Thursday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

May 4, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning; it’s May 4, and Spring is pretty much here in Chicago after a terribly rainy weekend. It’s another triple food holiday: National Candied Orange Peel Day, National Homebrew Day, and National Hoagie Day. I like all of those, and love candied orange peel, on which you can find good deals on Amazon. It’s also Star Wars Day, and though many readers are fans, I must confess I’ve never seen any of the television episodes or movies.

On this day in 1886, the Haymarket Affair occurred in Chicago, with a bomb tossed into a group of police officers during a labor demonstration, killing one cop and wounding six; eight anarchists were convicted and four were hanged. It also brought crackdowns on immigrants and the labor movement. On May 4, 1904, the digging of the Panama Canal began, and in 1932 Al Capone began serving an 11-year prison sentence for evading federal taxes, the only crime they could pin on him. In 1953, Ernest Hemingway was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his short novel The Old Man and the Sea, a book I think is overrated (I like his short stories and The Sun Also Rises  better). The next year he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but didn’t accept it in person as he was suffering from the aftermath of a plane crash. On May 4, 1961, the “Freedom Riders” began their pro-civil-rights bus odyssey through the South. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, and in 1998 “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski received four life sentences plus 30 years in a plea deal (he’s still alive and in jail).

Notables born on this day include Alice Liddell (1852, the model for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland). Here’s her photo:

Alice lived to age 82.

Also born on this day were Eugenie Clark, shark biologist and my former colleague and Maryland (1922), Audrey Hepburn (1929), George Will (1941), and Randy Travis (1959). Those who died on this day Moe Howard of the Three Stooges (1975, real name Moses Harry Horwitz), Dom DeLuise (2009), and biologist Christian de Duve (2013). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is engaged in food-centered philosophy:

A: What are you thinking about?
Hili: About the problem of memory.
A: And?
Hili: Nothing, just that yesterday I had beef.
In Polish:
Ja: Nad czym myślisz?
Hili: Nad problemem pamięci.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Nic tylko wczorajsza wołowina.

Leon’s hiking in the woods near Wloclawek and bonding with his staff:

Leon: How many roads we passed together? How many paths we walked?

How many roads can a cat walk down before you call him a cat?

Spring is coming to Winnipeg, too, and Gus is hunting rodents, though he’s not allowed to get them. His staff’s notes:

Here are a few pics of mouse hunting this afternoon. Gus was certain there was a mouse behind these rocks and he spent a good portion of the day just staring at them. Good old Gus.

A reprehensible witch hunt in academia: feminist philosopher equates the defenses of transgenderism and of transracialism—and gets crucified

May 3, 2017 • 11:45 am

Gender is widely agreed by the Left to be a social construct, not a biological reality. If that’s the case, why isn’t race? Why was someone like Rachel Dolezal, who was white but claimed to be black, vilified and fired from her job as the Spokane, Washington head of the NAACP, while a man who claims to be a woman (or vice versa) is defended and her courage lauded? The distinction has always baffled me, especially because race is also seen to be a social construct.

Those were the questions asked in an article recently published in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia by Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Her piece is called “In defense of transracialism“, and is free online (reference and link below).  I have only skimmed the full piece, but it’s dissected by Jesse Singal at New York Magazine’s “Intelligencer column” “This is what a modern-day witch hunt looks like.” And indeed, merely for pointing out that the arguments used to support transgender rights are similar to those that could be used to support transracial rights, Tuvel has been excoriated by academics, and the journal asked to retract the article. She has received a ton of hate mail. It is truly a Leftist witch hunt—a purity test that Tuvel apparently failed big time.

First, the abstract and first footnote in Tuvel’s paper:

And her concluding paragraph:

Haslanger writes, “rather than worrying, ‘what is gender, really?’ or ‘what is race, really?’ I think we should begin by asking (both in the theoretical and political sense) what, if anything, we want them to be” (Haslanger 2012, 246). I have taken it as my task in this article to argue that a just society should reconsider what we owe individuals who claim a strongly felt sense of identification with another race, and accordingly what we want race to be. I hope to have shown that, insofar as similar arguments that render transgenderism acceptable extend to transracialism, we have reason to allow racial self-identification, coupled with racial social treatment, to play a greater role in the determination of race than has previously been recognized. I conclude that society should accept such an individual’s decision to change race the same way it should accept an individual’s decision to change sex.

For this she is being crucified in public by her fellow academics, who accused her of not only being transphobic (not true at all), but perpetrating tangible harm and even violence on both the black and trans communities (another lie).

