Theory of Knowledge

IBO Workshop Theory of Knowledge

5 - 9 July 2004 Geneva

Workshop Leader Nicholas Alchin

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 1 Theory of Knowledge

Why are we doing TOK?

You are a human being. And so you have a philosophical view of existence - whether you realise it or not. About this you have no choice. But there is a choice to be made about your philosophy, and it can be put in these terms: Is your philosophy based on conscious, thoughtful and well-informed reflection? Is it informed by logical analysis but sensitive enough not to be bound by it? Or have you let your subconscious amass an ugly pile of unexamined prejudices, unjustified intolerences, hidden fears, doubts and implicit contradictions, thrown together by chance but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown?

It is not the answer that enlightens but the question. Eugène Ionesco

The Contradictions in the Real... Salman Rushdie the ground beneath her feet (Vintage Books, London 2000) pp386-

The world is irreconcilable, it doesn’t add up, but if we cannot agree with ourselves that it does, we can’t make judgements or choices. We can’t live. ...the contradictions in the real have become so glaring, so inescapable, that we’re all learning to take them in our stride. We go to bed thinking - just a random example - that Mr. N––––– M–––––– or Mr. G––––– A––––– is a notorious terrorist and wake up hailing him as the saviour of his people. One day the islanders inhabiting a particular cold wet lump of godforsaken rock are vile devil worshipers swigging blood and sacrificing babies, the next day it’s as if nothing of the sort ever occurred. The leaders of whole countries vanish as if they never were, they’re miraculously erased from the record and then they pop up again as talk show hosts or pizza pluggers, and lo!, they’re back in the history books again.

Certain illnesses sweep across large communities, and then we learn that no such illnesses ever existed. Men and women recover memories of having been sexually abused as children. Whoosh, no they don’t, their parents are reinstated as the most loving and laudable people you could imagine. Genocide occurs; no it doesn’t. Nuclear waste contaminates large swathes of entire continents, and we all learn words like “half-life”. But in a flash all the contamination has gone and you can happily eat your lamb chops. The maps are wrong. Frontiers snake across disputed territory, bending and cracking. A road no longer goes where it went yesterday. A lake vanishes. Mountains rise and fall. Well-known books acquire different endings. Colour bursts out of black-and-white movies. Art is a hoax. Style is substance. The dead are embarrassing. There are no dead.

You’re a sports fan but the rules are different every time you watch. You’ve got a job! No, you don’t! That woman powdered the President’s johnson! In her dreams - she’s a celebrated fantasist! You’re a sex god! You’re a sex pest! She’s to die for! She’s a slut! You don’t have cancer! April fool, yes you do! That good man in Nigeria is a murderer! That murderer in Algeria is a good man! That psycho killer is an American patriot! That American psycho is a patriot killer! And is that Pol Pot dying in the Ankoran jungles or is it just Nol Not? These things are bad for you: sex, high-rise buildings, chocolate, lack of exercise, dictatorship, racism! No, au contraire! Celibacy damages the brain, high-rise

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 3 Theory of Knowledge buildings bring us close to God, tests show that a bar of chocolate a day significantly improves children’s academic performance, exercise kills, tyranny is just a part of our culture so I’ll thank you to keep your cultural-imperialist ideas off my fucking fiefdom, and as for racism, let’s not get all preachy about this, it’s better out in the open than under some grubby carpet. That extremist is a moderate! That universal right is culturally specific! This circumcised woman is culturally happy! That Aboriginal whistlecockery is culturally barbaric! Pictures don’t lie! This image has been faked! Free the press! Ban nosy journalists! The novel is dead! Honour is dead! God is dead! Aargh, they’re all alive and they are coming after us! That star is rising! No, she’s falling! We dined at nine! We dined at eight! You were on time! No, you were late! East is West! Up is down! Yes is No! In is Out! Lies are Truth! Hate is Love! Two and two makes five! And everything is all for the best, in this best of all possible worlds.

The Problem of Individuality based on an article by Max Henninger

"Among humans," said Pablo Picasso, "there are far more fakes than originals."

Our age is an age of conformity. Today, no-one who does not conform can feel comfortable. Whenever individual thought arises, it is a struggle to make it heard. Right from early childhood, we are constantly bombarded with facts, opinions and the thoughts of others, until we find it very difficult to think at all except in the terms that others have thought before us. Most of us entirely abandon the search for originality; our capacity for individual thinking having been smothered in a unending flood of clichés. And so conformity has become the order of the day.

It is natural to ask why we all accept this situation. Why is individual thinking so feared? Why is it so avoided? The answer is simple: To be an individual requires courage and it requires strength. Conformity, by contrast requires nothing but nodding and easy assent to whatever everybody else thinks. The individual thinker is alone, with only himself to rely on. The individual must have the courage to say: "Here I am. I am different to the rest, and I am not afraid of that. And I will remain different until the day I die". And it requires strength to maintain that position.

The position of the conformist could not be more different. He feels safe because he has made sure that he is with the majority. He cannot be singled out because

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 4 Theory of Knowledge there is nothing for which to single him out. And he need not bother with leaving his mark on his world, with creating anything new, because in one sense he will not die. He will live on in the millions of people who are just like him. He is immortal.

It is perhaps natural that we always seek the easiest solution to a problem. But it is not a good thing that we do so. The individual thinker is prepared to go beyond the easy and obvious solution. She is prepared to question. As a result she is often shunned and sometimes loathed by those who know her. Why? Because she is a danger. She is a threat. By showing that she relies on her own judgements and values, and not those of others, she demonstrates a great power. As well as the burden, hers is the freedom of individuality. And the conformist, trapped in the ideas of others, hates nothing more than someone with the freedom she does not have.

Today, as throughout history, the individual thinker’s life will not be an easy one. It may even be a dangerous one. It is unlikely that he will be nailed to a cross, but make no mistake, the means of suppression are there, though they are rather more subtle. It is as true as it ever was that individual thinkers are likely to lead the lives of outcasts. And it is as true as it ever was that we desperately need those with the courage and strength to live independently. In our age of information and conformity the vast majority of people live passively, dominated by things outside of themselves and alienated from their human potential. We need individual thinkers.

And things are not improving. What little individuality is left is being diluted more and more. Perhaps one day there will be none, and something precious and vital will have been lost.

I hope you can see what I mean when I ask: Are you real? Or just another fake?

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 5 Theory of Knowledge Oakeshott on Conversation

It may be supposed that the diverse idioms of utterance which make up current human intercourse have some meeting-place and compose a manifold of some sort. And, as I understand it, the image of this meeting-place is not an inquiry or an argument, but a conversation.

In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no 'truth' to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing. Of course, a conversation may have passages of argument and a speaker is not forbidden to be demonstrative; but reasoning is neither sovereign nor alone, and the conversation itself does not compose an argument. . . . In conversation, 'facts' appear only to be resolved once more into the possibilities from which they were made; 'certainties' are shown to be combustible, not by being brought in contact with other 'certainties' or with doubts, but by being kindled by the presence of ideas of another order; approximations are revealed between notions normally remote from one another. Thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each other's movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions. Nobody asks where they have come from or on what authority they are present; nobody cares what will become of them when they have played their part. There is no symposiarch or arbiter, not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials. Every entrant is taken at its face-value and everything is permitted which can get itself accepted into the flow of speculation. And voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy. Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, not is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another.

…… it is the ability to participate in this conversation, and not the ability to reason cogently, to make discoveries about the world, or to contrive a better world, which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilized man from the barbarian… …education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 6 Theory of Knowledge partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance.

Oakeshott, Michael. "The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind," Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. London: Methuen, 1962: 197-247.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 7 Theory of Knowledge Ten Tips on Theory of Knowledge Presentations

There is no general method or formula which is ‘correct’. You can probably ignore some of this advice and still do a good presentation… but following it may well help.

1 Familiarise yourself with the assessment criteria; notice, for example that whatever your topic, the focus must be on knowledge issues and that you should choose a contemporary issue.

2 Choose a concrete topic which interests you and find the TOK in it. TOK can be found almost anywhere, so use the opportunity to do something which you will enjoy doing. Do not just choose, say, the death penalty just because you have a book on it. Your presentation will come across much better if you choose something which means something to you personally; your own school, recent events in the news, cartoons, books and films are often fertile ground for presentation topics. Some of the most effective presentations start with an everyday story and go on to draw out the TOK aspects.

3 You should be exploring an issue; this means that you should present different points of view - even if they contradict each other and even if you disagree with them. You can try to reconcile different points of view or explain precisely why they are incompatible. You do not have to choose one point of view as ‘correct’, but you should avoid the rather vacuous ‘so there are different points of view all of which are equally valid’ approach. Do not be afraid of giving your own opinion; you can point out that there are problems with your opinion, but be honest and say what you really think!

4 Try to cover the facts quickly and get on to the abstract TOK principles. If you have chosen a topic where there are important facts that the audience needs to know then you should get through these quickly - there are no marks for dissemination of information. The focus of the presentation must be analysis, not description. If you can’t summarise the facts in a couple of minutes then you should give a summary to read beforehand.

5 Once you have drawn out the abstract TOK principles you should try to see what the implications of these principles are, and perhaps use these implications to reflect on the validity of the principles. For example, if you

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 8 Theory of Knowledge are considering the argument for the death penalty which states that murderers lose the right to life, the principle seems to be ‘an eye of an eye’. But you could ask ‘what do we do with a thief? Or a rapist?’ The answers to these questions may or may not lead to a reformulation of the principle.

6 Consider carefully how you communicate the structure your presentation. It may be clear in your mind, but the audience may not find it so easy. It can help to have one or two overheads with the main points in bullet form, using a large font.

7 Try to state explicitly the problems of knowledge that you are looking at. This will help you retain clarity and make it easier for an examiner to give you high marks in criterion A. If you use an overhead then this is an obvious place to list the problems.

8 If appropriate use a film clip, slides, photos, newspaper cutting or any other prop. Your presentation will probably be far more interesting if you can use something other than your voice!

9 In your conclusion try to summarise (very briefly – one or two sentences) what you have said, and try to end with a forward-looking view. This might be a summary of the main principles you have identified or some issues which have arisen and which have not been answered. Do not just reiterate your arguments. The end should ‘feel’ like a conclusion and not just be a ‘well that’s it’

10 Don't get hitched with a loser for a partner.

Ten Tips on writing a good Theory of Knowledge essay

There is no general method or formula which is ‘correct’. You can probably ignore some of this advice and still write a good essay… but following it may well help.

1 Familiarise yourself with the assessment criteria; notice, for example that (i) your examples should be varied and culturally diverse, (ii) you will lose marks if you do not properly cite any sources you use, and (iii) you need a clear introduction and conclusion.

2 Do not get bogged down in definitions. While it is important to know what you are talking about, you could waste a whole essay in trying to, say, define ‘truth’. Also, dictionary definitions are not always helpful – if a dictionary says that ‘reality is that which is real’ then what does this tell you?

3 Make distinctions between different areas of knowledge and different ways of knowing. You sould avoid making claims that apply to all aspects of knowledge - because different areas of knowledge or ways of knowing ‘work’ differently, and what is true for e.g. maths in unlikely to be quite right for e.g. biology.

4 Do not make grandiose but rather meaningless claims. The best (or worst) one I have seen was something like "Since the dawn of the universe, truth has haunted mankind". The same sentiment (if I understand it correctly, which I may not) would be much better put as "Humans are a curious species, always seeking the truth" (which may still be an exaggeration).

5 In your introduction spend a few lines explaining the question, and clarifying how you are going to interpret it. You may want to offer a position that you know is wrong, and explain why it is wrong, perhaps developing it into a better one. For example, one essay title was based on a

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 10 Theory of Knowledge quote from CS Lewis: "What I tell you three times is true". A possible introduction might be: Lewis’s quote seems, at first sight, to be ridiculous. If I tell you three times that I am an alien, or that 1 + 1 = 5, you are unlikely to believe me. Mere repetition is not enough. However, if I ask you how you know that Canberra is the capital of Australia, it may well be that you know it simply because you have heard it several times. In other words in this case, repetition is enough. So perhaps there is some merit in the claim, depending on the particular area of knowledge in question.

How not to approach a Theory of Knowledge Essay

6 In your introduction try to provide some ‘signposts’ that indicate what you will be trying to do in your essay. It is much easier to follow an argument when you have a vague idea where it is headed, but you should not spell out the whole thing. Following on the example in 5 above, the next sentence might be In this essay I shall attempt to see under what circumstances repetition becomes convincing, and by looking at the natural sciences and empirical knowledge in general, I hope to show that Lewis is absolutely right in certain areas of knowledge, and completely wrong in others.

7 Use your own original examples to make your points. These can be taken from your IB subjects, your everyday life, newspapers and so on. Try not

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 11 Theory of Knowledge to use the rather tired examples of say, the flat earth as an example of an error that everyone believed, or Hitler as an immoral person. Also the best essays do not spend a great deal of space describing examples, but use them often almost in passing to make an analytical point which can then be developed.

8 Remember that your essay is an extended argument– not a collection of several loosely related points. Your essay should move from point to point while always extending the argument and clarifying the nature of your answer. Try to develop a narrative or theme that will link paragraphs and points together smoothly. This may well not be a simple matter and is likely to require a great deal of thought, but it does mean that you can make the essay your own. Find your own theme and address the issues in a manner that interests you and means something to you.

9 Try to develop an abstract as you write your essay. This is really to help you with point 8. An abstract is a one-paragraph summary of your argument- and if you cannot explain your argument briefly then the reader will have no chance of understanding it. The abstract should not be included when you have finished the essay, but the act of writing it should help you retain clarity over what it is that you are trying to do. It is very easy to get lost in TOK essays; the abstract is a way of sticking to the argument that you want to make.

10 In your conclusion try to summarise (very briefly – one or two sentences) what you have said, and try to end with a forward-looking view. This might be an explanation of exactly why you were unable to answer the question, or what you would need to know in order to answer the question. Do not just reiterate your arguments. The final paragraph should ‘feel’ like conclusion and not leave the reader hanging in mid-air..

It seems then, that the nature of our senses implies that we will never have access to the ‘real world’ (though as we have seen, ‘real world’ is a highly problematic phrase). Some people may feel this is a great disappointment, while others may not care, but it is certainly humbling to note that even in this advanced age, for all our scientific expertise and high-tech machines, we will never know reality.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 12 Theory of Knowledge Given that several of the problems of knowledge that you identify may apply to the essay you are writing, you may wish to acknowledge the irony of taking up a position at all! Structuring the Course Adapted from : Preparing your school for the IB Diploma (CUP 2004)

What 'content' do we wish to cover? The subject guide contains:

Way of Knowing Perception, Emotion, Reason, Language Areas of Knowledge The Arts, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, History, Ethics, Mathematics

Three other themes that are commonly explicitly included in the course are The Nature of Truth, Paradigms and Media. Depending on the charter/mission statement of your school, there may be other aspects worth dedicating a unit of study to, such as Human Rights and Responsibilities, or the Role of Government, or Internationalism. Some teachers feel that TOK is the ideal vehicle for introducing students to important ideas that they would not meet elsewhere, thus moving the course towards a liberal arts conception of education. There is a lot to be said for this, as long as the approach remains a critical one and not just the learning

In what order shall we cover the 'content'? Here are two possibilities: The ‘Logical Approach'. It is often heard that you need to consider the Ways of Knowing first, before looking at how they operate within the Areas of Knowledge. Within the Ways of Knowing it can be argued that it makes sense to start with Language, as this is the medium through which the classes are held. So you work through the lists above, introducing individual topics as you wish.

The advantage of this system is clarity. The course outline is straightforward and is laid out in the subject guide. The disadvantage is that the scheme is not student-centered; it starts with the most theoretical themes (reasoning, perception, language, emotion) and then applies them to the specific areas from which they arise: the arts, natural sciences, human sciences, ethics, history and mathematics. I know that this approach is used successfully in many schools, but arguably students find it easier to do the reverse. This accords with the pedagogical approach of starting with concrete examples and developing abstract principles.

The next approach is rather more complex and needs more work to set up. However, I think it is a better system.

The 'Narrative Approach.' The idea here is to develop a narrative that runs through the course and that ties all the disparate areas and themes together in a coherent manner. To develop this narrative I use the metaphor of a journey in search of truth. At the start of the journey through IB we might ask the students ‘What is knowledge?’ and ‘What is most certain?’ .In our technological world, the ‘natural sciences’ may well appear to be the answer to both questions. Sciences have been incredibly successful in developing useful theories about the world around us and so their methodologies are well worth exploring. However, students are often relieved to find that there are significant issues that the so- called scientific method cannot address. TOK classes find that, despite its successes in uncovering certain kinds of knowledge, Science leaves unanswered certain questions about our lives and the human condition. So our search continues, and we can naturally turn the arts and how they allow us to gain knowledge about ourselves, each other and our communities. However, students discover that the subjective truths of the arts come at a cost; we must sacrifice objectivity and certainty. So, returning to our search for certainty, how about 1 + 1 = 2 as an indubitable truth? TOK can then examine whether mathematics offers us absolutely certain knowledge. Maths naturally leads to general systems of reasoning, with all their strengths and limitations. Students can then ponder the limitations of applying reasoning to human endeavours –the Social Sciences and History. These disciplines attempt to combine the rigour of Natural Sciences with the insights and empathy developed in the arts but we find that trying to analyse humans introduces a whole raft of problems, not least those of individuality, bias and selection (some of which we will have seen before in other contexts).

