Two recent happenings in the world of the judicial branch of the United States have got my brain rolling again in the world of law. First, and least important in my opinion, is the confirmation of Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court. Congratulations to her, and I hope that she proves to be a worthy justice. The make-up of the court, much like with Sotomayor's confirmation, will not change with this appointment. To all the detractors that claim that she is inexperienced, we must remember that William Rehnquist had no bench experience either. Secondly, Perry v. Schwarzenegger has been decided in favor of the plaintiffs, striking down Proposition 8 in California and paving the way for appellate and eventual supreme court arguments (one can hope). Both of these elements bring about one of the most fundamental questions that I have concerning the entire judicial branch of government: is the judiciary undemocratic?
In order to get to the answer to this question it would do us well to explore what I mean by democracy. In plain terms, democracy comes from the greek dêmos meaning people and krátos meaning power. People power. In theoretical terms, democracy exists only when the people decide. We obviously do not have this style of government and never have had it. In fact, it does not seem to be desirable or practical. Decisions about national security, for instance, should not be left up to majority rule, for in the process of informing the public about the issue, we may reveal secrets that aid enemies of the state. Thus, some portions of our government are not purely democratic and should not be. Instead we tend to claim that we have is a Republican Democracy but that doesn't seem to be accurate either. The only thing that the term Republican tells us here is that our leaders are elected by us and that there is no monarchy. In any event, we tend to view America as being a democracy, or at least having a democratic ideal that we strive for. The executive is selected by us, the legislative is as well. The judiciary, however, besides some local and state judgeships, is for the most part filled by appointment. The theory behind why judges are appointed and not elected is that it removes them from the world of politics and allows us to view them as isolated and impartial. Few things are worse to Americans than the notion that the rulings of judges are political in nature. So we have here at least one characteristic of the judiciary that is undemocratic. Judges are not elected by us.
That first strike against democracy by the judiciary is the least important, however. If we dig a bit deeper we see an even more theoretical underpinning for the undemocratic nature of the judiciary, one that has strange historical bedfellows. When the Constitution of the United States was ratified, the language concerning the judiciary was rather sparse. Article III outlines the structure of the supreme court and its jurisdiction (original and appellate), but gave very little instruction on how the judges should rule. Coupled with the lack of the any outlined bill of rights, the Constitution lacked any sort of judicial map. Due to concerns unrelated to the judiciary, the bill of rights was supported, against the wishes of some of the framers (including Madison), by Jefferson and others. Here we have a strongly small government guy (Jefferson) arguing against a guy who tended toward centralized government (Madison) arguing in favor of federal protection of specific rights. Jefferson's legacy has become something of an individualistic war cry. We pull Jefferson out every time we want support for individual rights against the tyranny of government, or the majority. In any event, once the Bill of Rights was ratified, the court system had a better guide in their judicial decisions, at least federally. It took another one hundred and fifty or so years for the first ten amendments to be incorporated into the law of the states, and even now some do not apply effectively.
In the end, it seems that the party responsible for the reliance on the bill of rights by the judiciary was the precursor to the small government, individualists that we now characterize as standing on the right side of the line. What is interesting is that the right currently accuses the judiciary of "activism" when it rules in a way unfavorable to their other, unrelated convictions. This is partly because of disagreements about the rulings, but more importantly because they see that the judiciary, by usurping the power of the people, has performed an undemocratic act.
This undemocratic nature of the judiciary, I believe, is one of the strongest parts of American life. In order for freedom to exist in the way that Americans characterize it, we must rely upon a safeguard against the "tyranny of the majority" as Alexis De Tocqueville describes in Democracy In America. We must be willing to say that sometimes, judges know better than we do what is good for the individual. Else, we have mob rule, which we all can agree is a very frightening prospect. It is important to remember, at times like these where we are polarized by issues like gay marriage and illegal immigration, that the judiciary is there to act as a moderate voice in the debate. We should back off of our calls for impeachment of judges when they rule in ways that we disagree with and we should understand that when we call judges "activists" we are describing the function we as a nation already prescribed for them. Yes, the judiciary is undemocratic, and it's better that way.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
What is Belief? or Where Do We Go From Here?