Part of Singal’s analysis:

Tuvel structures her argument more or less as follows: (1) We accept the following premises about trans people and the rights and dignity to which they are entitled; (2) we also accept the following premises about identities and identity change in general; (3) therefore, the common arguments against transracialism fail, and we should accept that there’s little apparent logically coherent reason to deny the possibility of genuine transracialism.

Anyone who has read an academic philosophy paper will be familiar with this sort of argument. The goal, often, is to provoke a little — to probe what we think and why we think it, and to highlight logical inconsistencies that might help us better understand our values and thought processes. This sort of article is abstract and laden with hypotheticals — the idea is to pull up one level from the real world and force people to grapple with principles and claims on their own merits, rather than — in the case of Dolezal — baser instincts like disgust and outrage. This is what many philosophers do.

Tuvel’s article rebuts a number of the arguments against transracialism, and it’s clear, throughout, that Tuvel herself is firmly in support of trans people and trans rights. Her argument is not that being transracial is the same as being transgender — rather, it’s “that similar arguments that support transgenderism support transracialism,” as she puts it in an important endnote we’ll return to. It’s clear, from the way Tuvel sets things up, that she’s prodding us to more carefully examine why we feel the way we do about Dolezal, not to question trans rights or trans identities.

Usually, an article like this, abstract and argumentatively complex as it is, wouldn’t attract all that much attention outside of its own academic subculture. But that isn’t what happened here — instead, Tuvel is now bearing the brunt of a massive internet witch-hunt, abetted in part by Hypatia’s refusal to stand up for her. The journal has already apologized for the article, despite the fact that it was approved through its normal editorial process, and Tuvel’s peers are busily wrecking her reputation by sharing all sorts of false claims about the article that don’t bear the scrutiny of even a single close read.

The biggest vehicle of misinformation about Tuvel’s articles comes from the “open letter to Hypatia” that has done a great deal to help spark the controversy. That letter has racked up hundreds of signatories within the academic community — the top names listed are Elise Springer of Wesleyan University, Alexis Shotwell of Carleton University (who is listed as the point of contact), Dilek Huseyinzadegan of Emory University, Lori Gruen of Wesleyan, and Shannon Winnubst of Ohio State University. (Update: As of the morning of May 3, all the names had been removed from the letter. A note at the top of it reads “We have now closed signatories for this letter in order to send it to the Editor and Associate Editors of Hypatia.”)

In the letter, the authors ask that the article be retracted on the grounds that its “continued availability causes further harm” to marginalized people. The authors then list five main reasons they think the article is so dangerously flawed it should be unpublished. . .

Singal goes on to point out that four five of those reasons are based on a total misreading of Tuvel’s article, whose main point is given above and by Singal in his second and third paragraph. (The other criticism is trivial.) He then rebuts each of the “reasons,” and goes on to show how Tuvel is being ripped to shreds, unjustly, by academics. She has even been accused of “perpetrating violence” and “enacting harm”

The letter’s authors, presumably Leftists, are doing all they can do demonize Tuvel for–what? None of the objections recognize that the transgenderism and transracialism are both based on people feeling that they’re different from how their external appearance has led society to categorize them. One is based on genitalia, the other skin color.  If a biological male feels that he is really a woman, why can’t a white person feel that they’re black? And regardless of which sex is “privileged,” people transition in both directions. But of course never underestimate Regressives’ tendency to reach a conclusion first (“white people have privilege and just can’t say they feel or are black”) and then find arguments to support it.

Singal concludes:

I could go on and on. This is a witch hunt. There has simply been an explosive amount of misinformation circulating online about what is and isn’t in Tuvel’s article, which few of her most vociferous critics appear to have even skimmed, based on their inability to accurately describe its contents. Because the right has seized on Rachel Dolezal as a target of gleeful ridicule, and as a means of making opportunistic arguments against the reality of the trans identity, a bunch of academics who really should know better are attributing to Tuvel arguments she never made, simply because she connected those two subjects in an academic article.

The Chronicle of Higher Education shows how the craven journal Hypatia apologized (you can see the journal’s reprehensible Facebook apology here, but I want to reproduce it because it so resembles the apologies of the accused during China’s Cultural Revolution:

From the Chronicle:

The article, ”In Defense of Transracialism,” by Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College, drew a significant backlash following its publication, in late March. The article discusses public perceptions of racial and gender transitions by comparing the former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal’s desire to be seen as black with the celebrity Caitlyn Jenner’s public transition from male to female. [JAC: the article does far more than just draw a parallel!]