This seems to me to be a fairly natural place to pause and take stock. We have covered several familiar areas of knowledge (natural sciences, arts, social sciences, history and mathematics) and one way of knowing (reasoning), but have we made much progress of our search for certainty? Student opinion tends to vary, but discussion tends to highlight several themes/problems that will have arisen – perhaps perception, culture, paradigms, language. Now that they have been aired we can begin to look at these more abstract issues in their own right. Notice that these abstract issues rise naturally and are not simply given to the students.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 14 Theory of Knowledge We will have come across the problems of perception several times. We can look at the practical problems (we can all think of times that our senses have failed us) and philosophical problems (could life really be an illusion?) and this leads us nicely to paradigms as general problems of knowledge. The concept of paradigms reflects the fact that differing perspectives can result in radically different interpretations of the same information. As a simple example, the stars at night can be taken as ‘evidence’ for either the existence of God or for the meaningless of human existence! Students must come to understand that the biggest paradigm is background and culture. Our cultures strongly affect certain areas of knowledge (ethics is perhaps the most obvious example) and perhaps actually determine our belief systems. Subsequently, it is only natural to turn students’ attention to language as a means of expressing cultural values and as a medium of communication. They will soon discover that language is not the ideal tool for the job that it first appears to be.

By this time we are approaching the end of the course, so it is natural to review our quest for certainly and apply the themes explored to areas of experience outside the school curriculum. I think it is always worth shifting the emphasis outward as we near the end of High School. After all, TOK is a tool for life so looking beyond the school walls is essential. Ethics and religion are the most obvious topics here, and taken together, these areas perhaps provide compelling reasons to go beyond the purely rational. This leads us to examine the nature of feelings, emotion and intuition. To end the course we ask how far we have come. Has our quest for certainty been successful? If so, how? If not, why not? Most importantly, where will our quest take us after the end of TOK?

What lectures shall we have? Lectures can add to the course - but (a) they must not be overdone and (b) they must be very good. Let's discuss this one; I think certain areas lend themselves to lectures better than other.

What assessments do we need? Traditionally the first TOK assessment has been effort only. I can some merit in this but I am concerned that this leads to a poor perception of TOK among students. I would incline toward bringing TOK in line with all other subjects in this respect.

What amount of written work will we set on a regular basis? From the students’ perspective, writing TOK pieces is very difficult. It’s not just that the ideas are hard (which they are) but that structuring an original and complex argument is a real intellectual challenge. It is easy to spend a long time thinking hard but ending up very confused and even demoralised. This means that NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 15 Theory of Knowledge students need to be broken in gently starting with shorter, more descriptive pieces and gradually moving into more analytic ones: in my experience, throwing them in at the deep end (i.e with an IB essay title) is not a good approach. Since it is important to establish working expectations right from the start, I suggest that one written piece a week be the norm to start with – just a side of hand- written A4 or the equivalent. Assignments should be closely related to class work and ‘easy’ to get started on. For instance, start with “Which of your 6 IB subjects do you think is the most reliable and why?” or “Describe a time when your senses deceived you. Why do you think this happened?” As the course progresses and students become familiar with the focus of the work you can develop more difficult and longer essay-like assignments and allow them to set their own titles – and this is when their interest really takes off. Reading these journal entries can be wonderful insight into the concerns and lives of the students, and I always make a point, when I mark them every few weeks, of writing detailed and personal responses. With classes of 15 all sorts of issues come to light and it an excellent way of establishing a genuinely meaningful conversation with each and every one of them. Once students have this personal engagement with the issues, writing the essays becomes less of a chore, more of a pleasure, and the grades are likely to improve significantly.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 16 Theory of Knowledge The Theory of Knowledge Journal

Theory of Knowledge is an extremely practical subject. It can be applied in all your IB subjects, and in almost any aspect of your daily life. Your essays and your presentations will be awarded marks for how you relate what we do in class to your own experiences. It is therefore important that you get used to applying the ideas of Theory of Knowledge to your own original examples.

You are required to keep a Theory of Knowledge journal, in which you make weekly entries about the ideas of Theory of Knowledge and how they apply to your everyday life. You may write the journal entries on any topic which interests you; the only requirement is that it is TOK-related. There is no word limit. You will find that the journals are hard to write at first, but after a while you will begin to see possible entries all around. Importantly, essays/presentations are made much easier by a series of good journals. Your teacher will read your journals every few weeks.

On Holiday to Jakarta I went to Jakarta for the Easter Holiday. I went with a Dutch airplane from Singapore to Jakarta (KLM). It was so bored in the airplane, so I read the airplane’s magazine. When I was reading it, there is an article about my country, Indonesia. I was quite shocked to see some of the data about Indonesia that they have given. One thing that really surprised me was that they have given a different date for our Independence Day. Of course it could be a misprint but when I think about it again I think they have put it deliberately. The real Independence Day, or at least the one that government has told us, is 17 August 1945. But in the magazine they have put 1950, and they said the Dutch gave the independence because the UN have insisted. But according to our history, the Dutch did not give the Independence Day in 1950. It is said that we have fought for it, and on that day our first president, Soekarno, had declared our independence. When I read this I felt confused which one I should believe, because both countries may be trying to make their country look good. For the traveller who read this maybe it is not such a big deal for them. But it certainly gave me a headache. But in the end I concluded that both dates are true. I’m certain that Soekarno did declare it, because there are lots of proof about it, like photos and people that listened to it. And I’m certain that Dutch did leave in 1950. So I thought that the date isn’t very important, though I’m still suspicious about that we fight for it or is it just given. And after reading this I

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 17 Theory of Knowledge feel more doubt about History. Tanya Wihardja

Do Males and Females think differently? I remember an English class when we were studying poetry. As we discussed, we spoke about the definitions of the word ‘home’. To the guys in the class it was quite clear – a place with four walls, windows, a door and a room where you slept. The reaction from the girls was one of utter disgust (and think disappointment). A ‘home’ was a place where you were always welcome, a domain of your private comfort. Males and females think differently. I don’t mean ideas, but ways of thinking differ between the sexes. As in my class discussion, males tend to be more literal with ideas and females have more ‘figurative’ thoughts. Generally, they tend to do these things well and be weaker at the other. The case again arises when we see in school more males taking science subjects while females enrol in the arts. The arguable thing is to say why males/females are different like this. I think it’s not built into people, but that it is an imposition of values by society – that it is not nature, but its nurture. Throwing it back I suppose we could say that it is nature which makes the sexes susceptible to society’s pressure and even what causes society’s mind set in the first place. This doesn’t mean that a woman can’t do science better than most men, or a man can’t write better poetry than most women (Marie Curie, Ted Hughes). We can both start at the same point and arrive at another similar destination, but the ways and routes we travel will differ. Sui Yang Phang

Aboriginal Art For project week I visited Australia, and looking at the Aboriginal paintings I started to think about the definitions of Art again. Some of the dot paintings are so simplistic and don’t depict a story or image – they are just lines of dots, yet they are still art. I wonder if it is just from the cultural aspect that they are considered art. There is something about these lines of dots which is creative – unlike, in my opinion, the sheep in formaldehyde and other modern paintings. There are other aboriginal paintings which would without a doubt be called Art – those telling a story, a part of their culture. There are now modernised aboriginal paintings which aren’t just using traditional earthy colours, but which are becoming a crossover into modern art. Yokoi Udea

English and Japanese When I learnt to speak English I don’t think I was really aware that I was learning a language. I had no teachers who speak Japanese and when I try to NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 18 Theory of Knowledge write an essay there were problems. If I look up one word in English, I get several Japanese translations, all of which are totally different. Depending on my choice, my sentence might not make sense. But after studying Japanese literature, I realised that there are some words and phrases that will never exist in English. It might be in the dictionary, but it wouldn’t be the right feeling/meaning. So only Japanese people who have the word for this feeling can talk about it, which I think is cool. So speaking another language broadens your knowledge and ability to feel things. Even though I have never studied Japanese literature before, I can feel what the author meant because we have a similar culture. I was surprised that I could feel this even tough I can’t read the letters properly or understand half the vocab. I guess culture is something that doesn’t disappear even if you are not immersed in it. I’ve lived in Japan for a year (5-6 yr old) but because my parents talk to me in Japanese and I’m taught manners that show Japanese values, I think I still understand Japanese literature. Yoko Ueda

Texts, Magazines and Online Resources Whether to use a text or not is a matter of ongoing debate in the TOK world - see the OCC for details. Texts available at the moment are

 Theory of Knowledge Nicholas Alchin, John Murray, London (2003)  Theory of Knowledge - Teachers Book Nicholas Alchin, John Murray, London (2003) (These two are closely cross-referenced and the latter gives activities and games, puzzles etc to complement the former).  Ways of Knowing Micheal Woolman, IBID Press Victoria, Australia (2000).  The Enterprise of Knowledge John L Tomkinson, Leader Books, Athens (2004)  Regarding the World: A Primer for ToK Tony Stuart, Sevenaoks School, (2000)  Man is the Measure Rueben Abel, Free Press; (1976)

In addition I would strongly recommend the following as covering an enormous amount of ground. They are not suitable for students but I found that they gave me a very good background for the issues:

Philosophy Books Reuben Abel - Man is the Measure (The Free Press 1976) Donald Palmer - Does the Centre Hold? (Mayfield 1991), NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 19 Theory of Knowledge Thomas Nagel - What does it All Mean? (Oxford University Press 1989) Bertrand Russell - The Problems of Philosophy (repr. Oxford University Press 1998)

Other Stephen Pinker - How the Mind Works (Penguin 1998) (but skip bits here and there). Stephen Pinker - The Language Instinct.(William Morrow and Co. 1994) Many would argue that Pinker is very simplistic in his arguments, but he touches on so many core TOK issues in such an entertaining and engaging way that even if you disagree totally with his theses, there is an enormous amount to be gained from his books.

As far as online links go, I am reluctant to put more than a few links here, as any directory of online resources will quickly become out of date and you may be as well advised to do a search on a popular engine. Neverthless, at time of writing, these are a few sites that I have found especially useful.

http://home.swipnet.se/ulf_p/tok/tok.htm - quite a good archive

http://www.adastranet.net/forum - back issues of IB TOK magazine available

http://www.philosophers.co.uk/games/games.htm - some good interactive games

http://www.digitalbrain.com/roztru/TOK/Theory%20of%20Knowledge.db_psc? verb=v - a great overview of the course and some very good links

http://web.mit.edu/persci/demos/Motion&Form/master.html - magnificent for perception

http://www.ibtok.com - great!

A Personal Reading List by Area Introduction At this stage, any text which takes a thoughtful, reflective and wide-ranging approach to knowledge will be very helpful. Excellent short and accessible essays on topics as diverse as propaganda, art, Santa Claus, God and truth can NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 20 Theory of Knowledge be found in Martin Gardner’s Order and Surprise (Oxford University Press, 1983) or The Whys of a Scrivening Philosopher (Oxford University Press, 1985). For a more philosophical but delightfully readable and very short introduction you might try Thomas Nagel’s What does it All Mean? (Oxford University Press 1989); by the same author Mortal Questions (Cambridge University Press, 1979) is much more advanced but equally fascinating. For a philosophical look at the whole concept of knowledge, it is hard to find a better introduction than Stephen Cade Hetherington’s Knowledge Puzzles (Westview Press 1996). In terms of relevant fiction, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Bodley Head 1974) takes an unusual but compelling approach to some of the issues, and the dazzling stories, essays and parables in Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths (Penguin 1964) defy description, providing a unique and paradoxical window on the everyday world.

From a philosophical point of view essential reading is Bertrand Russells Problems of Philosophy (repr. Oxford University Press 1998); a lighter text is Donald Palmer’s Does the Centre Hold? (Mayfield 1991),

Natural Sciences The recent explosion in popular science writing means that you really are spoiled for choice in this area, and any good bookstore will have a whole section devoted to the philosophical implications of the natural sciences! In terms of the scientific method itself, Alan Chalmers’ What is this thing called Science? (Open University Press 1979) is an accessible but detailed and lively overview; John Hosper’s An Introduction to philosophical Analysis (Prentice Hall 1957) ch.4 also provides a very brief but interesting overview. Recent classics are Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Hutchinson 1968) and Conjectures and Refutations (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1969), and Thomas Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution (Random House 1959) and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press 1970). On the issue of science and truth, John Ziman’s Reliable Knowledge (Cambridge University Press 1978) is helpful; on the links between science and religion (and interludes into the nature of time, free will, miracles, mind and self) a great starting point in Paul Davies’ God and the New Physics (Pelican 1984) or The Mind of God (Penguin 1992). The whole concept of laws of science and their nature is explored in John Barrow’s The World within the World (Oxford University Press 1988). Possible limits of science are discussed lucidly and entertainingly in both John Horgan’s The End of Science (William Morrow and Co. 1994) and John Barrow’s Impossibility (Vintage 1999), and Carl Sagan’s The NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 21 Theory of Knowledge Demon Haunted World (Ballentine Books 1996) is a classic call for us not to take these limits too far.

The Arts A extremely powerful introduction to the arts as socially and politically relevant is the very readable and short John Berger's Ways of Seeing (Penguin 1972), based on the BBC television series. The best general philosophical introduction I know if is ch. 10 of Donald Palmer's wonderful Does the Centre Hold? (Mayfield 1991), and Martin Gardner's The Why's of a Philosophical Scrivener (Oxford University Press 1983) ch 4 directly addresses the issue of aesthetic relativism. The links between the arts and the natural sciences are controversially explored in Edward Wilson's Consilience (Vintage 1999). In fiction I have been charmed and enlightened by Alain de Botton's How Proust can change your Life (Vintage Books 1998). For the thoughts of the critics, a great overview is Carolyn Korsmeyer, ed, Aesthetics: The Big Questions (Blackwell 1998), and many of the original expressions of aesthetic theory from down the ages and across the cultures can be found in David Cooper, Peter Lamarque, Crispin Sartwell (eds) Aesthetics : The Classic Readings (Blackwell 1997).

Maths It is difficult for the non-specialist to get to grips with much of the mathematical literature, but G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge University Press 1940 repr.1994) is a brilliant and engaging description for the layman. If you would like to get a first hand, totally non- algebraic experience of mathematical imagination, then Edwin Abbott’s classic Flatland (Penguin 1952) and it’s more readable descendent, Rudy Rucker’s The Fourth Dimension (and how to get there) (Rider and Company 1985) are unsurpassed for expanding conceptions of mathematics. Two very readable accounts of humans at the centre of mathematics are David Blatner’s The Joy of Pi (Penguin 1997) and Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Enigma (Walker and co., 1997). Getting very slightly more technical, an outstanding description of what mathematicians actually do can be found in Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh The Mathematical Experience (Houghton Mifflin 1981). The notion of proof is brialliantly explored in Imre Lakatos Proofs and Refutations (Cambridge University Press 1977). If you want an extraordinary introduction to the extraordinary findings of Gödel then Douglas Hofdstadter’s rich, enormously wide-ranging (and simply enormous) Gödel, Escher and Bach (Vintage 1989) remains more a literary experience than simply a book. The same ground is also covered in the excellent Ernest Nagel, James R. Newman’s Godel's Proof (New York University Press) NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 22 Theory of Knowledge

Rationalism A very gentle introduction to informal logic can be found in S. Morris Engel’s Fallacies and Pitfalls of Language (Prentice Hall 1994) or Neil Browne and Stuart Keeley’s Asking the Right Questions (Prentice Hall 1994). A sparkling, accessible but at the same time profound approach to reasoning and the possibility of paradox can be found is Raymond Smullyan’s brilliant What is the name of this book? (Prentice Hall 1978); informative though probably overrated is Edward de Bono’s classic Lateral Thinking (Ward Lock Education 1970). More analytic approaches to the use of reason in general can be found in A. J. Ayer’s The Problem of Knowledge (Open University Press 1956) Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy (repr. Oxford University Press 1998). An overview of what we mean by rationality and different possible conceptions of the notion is found in Mikael Stenmark’s Rationality in Science, Religion, and Everyday Life : A Critical Evaluation of Four Models of Rationality by (University of Notre-Dame Press, 1995)

Social Sciences For the problems in representing human information is meaningful form, Stephen Jay Gould’s handling of IQ in The Mismeasure of Man (WW Norton 1981) is brilliant. Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh tackle the issue more generally in Descartes’ Dream (Harvester books 1986). A reasonably technical but readable and rich account of the emerging discipline of decision theory (which attempts to model how humans actually make decisions) can be found in Stephen Watson’s Decision Synthesis (Cambridge University Press 1977); an economically-slanted alternative might be Brian Loasby Choice, Complexity and Ignorance (Cambridge University Press 1976). The issue of free-will is brilliantly introduced in Donald Palmer's Does the Centre Hold? (Mayfield 1991) ch. 6 and further explored in Daniel Dennett Elbow Room (MIT Press 1984). For a case study on psychology try Adrian Furnham’s All in the Mind (Whurr Publishers 1996). General reflections on human nature, with an emphasis on language can be found in Noam Chomsky Powers and Prospects (Pluto 1996); the links with the natural sciences are superbly and controversially explained in any of Edward Wilson Consilience (Vintage 1999), Matt Ridley The Red Queen (Penguin 1993), Stephen Pinker How the Mind Works (Penguin 1998). A broader, far more philosophical (and far more difficult) approach is taken in John Searle The Construction of Social Reality (Penguin 1995)

History A very brief overview of some ideas is in Reuben Abel Man is the Measure (The Free Press 1976) ch 15, but perhaps the classic introduction to some of the ideas of historiography is E. H. Carr’s very accessible What is History? (Random House 1967). A useful overview of the post-modern criticisms of historical truth is found in K. Jenkins (ed) The Post-Modern History Reader (Routledge 1997); a response to these claims has been mounted in R. J. Evans In defence of History (repr. WW Norton and Co 1999). Other excellent book are A. Marwick’s The Nature of History (repr. Lyceum Books 1989) and Barbara Tuchman’s enagaging collection of essays Practicing History (repr. Ballentine Books 1991) To look at current controversies and some lesser-know views, you will not find better themes than in Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide (City Light Book 1997) and James Peck ed. The Chomsky Reader (Random House 1987)

Empiricism An overview of the philosophical ideas may be found in any introduction to philosophy; I recommend Donald Palmer's Does the Centre Hold? (Mayfield 1991) ch 3 or John Hospers An introduction to Philosophical Analysis (Prentice Hall 1953) ch 3. The phenomenon and implications of of synesthesia is described in detail in Richard Cytowic The Man who Tasted Shapes (Abacus 1993). For a defence that the world really is there (do you need one?) Martin Gardner The Whys of a Philosophical Scriverner (Oxford University Press 1983) Ch1 is delightful. A more controversial (maybe even extreme, but still important and interesting, if rather difficult) defence of empiricism may be found in A. J. Ayer Language Truth and Logic (Dover Books 1946). Empiricists [Abridged]Locke, Berkeley and Hume (Anchor Books/Doubleday 1961) is a good primary source.

