Perhaps this moment more than any other, the moment of his first astonishment, marked the beginning for the engineer of what is called a normal life. From that time forward it was possible to meet him and after a few minutes form a clear notion of what sort of fellow he was and how he would spend the rest of his life.
During a press conference at last year’s Jazz & Heritage Festival, Mayor Landrieu told me, “There is a way to organize culture without killing it.” Those words are either comforting or alarming, depending upon whom you ask. As David Freedman, the general manager of listener-supported WWOZ-FM (self-proclaimed “Guardians of the Groove”), told me, “An unintended consequence may be the death of spontaneous culture in New Orleans. Some may think this is good for tourism and development, but it is not good for the distinct musical traditions at the core of our identity.”
David Freedman is right. These words are ALARMING. The rationalist as usual thinks that one can “organize” culture. They have little or no appreciation of the power of spontaneous order, jazz being a wonderful instantiation of a spontaneous order. An organized culture is a moribund culture.
The author of Zuleika Dobson, or, an Oxford love story born on this day. Had I a daughter, she’d have been named Zuleika.
This in the NYT — H/T to Troy Camplin
In a paper from a few years ago I had a section in a chapter in Hayek and Behavioral Economics that deals with this notion, a curtain-raiser to a more detailed examination.
Taking Ignorance Seriously
As already indicated the other component to thinking about complexity resides in the realm of epistemology. Epistemology in the Plato-Descartes tradition besides being highly individualistic, i.e. individualistic (or internal) in the sense that knowledge relies solely upon the operation of mental states without any appeal to external considerations – is primarily concerned with justification. It therefore has a distinctly positive concern. Ignorance, for want of a better term, by contrast does not play a leading role in epistemology.
The sort of ignorance we are concerned with here is “inevitable ignorance” (Rescher, 2009, p. 2) – the idea marking what we cannot know as opposed to “culpable ignorance” what we don’t know or what we should know but don’t, or as others term it “deliberate or inadvertent neglect, secrecy or suppression, unquestioned tradition (or avoidable) cultural political selectivity” (Proctor, 2008). But neither are we concerned with insolubilia (Rescher, 2009, p. 11). Preeminent examples of insolubilia typically come from the realm of theology, a domain that cannot be considered a proper object of epistemological study.[i]
When Hayek delivered his Nobel Prize Lecture entitled “The Pretence of Knowledge” he might well have had Socrates’ words in the deepest recesses of his mind. Plato in the Apology (29a) has Socrates say:
For this fear of death is indeed the pretence of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown; since no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is there not here conceit of knowledge, which is a disgraceful sort of ignorance?
Well-known epistemologist Susan Haack opened up a recent talk with the following, now infamous words, from Donald Rumsfeld:
. . . as we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
Despite Rumsfeld’s awkward phrasing, Haack saw that it brought to light a serious epistemological point – the idea of the “unknown unknowns.” Haack elucidates what she has previously termed as the “Rumsfeld Problem” (Haack, 2008) as follows.
To assess how good the evidence was that, e.g., Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, U.S. intelligence services needed to know not only where the available evidence [the “knowns”] pointed, and how secure it was, but also how comprehensive it was; and to do that, they needed to know what relevant evidence there might be that they didn’t have [the “unknowns”]. Unfortunately, though they knew what some of the relevant evidence was that they needed but didn’t have [the “known unknowns”], they didn’t realize that other evidence, evidence they also didn’t have, was also relevant [the “unknown unknowns”]. (Haack, 2011).
At first blush does it make any sense to posit the idea of “unknown unknowns”? Were they to be identified as such then surely we’d know something. The idea of “unknown unknowns” is a neglected part of epistemology and cuts across the epistemology of complexity in all its guises including the philosophy of sociality and the philosophy of mind. Hayek (1967, pp. 22-42) certainly thought that epistemological modesty was vital:
It is high time, however, that we take our ignorance more seriously. As Popper and others have pointed out, the more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance.
The perpetual limiting condition is what (to borrow a phrase from Colin McGinn, 1989) I’m terming as cognitive closure. The notion of cognitive closure, though unfashionable and controversial, is hardly an eccentric position; it has a long-standing provenance and can be found in different guises in recent philosophy of mind (McGinn, 1989 and Stoljar, 2006). Despite the aforementioned paradox, neither Hayek nor Simon are saying that scientific or social “progress” is not possible. What they are saying is that one has to be very careful about characterizing progress – progress is not a straightforward linear phenomenon – and that epistemic modesty should be an epistemic virtue.
Notes:
[i] Take the concept of God: the concept does not achieve enough clarity and distinctness to be discussable. When we cite the divine attributes — omniscience, omnipotence, and so on — we don’t have the least purchase on these ideas which generate paradoxes almost immediately.
Dick Taylor Bolivia — the winner by a mile. Dick Taylor is proving to the most consistently top-notch manufacturer.
Amano Chuao — disappointing given its promotion as top-of-the-line and their bar from the last taste testing was the winner, even beating Dick Taylor. Not bad, but not distinguished.
Pacari Ecuadorian — too sweet.
Ethereal Meltaway — pleasant and distinctive for flavoured chocolate.
Ritual Chocolate Anyetsu Bar — as above, not in the premier league but nicely done. Would be nice finely grated over some good vanilla ice-cream.