In this post I will address a certain problem in philosophy that I have been in nearly constant confrontation with: what is a belief?
Psychologists regard beliefs as states of the brain in which a person holds a certain proposition to be true or false. Thus, I can either believe that the statement "God exists" is either true or false. Beliefs are thoughts about the truth value of propositions. We then act upon those beliefs. That is the psychological story.
The philosophical story is much less clear. A pure definition of the term 'belief' is hard to come by. Most philosophers argue that the term 'belief' is in direct reference to the three tiered structure of the traditional formulation of knowledge: Justified true belief is knowledge. The problem here is that this does not give us a solid understanding of what a belief is. If we take the psychological stance of a belief being a state of the brain that holds certain propositions true or false, then we can join that with justification (whatever test for that we can determine later) and an actual objective determination of the truth value of the proposition, we then have knowledge. Whatever the case may be, we see that until it gets called knowledge (as in successfully passes the test), the truth values of beliefs in reality are undetermined. How that determination occurs, if in fact it does, has been a matter of debate for most of the past two centuries of Anglo-American philosophy. In the end, we either have said determination or we do not. If we do, if we have some sort of naturalized epistemology (that is, an epistemology grounded in empirical understanding of the natural world via science), then we can be successful in considering something to lie in the category of knowledge.
For example, I have a belief that the proposition "today is Wednesday" is true. I am justified in believing that the proposition is indeed true, and as far as we can tell, it is true. Here I know that the proposition "today is Wednesday" is true. I contend here that I no longer belief that the statement "it is Wednesday" is true, I know it to be true. Thus, belief is no longer in the equation. Here lies the dragon: beliefs depend upon the uncertainty of the truth value of the proposition in question. Once the truth value has been determined via some sort of agreed upon procedure (such as empirical investigation), then we add it to the body of knowledge we possess. We no longer believe it, we know it to be true.
The argument in the above paragraph rankles the contemporary analytic philosopher because it chops at the knees justified true belief as being a constant state for a piece of knowledge. We are led from that argument to picture a process of moving from belief to knowledge in such a way as to clear out the belief from the brain. A new state is in effect and the old state is gone. This is more in keeping with modern psychological research, however, and so we must be willing to consider it to be the case. Belief is not part of knowledge, but something separate from it.
Even if we have this new conception of belief as a temporary state on the road to knowledge, we still have not determined what exactly the requirements for the test of determining the truth value of a belief are. We like to say that empirical verification is where it's at, but verificationism has multiple problems that require either ad hoc revisions or an outright jettison of certain supposedly verified statements that are blatantly false. If we decide that verificationism is a failure and we move on to falsifiablilty, that does very little to actually confirm the truth value of any proposition. In fact, in the end, we tend to see that it is nearly impossible to say for certain (outside of very special sorts of statements) that any proposition is true or false. It becomes an approximation game, a probability contest.
If the probability contest is the model we actually use in determining the truth value of propositions, then those values can be suspect. This means that the last, and most important tier of the justified true belief model of epistemology is nearly impossible to achieve. Thus, we believe most things, but know very little. Justification and determination of the truth value of the claim become the same thing. This is troubling to many, but for me, it is another opening of the door, another widening of the gap between what we claim to know and what we know. We confront. once again, our lack of ability to reach certainty.
Psychologists regard beliefs as states of the brain in which a person holds a certain proposition to be true or false. Thus, I can either believe that the statement "God exists" is either true or false. Beliefs are thoughts about the truth value of propositions. We then act upon those beliefs. That is the psychological story.
The philosophical story is much less clear. A pure definition of the term 'belief' is hard to come by. Most philosophers argue that the term 'belief' is in direct reference to the three tiered structure of the traditional formulation of knowledge: Justified true belief is knowledge. The problem here is that this does not give us a solid understanding of what a belief is. If we take the psychological stance of a belief being a state of the brain that holds certain propositions true or false, then we can join that with justification (whatever test for that we can determine later) and an actual objective determination of the truth value of the proposition, we then have knowledge. Whatever the case may be, we see that until it gets called knowledge (as in successfully passes the test), the truth values of beliefs in reality are undetermined. How that determination occurs, if in fact it does, has been a matter of debate for most of the past two centuries of Anglo-American philosophy. In the end, we either have said determination or we do not. If we do, if we have some sort of naturalized epistemology (that is, an epistemology grounded in empirical understanding of the natural world via science), then we can be successful in considering something to lie in the category of knowledge.