Paradigms The term paradigm was made common by Thomas Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution (Random House 1959) and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press 1970), both of which are which are very readable and extremely interesting. There are few books which deal directly with the issue, most are written in a particular paradigm, but Paul Davies Are we alone? (Penguin 1995) deals with the implications of finding alien life. Perhaps most helpful would be a list of books dealing with the great paradigm shift we are currently in (at the end of?). With the topic of evolution so

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 24 Theory of Knowledge controversial, why take anyone's word for it? Read the following and make your own mind up! Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker (repr. WW Norton and Co 1996) and The Selfish Gene (repr. Oxford University Press 1990) were the first popular books to really challenge religious views. Robert Wright The Moral Animal (Vintage 1994) applies the theory to see if it can explain our sense of right and wrong, and Stephen Pinker, in How The Mind Works (Penguin 1998) argues that most aspects of what we know about the brain support evolutionary theory. Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Touchstone 1996) takes an overview. Anti-evolution writers who argue that the scientific evidence is simply not good enough to support the theory include Micheal Behe, who in Darwin's Black Box : The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (Touchstone 1998) suggests that irreducible biochemical complexity in nature cannot be explained by evolution. Phillip E. Johnson Objections Sustained : Subversive Essays on Evolution, Law & Culture (Intervarsity Pr August 1998) takes a similar line and this is followed up in detail by Lee M. Spetner Not By Chance (Judaica Pr; March 1998) where many examples are taken which, it is suggested, show that many natural forms of life must have been designed. A. N. Field in The Evolution Hoax Exposed (Tan Books and publishers 1971) goes on to suggest that believeing in evolution leads to many social ills, and Michael Denton, in Evolution : A Theory in Crisis (Adler & Adler,December 1996) argues that a rational appraisal of the evince will lead to the jettisoning of Darwinism in due course.

Language A most profound and wide-ranging introduction to a wide range of language issues is Stephen Pinker’s - The Language Instinct (William Morrow and Co. 1994). Pinker’s Words and Rules (Basic Books 1999) is a more detailed introduction to linguistics. For an entertaining guide to deceptive language try William Lutz’s Double Speak (Harper and Row 1989). The problem of meaning is well covered is many philosophy texts - I can recommend as a very brief introduction Thomas Nagel’s What does it all Mean? (Oxford University Press 1987) ch5. Two more general overviews are provided in Reuben Abel’s Man is The Measure (The Free Press 1976) ch 7 or John Hosper’s Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (Prentice Hall 1953). A fascinating, less philosophical and more comprehensive guide is found in David Crystal’s Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language (Cambridge University Press 1992), and Geoffrey Pullman’s The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and other irreverent essays on the study of language (University of Chicago Press 1991) remains an entertaining and informative peek at some areas and characters in linguistics.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 25 Theory of Knowledge As an introduction to the subtle and controversial aspects of language it is hard to beat Noam Chomsky’s Language and Thought (Moyer Bell 1993) or the early chapters in Powers and Prospects (Pluto Press 1996).

Ethics It is well worth checking some introductions to philosophy and then going on to look at some applied issues. Recommended introductions are Thomas Nagel’s What does it all Mean? (Oxford University Press 1987) ch7, or John Hosper’s Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (Prentice Hall 1953) ch8 or .Donald Palmer's Does the Centre Hold? (Mayfield 1991) ch7,8. For a more detailed look at I recommend Gilbert Harman’s The Nature of Morality (Oxford University Press 1977) and Christopher Biffle, ed, A guided tour of John Stuart Mill’s ‘Utilitarianism’, (Mayfield Publishing Co 1993); and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotions (Philosphical Library 1957). Three excellent studies are Jonathan Glover’s Causing Death and Saving Lives (Pelican 1977) and John Harris’ The Value of Life (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1985) and Violence and Responsibility (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1988).

Politics A tremendous personal view, largely concerned with practical matters in America this century, is given in Martin Gardner’s The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (Oxford University Press 1983) in ch.7 - 9. A brief general overview can be found in Donald Palmer's Does the Centre Hold? (Mayfield 1991) ch 9 or in the Alan Brown’s Modern Political Philosophy (Penguin 1986). A classic attack on Marxism can be found in volume II of Karl Popper The Open Society and its Enemies (Princeton University Press 1971); the minimalist state is defended in Robert Nozick’s influential Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books 1974) and the interesting but at times dense John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press 1971) discusses the veil of ignorance. More technical but still fairly readable is . Ball and R. Dagger Political Ideologies and the Democratic Ideal (Longman November 1998), and since M. Forsyth, M. Keens-Soper and J. Hoffman (ed) The Political Classics - Hamilton to Mill (Oxford University Press 1993) contains the classic thoughts of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill all in one handy place. For a brilliant web-site with many profound social and political issues discussed by many great thinkers, and an extensive archive, go to http://www.zmag.org

God Check the philosophy or religion section in any book shop and you will be spoiled for choice; here are a few personal favourites. An excellent brief overview can NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 26 Theory of Knowledge be found in Donald Palmer's Does the Centre Hold? (Mayfield 1991) ch 5; a very personal account of the defence of faith against the problem of evil and doubt is in Martin Gardner’s The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (Oxford University Press 1983) ch.10 - 16. For and against the existence of God is covered very readably in Todd C. Moody’s Does God Exist? : A Dialogue (Hackett Pub Co; October 1996); the challenge posed by science is well covered by Cambridge scientist and theologian John C. Polkinghorne in Belief in God in an Age of Science (Yale University Press 1999). William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (Random House 1999) remains unsurpassed, in my view, as a

thoughtful and interested reflection on religion.Three Categories of Knowledge: Crucial Distinctions

It is very easy to read, often in reputable newspapers, that news is about facts, and opinions on those facts. Facts are disputable - we can argue about the number of computers sold in India in 1999 - but there is a right and a wrong answer. Opinions are rather different - and you may hear it said that an opinion can never be wrong - after all, everybody is entitled to their own opinion aren’t they? The notion of freedom is sometimes interpreted as meaning that anyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s.

But this is actually pure nonsense.

Suppose you are a keen runner, but that you break your leg in an accident. Your leg is put in plaster for a month, and when it is removed you are keen to get training straightway. In my opinion, you should get training immediately, and really push yourself hard, ignoring any pain, until your are as fit as you were before the accident. In your doctor’s opinion you should take things very slowly, and stop as soon as you feel any pain.

Whose opinion is the better one? Clearly, the one which is a judgement based on reason. This is the kind of opinion most important to educated people, and the kind we will concentrate on in this course. Any Critical Thinker will recognise that some opinions are better than others - the difficult thing is to decide how you tell the good opinion from the bad. In

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 27 Theory of Knowledge the running case, it seems reasonable to trust a doctor, as she will have better reasons for her judgment than a layperson.

We might plausibly argue that there are three types of questions: • Questions which have one correct answer. How many atoms of hydrogen are there in a water molecule? • Questions which have many possible answers but which require justification and reasoned judgements. What is the best way to tackle the developing world’s debt problems? • Questions which have no correct answer but depend totally on the person answering the question. Which type of chocolate do you like best?

Sometimes it may be possible to argue about which category a question might fall into - for example ‘Is this painting good Art?’. Some might put it in the third category, some might prefer the second. If in doubt, it is worth exploring further by assuming it is a question worthy of debate, and to see how a discussion develops - if it turns out to be pure personal choice, with nothing to be said for one side more than another, than it will probably turn out to be a short and boring discussion! If you find yourself coming up with reasons which appeal to universal intellectual standards such as clarity, consistency, honesty, factual accuracy and so on, then the question is certainly a ‘type two’ question.

It is the appeal to universal intellectual standards which is important, and it is these standards and their use which consitutes Critical Thinking. The standards mean that here we can try to make coherent intellectual progress towards a well-reasoned and justified answer, with even the hardest questions.

A Model for the Course

When thinking about problems of knowledge, we often challenge students about what it is that they know and how they know it. Some students may react by saying "I just know it". More often, however, they catch onto the

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 28 Theory of Knowledge more 'sophisticated' game - and then they point out all the problems and the uncertainties, and conclude that we can't know anything - "It could all just be an illusion right?".There is therefore sometimes a danger that we push students towards one of two extremes - prejudice and certainty, or complete relativism and skepticism.

Prejudice and Certainty Relativism and Skepticism

• Obvious things must be true; • Nothing is what is seems to be; • We can easily attain certainty; • Certainty is impossible; • TOK isn't important and doesn't • The purpose of TOK is to be able to apply to 'the real world'; be skeptical about everything • I know the truth; • There is no such thing as truth; • My standards are better than any • There are no standards by which to other standards; judge anything; • My culture is the best in every way; • All cultural perspectives are equally valid

In my experience, of the two equally unattractive options, students have tended towards complete relativism and skepticism rather than prejudice and certainty. Very few of them realise that statements like those above may actually be self-contradictory. If students leave the course holding either of these positions then we have failed them.

The central aim for us as teachers is therefore to try to move students on further. We are hoping to arrive at a third position, which one might argue lies beyond, or possibly between the two positions. Let us call this position that of the critical thinker:

The Critical Thinker

• Things are not always what they seem to be; we must examine and analyse; • Certainty is very difficult to come by in all except the simplest cases (and even many of those); • We are all searching for the truth, but it is hard to say that we know we have found it. • Many standards are defensible; but many are not. • I have considered several positions and know and can justify what I believe to be reasonable and unreasonable.

In attempting to reach this position we consider vast areas of knowledge, in some cases dealing in a few pages with what has occupied the lives of many great thinkers. This is intentional. We aim to introduce the questions, to shake a few prejudices and certainties, and then further study can be more focussed. This approach has two important implications: firstly that it is a fascinating course with something in it for everyone; secondly that it greatly simplifies some difficult areas. We must try to adopt a simple, but not simplistic approach, but if some students after reading and reflecting feel that the material is too simple, then it will have served its purpose. There are no generally accepted answers to many of the questions here; and a proper investigation of the issues must, of necessity, be left to specialists. Just as in the sciences we teach incorrect theories to students so that they may better understand the ‘correct’ ones when they meet them, so here we introduce claims which patently do not stand up to detailed scrutiny. This is deliberate and has proven to be an effective pedagogical approach.

Funes, the Memorious By Jorge Luis Borges

I remember him (I scarcely have the right to use this ghostly verb; only one man on earth deserved the right, and he is dead), I remember him with a dark passionflower in his hand, looking at it as no one has ever looked at

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 30 Theory of Knowledge such a flower, though they might look from the twilight of day until the twilight of night, for a whole life long. I remember him, his face immobile and Indian-like, and singularly remote, behind his cigarette. I remember (I believe) the strong delicate fingers of the plainsman who can braid leather. I remember, near those hands, a vessel in which to make maté tea, bearing the arms of the Banda Oriental; I remember, in the window of the house, a yellow rush mat, and beyond, a vague marshy landscape. I remember clearly his voice, the deliberate, resentful nasal voice of the old Eastern Shore man, without the Italianate syllables of today. I did not see him more than three times; the last time, in 1887. . . .

My first recollection of Funes is quite clear: I see him at dusk, sometime in March or February of the year '84. That year, my father had taken me to spend the summer at Fray Bentos. I was on my way back from the farm at San Francisco with my cousin Bernardo Haedo. We came back singing, on horseback; and this last fact was not the only reason for my joy. After a sultry day, an enormous slate-grey-storm had obscured the sky. It was driven on by a wind from the south; the trees were already tossing like madmen; and I had the apprehension (the secret hope) that the elemental downpour would catch us out in the open. We were running a kind of race with the tempest. We rode into a narrow lane which wound down between two enormously high brick footpaths. It had grown black of a sudden; I now heard rapid almost secret steps above; I raised my eyes and saw a boy running along the narrow, cracked path as if he were running along a narrow, broken wall. I remember the loose trousers, tight at the bottom, the hemp sandals; I remember the cigarette in the hard visage, standing out against the by now limitless darkness. Bernardo unexpectedly yelled to him: "What's the time, Ireneo?" Without looking up, without stopping, Ireneo replied: "In ten minutes it will be eight o'clock, child Bernardo Juan Francisco." The voice was sharp, mocking.

I am so absentminded that the dialogue which I have just cited would not have penetrated my attention if it had not been repeated by my cousin, who was stimulated, I think, by a certain local pride and by a desire to show himself indifferent to the other's three-sided reply.

He told me that the boy above us in the pass was a certain Ireneo Funes, renowned for a number of eccentricities, such as that of having nothing to do with people and of always knowing the time, like a watch. He added that Ireneo was the son of Maria Clementina Funes, an ironing woman in the

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 31 Theory of Knowledge town, and that his father, some people said, was an "Englishman" named O'Connor, a doctor in the salting fields, though some said the father was a horse-breaker, or scout, from the province of El Salto. Ireneo lived with his mother, at the edge of the country house of the Laurels.

In the years '85 and '86 we spent the summer in the city of Montevideo. We returned to Fray Bentos in '87. As was natural, I inquired after all my acquaintances, and finally, about "the chronometer Funes." I was told that he had been thrown by a wild horse at the San Francisco ranch, and that he had been hopelessly crippled. I remember the impression of uneasy magic which the news provoked in me: the only time I had seen him we were on horseback, coming from San Francisco, and he was in a high place; from the lips of my cousin Bernardo the affair sounded like a dream elaborated with elements out of the past. They told me that Ireneo did not move now from his cot, but remained with his eyes fixed on the backyard fig tree, or on a cobweb. At sunset he allowed himself to be brought to the window. He carried pride to the extreme of pretending that the blow which had befallen him was a good thing. . . . Twice I saw him behind the iron grate which sternly delineated his eternal imprisonment: unmoving, once, his eyes closed; unmoving also, another time, absorbed in the contemplation of a sweet-smelling sprig of lavender cotton.

At the time I had begun, not without some ostentation, the methodical study of Latin. My valise contained the De viris illustribus of Lhomond, the Thesaurus of Quicherat, Caesar's Commentaries, and an odd-numbered volume of the Historia Naturalis of Pliny, which exceeded (and still exceeds) my modest talents as a Latinist. Everything is noised around in a small town; Ireneo, at his small farm on the outskirts, was not long in learning of the arrival of these anomalous books. He sent me a flowery, ceremonious letter, in which he recalled our encounter, unfortunately brief, "on the seventh day of February of the year '84," and alluded to the glorious services which Don Gregorio Haedo, my uncle, dead the same year, "had rendered to the Two Fatherlands in the glorious campaign of Ituzaingó," and he solicited the loan of any one of the volumes, to be accompanied by a dictionary "for the better intelligence of the original text, for I do not know Latin as yet." He promised to return them in good condition, almost immediately. The letter was perfect, very nicely constructed; the orthography was of the type sponsored by Andrés Bello: i for y, j for g. At first I naturally suspected a jest. My cousins assured me it was not so, that these were the ways of Ireneo. I did not know whether

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 32 Theory of Knowledge to attribute to impudence, ignorance, or stupidity the idea that the difficult Latin required no other instrument than a dictionary; in order fully to undeceive him I sent the Gradus ad Parnassum of Quicherat, and the Pliny.

On 14 February, I received a telegram from Buenos Aires telling me to return immediately, for my father was "in no way well." God forgive me, but the prestige of being the recipient of an urgent telegram, the desire to point out to all of Fray Bentos the contradiction between the negative form of the news and the positive adverb, the temptation to dramatize my sorrow as I feigned a virile stoicism, all no doubt distracted me from the possibility of anguish. As I packed my valise, I noticed that I was missing the Gradus and the volume of the Historia Naturalis. The "Saturn" was to weigh anchor on the morning of the next day; that night, after supper, I made my way to the house of Funes. Outside, I was surprised to find the night no less oppressive than the day.

Ireneo's mother received me at the modest ranch. She told me that Ireneo was in the back room and that I should not be disturbed to find him in the dark, for he knew how to pass the dead hours without lighting the candle. I crossed the cobblestone patio, the small corridor; I came to the second patio. A great vine covered everything, so that the darkness seemed complete. Of a sudden I heard the high-pitched, mocking voice of Ireneo. The voice spoke in Latin; the voice (which came out of the obscurity) was reading, with obvious delight, a treatise or prayer or incantation. The Roman syllables resounded in the earthen patio; my suspicion made them seem undecipherable, interminable; afterwards, in the enormous dialogue of that night, I learned that they made up the first paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book of the Historia Naturalis. The subject of this chapter is memory; the last words are ujt nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum.

Without the least change in his voice, Ireneo bade me come in. He was lying on the cot, smoking. It seems to me that I did not see his face until dawn; I seem to recall the momentary glow of the cigarette. The room smelled vaguely of dampness. I sat down, and repeated the story of the telegram and my father's illness.

I come now to the most difficult point in my narrative. For the entire story has no other point (the reader might as well know it by now) than this

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 33 Theory of Knowledge dialogue of almost a half-century ago. I shall not attempt to reproduce his words, now irrecoverable. I prefer truthfully to make a résumé of the many things Ireneo told me. The indirect style is remote and weak; I know that I sacrifice the effectiveness of my narrative; but let my readers imagine the nebulous sentences which coulded that night.

Ireneo began by enumerating, in Latin and Spanish, the cases of prodigious memory cited in the Historia Naturalis: Cyrus, king of the Persians, who could call every soldier in his armies by name; Mithridates Eupator, who administered justice in the twenty-two languages of his empire; Simonides, inventory of mnemotechny; Metrodorus, who practised the art of repeating faithfully what he heard once. With evident good faith Funes marvelled that such things should be considered marvellous. He told me that previous to the rainy afternoon when the blue-tinted horse threw him, he had been - like any Christian - blind, deaf-mute, somnambulistic, memoryless. (I tried to remind him of his precise perception of time, his memory for proper names; he paid no attention to me.) For nineteen years, he said, he had lived like a person in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard without hearing, forgot everything - almost everything. On falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories. A little later he realized that he was crippled. This fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a minimum price to pay. And now, his perception and his memory were infallible.