I’ve always felt that Housman was one of the sharpest and most insightful intellects of his day and certainly beyond, a caste of mind not terribly dissimilar to that other danger man, Bernard Williams. In critical mode reading them is akin to handling razor blades. Below is Housman as scathing classicist. After that is Richard Dawkins reading some Housman, which he delivers very well and meaningfully indeed. Though Housman is coopted by the atheist movement (fair enough since AE was one) they gloss over the very subtle threads that inform Housman’s atheism: a deeply tragic, frustrating personal life informed by his traditionalist outlook, a world away from the prevailing table-thumping rationalistic ideological atheism.
His poetry and scholarship were written not by a militant atheist or a gay rights activist like his brother, but by a man who was outraged by failure in the search for truth, and even lapses in accuracy. (“Accuracy is a duty and not a virtue.”)” He treated the moral virtues, including patriotism, the love of beauty, the search for truth, and friendship as realities that imposed lifelong obligations. He lived and wrote as though morality and duty were real, not “hollow fictions.” E. Christan Kopff
The extract below from Selected Prose. Cambridge University Press, 1961, pp. 35-37.
An editor of no judgment, perpetually confronted with a couple of MSS. to choose from, cannot but feel in every fibre of his being that he is a donkey between two bundles of hay. What shall I do now? Leave criticism to the critics, you might say, and betake himself to any honest trade for which he is less unfit. But he prefers a more flattering solution: he confusedly imagines that if one bundle of hay is removed he will cease to be a donkey.
So he removes it. Are the two MSS. equal and do they bewilder him with their rival merit and extract from him at every other moment the novel and distressing effort of using his brains? Then he pretends that they are not equal: he calls one of them ‘the best MS.,’ and to this he resigns the editorial functions which he is himself unable to discharge. He adopts its readings when they are better than its fellow’s, adopts them when they are no better, adopts them when they are worse: only when they are impossible, or rather when he perceives their impossibility, is he dislodged form his refuge and driven by stress of weather to the other port.
This method answers the purpose for which it was devised: it saves lazy editors from working and stupid editors from thinking. But someone has to pay for these luxuries, and that someone is the author; since it must follow, as the night the day, that this method should falsify his text. Suppose, if you will, that the editor’s ‘best MS.’ is in truth the best: his way of using it is nonetheless ridiculous. To believe that wherever a best MS. gives possible readings gives true readings, and that only where it gives impossible readings does it give false readings, is to believe that an incompetent editor is the darling of Providence, which has given its angels charge over him lest at any time his sloth and folly should produce their natural results and incur their appropriate penalty. Chance and the common course of nature will not bring it to pass that the readings of a MS. are right wherever they are possible and impossible wherever they are wrong: that need divine intervention; and when one considers the history of man and the spectacle of the universe I hope one may say without impiety that divine intervention might have been employed better elsewhere. How the world is managed, and why it was created, I cannot tell; but it is no feather-bed for the repose of sluggards.
Apart from its damage to the author, it might perhaps be thought that this way of editing would bring open scorn upon the editors, and that the whole reading public would rise up and tax them, as I tax them now, with ignorance of their trade and dereliction of their duty. But the public is soon disarmed. This planet is largely inhabited by parrots, and it is easy to disguise folly by giving it a fine name.
Some may recall this bit of satire from the band 43 years ago — tricky Dicky was of course President. In the UK we had the perennial Screaming Lord Sutch, founder of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party taking the piss. The point is that perhaps it shouldn’t surprise one that that otherwise intelligent people of all political persuasions have such a blindspot regarding politics. They are rightly sceptical of junk “science”, charlatan “preachers”, product marketing hype, and so on and so forth but they leave their critical faculties at the door when it comes to politics. They do, though, seem to seek salvation via the “politics of faith“: that is, the explicit or tacit view that assumes that human power alone can achieve some preferred outcome, one that corresponds with a superficial “branded” view of their “moral” selves. In this sense, politics as a general enterprise, is a most vulgar activity setting aside the deep problems of unforeseen circumstances that few take cognizance of. Now this outlook doesn’t entail or recommend the minimal state or anarchy. It is merely epistemologically (and ultimately) morally prudential in preserving our complex liberal inheritance which is being deeply corroded, most notably by its ostensible “friends”: crypto-totalitarianism masquerading as “liberalism” and their complicitous fundamentalist counterpart, masquerading as “conservativism” both engaging in ritualized point-scoring. Speaking of which, the online epistemic claustrophobia across the political spectrum is now so oppressive that we may have lost all possibility of a veritistic consensus framework — far more insidious than the post-modern relativistic cultural wars of the mid-nineties. What a grim state of affairs! So here’s to food, booze and friendship.
Damian Flanagan reports (in case you are wondering who Donald Keene is). Also check out Damian’s bio of YM.
“The Sea of Fertility,” the leviathan that Mishima left behind, is arguably both the most important Japanese literary work written in the last 100 years and, by far, the least understood.
Incorporating ideas from noh theater and araya-shiki, the Buddhist concept of an all-encompassing fundamental consciousness, Mishima hit upon an eccentric concept: His protagonist would keep being reincarnated as soon as he or she reached the age of 20.
This posted under the FirstView section of EPISTEME. Glad to see the implications (or not) between EM and (social) epistemology are now being examined quite regularly — a connection I’ve been making for several years now. Next development — stigmergic epistemology, something my co-author and I have been working on for a while . . .
Steve Horwitz’ long awaited book.
I look at the ongoing debate over parenting in the United States, asking whether we are raising a nation of wimps rather than free-range kids.
Since about 18% of the population are millennials we are already have a significant nation of wimps or entitled bleating self-induced “autistic” instrumentalist wet noodles. See Keith Parsons @ the Huff Post.