For example, I have a belief that the proposition "today is Wednesday" is true. I am justified in believing that the proposition is indeed true, and as far as we can tell, it is true. Here I know that the proposition "today is Wednesday" is true. I contend here that I no longer belief that the statement "it is Wednesday" is true, I know it to be true. Thus, belief is no longer in the equation. Here lies the dragon: beliefs depend upon the uncertainty of the truth value of the proposition in question. Once the truth value has been determined via some sort of agreed upon procedure (such as empirical investigation), then we add it to the body of knowledge we possess. We no longer believe it, we know it to be true.
The argument in the above paragraph rankles the contemporary analytic philosopher because it chops at the knees justified true belief as being a constant state for a piece of knowledge. We are led from that argument to picture a process of moving from belief to knowledge in such a way as to clear out the belief from the brain. A new state is in effect and the old state is gone. This is more in keeping with modern psychological research, however, and so we must be willing to consider it to be the case. Belief is not part of knowledge, but something separate from it.
Even if we have this new conception of belief as a temporary state on the road to knowledge, we still have not determined what exactly the requirements for the test of determining the truth value of a belief are. We like to say that empirical verification is where it's at, but verificationism has multiple problems that require either ad hoc revisions or an outright jettison of certain supposedly verified statements that are blatantly false. If we decide that verificationism is a failure and we move on to falsifiablilty, that does very little to actually confirm the truth value of any proposition. In fact, in the end, we tend to see that it is nearly impossible to say for certain (outside of very special sorts of statements) that any proposition is true or false. It becomes an approximation game, a probability contest.
If the probability contest is the model we actually use in determining the truth value of propositions, then those values can be suspect. This means that the last, and most important tier of the justified true belief model of epistemology is nearly impossible to achieve. Thus, we believe most things, but know very little. Justification and determination of the truth value of the claim become the same thing. This is troubling to many, but for me, it is another opening of the door, another widening of the gap between what we claim to know and what we know. We confront. once again, our lack of ability to reach certainty.
Lazarus Never Had a Blog
Once again, I am delving into the world of the written word on the interwebs. This is the second incarnation of this particular blog. Instead of picking up where I left off or creating a new blog, I have deleted the old posts and have begun anew under the same moniker. I am pleased with the name, and have used it for over a decade now. My intention for this blog is to use it as a means of collecting, analyzing, and sharpening my thoughts on the two things that I care most about academically: philosophy and politics. Oftentimes, the two merge in a way that causes problems for the rigorous analytic philosopher. I am all in favor of causing those problems. In fact, the more perturbed the better. Allow me to list a few of my stances in the fields I will be discussing so as to have full disclosure in subsequent posts:
I shall begin with my political views because they tend to connect with my philosophical positions and are somehow more simplistic. I am what I consider a liberal libertarian (although I despise the latter term for reasons that will soon be clear) when it comes to social issues. This means that I am anti-authoritarian and liberal at the same time. This may sound confusing, but allow me to explain.
I believe that government has no business telling us what we can and cannot do with our own bodies. For instance, I am in favor of the legalization and regulation of ALL drugs that are currently illegal. I don't care about increase in usage, even if in fact there is any empirical evidence to support the claim that legalization begets increased usage.
I believe that what we do in the privacy of our own homes is not the government's business so long as it is safe. sane, and consensual. That means that you are free to have sex with who you want in any combination at any time in any way so long as you abide by the three rules outlined. Toward that end, I am in favor of either two positions on the marriage debate: abolish marriage from the books, as in remove the government's grasp on the private institution, or, legalize it for every sexual orientation in any combination. This includes polygamy. The government has no business regulating the private affairs of individuals so long as no harm has been done. Which leads me to a side note about my jurisprudential stance: prior restraint should also encompass other issues of freedom beyond free speech. We should have laws that are punitive, not preventive.To restrain a populous to act is to infringe upon the very thing that has made America the great nation that it is. We rely on freedom to progress, and without that freedom, we will stagnate. We must, in John Dewey's words, be willing to experiment, and not set in stone ideological concepts that become obsolete in the face of an ever changing society.