We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho. These recollections were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day. He told me: I have more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was a world. And again: My dreams are like your vigils. And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 34 Theory of Knowledge A circumference on a blackboard, a rectangular triangle, a rhomb, are forms which we can fully intuit; the same held true with Ireneo for the tempestuous mane of a stallion, a herd of cattle in a pass, the ever- changing flame or the innumerable ash, the many faces of a dead man during the course of a protracted wake. He could perceive I do not know how many stars in the sky.

These things he told me; neither then nor at any time later did they seem doubtful. In those days neither the cinema nor the phonograph yet existed; nevertheless, it seems strange, almost incredible, that no one should have experimented on Funes. The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.

The voice of Funes, out of the darkness, continued. He told me that toward 1886 he had devised a new system of enumeration and that in a very few days he had gone before twenty-four thousand. He had not written it down, for what he once meditated would not be erased. The first stimulus to his work, I believe, had been his discontent with the fact that "thirty- three Uruguayans" required two symbols and three words, rather than a single word and a single symbol. Later he applied his extravagant principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Máximo Perez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Train; other numbers were Luis Melián Lafinur, Olimar, Brimstone, Clubs, The Whale, Gas, The Cauldron, Napoleon, Agustín de Vedia. In lieu of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a species of mark; the last were very complicated. . . . I attempted to explain that this rhapsody of unconnected terms was precisely the contrary of a system of enumeration. I said that to say three hundred and sixty-five was to say three hundreds, six tens, five units: an analysis which does not exist in such numbers as The Negro Timoteo or The Flesh Blanket. Funes did not understand me, or did not wish to understand me.

Locke, in the seventeenth century, postulated (and rejected) an impossible idiom in which each individual object, each stone, each bird and branch had an individual name; Funes had once projected an analogous idiom, but he had renounced it as being too general, too ambiguous. In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He determined to reduce all of his past experience to some seventy thousand recollections, which he NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 35 Theory of Knowledge would later define numerically. Two considerations dissuaded him: the thought that the task was interminable and the thought that it was useless. He knew that at the hour of his death he would scarcely have finished classifying even all the memories of his childhood.

The two projects I have indicated (an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, and a usable mental catalogue of all the images of memory) are lacking in sense, but they reveal a certain stammering greatness. They allow us to make out dimly, or to infer, the dizzying world of Funes. He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three- fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three- fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him on every occasion. Swift writes that the emperor of Lilliput could discern the movement of the minute hand; Funes could continuously make out the tranquil advances of corruption, of caries, of fatigue. He noted the progress of death, of moisture. He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform world which was instantaneously and almost intolerably exact. Babylon, London, and New York have overawed the imagination of men with their ferocious splendour; no one, in those populous towers or upon those surging avenues, has felt the heat and pressure of a reality as indefatigable as that which day and night converged upon the unfortunate Ireneo in his humble South American farmhouse. It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to be abstracted from the world; Funes, on his back in his cot, in the shadows, imagined every crevice and every moulding of the various houses which surrounded him. (I repeat, the least important of his recollections was more minutely precise and more lively than our perception of a physical pleasure or a physical torment.) Toward the east, in a section which was not yet cut into blocks of homes, there were some new unknown houses. Funes imagined them black, compact, made of a single obscurity; he would turn his face in this direction in order to sleep. He would also imagine himself at the bottom of the river, being rocked and annihilated by the current.

Without effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details. NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 36 Theory of Knowledge

The equivocal clarity of dawn penetrated along the earthen patio. Then it was that I saw the face of the voice which had spoken all through the night. Ireneo was nineteen years old; he had been born in 1868; he seemed as monumental as bronze, more ancient than Egypt, anterior to the prophecies and the pyramids. It occurred to me that each one of my words (each one of my gestures) would live on in his implacable memory; I was benumbed by the fear of multiplying superfluous gestures.

Ireneo Funes died in 1889, of a pulmonary congestion.

How do we know anything? Thomas Nagel

If you think about it, the inside of your own mind is the only thing you can be sure of.

Whatever you believe - whether it's about the sun, moon, and stars, the house and neighborhood in which you live, history, science, other people, even the existence of your own body - is based on your experiences and thoughts, feelings and sense impressions. That's all you have to go on directly, whether you see the book in your hands, or feel the floor under your feet, or remember that George Washington was the first president of the United States, or that water is H2O. Everything else is farther away from you than your inner experiences and thoughts, and reaches you only through them

Ordinarily you have no doubts about the existence of the floor under your feet, or the tree outside the window, or your own teeth. In fact most of the time you don't even think about the mental states that make you aware of those things: you seem to be aware of them directly. But how do you know they really exist?

If you try to argue that there must be an external physical world, because you wouldn’t see buildings, people or stars unless there were things out there that reflected or shed light into your eyes and caused your visual experiences, the reply is obvious: How do you know that? It’s just another claim about the external world and your relation to it, and has to be based on the evidence of your senses. But you can rely on that specific evidence NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 37 Theory of Knowledge about how visual expereicnes are caused only if you can already rely in general on the contents of your mind to tell you about the external world. And that is exactly what has been called into question. If you try to prove the reliability of your impressions by appealing to your impressions, you're arguing in a circle and won't get anywhere.

Would things seem any different to you if in fact all these things existed only in your mind - if everything you took to be the real world outside was just a giant dream or hallucination, from which you will never wake up? If it were like that, then of course you couldn't wake up, as you can from a dream, because it would mean there was no "real: world to wake up into. So it wouldn't be exactly like a normal dream or hallucination. As we usually think of dreams, they go on in the minds of people who are actually lying in a real bed in a real house, even if in the dream they are running away from a homicidal lawnmower through the streets of Kansas City. We also assume that normal dreams depend on what is happening in the dreamer's brain while he sleeps.

But couldn't all your experiences be like a giant dream with no external world outside it? How can you know that isn't what's going on? If all your experience were a dream with nothing outside, then any evidence you tried to use to prove to yourself that there was an outside world would just be part of the dream. If you knocked on the table or pinched yourself, you would hear the knock and feel the pinch, but that would be just one more thing going on inside your mind like everything else. It's no use: If you want to find out whether what's inside your mind is any guide to what's outside your mind, you can't depend on how things seem - from inside your mind - to give you the answer.

But what else is there to depend on? All your evidence about anything has to come through your mind - whether in the form of perception, the testimony of books and other people, or memory - and it is entirely consistent with everything you're aware of that nothing at all exists except the inside of your mind. It's even possible that you don't have a body or a brain - since your beliefs about that come only through the evidence of your senses. You've never seen your brain - you just assume that everybody has one - but even if you had seen it, or thought you had, that would have been just another visual experience. Maybe you, the subject of experience, are the only thing that exists, and there is no physical world at all - no stars, no earth, no human bodies. Maybe there isn't even any space. NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 38 Theory of Knowledge

The most radical conclusion to draw from this would be that your mind is the only thing that exists. This view is called solipsism. It is a very lonely view, and not too many people have held it. As you can tell from that remark, I don't hold it myself. If I were a solipsist I probably wouldn't be writing this book, since I wouldn't believe there was anybody else to read it. On the other hand, perhaps I would write it to make my inner life more interesting, by including the impression of the appearance of the book in print, of other people reading it and telling me their reactions, and so forth. I might even get the impression of royalties, if I'm lucky.

Perhaps you are a solipsist: in that case you will regard this book as a product of your own mind, coming into existence in your experience as you read it. Obviously nothing I can say can prove to you that I really exist, or that the book as a physical object exists.

On the other hand, to conclude that you are the only thing that exists is more than the evidence warrants. You can't know on the basis of what's in your mind that there's no world outside it. Perhaps the right conclusion is the more modest one that you don't know anything beyond your impressions and experiences. There may or may not be an external world, and if there is it may or may not be completely different from how it seems to you - there's no way for you to tell. This view is called skepticism about the external world.

An even stronger form of skepticism is possible. Similar arguments seem to show that you don't know anything even about your own past existence and experiences, since all you have to go on are the present contents of your mind, including memory impressions. If you can't be sure that the world outside your mind exists now, how can you be sure that you yourself existed before now? How do you know you didn't just come into existence a few minutes ago, complete with all your present memories? The only evidence that you couldn't have come into existence a few minutes ago depends on beliefs about how people and their memories are produced, which rely in turn on beliefs about what has happened in the past. But to rely on those beliefs to prove that you existed in the past would again be to argue in a circle. You would be assuming the reality of the past to prove the reality of the past.

It seems that you are stuck with nothing you can be sure of except the contents of your own mind at the present moment. And it seems that

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 39 Theory of Knowledge anything you try to do to argue your way out of this predicament will fail, because the argument will have to assume what you are trying to prove - the existence of the external world beyond your mind.

Suppose, for instance, you argue that there must be an external world, because it is incredible that you should be having all these experiences without there being some explanation in terms of external causes. The skeptic can make two replies. First, even if there are external causes, how can you tell from the contents of your experience what those causes are like? You've never observed any of them directly. Second, what is the basis of your idea that everything has to have an explanation? It's true that in your normal, nonphilosophical conception of the world, processes like those which go on in your mind are caused, at least in part, by other things outside them. But you can't assume that this is true if what you're trying to figure out is how you know anything about the world outside your mind. And there is no way to prove such a principle just by looking at what's inside your mind. However plausible the principle may seem to you, what reason do you have to believe that it applies to the world?

Science won't help us with this problem either, though it might seem to. In ordinary scientific thinking, we rely on general principles of explanation to pass from the way the world first seems to us to a different conception of what it is really like. We try to explain the appearances in terms of a theory that describes the reality behind them, a reality that we can't observe directly. That is how physics and chemistry conclude that all the things we see around us are composed of invisibly small atoms. Could we argue that the general belief in the external world has the same kind of scientific backing as the belief in atoms?

The skeptic's answer is that the process of scientific reasoning raises the same skeptical problem we have been considering all along: Science is just as vulnerable as perception. How can we know that the world outside our minds corresponds to our ideas of what would be a good theoretical explanation of our observations? If we can't establish the reliability of our sense experiences in relation to the external world, there's no reason to think we can rely on our scientific theories either.

There is another very different response to the problem. Some would argue that radical skepticism of the kind I have been talking about is meaningless, because the idea of an external reality that no one could ever discover is meaningless. The argument is that a dream, for instance, has to NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 40 Theory of Knowledge be something from which you can wake up to discover that you have been asleep; a hallucination has to be something which others (or you later) can see is not really there. Impressions and appearances that do not correspond to reality must be contrasted with others that do correspond to reality, or else the contrast between appearance and reality is meaningless.

According to this view, the idea of a dream from which you can never wake up is not the idea of a dream at all: it is the idea of reality - the real world in which you live. Our idea of the things that exist is just our idea of what we can observe. (This view is sometimes called verificationism.) Sometimes our observations are mistaken, but that means they can be corrected by other observations -as when you wake up from a dream or discover that what you thought was a snake was just a shadow on the grass. But without some possibility of a correct view of how things are (either yours or someone else's), the thought that your impressions of the world are not true is meaningless.

If this is right, then the skeptic is kidding himself if he thinks he can imagine that the only thing that exists is his own mind. He is kidding himself, because it couldn't be true that the physical world doesn't really exist, unless somebody could observe that it doesn't exist. And what the skeptic is trying to imagine is precisely that there is no one to observe that or anything else - except of course the skeptic himself, and all he can observe is the inside of his own mind. So solipsism is meaningless. It tries to subtract the external world from the totality of my impressions; but it fails, because if the external world is subtracted, they stop being mere impressions, and become instead perceptions of reality.

Is this argument against solipsism and skepticism any good? Not unless reality can be defined as what we can observe. But are we really unable to understand the idea of a real world, or a fact about reality, that can't be observed by anyone, human or otherwise?

The skeptic will claim that if there is an external world, the things in it are observable because they exist, and not the other way around: that existence isn't the same thing as observability. And although we get the idea of dreams and hallucinations from cases where we think we can observe the contrast between our experiences and reality, it certainly seems as if the same idea can be extended to cases where the reality is not observable.

If that is right, it seems to follow that it is not meaningless to think that the world might consist of nothing but the inside of your mind, though neither you nor anyone else could find out that this was true. And if this is not meaningless, but is a possibility you must consider, there seems no way to prove that it is false, without arguing in a circle. So there may be no way out of the cage of your own mind. This is sometimes called the egocentric predicament.

And yet, after all this has been said, I have to admit it is practically impossible to believe seriously that all the things in the world around you might not really exist. Our acceptance of the external world is instinctive and powerful : we cannot just get rid of it by philosophical arguments. Not only do we go on acting as if other people and things exist: we believe that they do, even after we've gone through the arguments which appear to show we have no grounds for this belief (We may have grounds, within the overall system of our beliefs about the world, for more particular beliefs about the existence of particular things: like a mouse in the breadbox, for example. But that is different. It assumes the existence of the external world.)

If a belief in the world outside our minds comes so naturally to us, perhaps we don't need grounds for it. We can just let it be and hope that we're right. And that in fact is what most people do after giving up the attempt to prove it : even if they can't give reasons against skepticism, they can't live with it either. But this means that we hold on to most of our ordinary beliefs about the world in face of the fact that (a) they might be completely false, and (b) we have no basis for ruling out that possibility.

We are left then with three questions:

• Is it a meaningful possibility that the inside of your mind is the only thing that exists - or that even if there is a world outside your mind, it is totally unlike what you believe it to be?

• If these things are possible, do you have any way of proving to yourself that they are not actually true?

• If you can't prove that anything exists outside your own mind, is it all right to go on believing in the external world anyway?

Bats; sight and sound

These bats are like miniature spy planes, bristling with sophisticated instrumentation. Their brains are delicately tuned packages of miniaturised electronic wizardry, programmed with the elaborate software necessary to decode a world of echoes in real time. Their faces are often distorted into gargoyle shapes that appear hideous to us until we see them for what they are, exquisitely fashioned instruments for beaming ultrasound in desired directions.

Although we can't hear the ultrasound pulses of these bats directly, we can get some idea of what is going on by means of a translating machine or 'bat- detector'. This receives the pulses through a special ultrasonic microphone, and turns each pulse into an audible click or tone which we can hear through headphones. If we take such a 'bat-detector' out to a clearing where a bat is feeding, we shall hear when each bat pulse is emitted, although we cannot hear what the pulses really 'sound' like. If our bat is Myotis, one of the common little brown bats, we shall hear a chuntering of clicks at a rate of about 10 per second as the bat cruises about on a routine mission. This is about the rate of a standard teleprinter, or a Bren machine gun.

Presumably the bat's image of the world in which it is cruising is being updated 10 times per second. Our own visual image appears to be continuously updated as long as our eyes are open. We can see what it might be like to have an intermittently updated world image, by using a stroboscope at night. This is sometimes done at discotheques, and it produces some dramatic effects. A dancing person appears as a succession of frozen statuesque attitudes. Obviously, the faster we set the strobe, the more the image corresponds to normal 'continuous' vision. Stroboscopic vision 'sampling' at the bat's cruising rate of about 10 samples per second would be nearly as good as normal 'continuous' vision for some ordinary purposes, though not for catching a ball or an insect.

This is just the sampling rate of a bat on a routine cruising flight. When a little brown bat detects an insect and starts to move in on an interception course, its click rate goes up. Faster than a machine gun, it can reach peak rates of 200 pulses per second as the bat finally closes in on the moving target. To mimic this,

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 43 Theory of Knowledge we should have to speed up our stroboscope so that its flashes came twice as fast as the cycles of mains electricity, which are not noticed in a fluorescent strip light. Obviously we have no trouble in performing all our normal visual functions, even playing squash or ping-pong, in a visual world 'pulsed' at such a high frequency. If we may imagine bat brains as building up an image of the world analogous to our visual images, the pulse rate alone seems to suggest that the bat's echo image might be at least as detailed and 'continuous' as our visual image. Of course, there may be other reasons why it is not so detailed as our visual image.

Indeed, if I were forced to try the impossible, to imagine what it is like to be a bat, I would guess that echo-location for them, might be rather like seeing for us. We are such thoroughly visual animals that we hardly realise what a complicated business seeing is. Objects are out there, and we think that we 'see' them out there. But I suspect that really our percept is an elaborate computer model in the brain, constructed on the basis of information coming from out there, but transformed in the head into a form in which that information can be used. Wavelength differences in the light out there become coded as 'colour' differences in the computer model in the head. Shape and other attributes are encoded in the same kind of way, encoded into a form that is convenient to handle. The sensation of seeing is, for us, very different from the sensation of hearing, but this cannot be directly due to the physical differences between light and sound. Both light and sound are, after all, translated by the respective sense organs into the same kind of nerve impulses. It is impossible to tell, from the physical attributes of a nerve impulse, whether it is conveying information about light, about sound or about smell. The reason the sensation of seeing is so different from the sensation of hearing or the sensation of smelling is that the brain finds it convenient to use different kinds of internal model for representing the visual world, the world of sound and the world of smell. It is because we internally use our visual information and our sound information in different ways and for different purposes that the sensations of seeing and hearing are so different. It is not directly because of the physical differences between light and sound.

But a bat uses its sound information for very much the same kind of purpose as we use our visual information. It uses sound to perceive, and continuously update its perception of the position of objects in three-dimensional space, just as we use light. The type of internal computer model that it needs, therefore, is one suitable for the internal representation of the changing positions of objects in three-dimensional space. My point is that the form that an animal's subjective NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 44 Theory of Knowledge experience takes will be a property of the internal computer model. That model will be designed, in evolution, for its suitability for useful internal representation, irrespective of the physical stimuli that come to it from outside. Bats and humans need the same kind of internal model for representing the position of objects in three-dimensional space. The fact that bats construct their internal model with the aid of echoes, while we construct ours with the aid of light, is irrelevant. That outside information is, in any case, translated into the same kind of nerve impulses on its way to the brain.

