Armchair Warriors and Objectivist 'Science'

Thanks to John and Ed for the compliments. Aaron, it's interesting that you should mention Laryrinths of Reason. I have that book, and just recently dusted it off (and believe me, it's gathered some dust in the past few years!) in response to your remarks about paradoxes and such. Speaking of Bertrand Russell, one thing I do like about him is that he writes well, even if I don't always agree with what he writes. Why I Am Not A Christian is a fun read. Brand Blanshard, another fine philosophical writer, has written a book entitled On Philosophical Style, which is a gem, well worth getting if you can find it. In it, Blanshard relates the following incident:

Lord Macaulay once recorded in his diary a memorable attempt--his first and apparently also his last--to read Kant's Critique: "I received today a translation of Kant. . . . I tried to read it, but found it utterly unintelligible, just as if it had been written in Sanscrit. Not one word of it gave me anything like an idea except a Latin quotation from Persius. It seems to me that it ought to be possible to explain a true theory of metaphysics in words that I can understand. I can understand Locke, and Berkeley, and Hume, and Reid, and Stewart. I can understand Cicero's Academics, and most of Plato; and it seems odd that in a book on the elements of metaphysics . . . I should not be able to comprehend a word."

What sort of writing was it that Macaulay was called upon to read? I quote a single fairly typical sentence: "Because a certain form of sensuous intuition exists in the mind a priori which rests on the receptivity of the representative faculty (sensibility), the understanding, as a spontaneity, is able to determine the internal sense by means of the diversity of given representations, conformably to the synthetical unity of apperception, and thus to cogitate the synthetical unity of the apperception of the manifold of sensuous intuition a priori, as the condition to which must necessarily be submitted all objects of human intuition."

If Kant's philosophy hadn't given Rand fits, his philosophical style surely would have! Those who've read and liked Blanshard's Reason and Analysis, a masterful critique of the analytic movement in philosophy, are sure to appreciate this elegant sixty-nine page volume, which is more of a monograph than a book, and one reminiscent of Strunk & White's Elements of Style, but written especially for philosophers.

And let's not forget John Hospers, who majored in English before getting his degree in philosophy. It was Rand who once said of him that "he could really write." I agree and would put him in the same category as Blanshard and Russell.

But get On Philosophical Style if you can. It's well worth reading for its choice commentary on how philosophers should communicate their ideas.

- Bill
(Edited by William Dwyer
on 4/17, 9:06pm)

Post 61

Monday, April 17, 2006 - 9:16pm

Kant wrote ...

====================
Because a certain form of sensuous intuition exists in the mind a priori which rests on the receptivity of the representative faculty (sensibility), the understanding, as a spontaneity, is able to determine ...
====================

23 words before the subject of the sentence is introduced, 30 words before the verb!

Wow.

Ed

Post 62

Tuesday, April 18, 2006 - 6:58am

Germans are fond of long sentences, and they also put the verb at the end of the sentence.

Post 63

Tuesday, April 18, 2006 - 7:09am

Only to say that I agree with Hong Zhang, who was backed by Glenn Fletcher and Stephen Boydstun, on a central point of this thread:

For certain disciplines, QM certainly is one of them, I can't imagine how anybody can really understand it without the grasp of the mathematical principles involved.

Yes: that's because QM describes a reality that is beyond the rational tools we use for everyday experience.

QM is practically impossible to grasp without accepting that it has almost nothing to do with the "common sense" of Classical Mechanics, and at the same time it is perfectly in line with logic and experiments. We know that an electron behaves as a particle and as a wave at the same time. Beyond "common sense", and true.

Besides, science includes a handful of implicit, undemonstrated assumptions --all related to the pervasive metaphysical supposition that reality is ultimately intelligible.

All unprejudiced individuals may eventually understand this.

---

Besides, Aaron said:

What are your thoughts on the concept of space and time themselves being quantized?

I think this "Plank scale" phenomenon will be eventually demonstrated as true. I can bring you a scientist defending the possibility you state: Prof. Lee Smolin.