That said, that is where my libertarian leanings end. I do not favor an unfettered, unregulated market for two reasons. First, a market thus described has never and will never exist without an abolishment of government, something I do not favor (my views on anarchism will be made plain later). Secondly, unregulated markets are not the silver bullet capitalists think they are. Suffering increases, gaps in economic classes widen, and aristocracies arise if the market is not kept in check. I do not favor the simplistic vision of Ron Paul to abolish the Fed or the IRS. Federal taxes are necessary, and federal regulation of interest rates is also necessary for a functioning, developed country.
Moreover, politics is a game. Plain and simple. Politicians play the game. Some win, some lose, but it seems to me that the winners end up in the center of any ideological debate. Perhaps that sounds cynical, but it is the truth. We cannot pretend that politicians have become more selfish and unresponsive; they have always been this way. If we were take the example of comparing G. W. Bush to Obama, we will see that as soon as they both sat in the Oval Office for a while they came to the same conclusions about certain happenings. This is due to many factors, not the least of which is that they started with ideas and ended with having to deal with reality. Here is the philosophical rub that I have come to embrace: ideas do us no good if they fail when confronted with the reality of a situation. In the words of William James (another pragmatist that I admire) we must look for the cash value of ideas, the real world results of ideas in practice. If they do not produce revenue, they must be cast aside and new ideas must take center stage.
Philosophically, I believe in very little. This may sound strange coming from a scholar of philosophy, but the fact of the matter is that holding strong to a belief is the sure death of that belief. We must be willing to consider everything. This includes every facet of thought, from our reliance on logic and mathematics to our definitions of terms (including the term 'belief').
I favor any argument that widens the gap rather than shrink the gap. This makes me a bad philosopher, for it seems to me that the basic tenet of nearly every philosophy is to hone down, into certainty (or as close as we can get it), the terms in which we discuss anything. I have been accused of an unceasing avoidance of planting flags, standing firm in positions, but I believe that I am stronger because I am willing to, in the words of W.V.O. Quine, acknowledge that everything is subject to revision.
In a historical sense, I believe that philosophy has suffered from the beginning by Plato. The Platonic search for truth, for the "really real" is a fantasy. We will never access such metaphysical dreamscapes. We are often all too willing to say, "X is true and thus Y" without ever questioning whether X has any ability to have a truth value. It seems to me that empiricism is the best approach that we have come across to understand, or at least explain, the world around us. That said, our methods change, and so do our results. We must not jump to the conclusion, in the face of such uncertainty, that we are wrong or inaccurate in our descriptions, but we must accept that our descriptions, our methods, our tools for explanation may be flawed. We may never have any way to truly describe the world in any objective sense, but we can build "webs of belief" (again Quine) for understanding the world.
Lastly, I am unwilling to say that there is a direct, definable difference between "us" and "the world." We are part of "the world" in such a way as to render the discussion of such distinctions moot. We are the world and the world is us. That may seem like Buddhist drivel, but rest assured, I am not advocating any spiritual position here. Our consciousness, as we understand it, in the subjective particular, requires that we separate our own individual persons from the external world. That, however, does not mean that we are separate in any real sense. That attitude merely means that we have found it useful to do so.
In this introduction to this new incarnation of my blog I have attempted to outline my positions of nearly everything I will be discussing. This will allow for me to proceed uninhibited by questions about my particular political and philosophical stances. Thanks for reading. I hope to not disappoint.
I shall begin with my political views because they tend to connect with my philosophical positions and are somehow more simplistic. I am what I consider a liberal libertarian (although I despise the latter term for reasons that will soon be clear) when it comes to social issues. This means that I am anti-authoritarian and liberal at the same time. This may sound confusing, but allow me to explain.
I believe that government has no business telling us what we can and cannot do with our own bodies. For instance, I am in favor of the legalization and regulation of ALL drugs that are currently illegal. I don't care about increase in usage, even if in fact there is any empirical evidence to support the claim that legalization begets increased usage.