Since a backlash erupted on social media, more than 400 academics have signed an open letter to the editor of Hypatia calling for the article to be retracted. “Our concerns reach beyond mere scholarly disagreement; we can only conclude that there has been a failure in the review process, and one that painfully reflects a lack of engagement beyond white and cisgender privilege,” the letter says.

The journal’s Facebook apology responded to those concerns by saying that it would be looking closely at its editorial processes to make sure they are more inclusive of transfeminists and feminists of color, whom the journal said had been particularly harmed by the article. The journal also apologized for its initial response to the backlash, saying that an earlier Facebook post had “also caused harm, primarily by characterizing the outrage that met the article’s publication as mere ‘dialogue’ that the article was ‘sparking.’ We want to state clearly that we regret that the post was made.”

Tuvel has responded to the criticism (see here), apologizes for one or two items, like “deadnaming” Caitlyn Jenner (giving her pre-transition name), but ends in this way:

Calls for intellectual engagement are also being shut down because they “dignify” the article. If this is considered beyond the pale as a response to a controversial piece of writing, then critical thought is in danger. I have never been under the illusion that this article is immune from critique. But the last place one expects to find such calls for censorship rather than discussion is amongst philosophers.

Indeed. Philosopher Russell Blackford has been defending Tuvel on Twitter and criticizing the witch hunt in a series of tweets, calling attention to others’ defenses of Tuvel. I am proud to call him my friend. Read the following from bottom up, in chronological order:

And Yale’s Paul Bloom, Ceiling Cat bless him, has also defended Tuvel:

https://twitter.com/paulbloomatyale/status/859377167335124994

Hypatia should be mocked and vilified for its cowardice, as should those academics who went after tuvel because her Gendankenartikel violated the Regressive Left’s norms of purity. These are not students attacking Tuvel—they are professional academics, and I have nothing but contempt for them. (Remember, today’s students are tomorrow’s professors.) I am appalled, but not surprised. I’ll end with Singal’s words:

. . . what’s disturbing here is how many hundreds of academics signed onto and helped spread utterly false claims about one of their colleagues, and the extent to which Hypatia, faced with such outrage, didn’t even bother trying to sift legitimate critiques from frankly made-up ones. A huge number of people who haven’t read Tuvel’s article now believe, on the basis of that trumped-up open letter and unfounded claims of “violence,” that it is so deeply transphobic it warranted an unusual apology from the journal that published it.

We should want academics to write about complicated, difficult, hot-button issues, including identity. Online pile-ons cannot, however righteous they feel, dictate journals’ publication policies and how they treat their authors and articles. It’s really disturbing to watch this sort of thing unfold in real time — there’s such a stark disconnect between what Tuvel wrote and what she is purported to have written. This whole episode should worry anybody who cares about academia’s ability to engage in difficult issues at a time when outrage can spread faster than ever before.

h/t: Grania

______

Tuvel. R. 2017. In defense of transracialism. Hypatia 32:263-278, DOI: 10.1111/hypa.12327

Spot the copperhead snake

May 3, 2017 • 11:00 am

Twisted Sifter has a “spot the. . .” picture (h/t: reader Debby). Here’s their picture and words:

Did you see it? It’s there, hiding in plain sight. A venomous copperhead snake (Agkistrodon contortrix). Take another look, see if you can spot the little guy.

Reveal at about 1 p.m.

Photograph by Jerry Davis | Outline by @SssnakeySci

Heather Hastie on the problem of North Korea

May 3, 2017 • 10:30 am

I call your attention to a new piece at Heather’s Homilies, “The problem of North Korea.” Like many, I’ve been concerned that the fact that a wacko is head of state in both the U.S. and North Korea makes the peninsula a powder keg, a possible site for a nuclear war. Heather has convinced me that, insofar as Trump listens to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, the danger is less than I thought.

Go over and have a look at her piece. As usual, it’s thoughtful and thorough. Here’s a cartoon of what I worried about, taken from Heather’s post:

 

The TLS on Plantinga and me

May 3, 2017 • 9:15 am

I recently published my take on the award of the Templeton Prize to Alvin Plantinga, a “religious philosopher” (read: “theologian”) whose work consists of untenable arguments couched in unreadable prose.  Rupert Shortt, religion editor of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), writes about it in a short piece, “Alvin Plantinga and the Templeton Prize“. Google adds that Shortt is “a former Visiting Fellow at Oxford University. His books include Benedict XVI (2005), Christianophobia: A Faith under Attack (2012) and Rowan’s Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop (2014)”. Reader Michael (see below) adds that Shortt studied under Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and Shortt’s writings (e.g., here) clearly show that he’s a believer and an apologist.

