fossil remains. Several others are proponents of intelligent design, which rejects evolution as a discredited theory.

Some are heads of departments, seven lecture in the life sciences and seven are professors. They work in universities such as Bristol, Leeds, Manchester Metropolitan and Southampton.

They include Jonathan Swingler, head of Southampton University's School of Engineering Sciences, who believes dinosaurs co-existed with humans; and George Marshall, lecturer in neurobiomedicine at Glasgow University, who claims the complexity of the eye makes him "balk at evolutionary theory".

It is not particularly good news to find that Richard Dawkins is wrong about this as well as about everything else--this is one instance in which one might have wished he had been more on target.

It is one thing to discuss these matters in, say, a course on methodology, or in philosophy of science courses, since these views are connected to the demarcation problem, which is a very real and very important problem in its own right but which ought not to be mistaken for a problem of the empirical sciences themselves. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to introduce either creationism or intelligent design into a curriculum in the empirical sciences, since neither is an empirical theory. Intelligent design, in particular, is not a theory at all but an a priori metaphysical committment.

I suspect that, in reality, rather than in the imaginations of such as Richard Dawkins, there are plenty of folks in academic positions everywhere in the world who hold views that are less than rational. The reason is not benighted fundamentalism run rampant, but the sad fact that humans are generally not very rational creatures. It is all too easy for our intellectual inferences to be swayed by passions, desires, and false beliefs grounded in faulty assumptions. So as disappointing as it is to find creationists and intelligent designers teaching science in England, it is not, in the end, all that surprising.

Justice and Mercy

Today we remember, among others, St. Thomas More, martyred along with St. John Fisher by king Henry VIII in 1535 and canonized in the Church 400 years later. That's a long time to wait for justice to be done, but presumably in St. Thomas More's case the justice he received in 1535 at the hands of a bloody tyrant was more than balanced by the divine justice meted out to him in heaven at the hands of Our Lord, whose mercy and compassion we celebrate in a special way tomorrow.

One of my favorite readings from the Office is an optional reading for this day, taken from a letter that purports to be from St. Thomas More to his daughter Margaret (though it may actually have been written by Margaret herself from notes she had made of conversations with her father while in prison):

If her permits me to perish for my faults, then I shall serve as praise for his justice. But in good faith, Meg, I trust that his tender pity shall keep my poor soul safe and make me commend his mercy.

It is, perhaps, only a saint who can take comfort in the thought that even his own deserved mortal damnation is in some sense a good thing, since it is a manifestation of God's own justice. But at the same time the saint recognizes that God will look kindly on a humble and contrite heart, and mercy will conquer justice.

Tomorrow we remember St. Thomas Garnet, another Recusant Catholic martyred during the bloody years of the persection of Catholics in England. Fr. Garnet was falsely accused of complicity in the "Powder Treason", or Gunpowder Plot, that was used as an excuse for unprecedented persecution of Catholics in the century that followed. For three hundred years Catholics had to endure the hatred of their countrymen, but they continued to put their trust in God, and to believe that nothing that harms the mortal body in this world can affect the condition of one's immortal soul, a lesson that St. Thomas More had learned well (from Plato!--see his dialogue Phaedo, which appears to have been a source for the letter from which I quoted above).

It's a valuable lesson for all of us, actually, especially in these debauched times in which we live. Live justly, judge never, forgive ever, and you will be shown mercy and justice.

It Must Have Been the Guy Sitting Next To Me

Last night I played trumpet in a concert for the first time in over thirty years. It was something of a rush. The "Communiversity Band" (the name is dumb; if you Google it you'll find that a lot of universities use it, for some reason) is a summer band here at Ohio University that is made up of faculty, students, and folks from the local community, including some high school students. In spite of the eclectic mix of talents, it sounds really quite good. Well, except maybe for the trumpet section, where I think there may have been a few sour notes sounded last night.

St. Louis Seminarians

If you enjoyed the Duel of the Seminarians video I linked to in the previous post, you should check out the other web pages available from various St. Louis Seminarians. Some of them have formed a band called the Priesty Boyz (band site here; blog here), and Jeff Geerling has a blog of his own and a website. These are some thoughtful, prayerful guys, and the future of our priesthood looks good to me.

Is Michael Grosch a Sith?

You'll have to watch the video to find out.