My conjecture, therefore, is that bats 'see' in much the same way as we do, even though the physical medium by which the world 'out there' is translated into nerve impulses is so different - ultrasound rather than light. Bats may even use the sensations that we call colour for their own purposes, to represent differences in the world out there that have nothing to do with the physics of wavelength, but which play a functional role, for the bat, similar to the role that colours play to us. Perhaps male bats have body surfaces that are subtly textured so that the echoes that bounce off them are perceived by females as gorgeously coloured, the sound equivalent of the nuptial plumage of a bird of paradise. I don't mean this just as some vague metaphor. It is possible that the subjective sensation experienced by a female bat when she perceives a male really is, say, bright red: the same sensation as I experience when I see a flamingo or, at least, the bat's sensation of her mate may be no more different from my visual sensation of a flamingo, than my visual sensation of a flamingo is different from a flamingo's visual sensation of a flamingo.

I can imagine some other world in which a conference of learned, and totally blind, bat-like creatures is flabbergasted to be told of animals called humans that are actually capable of using the newly discovered inaudible rays called 'light', still the subject of top-secret military development, for finding their way about. These otherwise humble humans are almost totally deaf (well, they can hear after a fashion and even utter a few ponderously slow, deep drawling growls, but they only use these sounds for rudimentary purposes like communicating with each other; they don't seem capable of using them to detect even the most massive objects). They have, instead, highly specialised organs called 'eyes' for exploiting 'light' rays. The sun is the main source of light rays, and humans, remarkably, manage to exploit the complex echoes that bounce off objects when light rays from the sun hit them. They have an ingenious device called a 'lens', whose shape appears to be mathematically calculated so that it bends these silent rays in such a way that there is an exact one-to-one mapping between objects in the world and an 'image' on a sheet of cells called the 'retina'. These NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 45 Theory of Knowledge retinal cells are capable, in some mysterious way, of rendering the light 'audible' (one might say), and they relay their information to the brain. Bat mathematicians have shown that it is theoretically possible, by doing highly complex calculations, to navigate safely through the world using these light rays, just as effectively as bats can in the ordinary way using ultrasound - in some respects even more effectively! But who would have thought that humble humans could do these calculations?

The Non-Substantial World of Modern Physics (1935) A. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World

I have settled down to the task of writing these lectures and have drawn up my chairs to my two tables. Two tables! Yes; there are duplicates of every object about me - two tables, two chairs, two pens.

This is not a very profound beginning to a course which ought to each transcendent levels of scientific philosophy. But we cannot touch bedrock immediately; we must scratch a bit at the surface of things first. And whenever I begin to scratch the first thing I strike is - my two tables. One of them has been familiar to me from earliest years. It is a commonplace object of that environment which I call the world. How shall I describe it? It has extension; it is comparatively permanent; it is coloured; above all it is substantial. By substantial I do not merely mean that it does not collapse when I lean upon it; I mean that it is constituted of "substance" and by that word I am trying to convey to you some conception of its intrinsic nature. It is a thing; not like space, which is a mere negation; nor like time, which is - Heaven knows what! But that will not help you to my meaning because it is the distinctive characteristic of a thing to have this substantiality, and I do not think substantiality can be described better than by saying that it is the kind of nature exemplified by an ordinary table. And so we go round in circles. After all if you are a plain common-sense man, not too much worried with scientific scruples, you will be confident that you understand the nature of an ordinary table. I have even heard of plain men who had the idea that they could better understand the mystery of their own nature if scientists would discover a way of explaining it in terms of the easily comprehensible nature of a table.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 46 Theory of Knowledge Table No. 2 is my scientific table. It is a more recent acquaintance and I do not feel so familiar with it. It does not belong to the world previously mentioned - the world which spontaneously appears around me when I open my eyes, though how much of it is objective and how much subjective I do not here consider. It is part of a world which in more devious ways has forced itself on my attention. My scientific table is mostly emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself. Notwithstanding its strange construction it turns out to be an entirely efficient table. It supports my writing paper as satisfactorily as table No. 1; for when I lay the paper on it the little electric particles with their headlong speed keep on hitting the underside, so that the paper is maintained in shuttlecock fashion at a nearly steady level. If I lean upon this table I shall not go through; or, to be strictly accurate, the chance of my scientific elbow going through my scientific table is so excessively small that it can be neglected in practical life. Reviewing their properties one by one, there seems to be nothing to choose between the two tables for ordinary purposes; but when abnormal circumstances befall, then my scientific table shows to advantage. If the house catches fire my scientific table will dissolve quite naturally into scientific smoke, whereas my familiar table undergoes a metamorphosis of its substantial nature which I can only regard as miraculous.

There is nothing substantial about my second table. It is nearly all empty space - space pervaded, it is true, by fields of force, but these are assigned to the category of "influences", not of "things". Even in the minute part which is not empty we must not transfer the old notion of substance. In dissecting matter into electric charges we have travelled far from that picture of it which first gave rise to the conception of substance, and the meaning of that conception - if it ever had any - has been lost by the way. The whole trend of modern scientific views is to break down the separate categories of "things", "influences", "forms" etc, and to substitute a common background of all experience. Whether we are studying a material object, a magnetic field, a geometrical figure, or a duration of time, our scientific information is summed up in measures; neither the apparatus of measurement nor the mode of using it suggests that there is anything essentially different in these problems. The measures themselves afford no ground for a classification by categories. We feel it necessary to concede some background to the measures - an external world; but the attributes of this world, except in so far as they are reflected in the measures, are outside scientific scrutiny. Science has at last revolted against attaching exact knowledge contained in these measurements to a traditional picture - gallery of NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 47 Theory of Knowledge conceptions which convey no authentic information of the background and obtrude irrelevancies into the scheme of knowledge. I will not here stress further the non-substantiality of electrons, since it is scarcely necessary to the present line of thought. Conceive them as substantially as you will, there is a vast difference between my scientific table with its substance (if any) thinly scattered in aspects in a region mostly empty and the table of every day conception which we regard as the type of solid reality - an incarnate protest against Berkeleian subjectivism. It makes all the difference in the world whether the paper before me is poised as sit were on a swarm of flies and sustained in shuttlecock fashion by a series of tiny blows from the swarm underneath, or whether it is supported because there is substance below it, it being the intrinsic nature of substance to occupy empty space to the exclusion of other substance; all the difference in conception at least, but no difference to my practical task of writing on the paper.

I need not tell you that modern physics has by delicate test and remorseless logic assured me that my second scientific table is the only one which is really there - wherever "there" may be. On the other hand I need not tell you that modern physics will never succeed in exorcizing that first table - strange compound of external nature, mental imagery and inherited prejudice - which lies visible to my eyes and tangible to my grasp. The Rabble of the Senses.

In trying to distinguish appearance from reality, and to lay bare the fundamental structure of the universe, science has had to transcend the "rabble of the senses." But the highest edifices of science, Einstein has pointed out, have been "purchased at the price of emptiness of content." For the only world we can truly know is the world created for us by the senses. If we erase all the impressions which they translate and which memory stores, nothing is left... So paradoxically what the scientist and the philosopher call the world of appearance - the world of light and colour, of blue skies and green leaves, of sighing wind and murmuring water, the world designed by the physiology of the human sense organs - is the world in which we are imprisoned by our essentially limited nature. And what the scientist, and the philosopher call the world of reality - the colourless, soundless, impalpable cosmos which lies like an iceberg beneath the place of man's perceptions - is a skeleton structure of symbols. Lincoln Barnett

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 48 Theory of Knowledge The Universe and Dr. Einstein The importance of premises

We must be alert to a crucial problem of knowledge - that the validity of the logic is one thing, but the truth of the conclusion is something entirely different. And if the truth of the conclusion depends on the truth of the premises then we need to take a close look at what we use as premises.

We shall try to apply logic to a set of facts (given in story form) to test the truth of certain conclusions. Based on only the information in the story:

If the statement is definitely true mark ‘T’. If the statement is definitely false mark ‘F’. If there is not enough information, and you cannot decide, then mark ‘?’.

There is, however, one catch; once you have answered a question, you should not go back and change any of your earlier answers. Doing so will invalidate the exercise.

The old man had just turned off the lights in the store and was preparing to lock up and go home when a youth appeared and demanded money. The owner opened the cash register; the contents were grabbed, and the man ran away. The police were informed immediately.

1 A young man appeared after the lights had been turned off. 2 The old man was preparing to go home. 3 The robber demanded money. 4 Someone opened the cash register. 5 The robber demanded money from the owner. 6 The person who opened the cash register was a man. 7 The cash register contained money, but we are not told how much money. 8 The gender of the owner was not revealed in the story. 9 The robber did not demand money. 10 After the man grabbed the contents of the cash register, he ran away. 11 The young man appeared after the lights had been turned off. 12 The robber was a man. 13 The owner was a man.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 49 Theory of Knowledge 14 The owner appeared and demanded money. 15 The man ran away after he had demanded money.

Credibility Gap?

As a conscious being I am involved in a story. The perceiving part of my mind tells me a story of a world around me. The story tells of familiar objects. It tells of colours, sound, scents belonging to these objects; of boundless space in which they have their existence, and of an ever-rolling stream of time bringing change and incident. It tells of life other than mine busy about its own purpose.

As a scientist I have become mistrustful of this story. In many instances it has become clear that things are not what they seem to be. According to the story teller I am sitting at a substantial desk; but I have learned from physics that the desk is not at all the continuous substance that it is supposed to be in the story. It is a host of tiny electric charges darting hither and thither with inconceivable velocity. Instead of being solid substance my desk is more like a swarm of gnats.

So I have come to realise that I must not put overmuch confidence in the story teller who lives in my mind. Sir Arthur Eddington (New Pathways in Science) Common Fallacies

A fallacy is an argument which, however appealing it may be, is not logically valid. There are a great many reasons that an argument may seem convincing where it should not, and here are some examples of the most common ones (they are intentionally rather ridiculous to make the point).

• Make sure you understand the principle behind each fallacy and write a definition as to what each one means. Give another example. • See if you can find examples of fallacies in everyday conversation and in the editorials and adverts of newspapers

Ad Hominem • You argue that God doesn't exist because you are so bigoted.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 50 Theory of Knowledge • Jim’s argument about his ex-wife should be ignored because he is very bitter towards her. • You claim that Tim is innocent, but why should we listen to you? You are a criminal too.

Unpalatable Consequences • Evolution cannot be true, because if it were, then we would be no better than the apes.

• You must believe in God, otherwise life would have no meaning. • I don’t believe a nuclear war will happen because I could never sleep at night if I did.

Red Herring • Air bags in cars do not really increase safety, and besides, most cars with air bags are Japanese. • Women should be able to decide about abortion - men getting involved is just another example of the long history of male oppression of women. • This may be a meat-importing company, but I happen to like the taste of red-herrings.

Appeal to Authority • One of the world’s top economists states that interest rates will fall soon. • The Prime Minister says that traditional educational ways are in dire need of reform. • It must be true - our Theory of Knowledge teacher says so!

Straw Man • I can’t understand anyone wanting to cut military expenditure. Why would anyone want to leave our country defenseless? • Evolutionists say that life came about by chance - how ridiculous! NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 51 Theory of Knowledge • To be anti-abortion is wrong since pro-lifers believe a woman would have to bring her fetus to term even if it means she dies in the process.

Appeal to Common Practice • Some people say that cheating on tests is wrong, but everyone does it, so it's okay.. • Political corruption is just a way of life; there’s no point in complaining. • You shouldn’t pick on me for not doing my homework when others haven’t done it either.

False Dilemma • Either you're for me or against me. • America: love it or leave it. • Either we cut welfare benefits or we raise income tax : that is the choice we face.

Loaded Language • Clear thinkers will agree with me that we should have another free vote on abortion. • The Minister claims that the new tax rate will benefit the poor. • The proposal is likely to be resisted by the bureaucrats in the Government.

Ad Bacculam • You had better agree that the new policy is a good one if you expect to keep your job. • The defendant is innocent because if he isn't, there will be a very violent riot. • If you don’t turn to religion you will face eternal damnation.

Contradiction in Terms • There are absolutely no absolutely true statements. • It is impossible for written words to communicate anything. • I do not exist.

Begging the Question , or Circular Argument • Whatever is denser than water will sink, because such objects cannot float.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 52 Theory of Knowledge • God exists because the Bible says that he does; and the bible is God’s own truth. • The stock market fell yesterday due to profit-taking by investors.

False Cause, or post hoc ergo propter hoc • Smokers get bad grades; to improve yours you had better give up! • College-educated people earn more money than those who haven’t been to college; if I want to earn a lot of money I had better get a good education! • Both times I have had a car accident I was wearing that shirt. I’ll never wear it again.

