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It is expertise that lets us get out of our heads, to the things that matter. Skillful, fluent action is not slavery to the neural zombie within; it is liberation from the rote and the regulated. It is flexible attunement to where we find ourselves. (Echoes of Emerson again.) It is intelligent life.
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exercises of theoretical knowledge involve active reflection, engagement with the propositions or rules of the theory in question that guides the subsequent exercise of the knowledge. Think of the chess player following an instruction she has learned for an opening move in chess. In contrast, practical knowledge is exercised automatically and without reflection. The skilled tennis player does not reflect on instructions before returning a volley — she exercises her knowledge of how to return a volley automatically. Additionally, the fact that exercises of theoretical knowledge are guided by propositions or rules seems to entail that they involve instructions that are universally applicable — the person acting on theoretical knowledge has an instruction booklet, which she reflects upon before acting. In contrast, part of the skill that constitutes skill at tennis involves reacting to situations for which no instruction manual can prepare you. The skilled tennis player is skilled in part because she knows how to adjust her game to a novel serve, behavior that does not seem consistent with following a rule book.
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In many (though not all) of the world’s languages, the same verb is used for practical as well as theoretical knowledge (for example, “know” in English, “savoir” in French). More important, when one reflects upon any exercise of knowledge, whether practical or theoretical, it appears to have the characteristics that would naïvely be ascribed to the exercise of both practical and intellectual capacities. A mathematician’s proof of a theorem is the ideal example of the exercise of theoretical knowledge. Yet in order to count as skilled at math, the mathematician’s training — like that of the tennis player — must render her adept in reacting to novel difficulties she may encounter in navigating mathematical reality.
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Surrealism was fueled by a romantic impulse. It emphasized the new against the dictates of tradition, the intensity of lived experience against passive contemplation, subjectivity against the consensually real, and the imagination against the instrumentally rational. Solidarity was understood as an inner bond with the oppressed.
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They also keep us in conversation with the great minds of our past. This conversation may not, as some hope, tap into a source of enduring wisdom, but it at least provides a critical standpoint for assessing the limits of our current cultural assumptions.
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no one has theoretical expertise in more than a few specialized subjects, and there is no strong correlation between having such knowledge and being able to use it to resolve complex social and political problems. Even more important, our theoretical knowledge is often highly limited, so that even the best available expert advice may be of little practical value. An experienced and informed non-expert may well have a better sense of these limits than experts strongly invested in their disciplines. This analysis supports the traditional American distrust of intellectuals: they are not in general highly suited for political office.
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the next time you are about to hurl the “that’s irrational” judgment at someone, stop and think in what sense you mean it, and consider whether it actually applies to the situation at hand. It may save you some grief and frustration, and who knows, you may even get your point of view across in a less threatening manner. Assuming that’s of concern to you, of course.
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The ancient Greeks had already made a distinction between “theoria” (theoretical reason) and “praxis” (practical reason), the first one being the sort of reasoning that is supposed to reflect a point of view from nowhere, as the phrase goes, while the second one is a type of instrumental rationality deployed in the pursuit of specific ends.
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modern philosophy and cognitive science have respectively argued and shown convincingly that human beings can hardly access a view from nowhere, but it is an ideal, meaning that in some cases we want to transcend as much as possible our foibles and specific issues to look at the world as broadly as is feasible for us.
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The idea of reflective equilibrium was introduced by Nelson Goodman in his book “Fact, Fiction, and Forecast.” Goodman was not concerned with morality, but with the validity of one’s thinking. Goodman’s suggestion was that we justify our rules of reasoning based on how those rules fare when confronted with a range of instances of what we believe are correct inferences. If an inferential rule yields unacceptable results, we may decided to discard that rule no matter how it may have seemed like a good idea at the start.
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The most famous application of the principle of reflective equilibrium is found in John Rawls’ highly influential “A Theory of Justice.” Rawls proposed to apply Goodman’s approach to adjusting our sometimes conflicting moral beliefs, just as in the hypothetical case of the Bible and disrespectful children mentioned before. Whether or not one agrees with the outcome of Rawls’ particular analysis of justice as fairness, the reflective equilibrium approach should be compelling to anyone seriously interested in, well, reflecting on her own beliefs.