I Guess We Know Which Side She's On

The newsreader for WOUB-FM, my local NPR station, in recounting the story of the warning to the Episcopal General Convention from the more traditional Anglican domains, referred at least four times to the Anglicans as "the Angelicans".

Eternal Protest

Fr. Kimel has an excellent discussion up at Pontifications about the election of a woman as Presiding Bishop in the PECUSA.

I've Got Your Spirit For You Pal, Right Here

Tom expresses his utter lack of interest in the new Mass translations in a post at Disputations. (Zippy notes in a comment there that he doesn't care enough about it even to put up a post about how he doesn't care about it.)

As I have mentioned in many posts, I think that a lot of the whining one hears about "prayerfulness" or "reverence" and the lack thereof at Mass amounts to disputes about matters of aesthetic tastes, and, as they say, de gustibus non disputandum est. Noticing that doesn't stop me, obviously, from pointing out the things that I like best at a Mass. I don't think that makes me a hypocrite: I could be arguing in my spare time, as it were. But I can't help but remember a discussion with Tom, back in the old days of the Free Catholic Mailing List, in which I said much the same thing that Tom is now saying in his post, only to be lectured by him about how, if there is a Form of the Good and a Form of Beauty, and if God is Good, then there must be some connection between Goodness and Beauty--aesthetic matters, in short, are not merely subjective.

A point with which I agree, if it is properly understood. But that certainly does not settle the question of whether it is in some sense--aesthetically, theologically, liturgically--better to say "and with your spirit" rather than "and also with you", one of the changes in the translation that seems to be singled out rather more often than its semantic content would appear to warrant, either for praise among those who think it a good thing, or for ridicule among those who, like Tom, find the issue to be a tempest in a tea pot.

Other changes strike me as far more important and interesting, as I've remarked in other posts. But the general principle involved--the importance of accurately and faithfully reflecting, in translation, the semantic content of the Latin originals--seems to me to be far more important than some folks are willing to admit. In some cases, at least in my opinion, the more literal translation is also the more aesthetically pleasing. For example, consider the prayer for the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time, which reads, in the banal version of the ICEL:

Father, you show your almighty power in your mercy and forgiveness. Continue to fill us with your gifts of love. Help us to hurry toward the eternal life you promise and come to share in the joys of your kingdom.

The Latin really is much better, more sublime:

Deus, qui omnipotentiam tuam parcendo maxime et miserando manifestas, gratiam tuam super nos indesinenter infunde, ut, ad tua promissa currentes, caelestium bonorum facias esse consortes.

A more literal translation might be something like the following:

God, who make manifest your almighty power most of all in your forgiveness and mercy, pour forth your grace upon us without ceasing, that, as we hurry towards your promises, you might make us to be partakers of your heavenly goods.

Somebody who is actually able to write decent English could probably come up with something much better than that--I offer it merely as a contrast to the ICEL version, which glosses over important elements of the Latin original. John Zuhlsdorf provides other examples of the same problem in his quasi-blog, What Does the Prayer Really Say? The simplified, "dynamic equivalence" examples have a certain utilitarian appeal, I guess, but they just don't cut it, in the end, because they don't aspire to anything, they fail to represent, in words, the grandeur of what they are saying.

We are all of us imagines Dei and, as such, are called to rise above the sinful and the fallen and strive to be more like the divine and perfect ("Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect"). It seems unlikely that such a calling is grounded in merely subjective values. If actions and choices can be more or less noble and good, it seems at least plausible that the linguistic representations of those actions--and the virtues that underlie them--can also be more or less noble and good. Indeed, words are also employed as imagines, and there is no reason why words should not be arrayed in the greatest splendor possible. I like music of all kinds--medieval, baroque, classical, rock, jazz--but I think it goes without saying that a simple tune such as "Jesus Loves Me, This I Know" fails to rise to the same level as, say, Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610--or even "Love Divine." So it does not seem impossible to me that, say, one poem may rise above another in its manner of expression.

The Mass is our greatest theme, and the words we employ in giving expression to it ought to rise above all others in manner of expression, in my opinion. Certainly there will be disputes about whether these wordds really do rise above those--I think there will always be such disputes, because there is indeed an aesthetic component in such matters. There is a kind of grammar to aesthetics, however, and just as we ought to aim to express ourselves clearly and well in ordinary language, we ought also to express our theme of the Mass not only clearly (what seemed to be the goal of dynamic equivalence), but well.