Post 64

Tuesday, April 18, 2006 - 11:24am

Bill:

And you're merely displaying your ignorance of what I said. I was replying to Joel Catala, who wrote:
In the Schroedinger's cat experiment, if the disintegrating bit of radioactive substance is of the size of the buckminsterfullerene molecule (or smaller), the laws and axioms of quantum mechanics indeed apply with full validity, and Schroedinger's description is deemed as fundamentally correct.
So, where did you get the idea that I was attributing that view to contemporary physicists?

Do you doubt that superposition states can exist for the the buckminsterfullerene molecule? See for example
here. Note that Joel wrote that the laws of QM (in this case the superposition of states) apply for systems "the size of the buckminsterfullerene molecule or smaller". As far as I know cats and glass vessels are not smaller than a buckminsterfullerene molecule, so your sarcastic remarks about cats that are dead and alive at the same time are misplaced; in an earlier post I've explained the historical context of Schr�dingers thought experiment.

First of all, there is no official "Objectivist claim" that QM tells us that particles follow and don't follow at the same time a trajectory, or that a particle can be at two places at the same time.

I said nothing about an "official Objectivist claim", I said "the Objectivists' claim", while this is what I repeatedly hear Objectivists say. But if I recall correctly, there is even in the Objectivist canon (Rand's and/or Peikoff's writings) a remark that physicists believe that a particle can be at two places at the same time, although I can't remember at the moment where that is stated.

Secondly, I myself did not make that claim; I simply asked you a question, because I wasn't clear on what you were claiming. Please don't read more into what I say than is actually there.

And where did I say that you made that claim? See above. But even if you didn't state that explicitly, the whole tenor of your argument suggests that you think that physicists do claim such things.

Post 65

Tuesday, April 18, 2006 - 11:26am

Ed:

Kant wrote ...

====================
Because a certain form of sensuous intuition exists in the mind a priori which rests on the receptivity of the representative faculty (sensibility), the understanding, as a spontaneity, is able to determine ...
====================

23 words before the subject of the sentence is introduced, 30 words before the verb!

Gosh, I didn't know that Kant wrote in English.

Post 66

Tuesday, April 18, 2006 - 12:00pm

Cal, thank you for your honesty.

Post 67

Tuesday, April 18, 2006 - 10:22pm

I replied to Cal, "And you're merely displaying your ignorance of what I said. I was replying to Joel Catala, who wrote: In the Schroedinger's cat experiment, if the disintegrating bit of radioactive substance is of the size of the buckminsterfullerene molecule (or smaller), the laws and axioms of quantum mechanics indeed apply with full validity, and Schroedinger's description is deemed as fundamentally correct. So, where did you get the idea that I was attributing that view to contemporary physicists? Cal replied,

Do you doubt that superposition states can exist for the the buckminsterfullerene molecule? See for example here. Note that Joel wrote that the laws of QM (in this case the superposition of states) apply for systems "the size of the buckminsterfullerene molecule or smaller". As far as I know cats and glass vessels are not smaller than a buckminsterfullerene molecule, so your sarcastic remarks about cats that are dead and alive at the same time are misplaced; in an earlier post I've explained the historical context of Schr�dingers thought experiment.

I'm sorry. I stand corrected. It appears that I misread Joel's post, and took him to be claiming that Schroedinger's thought experiment was itself legitimate, when all he was claiming is that its bmf analog was. There was clearly no justification for my misreading him, as he was quite clear in what he said. However, I still don't understand how an electron can be both a particle and a wave at the same time, any more than Schroedinger's cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. Your reply, "That's just an experimental fact, which you claim not to dispute," is incorrect. It's not an experimental fact; it's an interpretation of an experimental observation - an interpretation that doesn't make sense, because a particle and a wave are two different entities; an electron cannot be both at the same time.

First of all, there is no official "Objectivist claim" that QM tells us that particles follow and don't follow at the same time a trajectory, or that a particle can be at two places at the same time.
I said nothing about an "official Objectivist claim", I said "the Objectivists' claim", while this is what I repeatedly hear Objectivists say. But if I recall correctly, there is even in the Objectivist canon (Rand's and/or Peikoff's writings) a remark that physicists believe that a particle can be at two places at the same time, although I can't remember at the moment where that is stated.