Love is A Fallacy by Max Shulman

Cool was I, and logical. Keen, calculating, perspicacious, acute and astute - I was One afternoon I found Petey lying on all of these. My brain was as powerful his bed with an expression of such as a dynamo, as precise as a chemist's distress an his face that I immediately scales, as penetrating as a scalpel. And diagnosed appendicitis. - think of it! - I was only eighteen. "Don't move," I said, "don't take a laxative. I'll get a doctor." It is not often that one so young has "Raccoon," he mumbled thickly. such a giant intellect. Take, for "Raccoon?" I said, pausing in my flight. example, Petey Burch, my roommate at "I want a raccoon coat," he wailed. the University of Minnesota. Same age, "I should have known it," he cried, same background, but dumb as an ox. A pounding his temples. "I should have nice enough fellow, you understand, but known they'd come back when the nothing upstairs. Unstable. Charleston came back. Like a fool I Impressionable. Emotional type. Worst spent all my money for textbooks, and of all, a faddist. Fads, I submit, are the now I can't get a raccoon coat." very negation of reason. To be swept up "Can you mean," I said incredulously, in every new craze that comes along, to "that people are actually wearing surrender yourself to idiocy just raccoon coats again?" because everybody else is doing it - this "All the Big Men on Campus are wearing to me, is the acme of mindlessness. them. Where've you been?" Not, however, to Petey.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 53 Theory of Knowledge "In the library," I said, naming a place exception, married to beautiful, not frequented by Big Men on Campus." gracious, intelligent women. With one He leaped from the bed and paced the omission, Polly fitted these room. "I've got to have a raccoon coat," specifications perfectly. he said passionately. "I've got to!" Beautiful she was. She was not yet of "Petey, why?" Look at it rationally. pin-up proportions, but I felt that time Raccoon coats are unsanitary. They would supply the lack. She already had shed. They smell bad! They weigh too the makings. much. They're unsightly. They ..." Gracious she was. By gracious I mean "You don't understand," he interrupted full of graces. She had an erectness of impatiently. "It's the thing to do. Don't carriage, an ease of bearing, a poise you want to be in the swim?" that clearly indicated the best of "No, " I said truthfully. breeding. At table her manners were "Well, I do," he declared. "I'd give exquisite. I had seen her at the Kozy anything for a raccoon coat. Anything." Kampus Korner Kafé eating the I stroked my chin thoughtfully. It so specialty of the house - a sandwich that happened that I knew where to get my contained scraps of pot roast, gravy, hands on a raccoon coat. My father had chopped nuts and a dipper of had one in his undergraduate days; it sauerkraut - without even getting her lay now in a trunk in the attic back fingers moist. home. It also happened that Petey had Intelligent she was not. In fact, she something I wanted. He didn't have it veered in the opposite direction. But I exactly, but at least he had first rights believed that under my guidance she on it. I refer to his girl, Polly Espy. would smarten up. At any rate, it was worth a try. It is, after all, easier to I had long coveted Polly Espy. Let me make a beautiful dumb girl smart than emphasise that my desire for this to make an ugly smart girl beautiful. young woman was not emotional in "Petey" I said, "are you in love with nature. She was, to be sure, a girl who Polly Espy?" exited the emotions, but I was not one "I think she's a keen he replied, "but I to let my heart rule my head. I wanted don't know if you'd call it love. Why? Polly for a shrewdly calculated, entirely "Do you have any kind of formal cerebral reason. arrangement with her? I mean are you going steady or anything like that?" I was a freshman in law school. In a few "No. We see each other quite a bit, but years I would be out at practice. I was we both have other dates. Why?" well aware of the importance of the "Is there," I asked, "any other man for right kind of wife in furthering a whom she has a particular fondness?" lawyer's career. The successful lawyers "Not that I know of. Why?" I had observed were, almost without NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 54 Theory of Knowledge I nodded with satisfaction. "In other I shrugged. "Okay. If you don't want to words "If you were out of the picture, be in the swim, I guess it's your the field would be open. Is that right?" business." "I guess so. What are you getting at?" I sat down an a chair and pretended to "Nothing, nothing," I said innocently, read a book, but out of the corner of and took my suitcase out of the closet. my eye I kept watching Petey. He was a "Where are you going?" asked Petey. torn man. First he looked at the coat "Home for the weekend." I threw a few with the expression of a waif at a things in the bag. bakery window. Then he turned away "Listen," he said, clutching my arm and set his jaw firmly. Then he looked eagerly, "While you're home, you back at the coat, with even more couldn't get some money from your old longing in his face. Then he turned man, could you, and lend it to me so I away, but with not so much resolution can buy a raccoon coat?" this time. Back and forth his head "I may do better than that." I said with swivelled, desire waning, resolution a mysterious wink and closed my bag waning. Finally he didn't turn away at and left. all; he just stood and stared with mad lust at the coat. * * * * * "It isn't as though I was in love with Polly," he said thickly. "Or going steady "Look!" I said to Petey when I got back or anything life that." Monday morning. I threw open the "That's right," I murmured. suitcase and revealed the huge hairy "What's Polly to me, or me to Polly?" object that my father had worn in his "Not a thing," said I. Stutz Bearcat in 1925. "It's just been a casual kick - just a "Holy Toledo!" said Petey reverently. He few laughs, that's all." plunged his hands into the raccoon coat "Try on the coat." said I. and then his face. "Holy Toledo"' he He complied. The coat bunched over his repeated fifteen or twenty times. ears and dropped all the way down to "Would you like it?" I asked. his shoe tops. He looked like a mound of "Oh yes!" he cried clutching the greasy dead raccoons. "Fits fine," he said pelt to him. Then a canny look came into happily. his eyes. "What do you want for it?" I rose from my chair. "Is it a deal'? I "Your girl," I said, mincing no words. asked, extending my hand. "Polly?" he said in a horrified whisper. He swallowed. "It's a deal," he said and "You want Polly?" shook my hand. "That's right." He flung the coat from him. "Never," he * * * * * said stoutly. I had my first date with Polly the following evening. This was in the NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 55 Theory of Knowledge nature of a survey; I wanted to find out an old oak, and she looked at me just how much work I had to do to get expectantly. "What are we going to talk her mind up to the standard I required. about?" she asked. I took her first to dinner. "Gee that "Logic." was a delish dinner," she said as we left She thought this over for a minute and the restaurant. Then I took her to a decided she liked it. "Magnif," she said. movie. "Gee that was a marvy movie," "Logic" I said, clearing my throat, "is she said as we left the theatre. And the science of thinking. Before we can then I took her home. "Gee, I had a think correctly, we must first learn to sensaysh time," she said as she bade me recognise the common fallacies of logic. good night. These we will take up tonight." "Wow-dow!" she cried, clapping her I went back to my room with a heavy hands delightedly. heart. I had gravely underestimated I winced, but went bravely on. "First let the size of my task. This girl's lack of us examine the fallacy called "Dicto information was terrifying. Nor would it Simpliciter." be enough merely to supply her with "By all means," she urged, batting her information. First she had to be taught lashes eagerly. to think. This loomed as a project of no "Dicto Simpliciter means an argument small dimensions, and at first I was based on an unqualified generalisation. tempted to give her back to Petey. But For example: Exercise is good. then I got to thinking about her Therefore everybody should exercise." abundant physical charms and about the "I agree," said Polly earnestly. "I mean way she entered a room and the way exercise is wonderful. I mean it builds she handled a knife and fork, and I the body and everything." decided to make an effort. "Polly" I said gently, "the argument is a I went about it, as in all things, fallacy. 'Exercise is good' is an systematically. I gave her a course in unqualified generalisation. For instance, logic. It happened that I, as a law if you have heart disease, exercise is student, was taking a course in logic bad, not good. Many people are ordered myself, so I had all the facts at my by their doctors not to exercise. You fingertips. "Polly" I said to her when I must qualify the generalisation. You picked her up on the next date, "tonight must say exercise is usually good, or we are going over to the Knoll and talk." exercise is good for most people. "OOh terrif," she replied. One thing I Otherwise you have committed a Dicto will say for this girl - you would go far Simpliciter. Do you see? to find another so agreeable. "No" she confessed. "But this is marvy. Do more! Do more!" We went to the Knoll, the campus "It will be better if you stop tugging at trysting place, and we sat down under my sleeve," I told her, and when she NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 56 Theory of Knowledge desisted, I continued. "Next we take up "Yes, let's" she chirped, blinking her a fallacy called Hasty Generalisation. eyes happily. Listen carefully: You can't speak I frowned but plunged ahead. "Here is French. I can't speak French. Petey an example of Contradictory Premises: Burch can't speak French. I must If God can do anything, can He make a therefore conclude that nobody at the stone so heavy that He won't be able to University of Minnesota can speak lift it?" French." "Of course," she replied promptly "Really?" said Polly, amazed. "Nobody?" "But if He can do anything, He can lift I hid my exasperation. "Polly, it's a the stone." I pointed out. fallacy. The generalisation is reached "Yeah" she said thoughtfully. "Well, too hastily. There are too few instances then, I guess He can't make the stone." to support such a conclusion." "But He can do anything," I reminded "Know any more fallacies?" she asked her. breathlessly. "This is more fun than She scratched her pretty, empty head. dancing even." "I'm all confused," she admitted. I fought off a wave of despair. I was "Of course you are. Because when the getting nowhere with this girl, premises of an argument contradict absolutely nowhere. Still, I am nothing each other, there can be no argument. if not persistent. I continued. "Next If there is an irresistible force there comes Post Hoc. Listen to this: Let's can be no immovable object. If there is not take Bill on our picnic. Every time an immovable object there can be no we take him out with us, it rains..." irresistible force. Get it?" "I know someone just like that," she "Tell me some more of this keen stuff" exclaimed. "A girl back home - Eula she said eagerly. Becker, her name is. It never fails. I consulted my watch. "I think we'd Every single time we take her on a better call it a night. I'll take you home picnic." now, and you go over all the things "Polly" I said sharply, "It's a fallacy. you've learned. We'll have another Eula Becker doesn't cause the rain. She session tomorrow night." has no connection with the rain. You are guilty of Post Hoc if you blame Eula I deposited her at the girls' dormitory, Becker." where she assured me that she had had "I'll never do it again," she promised a perfectly terrif evening, and I went contritely. "Are you mad at me?" glumly home to my room. Petey lay I sighed deeply. "No, Polly, I'm not snoring in his bed, the raccoon coat mad." huddled like a great hairy beast at his "Then tell me some more fallacies" feet. For a moment I considered waking "All right. Let's try Contradictory him and telling him that he could have Premises." his girl back. It seemed clear that my NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 57 Theory of Knowledge project was doomed to failure. The girl should be allowed to look at their simply had a logic-proof head. textbooks during examinations. After But then I reconsidered. I had wasted all, Surgeons have x-rays to guide them one evening; I might as well waste during an operation, lawyers have briefs another. Who knows?? Maybe, to guide them during a trial, carpenters somewhere in that extinct crater of have blueprints to guide them while her mind, a few embers still building a house. Why, then, shouldn't smouldered. Maybe somehow I could students be allowed to look at their fan them into flame. Admittedly it was textbooks during an examination?" not a prospect fraught with hope, but I "There now" she said enthusiastically, decided to give it one more try. "is the most marvy idea I've heard in Seated under the oak the next evening years." I said, "Our first fallacy tonight is "Polly" I said testily, "the argument is called Ad Misericordiam." all wrong. Doctors, lawyers, and She quivered with delight. carpenters aren't taking a test to see "Listen closely," I said. "A man applied how much they have learned, but for a job. When the boss asks him what students are. The situations are his qualifications are, he replies that he altogether different, and you can't has a wife and sit children at home. The make an analogy between them." wife is a helpless cripple; the children "I still think it's a good idea," said Polly. have nothing to eat, no clothes to wear, "Nuts" I muttered. Doggedly I pressed no shoes on their feet there are not on. "Next we'll try Hypothesis Contrary beds in the house, no coal in the cellar; to Fact." and winter is coming." "Sounds yummy," was Polly's reaction. A tear rolled down each of Polly's pink "Listen: If Madame Curie had not cheeks. "Oh, this is awful, awful, "she happened to leave a photographic plate sobbed. in a drawer with a chunk of pitchblende "Yes, it's awful." I agreed. "but it's no the world today would not know about argument. The man never answered the radium." boss's question about his qualifications. "True, true," said Polly, nodding her Instead he appealed to the bass's head. "Did you see the movie? Oh, it sympathy. He committed the fallacy of just knocked me out. That Walter Ad Misericordiam. Do you understand?" Pidgeon is so dreamy. I mean he "Have you got a handkerchief" she fractures me." blubbered. "If you could forget Mr. Pidgeon for a I handed her a handkerchief and tried moment," I said coldly, "I would like to to keep from screaming while she wiped point out that the statement is a her eyes. "Next," I said in a carefully fallacy. Maybe Madam Curie would have controlled tone, "we will discuss False discovered radium at some later date. Analogy. Here is an example: Students Maybe somebody else would have NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 58 Theory of Knowledge discovered it. Maybe any number of "Fire away," she said with an airy wave things would have happened. You can't of her hand. start with a hypothesis that is not true Heartened by the knowledge that Polly and then draw any supportable was not altogether a cretin, I began a conclusions from it." long patient review of all that I had "They ought to put Walter Pidgeon in told her. Over and over and over again I more pictures," said Polly. "I hardly cited instances, pointed out flaws, kept ever see him any more." hammering away without let up. It was One more chance, I decided. But just like digging a tunnel. At first everything one more. There is a limit to what flesh was work, sweat and darkness. I had no and blood can bear. "The last fallacy is idea when I would reach the light, or called Poisoning the Well." even if I would. But I persisted. I "How cute!" she gurgled. Pounded and clawed and scraped, and "Two men are having a debate: The finally I was rewarded. I saw a chink of first one gets up and says 'My opponent light. And then the chink got bigger and is a notorious liar. You can't believe a the Sun came pouring in and all was word that he is going to say,' ..now, bright. Polly, think. Think hard. What's wrong?" Five gruelling nights this took but it was I watched her closely as she knit her worth it. I had made a logician out of creamy brow in concentration. Suddenly Polly; I had taught her to think. My job a glimmer of intelligence - the first I was done. She was worthy of me at last. had seen - came into her eyes. "It's not She was a fit wife for me, a proper fair," she said with indignation. It's not hostess for my many mansions and a a bit fair. What chance has the second suitable mother for my well-heeled man got if the first man calls him a liar children. before he even begins talking?" It must be thought that I was without "Right!" I cried exultantly. "One love for this girl. Quite the contrary. hundred percent right. It's not fair. Just as Pygmalion loved the perfect The first man has poisoned the well woman he had fashioned, so I loved before anybody could drink from it. He mine. I determined to acquaint her with has hamstrung his opponent before he my feelings at our very next meeting. could even start. ... Polly, I'm proud of The time had come to change our you." relationship from academic to romantic. "Psshaw," she murmured, blushing with pleasure. * * * * * "You see, my dear, these things aren't so hard. All you have to do is "Polly", I said when we sat beneath our concentrate. Think - examine - evaluate. oak. "tonight we will not discuss Logic." Come now, let's review everything we "Aw, gee," she said, disappointed. have learned." NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 59 Theory of Knowledge "My dear," I said, favouring her with a I ground my teeth. I was not Pygmalion; smile, we have now spent five evenings I was Frankenstein, and a monster had together. We have gotten along me by the throat. Frantically I fought splendidly. It is clear that we are well back the tide of panic surging through matched." me. At all costs I had to keep cool." "Hasty Generalisation," said Polly "Well ', Polly," I said forcing a smile, brightly. you certainly have learned your "I beg your pardon," said I. fallacies.'' "Hasty Generalisation," she repeated. "You're darn right," she said with a "How can you say that we are well vigorous nod. matched on the basis of only five "And who taught them to you, Polly?" dates?" "You did." I chuckled with amusement. The dear "That's right. So you owe me child had learned her lessons well. "My something, don't you, my dear? If I dear," I said, patting her hand in a hadn't come along then you never would tolerant manner "five dates is plenty. have learned about fallacies." After all, you don't have to eat a whole "Hypothesis Contrary to Fact," she said cake to know that it's good." instantly. "False Analogy," said Polly promptly. I dashed perspiration from my brow. "I'm not a cake. I'm a young woman." "Polly" I croaked "you mustn't take all I chuckled with somewhat less these things so literally. I mean this is amusement. The dear child had learned just Classroom Stuff. You know that her lessons perhaps too well. I decided the things you learn in school don't to change tactics. Obviously the best have anything to do with life." approach was a simple, strong, direct "Dicto Simpliciter," she said, wagging declaration of love. I paused for a her finger at me playfully. moment while my massive brain chose That did it. I leaped to my feet the proper words. Then I began: bellowing like a bull. "Will you or will you "Polly, I love YOU. You are the whole not go steady with me?" world to me, and the moon and the "I will not," she replied. stars and the constellations of outer "Why not?" I demanded. space. Please, my darling say that you "Because this afternoon I promised will go steady with me, for if you will Petey Burch that I would go steady not, life will be meaningless. I will with him." languish. I will refuse my meals. I will I reeled back overcome with the infamy wander the face of the earth, a of it. After he promised, after he made shambling, hallow-eyed hulk." a deal, after he shook my hand! "The There, I thought, folding my arms, that rat!" I shrieked kicking up great chunks Ought to do it. of turf. "You can't go with him, Polly. "Ad Misericordiam, " said Polly. He's a liar. He's a cheat. He's a rat." NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 60 Theory of Knowledge "Poisoning the Well," said Polly, "and intellectual, a man with an assured stop shouting. I think shouting must be future. Look at Petey a knothead, a a fallacy too." jitterbug, a guy who'll never know With an immense effort of will, I where his next meal is coming from. Can modulated my voice. "All right," I said. you give me one logical reason why you "You're a logician. Let's look at this should go steady with Petey Burch?" thing logically. How could you choose "I certainly can," declared Polly. "He's Petey Burch over me? Look at me - a got a raccoon coat. brilliant student, a tremendous

Some more about the laws of logic...

You have have probably come across arguments such as these:

A: All humans are mortal; B: I am human; therefore : C: I am mortal. or A: Elvis is either dead or alive; B: Elvis is not alive; therefore : C: Elvis is dead.

The commentary that usually goes with these suggests that they are valid arguments. That is, it is usually argued that if A and B are true, then C must be true too. The two important words are if (because logic says nothing about the truth of the premises) and must (because logic appears to be absolutely certain). And if you agree with this then that’s just great for you - you have a powerful tool to use in your search for truth. But what if I do not agree that that these are valid arguments? Suppose I, a skeptic, concede that A and B are true, but think that C is false. How could you, a believer, convince me that C must be true? We can imagine a rather frustrating conversation:

Believer: Are you seriously saying that you agree that (A) All humans are mortal, and (B) I am human, but do not agree that it must then be true that (C) I am mortal? Skeptic: Yes. NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 61 Theory of Knowledge Believer: But that’s idiotic! Do you really think that I am immortal? Skeptic: Of course not - that’s not what I am suggesting at all. I am just saying that even though A and B are true, C still could be false - you still could be immortal. I know that you aren’t, as you are just like the rest of us, but I maintain that even though A and B are true, it does not mean that you must be mortal. Believer: OK so we agree that I am mortal - but what you say still doesn’t make any sense. How can you deny that I have to be mortal? All humans are mortal, I am a human... Skeptic: Yes we agree on this. Believer: .... and so I must be mortal. It simply must be true! Skeptic: Why? I don’t see it. Believer: Well, when we say all humans are mortal, then I come under the all bit - that’s what it means when we use the words like this. Skeptic: I understand the words, I just do not see the logic. It seems to me that it is perfectly possible for A and B to be true, but for C to be false. Believer: How? Skeptic: Easy - it would be true that (A) All humans are mortal (B) I am a human and also true that (C) I am immortal. Believer: But that’s impossible! Skeptic: Why? All you are doing is showing a lack of imagination. Believer: I can show you a thousand people who would agree with me! Would that convince you? Skeptic: Are you really saying that the so-called laws of logic are decided democratically? What happens if those thousand people change their mind? In any case, it is not hard to think of cases where a lot of people believe something whch has turned out to be false. Public opinion is hardly an argument - can you find no better way to persuade me? Believer: All I am saying is that some things are so obvious that they need no reasons and this is one of those things. Skeptic: What may be obvious to you may not be so obvious to everyone else.

This conversation could go on for a long time, but you can see that to whatever the believer says, the skeptic can just disagree. And irritating though it is, if the skeptic really cannot see the validity of the argument (it is valid isn’t it?) and the believer cannot provide a good reason, then isn’t the skeptic right to doubt the validity of the argument?

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 62 Theory of Knowledge Questions • Do you think the argument under debate is a valid argument? If so, why? If not, why not? • How would you convince the skeptic that the argument is valid? • How would you persuade the believer to doubt the validity of the argument? • Can you see why many philosophers have thought that there is such a close link between logic and language?

Essentially the skeptic and the believer are arguing about what is ‘obvious’, but ironically, it seems to be that what is ‘obvious’ is far from obvious. Many philosophers have shared the sceptic’s distrust of the fact that nearly everyone seems to find an argument valid, and looked for a way to base arguments on laws that don’t just seem right, but that it is impossible to dispute without talking nonsense. They have traditionally started with far more basic things than the one we have so far discussed, and if you look up ‘Laws of Logic’ in a dictionary of philosophy then you will find three laws. Here are the first two:

1. The law of identity: A thing is what it is. For example, a book is a book and a leaf is a leaf.

2. The law of non-contradiction: A statement cannot be both true and false at the same time. For example, if it is true that I always tell the truth, it cannot be true that I am a liar, and if I am dead then I cannot be alive.

Many people think that these are almost too obvious to state - but bearing in mind the skeptic’s words above, perhaps this is no bad thing. And if you are worried that these statements are simplistic, you are right - that is why they are axioms and not deductive results. So the natural question to ask is ‘Are these obvious and undeniable?’ Could even the skeptic still refuse to believe them? Let’s consider the first law:

Skeptic: I refuse to accept the law of identity. I can’t see why it has to be true. Believer: You call that a refusal do you? Skeptic: I do. Believer: Well then, in admitting that your refusal is a refusal, you have used the law of identity haven’t you? So you must think it is true after all. Skeptic: Err... well, then it is not a refusal.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 63 Theory of Knowledge Believer: Then you have no refusal. So you do not refuse to accept it, and so you must think it is true after all. Skeptic: Well, I still deny it. Believer: But now you are really making no sense at all. Skeptic: Maybe not to you, but I make perfect sense to me.

Question • Make up a dialogue between the sceptic and the believer where they debate the second law. • Explain in your own words the position of the skeptic. Why does he not accept the laws? • Is the skeptic’s position a reasonable one? That is, do you think it is possible to reasonably deny the two laws of logic given?

There is a third law of logic, but it is not so universally accepted:

3. The law of the excluded middle: A statement is either true or false (that is, there is no middle ground between true and false). So, for example, it is either true or false that I am alive, and it is either true or false that I am holding a book.