Although Shortt describes a bit of criticism I gave in Faith Versus Fact about Plantinga’s arguments , he’s clearly sympathetic to Plantinga’s claim that accepting God is a “properly basic belief” that needs no justification. Shortt doesn’t mention Plantinga’s belief that the “properly basic” God is the Christian god rather than Allah or Brahma, nor Plantinga’s idea (taken from Calvin) of the “sensus divinitatis” that God installed in us to enable us to sense him—and that that sensus is broken in atheists and Muslims. Finally, Shortt neglects Plantinga’s theodicy: that innocent people suffer because of Satan.

I’ll quote Shortt’s analysis, adding a few comments of my own.

Plantinga’s positive case for the existence of God is known as the evolutionary argument against naturalism. The basis of his case involves a distinction between adaptive behaviour and true beliefs. Evolution can explain the former, he thinks, but not the latter. His conclusion is that while no conflict exists between Christianity and science, there is a conflict between philosophical naturalism and science, because adherents of naturalism (including atheists) have no firm basis for believing that many of their statements genuinely map reality. The Darwinian view thus fatally undermines itself. If it is true, then the methods that support it are probably unreliable, meaning that we should not believe it . . .

In Faith Versus Fact (pp. 177-183), I argue that evolution can and would be expected to endow us with realistic beliefs about nature, but also that our senses and beliefs can be fooled by many features (indoctrination, optical illusions, “common sense”, and so on). Here’s what Shortt says about that:

In our conversation, I raised an objection expressed by some of Plantinga’s Christian critics, as well as by non-believers. The query centres on his assumption that the generation of reliable belief-producing mechanisms should not itself be part of evolutionary adaptation. This sort of reservation has also been voiced by Jerry Coyne in his recent book Faith Versus Fact: Why science and religion are incompatible. But whether or not one is fully convinced by Plantinga, he nevertheless succeeds in highlighting something disquieting about the naturalistic picture of our human predicament. Various scholars have noted that there is no systematic connection on a naturalistic world view between our possession of equipment that has turned out to be efficacious in the battle for survival, and our putative ability to track the truth in relation to our intellectual intuitions. The underlying point, as the philosopher John Cottingham urges, “is that it seems impossible for any philosopher to characterise our human situation with respect to the truth – the ways in which we have fallen short, the ways in which we are able to correct our mistakes – without implicitly assuming that we are indeed equipped to undertake the search for truth. And it is not clear that this assumption can be underwritten via the resources of evolutionary naturalism”.

If you know anything about evolution, the “evolutionary argument against naturalism” is a nonstarter. As I’ve said repeatedly, one cannot produce an a priori philosophical argument for why empirical observation, consensus, and reason—what I call “science construed broadly”—give us “true beliefs” (I prefer to call them “truths”). But we don’t need to. The reason we use such science is because it works. The theological method of revelation, dogma, scripture, and authority doesn’t work, as it’s provided no consensus on matters even as basic as the existence of God. This can be demonstrated by the difference in the efficacy of faith healing versus science-based medicine. We can make predictions based on science, but not on religious feelings. We can correct our mistakes using science, for that is what science is about, but we cannot correct our mistakes using religious belief. We cannot even approach truth using religious belief.

Shortt goes on:

In rejecting Plantinga’s arguments, Coyne stresses the many abilities that emerge as a by-product of evolution. Yes, he concedes, doing mathematics would not have enhanced the fitness of our pre-literate ancestors. But once the human brain had reached a certain level of complexity, it was already performing many tasks unconnected with evolution. Nor is this a mark of special pleading, Coyne adds. Crows can solve complex puzzles; lyrebirds can imitate chainsaws and car alarms. These will strike some as weak analogies, however, because Plantinga is talking about advanced abilities which float free from the world of contingency.

These are not weak analogies, for many animals can learn and some can reason—evolution, too, has bequeathed them with the ability to survive by forming what Plantinga calls “true beliefs” about the world. Certainly apes can do that very well, but they apparently lack the sensus divinitatis. Why? Yes, our reasoning is more complex, but is it not “true belief” when an antelope gets spooked when it sees or smells a lion? The canard of “advanced abilities” is irrelevant here.