I haven't seen that. You may be thinking of Peikoff's statement in OPAR, in which he writes that "Many commentators on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle claim that, because we cannot at the same time specify fully the position and momentum of subatomic particles, their action is not entirely predictable, and that the law of causality therefore breaks down. This is a non-sequitur, a switch from epistemology to metaphysics, or from knowledge to reality." (pp. 16, 17)

I wrote, "Secondly, I myself did not make that claim; I simply asked you a question, because I wasn't clear on what you were claiming. Please don't read more into what I say than is actually there.

And where did I say that you made that claim?

Okay, I see that you didn't; I must apologize for implying as much.

But even if you didn't state that explicitly, the whole tenor of your argument suggests that you think that physicists do claim such things.

Whoa! First, you object to my suggestion that you made that claim, and in the very next breath you so much as make it. I retract my apology! In fact, I don't think that physicists claim this, because I have no basis on which to think it. I have heard some physicists say things that I regard as nonsensical, but, fortunately, I haven't heard them say that.

- Bill

(Edited by William Dwyer
on 4/19, 1:16am)

Post 68

Tuesday, April 18, 2006 - 10:30pm

Ed quoted Kant:

====================
Because a certain form of sensuous intuition exists in the mind a priori which rests on the receptivity of the representative faculty (sensibility), the understanding, as a spontaneity, is able to determine ...
====================

and commented, "23 words before the subject of the sentence is introduced, 30 words before the verb!"

Cal replied,

Gosh, I didn't know that Kant wrote in English.

Huh?? He didn't. Like this was a translation? Hello!

- Bill

Post 69

Wednesday, April 19, 2006 - 12:27am

Oh Cal-o-mine,

There is a fallacy for that of which you speak -- though I, at present, know not which one it is.

Ed

Post 70

Wednesday, April 19, 2006 - 1:12am

How about "argumentum ad belligerance." I suppose his point was that since the original was in German, your astonishment at the length of Kant's sentence was misplaced, because Germans are notorious for long sentences. Who knows? But you weren't commenting on the original German; you were commenting on the English translation. In any case, I find it hard to believe that if you read that sentence in the original German, it would exhibit the virtue of elegant prose!

- Bill

Post 71

Wednesday, April 19, 2006 - 1:18am

Das ist v�llig wahr!

Ed
[subject within one word, verb within two words]

Post 72

Wednesday, April 19, 2006 - 3:25am

The point is that the discussion was about Kant's allegedly bad style. As a "proof" of Kant's bad style, Ed counted "23 words before the subject of the sentence is introduced, 30 words before the verb!" in a translation of Kant, as if a translation is a word by word transformation of the original text. But even if the word sequence of the translation is exactly the same as in the original text (what in general would result in a very bad translation), this still doesn't tell us much about Kant's style, as you'll have to compare it to other German texts, and not from some ethnocentric viewpoint decide that while it would be bad English it therefore also must be bad German. Or do you think that all German texts are bad, while they use a different sentence structure than is found in usanian texts?

Post 73

Wednesday, April 19, 2006 - 6:15am

Joel- Thanks for the note about continuous/discrete and Smolin. His paper http://qgravity.org/loop/ unfortunately is one of those where I could not identify whether it's meaningful but much terminology above my head, or could be randomly stringing concepts together. I will look for his book though.

Post 74

Wednesday, April 19, 2006 - 6:52am

Hi Aaron,

I did not read his book. My guess is that it is a good read for all scientists interested in the "edge" of physics.

And I would suggest non-scientists to refrain from it, and start with the books of Prof. Richard Feynman, who once said:

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

(Edited by Joel Catal� on 4/19, 7:32am)

Post 75

Wednesday, April 19, 2006 - 8:48am

The point is that the discussion was about Kant's allegedly bad style. As a "proof" of Kant's bad style, Ed counted "23 words before the subject of the sentence is introduced, 30 words before the verb!" in a translation of Kant, as if a translation is a word by word transformation of the original text. But even if the word sequence of the translation is exactly the same as in the original text (what in general would result in a very bad translation), this still doesn't tell us much about Kant's style, as you'll have to compare it to other German texts, and not from some ethnocentric viewpoint decide that while it would be bad English it therefore also must be bad German. Or do you think that all German texts are bad, while they use a different sentence structure than is found in usanian texts?