It has been suggested that there are two other possibilities: 3a that there are many other possibilities other than true and false. If true corresponds to the number ‘one’ and false to ‘zero’ then these other possibilities refer to numbers between zero and one. 3b that in addition to ‘true’ and ‘false’ there is one other possibility which is neither true nor false. Questions • In what subjects that you study might you want to accept either 3, or the modified 3a or 3b? Give some examples, thinking carefully - this is a complex issue ( e.g. perhaps surprisingly, there is a branch of mathematics (intuitionism) which holds 3 to be invalid, and uses 3b in its workings). There has been a great deal of disagreement over laws which are meant to be obvious! And we have not yet begun to look at constructing more complex arguments - so you can see that logical analysis can be a tricky business. To look into this in any more detail would very quickly get very technical and difficult, so perhaps we can end by reiterating two questions that need answering if we are to use logic as a reliable tool. Questions

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 64 Theory of Knowledge • What are the ‘correct’ basic laws of logic? • Once we have the ‘basic’ laws, how do we construct more complex ones?

Oh God, It’s Monday (A Humorous Approach to Philosophical Paradoxes) By John N Williams, NUS, Singapore

‘Black Monday again’, I thought as I boarded the bus for NUS. There I saw the headline on the sports page being read by the person in the seat in front. ‘World Long Jump Record Broken’ it read. ‘Wow’, I thought, ‘Carl Lewis has jumped further than Bob Beamon’s record’, for I knew that Lewis was taking part. If the record was to be broken, of course Lewis was the man to do it. My reverie was rudely broken by the angry voice of the driver. ‘No eating and drinking’ he admonished, pointing to the half-chewed sandwich in my hand. ‘But I was only eating, not eating and drinking’, I pointed out as I was thrown from the bus.

Heaving myself out of the storm drain I ran all the way to the lecture where peered nervously at my watch. At least that was something I could rely on. A state-of-the art chronometer which clearly said ‘10 am’. ‘Bang on time’, I thought as I slipped into the lecture theatre. Once inside, I described my experiences. ‘If I knew anything, I knew that it was 10 am, just as I knew that Lewis had broken Beamon’s record’, I told the class.

Then Alec, the smartest student in the class, raised his hand. I sighed. Alec had recently handed me an essay which began with the sentence, ‘If the first sentence of this essay is true, then this essay deserves to pass’. Was his first sentence true? If so, its first part, ‘the first sentence of this essay is true’ would have to be true as well. But then I would have to pass his essay. That seemed like cheating. Perhaps his first sentence was false. But that would mean that although its first part, ‘the first sentence of this essay is true’, was true, he didn’t deserve to pass. That seemed impossible, for if the first part were true, then the whole of his first sentence would also be true, not false. It seemed that by simply writing his first sentence, Alec had left me no choice other than pass him. Instead I had pretended to have lost it. In fact, it was still locked inside my filing cabinet, together with an earlier submission, entitled, ‘The Contents Of This Essay Are False’. At first glance, this looked like a clear admission that the essay deserved

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 65 Theory of Knowledge to fail. But wait, would that be the fallacy of argumentum ad hominem? At a second glance, the contents of the essay were the single sentence, ‘The title of this essay is true’. That time around, I had told him that his essay had been eaten by the cat.

‘Your examples are not examples of knowledge at all’, Alec objected. Patiently, I explained that I had every reason to think that my watch was working. And it did indeed read 10. Wasn’t I justified in thinking it was indeed 10? But perhaps this good evidence was misleading. Perhaps it wasn’t really 10 am at all, I thought, remembering the time when the students had broken into my house and systematically set all of my clocks and watches back by an hour. But no, that wasn’t his objection. He, along with his fellow classmates, conceded that it was indeed 10 am. How then could I fail to know this? Exasperated, I announced a surprise test, to be given some day before Saturday. True to form, the class demanded my definition of ‘surprise’. ‘It will be a surprise in that you will not know the day before which day I’m going to set the test’, I clarified. Once again Alec piped up. ‘But Sir, you can’t possibly give us the test on Friday, for then by Thursday we would know which day it would be. And since Friday is ruled out, Thursday is last possible day for you to give the test. But knowing that fact on Wednesday, we’d know that the test would be given the next day. And since Thursday is ruled out ...’ The argument ground to its inexorable conclusion as Alec rehearsed his argument to eliminate every day in backward calendar order. ‘So you see Sir, it is impossible for you to give us the surprise test’. ‘Impeccable reasoning’, I commented as I dished out the test papers. His jaw dropped.

Bolstered slightly by this minor victory, I retreated to my room where I checked my phone mail. ‘I’m not here at the moment’, I heard myself say. Interrupted by a knock on the door, I called out, ‘I’m not here at the moment’, before replying to a circular inviting donations to church restoration. I quickly penned a reply explaining that I could not donate on the grounds that God knows that I am an atheist. The excuse seemed lame, but I consoled myself with the fact that it might be true.

The next letter, from Professor Bayes in economics, was more promising. As an experiment, he actually wanted to give me money! All I had to do was chose between two envelopes, A and B. Both contained money, I was assured. Whichever I chose would be delivered to me the same day. How much would I get? I scanned the letter excitedly, but there was no clue as to the amounts in the envelopes. All it did say was that the amount in one envelope was twice that in the other.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 66 Theory of Knowledge Naturally, I chose an envelope at random (A as it happened) and left a phone message for the Prof.

Then I read the newspaper more carefully. I was surprised to learn that in fact it was Mike Powell who had broken Bob Beamon’s long-jump record, so the headline I had seen earlier hadn’t referred to Lewis at all. Nonetheless, Lewis had indeed jumped further than old record, but then Powell had jumped further still. Had I indeed known that Lewis had jumped further than Beamon?

The phone rang. It was Professor Bayes generously offering me a chance to reconsider my choice. But what was there to choose between? All I knew about envelope A was exactly all I knew about envelope B. ‘Let the amount in A be x ’, the Prof urged. ‘If you switch to B you have a half-chance of getting 2 x and a half x 1 1 1 chance of getting . So the expected value of the amount in B is ( x )  ( 2 x ) . 2 2 2 2 5 This comes to x , or 1.25 x . Since this is more than x , the expected amount in the 4 other envelope is more than the amount in the one you have chosen. Therefore you should make the switch’. Replacing the receiver gingerly back in its cradle, I brooded over the new offer. I knew that Professor Bayes’s principle of expected value (that the expected value of a choice is the sum of the expected values of each possible outcome, where the expected value of an outcome is the product of its value and probability) was a cornerstone of economic theory. Indeed it was taught in first-year stats. And his argument applying that principle was flawless. But if I did switch, wouldn’t the same argument compel me to switch back again? Then I would be doomed to shuffle the envelopes forever. Perhaps I was the unwitting subject of an experiment in psychology, not economics.

In fact today was so weird that for some time I had had the lingering suspicion that I wasn’t in my room in the Philosophy Department at all, but rather a brain floating in a vat in one of Dr Howard’s experiments being fed the indistinguishable experience of sitting in my room. Could I know that I was in my room and not in the vat? I glanced at my watch. It read 10 am. I shook it. It still read 10 am. By a fluke, my hitherto reliable watch must have stopped at exactly 10 am yesterday. And by another fluke, I must have glanced at my stopped watch at exactly 10 am. Was Alec right? Had I known that it was 10 am?

As I slipped the watch into my pocket, I encountered a folded piece of paper which I pulled out and examined. It was a half-forgotten lottery ticket. At least this was a more straightforward bet than Prof Bayes’s. To be realistic, there wasn’t

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 67 Theory of Knowledge much chance that this particular ticket would win. Indeed I knew that since there were a million tickets in the draw, it had only a one-millionth chance of winning. But still, a chance is a chance, although it would be silly to actually believe that the ticket would win. More sensible in fact to believe that the ticket would not win. Then I remembered that I had a second ticket in my pocket. That too, had only a one-millionth chance of winning, so likewise I ought to believe that it wouldn’t actually win either. But what if I had bought all of the million tickets? Shouldn’t I then believe that no ticket would win?

On the bus back home I drank but carefully abstained from eating as I reflected on the puzzling events on the day. Even more puzzling was the fact that for as long as I could remember, every Monday had followed this exact, same, puzzling course. But was it then reasonable to expect every future Monday to be the same? Or could I sensibly conjecture that even the longest established regularities, like the law of gravity, might at this very moment, cease to exist? As I was flung from the bus, I fervently hoped so. Emotions Paul Harkin

Since at least the time of Homer, the emotions have had pretty bad press. The Iliad opens with an account of 'the rage of Achilles', whose anger and wounded pride have such devastating consequences. Slightly later, the Greek tragedians offered their audiences characters such as Medea, a woman apparently so much in the grip of her spiteful jealousy that she is prepared to sacrifice her own children to ensure her revenge.

Plato also took a fairly dim view of the emotions, regarding them as agents of tyranny which enslave the true and rational part of our nature. And it is to Plato that we originally owe the idea that reason and emotion are distinct and opposed faculties or aspects of the human psyche. The Stoics who followed him claimed not merely that the passions are disruptive and uncontrollable forces, but that they involve false attributions of value to things (and people) in the world. Such attributions, in the form of love of family and friends, for instance, make us vulnerable, since we care what happens to them. When, thanks to the Stoics' own brand of therapy, we rid ourselves of these false conceptions, we can remain clear- eyed and unperturbed - 'Stoical', as we would say - in the face of our fate, and theirs. NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 68 Theory of Knowledge

Later, Hume, Kant and then Freud, each in his own way confirmed the gulf between reason and passion, and the events of our own century testify to the terrible potential of hatred in its different forms. We are, as a result, well primed to share the dim view of the emotions which has been our cultural inheritance. It is the view of Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy;

'…most of the strongest passions are destructive-hate and resentment and jealousy, remorse and despair, outraged pride and the fury of the unjustly oppressed…'.

While it is, of course, undeniable that emotions can be unruly and that they can and have had dreadful consequences, the good news is that many philosophers and psychologists have for some time been urging us not to infer from these facts any sweeping negative conclusions about the emotions. Better news still is that - contrary to appearances - we do not in fact hold such negative views ourselves. Our own thinking about the emotions is more ambiguous, perhaps even contradictory. We sometimes speak as if we endorse Plato's view, but in other respects our sympathies are quite different.

Literature offers some pertinent examples. In The Adventures of Hucklebery Finn, Huck's moral education - or at least the moral precepts he has been brought up to believe - tell him to turn in the runaway slave Jim. His emotions, however, will not allow him to follow the dictates of principle, and betray his new friend. Readers of the episode, as Twain intended, are on the side of Huck's emotions. Huck himself remains unsure.

We should not take this, however, as confirmation of a conflict between brute emotion on the one hand and reasoned precept on the other. The assumption that these are distinct and opposed forces is mistaken from the start. More generally, we do not think emotions are merely sources of potential danger; danger which can only be averted when harnessed to the constraining influence of reason. If we did, why would we think it a defect - as we surely do - to lack or be incapable of certain emotions? Camus' anti-hero Mersault, for example, (in L'Étranger) is notable, above all, for his emotional alienation, his inability to feel. Contrary to the Stoics, who wanted us to get rid of our emotions, we, in many respects, are anxious to feel more of them.

Underlying the wholly negative view of the emotions we can discern three basic claims: NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 69 Theory of Knowledge

First, emotion and reason are distinct and opposed parts of the psyche. What is emotional is irrational, and conversely, what is rational is not emotional. This is the account offered by Plato (in the Republic) in the form of his 'tri-partite' conception of the soul.

Secondly, it follows from this that there is no question of emotions being appropriate or inappropriate. We can contrast this with the case of beliefs, where we assume that questions of appropriateness do apply (for instance; are beliefs in an immanent Apocalypse appropriate to the available facts?)

Thirdly, if the previous two points are right, they imply a picture of the sort of thing an emotion is. Divorced from thought and reason, it must be something of the character of a sensation or feeling - akin to the appetites, perhaps, and the feeling of hunger.

So here we have an account of what an emotion is ( a sort of sensation) and of the value it has (i.e. not much, given what it is). In case anyone should think these views are of strictly historical interest, I offer the following (not unrepresentative) quotations from the editor of Living Marxism, writing recently on the subject of the media's handling of the death of Princess Diana:

'An atmosphere which puts feelings first is hardly conducive to any cool assessment of what has actually happened, never mind a critical discussion of the hows and whys behind the events. [...] Public debate was debased by an editorial elevation of feelings over facts and the insistence that the heart should rule the head'.

Here we find the same suspicion of the emotions, the same carving-up of the psyche into warring factions that we find in Plato. Lying behind Hume's view that emotion has mistakenly been allowed free rein in this particular instance - with disastrous results - is the more general suggestion that that could not but have been the outcome. It is reason that brings understanding, not emotion. The example of Huckleberry Finn should, however, already give us grounds for discontent with this easy formula.

One of the commendable developments in more recent philosophical writings on the emotions is that there has recently been a consensus that each of these three claims is false. To see why, we need to begin with the issue of what an emotion is. The temptation to think of emotion as a feeling and hence akin to a sensation, is a NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 70 Theory of Knowledge strong one. After all, emotions differ from thoughts, above all in how they feel. When you're angry, you feel a particular sort of way. It might seem natural, therefore, to conclude that emotions are feelings. However, for some years now, philosophers have argued against this line of thought. There are at least three considerations which can be offered against it.

In the first place, what are the feelings that are involved? Take anger; there are feelings corresponding to various physiological changes ; increased heartbeat, blood rushing to the larger muscles, the release of adrenaline, and so on. In addition, there is much that is unfelt: neuron firings and complex patterns of electrochemical and neurotransmitter activity. The difficulty is that if we consider the felt changes, it is clear that none of them is distinctive or definitive of anger. Many of them are shared with fear and other emotions.

In addition, experimental evidence also seems to support the suspicion that we could not easily identify our emotional states if this were the only basis for such judgements.

The second point is this: if feelings were the basis of our identification of our emotional states, our judgements would be inferences; we would infer the identity of the state we were in from the feelings. But while there may be some instances where this is the case, it is not the typical route to such knowledge; we seem to know 'from the inside' and not by inference. Confronted with a large lion, for example, I do not need to observe the sensation of adrenaline release, note my quickened pulse, feel the shaking in my legs and conclude from these that I am afraid. I know that without reference to these things. There must, therefore, be more to emotions than feelings.

The third point is that when we actually look at what is distinctive about different emotions, it seems clear that what distinguishes them is the thoughts that they comprise. Take fear: to fear something is to believe that it is threatening or dangerous. Or pride: to be proud is to think something is of value or deserving praise and to believe it is related to you in an appropriate way. Having these beliefs is what makes your emotion fear or pride. This is not to say that an emotion just is a set of beliefs (though the Stoics did think something like that). Most philosophers and psychologists would now say that thoughts and beliefs identify and in part constitute emotions, but that other factors such as feelings, dispositions, pain and pleasure and so on, are also necessary. This view of the emotions - Cognitivism, as it is known - therefore claims that beliefs are necessary but not sufficient for emotions. Having the beliefs alone isn't enough. NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 71 Theory of Knowledge

But even this much is a significant advance on Plato, Hume and the rest. For if my emotion (fear, say) is based on the belief that the object of my fear is dangerous and threatening, then, since that belief can be rational or irrational (appropriate or inappropriate to the facts) so the emotion itself can also be appropriate or inappropriate. If we accept this, all three of the claims above must be false. Since emotions are based on beliefs, they are not merely sensations, they can be appropriate, and furthermore it is a mistake to characterise the 'rational' and the 'emotional' as mutually exclusive, to think of them as distinct capacities, because they are in fact, intertwined.

Many psychologists and neurologists concur. Antonio Damasio, for instance, argues that neurological research reveals that patients whose emotional capacities are impaired as a result of brain lesions are also impaired across a range of cognitive capacities, such as the ability to prioritise, to deliberate, evaluate and make decisions. At the level of the brain too, it seems, emotion and reason are inseparable.

Although this new consensus on 'cognitive' theories of the emotions is welcome, there remains much disagreement and many unanswered questions. Some philosophers have wondered how the emotions of animals and young children fit the theory, since we hesitate in attributing beliefs to them. Others have recently rejected the cognitivist approach altogether and attempted to put feelings back at the centre of emotions.

And then there is the issue of emotional education. Psychologists and writers such as Daniel Goleman (in his best-seller, Emotional Intelligence) are interested in how the emotions are educated. This is an issue that also preoccupied Aristotle, one of the few early philosophers to have endorsed the cognitive view. But if, as cognitivists claim, beliefs are not sufficient for emotion, what else has to be changed in order to educate someone's emotions? It is one thing to get someone to believe that spiders aren't dangerous, but another to get them not to be frightened by spiders. Some therapies, however, achieve high levels of success in treating such recalcitrant emotions. But does such change amount to education? Education involves a transformation of understanding. Cognitivism seems, however, to concede that this will not be enough. How, then, can there be real education of the emotions? This issue is of abiding general importance as well as being relevant to all putative 'philosophical therapies', from Stoicism to the present day.

Suggested Reading Descartes' Error, Antonio Damasio (Picador) Emotion, William Lyons (Cambridge) The Fragility of Goodness, Martha Nussbaum (Cambridge)

Mathematics, Physics and Reality

I began by saying that there is probably less difference between the positions of a mathematician and of a physicist than is generally supposed, and that the most important seems to me to be this, that the mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality. This may seem a paradox, since it is the physicist who deals with the subject-matter usually described as ‘real’; but a little reflection is enough to show that the physicist’s reality, whatever it may be, has few or none of the attributes which common sense ascribes instinctively to reality. A chair may be a collection of whirling electrons, or an idea in the mind of God: each of these accounts of it may have its merits, but neither conforms at all closely to the suggestions of common sense.

I went on to say that neither physicists nor philosophers have ever given any convincing account of what ‘physical reality’ is, or of how the physicist passes, from the confused mass of fact or sensation with which he starts, to the construction of the objects which he calls ‘real’. Thus we cannot be said to know what the subject-matter of physics is; but this need not prevent us from understanding roughly what a physicist is trying to do. It is plain that he is trying to correlate the incoherent body of crude fact confronting him with some definite and orderly scheme of abstract relations, the kind of scheme which he can borrow only from mathematics.