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a similar approach had been used in philosophy of science by Pierre Duhem as a way to debunk the commonplace idea that science is about direct empirical testing of theories. Duhem, in a book published in 1908 (La Théorie Physique), pointed out that if there is a disagreement between a theory and the empirical evidence one cannot automatically reject the theory, because scientific theories are complex statements that include many assumptions and sub-theories. The existence of a disagreement between theory and evidence tells us that something is wrong, but not what. It could be that the core theory — say, the Copernican system — ought to be rejected. But it could also be that some adjustment to the theory would resolve the discrepancy (for example, Kepler’s modification of the original Copernicanism to account for the fact that the planets go around following elliptical, not circular orbits). Indeed, it may even be the case that the data is wrong, because of a malfunction of the instrumentation, or an error of interpretation.
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My own talk got things started by highlighting some recurring trends in biological theory, and proceeding to discuss examples of different ways of engaging in theoretical biology.
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My own talk got things started by highlighting some recurring trends in biological theory, and proceeding to discuss examples of different ways of engaging in theoretical biology.
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A pretty obvious and long-standing one is represented by what I think of as an obsession on the part of some biologists and philosophers of science to look for “laws” in biology. The literature is fascinating, but I am ultimately unconvinced that there are any such things as biological laws. Hell, I don’t think there are laws in physics, necessarily (only empirical generalizations). I think a good argument can be made that this search for biological laws is the result of the idea (put forth with the complicity of early 20th century philosophers of science) that physics is the “king” of sciences, and since it always strives for the broadest possible generalization (of which laws are the epitome), then biology has to do the same in order to be taken seriously. I sincerely hope we are getting away from that kind of thinking and toward a more flexible and pluralistic way of what it means to do good science.
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Gould wanted to show that Morton’s racial prejudices had led him, consciously or unconsciously, systematically to bias his ‘objective’ measurements. What happened was that Gould himself was led systematically to bias his interpretation of Morton’s measurement. Whether this was conscious or unconscious, whether it was simply sloppy work on Gould’s part or the result of his own ideological commitments, we may never know.
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In another sense, though, Gould has been shown to be wrong. The fact that ‘Morton’s data ‘are reliable despite his clear bias’, Lewis et al point out, ‘weakens the argument of Gould and others that biased results are endemic in science’:
The power of the scientific approach is that a properly designed and executed methodology can largely shield the outcome from the influence of the investigator’s bias. Science… relies on methods that limit the ability of the investigator’s admittedly inevitable biases to skew the results. Morton’s methods were sound, and our analysis shows that they prevented Morton’s biases from significantly impacting his results. The Morton case, rather than illustrating the ubiquity of bias, instead shows the ability of science to escape the bounds and blinders of cultural contexts.
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It is also, however, is too easy and comfortable a conclusion. While Morton may not have finagled these particular measurements, his ideological commitment clearly influenced his scientific outlook down to its very core. His belief in distinct racial types, his acceptance of polygenesis, his promotion of a hierarchy of racial groups, his very belief that skull sizes provided a useful means of distinguishing and ranking races – all came not from objective measurements but from a social attachment to ideas of race and superiority that shaped the way that he viewed and understood the facts of human differences. Morton’s racial science was not simply an unfortunate ‘bias’ upon his empirical research, as Lewis et al suggest. It lay at the very heart of his scientific commitment and shaped how he saw the world scientifically.
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It was one thing to criticize what had been done, and another thing entirely to design a matchmaking system that would work smoothly in the real world, with all its messy details and practical constraints
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it was time for economics, as a field, to turn a corner — how merely describing markets as they naturally occur was no longer enough. Instead, he said, economists have to make themselves useful by fixing broken systems in which people aren’t getting what they want.
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Empiricists, as the name suggests, put most weight on the evidence. Empirical analysis shows that the main determinants of inflation are past inflation and unemployment. Inflation rises when unemployment is below normal and falls when it is above normal.
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Though there is much debate about what level of unemployment is now normal, virtually no one doubts that at 9 percent, unemployment is well above it. With core inflation running at less than 1 percent, empiricists are therefore relatively unconcerned about inflation in the current environment.
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