Shortt continues:

It is important to be clear what Plantinga’s case does and doesn’t betoken in his eyes, let alone those of his opponents. As a Calvinist, he’d be the first to insist that reason alone cannot lead one to a living faith in God. Philosophers and theologians, however distinguished, can only take enquirers to the threshold of such faith. Getting beyond this point will involve living into a new way of thinking, not thinking into a new way of living. In other words, God is not be thought of primarily as an unmoved mover or first cause (despite being so, from a monotheistic standpoint), but rather as an intimate presence in the life of the believer responding to a gift from beyond his or her imagining.

What Shortt is saying here is that we must rely on our “internal feelings” to divine that there is indeed a god—the Christian god.  That is his “new way of thinking”, but it’s not new: it’s called “delusion” by some, “wish thinking” by others, and “confirmation bias” by still others. The plain truth is that “sensing an intimate presence in our lives” is no evidence that that presence exists at all, much less as the omnipotent, benevolent, and omniscient Abrahamic God.  All it shows is that you feel something.

And, by the way, what gives Shortt the authority to tell anyone how to conceive of God? The big advantage for him is to claim that, like Plantinga, believing in the existence of a divine being need not depend on evidence, but merely on our gut feelings. Well, isn’t that convenient? Sadly, what we feel inside has never been good evidence for the existence of what lies outside. That is what believers and religious philosophers obstinately refuse to see.

Reader Michael sent me his own take on the TLS piece, which I reproduce with his permission:

Bloody awful defence of Plantinga’s arguments by Rupert Shortt [Religion Editor at the TLS]. Shortt studied under Rowan Williams and advocates a ‘sophisticated’ and unfalsifiable view of a non-intervening God in his book God is No Thing: Coherent Christianity [a fluffy 96-page book I read in an hour for free in a Christian book shop last year].

An example of Shortt logic from the TLS article [apparently this is a common line among religious philosophers!]:

“…but Plantinga is bullish, pointing out, for example, that we take it wholly for granted that other minds exist apart from our own, even though this belief, while also “basic”, cannot be demonstrated beyond doubt. The same applies to belief in the past. We can play intellectual games suggesting that the world was created five minutes ago, along with all its ancient mountain ranges and so forth.”

What an absurd defence! If one wishes to take that line, then the endeavours of reasoning, philosophy, science or even getting up in the morning are futile! It is obvious that we must have something to stand on [first principles or axioms] that have to be taken on ‘faith’.

I think it is rank dishonesty to assign god the property of being ‘properly basic’, thus swerving around the need to show god is in the world/real.

Michael is absolutely right, except that we needn’t take things like reasoning on faith. We use reason because it works. And science isn’t really based on axioms: it’s not math. It’s based on a method that, refined over time, leads us to widely accepted facts about the universe: the facts that we can rely on to do things like establish the genealogy of species, cure disease, and land probes on comets. You can’t accomplish such things through prayer.

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ spanking

May 3, 2017 • 8:30 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “saved,” came with an email message:

Now there’s an image that would look good on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

And indeed, this kind of lunacy is the essence of Trinitarian Christianity:

I’d suggest becoming a “Patreon” of Jesus and Mo, even if you don’t have much to give on a regular basis. It’s a good strip and the author is of course risking his/her life by creating it,

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 3, 2017 • 7:30 am

Reader Tim Anderson from Oz sends astronomy, landscape and animal photos; his captions are indented.

Here a two astronomical images I have made recently. First is a globular cluster, Omega Centauri (NGC 5139). This is easily visible to the naked eye, as it is the brightest such object in the sky and contains about five million stars. This image was captured using a colour CCD camera.
Second is the Tarantula Nebula (NGC 2070), which is a very active star-forming region embedded in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This is another composite LRGB image with the L (for luminance) channel provided by imaging “Hydrogen Alpha” emissions given off by ionised hydrogen atoms in the gas clouds being excited by the intense stellar radiation. Unfortunately, it was a very hazy night, hence the haloes round the bright stars.
I found this fella (a short-beaked echidna, Tachyglossus aculeatus) waddling across a country road near Reid’s Flat in New South Wales:
Here is a juvenile nankeen night-heron (Nycticorax caledonicus) putting a tortoise in its place. This bird is common in Australian wetlands.
And “Sunset in Cowra, New South Wales”, sent yesterday:
I think this probably doesn’t count as wildlife, but this was the view down my street this evening.