I believe that what we do in the privacy of our own homes is not the government's business so long as it is safe. sane, and consensual. That means that you are free to have sex with who you want in any combination at any time in any way so long as you abide by the three rules outlined. Toward that end, I am in favor of either two positions on the marriage debate: abolish marriage from the books, as in remove the government's grasp on the private institution, or, legalize it for every sexual orientation in any combination. This includes polygamy. The government has no business regulating the private affairs of individuals so long as no harm has been done. Which leads me to a side note about my jurisprudential stance: prior restraint should also encompass other issues of freedom beyond free speech. We should have laws that are punitive, not preventive.To restrain a populous to act is to infringe upon the very thing that has made America the great nation that it is. We rely on freedom to progress, and without that freedom, we will stagnate. We must, in John Dewey's words, be willing to experiment, and not set in stone ideological concepts that become obsolete in the face of an ever changing society.
That said, that is where my libertarian leanings end. I do not favor an unfettered, unregulated market for two reasons. First, a market thus described has never and will never exist without an abolishment of government, something I do not favor (my views on anarchism will be made plain later). Secondly, unregulated markets are not the silver bullet capitalists think they are. Suffering increases, gaps in economic classes widen, and aristocracies arise if the market is not kept in check. I do not favor the simplistic vision of Ron Paul to abolish the Fed or the IRS. Federal taxes are necessary, and federal regulation of interest rates is also necessary for a functioning, developed country.
Moreover, politics is a game. Plain and simple. Politicians play the game. Some win, some lose, but it seems to me that the winners end up in the center of any ideological debate. Perhaps that sounds cynical, but it is the truth. We cannot pretend that politicians have become more selfish and unresponsive; they have always been this way. If we were take the example of comparing G. W. Bush to Obama, we will see that as soon as they both sat in the Oval Office for a while they came to the same conclusions about certain happenings. This is due to many factors, not the least of which is that they started with ideas and ended with having to deal with reality. Here is the philosophical rub that I have come to embrace: ideas do us no good if they fail when confronted with the reality of a situation. In the words of William James (another pragmatist that I admire) we must look for the cash value of ideas, the real world results of ideas in practice. If they do not produce revenue, they must be cast aside and new ideas must take center stage.
Philosophically, I believe in very little. This may sound strange coming from a scholar of philosophy, but the fact of the matter is that holding strong to a belief is the sure death of that belief. We must be willing to consider everything. This includes every facet of thought, from our reliance on logic and mathematics to our definitions of terms (including the term 'belief').
I favor any argument that widens the gap rather than shrink the gap. This makes me a bad philosopher, for it seems to me that the basic tenet of nearly every philosophy is to hone down, into certainty (or as close as we can get it), the terms in which we discuss anything. I have been accused of an unceasing avoidance of planting flags, standing firm in positions, but I believe that I am stronger because I am willing to, in the words of W.V.O. Quine, acknowledge that everything is subject to revision.
In a historical sense, I believe that philosophy has suffered from the beginning by Plato. The Platonic search for truth, for the "really real" is a fantasy. We will never access such metaphysical dreamscapes. We are often all too willing to say, "X is true and thus Y" without ever questioning whether X has any ability to have a truth value. It seems to me that empiricism is the best approach that we have come across to understand, or at least explain, the world around us. That said, our methods change, and so do our results. We must not jump to the conclusion, in the face of such uncertainty, that we are wrong or inaccurate in our descriptions, but we must accept that our descriptions, our methods, our tools for explanation may be flawed. We may never have any way to truly describe the world in any objective sense, but we can build "webs of belief" (again Quine) for understanding the world.
Lastly, I am unwilling to say that there is a direct, definable difference between "us" and "the world." We are part of "the world" in such a way as to render the discussion of such distinctions moot. We are the world and the world is us. That may seem like Buddhist drivel, but rest assured, I am not advocating any spiritual position here. Our consciousness, as we understand it, in the subjective particular, requires that we separate our own individual persons from the external world. That, however, does not mean that we are separate in any real sense. That attitude merely means that we have found it useful to do so.
In this introduction to this new incarnation of my blog I have attempted to outline my positions of nearly everything I will be discussing. This will allow for me to proceed uninhibited by questions about my particular political and philosophical stances. Thanks for reading. I hope to not disappoint.
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