Are you saying that the unintelligibility of that sentence is probably due to a bad translation? You can't be serious! Go back and read the original sentence. But if you are, then perhaps you or someone else could refer me to a translation that makes that sentence intelligible. I'm sure that Kant has been translated myriad times by people who were quite competent at converting German to English.

- Bill

Post 76

Wednesday, April 19, 2006 - 10:11am

Bill:

Are you saying that the unintelligibility of that sentence is probably due to a bad translation? You can't be serious! Go back and read the original sentence. But if you are, then perhaps you or someone else could refer me to a translation that makes that sentence intelligible. I'm sure that Kant has been translated myriad times by people who were quite competent at converting German to English.

You're rather jumping to conclusions. I nowhere said that this was a bad translation, I only said that translations in which every word is translated in the same sequence as in the original text would in general be very bad translations, so that if the translation isn't terrible, we can't conclude from the word order in a translated text that the original text had exactly the same word order. And is this sentence really so unintelligible? First, the sentence quoted is unfinished, so we have only half a sentence. Second, we don't know the context, so we may not know exactly what Kant means by terms like "sensuous intuition" and "representative faculty". I don't know this text, but I think it's not unlikely that Kant will have said much more about such terms, that he will have defined them, so that the sentence read in context may not be so unintelligible at all. Translation of such terms may also give rise to problems, as there often doesn't exist an exact equivalence of the original term, so that such terms are often translated literally, which may give a strange result for an English speaking reader, while the original term would be quite intelligible to a German reader.

I think that if the half-sentence as we see it now is unintelligible, this is more due to the fact that we don't know Kant's terms and don't know the context in which this sentence appears, than to his style. Anyhow, one should not draw conclusions about someone's style by merely counting words before the subject and the verb in a translation of that text. Are you an expert who can tell us what the normal style of theoretical German texts was, more than 200 years ago? What the average number of words in a sentence before the subject and the verb was? Is it really so strange that such a style may somewhat deviate from the modern American ideal (as far as you can compare styles in different languages at all)?
(Edited by Calopteryx Splendens
on 4/19, 10:13am)

Post 77

Wednesday, April 19, 2006 - 1:26pm

I asked Calopteryx, "Are you saying that the unintelligibility of that sentence is probably due to a bad translation? You can't be serious! Go back and read the original sentence. But if you are, then perhaps you or someone else could refer me to a translation that makes that sentence intelligible. I'm sure that Kant has been translated myriad times by people who were quite competent at converting German to English." He replied:

You're rather jumping to conclusions. I nowhere said that this was a bad translation. I only said that translations in which every word is translated in the same sequence as in the original text would in general be very bad translations, so that if the translation isn't terrible, we can't conclude from the word order in a translated text that the original text had exactly the same word order.
Okay, gotcha.
And is this sentence really so unintelligible? First, the sentence quoted is unfinished, so we have only half a sentence.

I see that you weren't aware that Ed was replying to a previous post in which I quoted the entire sentence. Go to Post 60, and you'll find the entire Kantian kit and caboodle in all its convoluted glory, along with a discussion of the context in which the sentence was cited.

- Bill

Post 78

Wednesday, April 19, 2006 - 2:50pm

Still I think that it is not the style (in the sense of the structure of the sentence) that makes the sentence difficult to understand, but the fact that we have little or no idea what is meant by all those phrases like "synthetical unity of apperception" or "the manifold of sensuous intuition a priori", which sound rather vague. I don't know the text, but it might be possible that Kant gives a clear explanation/definition of such terms elsewhere in the text. And as I said before, it may be that the translation doesn't help while it only literally translates such terms, which may make them more incomprehensible in English than in the original German. I've encountered the same kind of problem when I translated some English books about statistics into Dutch; sometimes you just have to rewrite the original text to make it comprehensible in the translation, while an Englishman wouldn't have any problems with the original text. A good translation is sometimes quite different from a literal translation, and my impression of the quoted text is that it has been rather literally translated (admittedly such texts are also very difficult to translate).

Post 79

Wednesday, April 19, 2006 - 4:35pm