A mathematician, on the other hand, is working with his own mathematical reality. Of this reality, I take a ‘realistic’ and not an ‘idealistic’ view. ...this realistic view is much more plausible of mathematical than of physical reality, because mathematical objects are so much more what they seem. A chair or a star is not in the least like what it seems to be; the more we think of it, the fuzzier its outlines become in the haze of sensation which surrounds it; but ‘2' or ‘317' has nothing to do with sensation, and its properties stand out the more clearly the more closely we scrutinise it. It may be that modern physics fits best into some framework of idealistic philosophy - I do not believe it, but there are eminent physicists who say so. Pure mathematics, on the other hand, seems to me a rock on which all idealism founders: 317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 73 Theory of Knowledge in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way. G. H. Hardy A Mathematician’s Apology

“ ..the number system is like human life...”

“I’m afraid of being locked up” I say. He puts the crabs in the pot. He lets them boil for no more than five minutes. In a way I’m relieved that he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t yell at me. He’s the only other person who knows how much we know.It seems necessary to explain my claustrophobia to him. “Do you know what the foundation of mathematics is?” I ask. “The foundation of mathematics is numbers. If anyone asked me what makes me truly happy, I would say: numbers. Snow and ice and numbers. And do you know why?” He splits the claws with a nutcracker and pulls out the meat with curved tweezers. “Because the number system is like human life. First you have the natural numbers. The ones that are whole and positive. The numbers of a small child. But human consciousness expands. The child discovers a sense of longing, and do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing?” He adds cream and several drops of orange juice to the soup. “The negative numbers. The formalisation of the feeling that you are missing something. And human consciousness expands and grows even more, and the child discovers the in-between spaces. Between stones, between pieces of moss on the stone, between people. And between numbers. And do you know what that leads to? It leads to fractions. Whole numbers plus fractions produces the rational numbers. And human consciousness doesn’t stop there. It wants to go beyond reason. It adds an operation as absurd as the extraction of roots. And produces irrational numbers.” He warms the French bread in the oven and fills the pepper mill. “It’s a form of madness. Because the irrational numbers are infinite. They can’t be written down. They force human consciousness out beyond the limits. And by adding the irrational numbers to the rational numbers you get the real numbers.” I’ve stepped out into the middle of the room to have more space. It’s rare that you have a chance to explain yourself to a fellow human being. Usually you have to fight for the floor. And this is important to me. “It doesn’t stop. It never stops. Because now, on the spot, we expand the real numbers with imaginary square roots of negative numbers. These are numbers we can’t picture, pictures that normal human consciousness cannot comprehend. And when we add the imaginary system to the real numbers, we have the complex NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 74 Theory of Knowledge number system. The first number system in which it’s possible to explain satisfactorily the crystal formation of ice. It’s like a vast, open landscape. The horizons. You head towards them and they keep receding. That is Greenland, and that’s what I can’t be without. That’s why I don’t want to be locked up.” I wind up standing in front of him. “Smilla,” he says, “can I kiss you?” From Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg

“What is the relationship between mathematical systems and the world?”

One possible definition of Maths is “the discipline which investigates deductively the conclusions implicit in the elementary concepts of spatial and numerical relations”. The question then arises “What is the relationship between mathematical systems and the world?”

We can identify at least four different approaches:

1. The ‘Platonic’ answer is that Maths is related to a higher reality that governs the world of our senses.

2. The ‘Logical’ answer is that maths is a logical system describing the way things necessarily must be in our world of sense.

3. The ‘Formalist’ answer is that maths is an internally consistent system without any necessary meaning for our world of sense.

4. The ‘Intuitionist’ answer is that maths is a human construction based on the intuition of the human mind that gave rational order to our world of sense.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 75 Theory of Knowledge Is this good maths or not?

What important point is made by this piece of logic? (And note that the same argument applies to boys too)

How to say 'I love you' in German

One of my German students said that 'Hab dich lieb' meant ' I love you' in German. I don't speak German, but I had thought the phrase 'Ich liebe dich' meant 'I love you'. When I asked the student if there was a difference she said at first that they were the same. The conversation went as follows: "So are there any other ways you could say 'I love you' in German?" "You could say 'Ich mag dich', but you wouldn't say that to your best friend." "Why not?" "It's not as strong as 'I love you' in English. 'Hab dich lieb' is friendlier." "So 'Ich mag dich' is an unfriendly way of saying I love you?"

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 76 Theory of Knowledge "No! It's just that 'Hab dich lieb' would be something between boyfriend and girlfriend, or maybe mother and child, or best friends. 'Ich mag dich' is more like 'I like you'. You would say it to somebody if you wanted to get together with them." "So would a husband say 'Hab dich lieb' to his wife?" "Not really" (screws face up) "It's kind of a teenager thing. Or maybe between best friends, or a mother and child. You have to really know each other to use it, but adults wouldn't use it. 'Hab dich leib' is kind of a cute or a cool way of saying it". Adults would sound pretty funny saying it. A husband would say 'Ich liebe dich' to his wife. That's closest to 'I love you' in English. "What would you say to a really close friend?" "As a teenage girl, I would say 'Hab dich lieb'" "So boys couldn't say that?" "Well that would indicate that they were gay." "But it doesn't mean that girls who say it are lesbian?" "No." "So how would straight teenage boys indicate that they liked their best male friend very much?" "'Ich mag dich' I suppose…. But that sounds pretty weird. Really guys just wouldn't say that, or maybe they'd just say something like 'Du bist cool' - 'you're cool'" "OK. And what about if you love running, or eating chocolate or something?" "'Ich liebe rennen" is 'I love running'. 'Ich liebe……" can be about things or people, but when it's about people it must be about boyfriend/girlfriend" "And what about 'Hab dich lieb' ? "That can only be about people". "How about 'I love my pet dog?'" "No. That would be either 'Ich lieb meinen hund' or 'ich mag meinen hund' - either would be OK".

Discussion Question The German student who told me all this didn't realise all the subtleties until we started to talk about it. Though she would instinctively use the right phrase as the right time, she was not consciously aware of the nuances at first. Find something, in one of the languages you speak, which is similar. You are looking for language which appears very simple but in fact has many shades of grey, many hidden rules, and which is doing far more than the simple, straightforward communication of one idea.

There was Once

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 77 Theory of Knowledge Margaret Atwood

-There was once a poor girl, as beautiful as she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the forest. -Forest? Forest is passé. I mean, I’ve had it with this all this wilderness stuff. It’s not the right image of our society today. Let’s have some urban for a change. -There was once a poor girl, as beautiful as she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the suburbs. -That’s better. But I have to seriously question this word ‘poor’. -But she was poor! -Poor is relative. She lived in a house didn’t she? -Yes. -Then socio-economically speaking, she was not poor. -But none of the money was hers. The whole point of the story is that the wicked stepmother makes her wear old clothes and sleep in the fireplace- -Aha! They had a fireplace. With ‘poor’, let me tell you, there’s no fireplace. Come down to the park, come to the subway stations after dark, come down to where they sleep in cardboard boxes, and I’ll show you poor! -There was once a middle-class girl, as beautiful as she was good - -Stop right there. I think we can cut the ‘beautiful’ don’t you? Women these days have to deal with too many intimidating physical role models as it is, what with all these bimboes in the adds. Can’t you make her, well, more average? -There was once a girl who was a little overweight and whose front teeth stuck out. Who - -I don’t think it’s nice to make fun of people’s appearances. Plus you are encouraging anorexia. -I wasn’t making fun! I was just describing. -Skip the description. Description oppresses. But you can say what colour she was. -What colour? -You know. Black. Brown. White. Red. Yellow. Those are the choices. And I’m telling you right now that I’ve had enough of white. Dominant culture this, dominant culture that... -I don’t know what colour. -Well it would probably be your colour wouldn’t it? -But this isn’t about me! It’s about this girl- -Everything is about you. -Sounds to me like you don’t want to hear this story at all. -O well, go on. You could make her ethic. that might help. -There was once a girl of indeterminate descent, as average looking as she was good, who lived with her wicked- Another thing. Good and wicked. Don’t you think we should transcend these puritanical judgmental moralistic epithets? I mean, so much of it is conditioning isn’t it?

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 78 Theory of Knowledge -There was once a girl, as average-looking as she was well-adjusted, who lived with her stepmother, who was not a very open and loving person, because she herself had been abused in childhood. Better. But I am so tired of negative female images. And stepmothers - they always get it in the neck! Change it to stepfather why don’t you? That would make more sense anyway, considering the bad behaviour you are about to describe. And throw in some whips and chains. We all know what those twisted, repressed, middle aged-men are like - -Hey just a minute! I’m a middle-aged - -Stuff it Mr Nosy Parker. Nobody asked you. Go on. -There was once a girl- -How old was she? -I don’t know. She was young. -This ends with a marriage, right? -Well, not to blow the plot, but - yes. -Then you can scratch the condescending paternalistic terminology. It’s woman pal. Woman. -There was once - -What’s this ‘was once’? Enough of the dead past. Tell me about now. -There - -So? -So what? -So, why not here?

Questions 1. What does this conversation tell us about the opening phrase ‘There was once a poor girl, as beautiful as she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the forest.”? 2. What sort of things does the second speaker object to? 3. What is the principle behind the objections? 4. Is the principle reasonable? 5. What would happen if the second speaker applied his own principle to what she herself is saying? 6. What can we learn about language from this dialogue?

Parlez-Vous my Language? Advances in dentistry may brighten our smiles, computer technology may lighten our load and engineering may help get us around, but it is through language and literature that we come alive writes Robert Dessaix in The Age (16th October 1999).

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 79 Theory of Knowledge In the 1830s in England many factory owners argued against the building of railways on the grounds that making travel available to the masses would do nothing for increased production, at least in their factories. Reform-minded industrialists thought travel might be of some practical benefit, making their workers healthier, happier and more productive. The high-minded spoke vaguely of train travel broadening the understanding of others, promoting tolerance and peace. They all had a point - they just had different notions of what sort of society was worth living in. Debate about the teaching of foreign languages and literatures at our universities today follows much the same lines: the factory-owning class can’t see much profit in it; the liberals hope it might provide a multicultural experience and open up trade opportunities at the same time; the high-minded say little and ponder retirement. Since the factory owners and their purse-proud surrogates in government and the universities rule the roost, the few lines allowed to operate have to justify their existence nowadays by catering to hordes of Sunday excursionists, and making their stations double as shopping arcades. To what extent is learning a foreign language or literature the key? In todays Australia this basic question is left without a cogent, socially acceptable answer. In a society that has become a cross between a giant business conglomerate and a feudal principality (I speak as a Victorian, of course), those of us who would argue for a place in the sun for language-teaching need, I think, to bite the bullet and assert other values entirely. To argue for the value of learning Spanish, say, in terms of social or commercial usefulness is a lost cause. What does reading Lorca or writing an essay on Bunuel do for the corporate balance sheets? Why should taxpayers pay for this sort of refinement of the sensibilities? Even to argue in these profit-and-loss terms is to be complicit with the philistines now running the academic show, not to mention the country. Besides, they are right - learning a foreign language in Australia in 1999 is a useless exercise. Its all loss and no profit. Many students and some staff won’t be aware of how different things looked a few decades ago. At my state school, for instance, in the 1950s, when those who were not alive at the time keep insisting Australia was a ‘monoculture’ (and indeed cappuccinos and tom yum soup were hard to come by), we all studied Latin and French, some of us took German and Ancient Greek, and I was allowed to study Russian. At the Australian National University (ANU), in the years that followed, the range of languages on offer at different times was staggering: from regional Indonesian languages to Dutch and Polish, from Italian to Hindi. As Australia has become wealthier and more multicultural, the range has shrunk dramatically and in the next few months will shrink even further. In those days of fuller employment, motivation was different, too. When I first took up Russian as a boy, walking into a newsagency in suburban Sydney buying myself a dictionary, I was not seeking knowledge to increase my career opportunities - there were none. When

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 80 Theory of Knowledge I enrolled in Russian at ANU, I was not seeking knowledge in order to serve some powerful institution in later life or to get in on the technological revolution (although in those post- Sputnik days Russia’s scientific prospects were looking bright). I did it - although I wouldn't have used these words then and to use them in these anti-humanist times is almost embarrassing - to magnify my experience of being human. And, at a more mundane level, to decipher the script on the Russian stamps in my collection. What has changed? In economic terms the employment situation has changed for the worse, of course, making my kind of motivation seem a self-indulgent luxury. In the cultural sphere, however, the changes have been even more profound. Where once ‘education’ had several meanings, it increasingly now means just ‘pedagogy’, the inculcation of knowledge to economic ends. Disagreement about the meaning of ‘education’ is hardly new - the Greeks were at each others throats about precisely these questions two-and-a- half millennia ago: one school argued for the legitimacy of learning for learnings sake, for education as the disinterested search for truths (not just facts), for what made the world work and humans human; the other school (the pedagogical) favoured learning for material achievement and advancement, for self-enrichment and power. Both schools had a point. The problem for language and literature teachers in our universities today is that they are expected to straddle both concepts of education at a time when the pedagogical arguments for language learning carry little weight. No one is arguing against the need to inculcate knowledge at the tertiary level: we want it drilled into our dentists, pilots and bridge-builders until they drop. The humanities, however, are there for a different purpose and there is a sort of barbarism - or perhaps its philistinism, which is barbarism gone middle-class - about the notion that their value is of the same nature as that dentistry or molecular biology. The life of the mind the humanities nourish may be impossible without engineers and good dentists, but the life that engineers and dentists make possible is scarcely worth living without a richly informed mental dimension to it. Not only the culture of education has changed. Two other developments have worked against language and literature departments in our universities. First, Australians now live in a distant khanate of the great American English-speaking empire. In the Roman empire you would have had to be highly eccentric to bother learning anything except Latin and Greek. Why learn Pictish or Aramaic when you could travel from the Scottish border to the Euphrates with perfect ease speaking just the two imperial languages? The odd spy or civil servant may have felt pressed to acquire a local dialect or two, but quite frankly, as a Roman vice-chancellor would no doubt have pointed out, there was no great call for Lydian from the Roman business community. And in the early 14th century, an Arabic-speaking scholar or trader could move with similar ease within the Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam, speaking Arabic with anyone he needed to make contact with from Spain to Southern

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 81 Theory of Knowledge China, from the Volga River to Zanzibar. A spot of Turkish or Persian might have helped here and there, but was hardly a requirement. Today as Australians we live firmly within the Dar al-English, and any vice-chancellor or dean worth his or her salt should point this out. But when I first started travelling in the 1960s, it wasn't quite like that. I carefully learnt a bit of Finnish, quite a lot of Polish, and even a spot of Bahasa Indonesia to get around. I learnt some Spanish to go to Spain and Italian to go to Italy. I wouldn't bother now. The language of globalisation is English. Every day a billion people use it in one form or another. Its the world’s lingua franca. To argue that you need Italian or French to conduct business in Italy or France is wishful thinking - hundreds of thousands of foreigners have lived there for decades without speaking a syllable. Multiculturalism of the official Australian variety hasn't helped the language teachers’ cause, either. Our brand of multiculturalism is not, after all, about individual Australians ceasing to be monocultural or bicultural - indeed, some of Australias immigrant communities fervently wish to remain monocultural - but about immigration policy, about making migrants feel their heritage counts for something, about making them feel more at home. But multiculturalism of the kind we all piously doff our caps to has made language learning even less necessary than it was just after the war. In the first place, who needs a cadre of Italian-speaking non-Italians when hundreds of thousands of Australians of Italian background already do it so well? With our kind of immigration policy, an educated bilingual speaker of any of 150 languages can be found almost instantly to perform any task. And in the second place, given our patterns of immigration, in Australia you are obliged to speak English in a way in which you simply aren’t in parts of Los Angeles, New York or even Canada. Even SBS is basically an English-speaking telvision station - it has to be. If Turks want to watch a Greek movie - as I hope many do - then they will have to be able to read English subtitles. I am not arguing here that ‘things have got worse’. I am not evoking any Golden Age of Education or Britishness. There was no Golden Age, not even in Athens. My point is simply that things have changed, certain ideas about education are in eclipse, and under these conditions those of us who believe that universities should offer more foreign languages and literatures, not fewer, need to rethink our tactics. Defending ourselves in terms of social or economic usefulness will get us nowhere, unless perhaps we are in the field of two or three Asian languages. If we do capitulate to the pressure to justify our existence in utilitarian terms, in no time at all we will find ourselves setting up stalls selling Italian for Tourists, Italian for Businessmen and quickie survey courses in Italian literature (in English, naturally). The microbiologists don’t put up with this sort of huckstering, so why should we? To argue the case for foreign languages from a different set of values we are going to have to use

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 82 Theory of Knowledge terminology some of us have been trained to think of as humanist, universalist and outdated. (Its not outdated, of course, it just isn't fashionable in certain circles, including the very circles that are currently being decimated.) We’re going to have to talk in terms of multiplying perceptions of the world, of refining our awareness of being alive, of seeing in colour instead of black and white, of opening doors to other selves we never knew existed - of multiculturalism, if you like, of a much richer, more real kind than the present model. Each new language learnt opens up a parallel universe. Its embarrassing, but these things have to be said. It was Wittgenstein who proposed that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world”. You dont have to be Wittgenstein to grasp that if you only have one word (lets say depressed) to describe your mental state, and can’t wonder whether you are actually more dejected or suffering from ennui rather than depressed, or melancholy, triste, despondent, disconsolate or just plain glum, then your experience is drained of colour and possibilities. You’re blocked from reinventing yourself. Does this kind of nuanced linguistic awareness have a cash value? None, I would suggest, that can be calculated by Treasury or Accounts. But it makes being here an adventure. In our particular culture, too, a facility with language is still widely seen as a feminine skill. Whether its the Bush Tucker man painstakingly dropping his ‘g’s - he occasionally slips up, but not too often - or politicians resorting to stunted English for a working-class audience, or our sportsmen carefully speaking like half-wits in television interviews, the message is clear: a real man doesn't speak too well. Speaking well is an embroidering activity, supplementary to the real business of life, and is therefore womens business. (Showbiz personalities - jester figures in general - have a special dispensation, of course. They can even be black or homosexual and get away with it.) One of the things learning foreign languages can do, as can serious literary studies, is to expand the sense of what it means to be masculine, something women have been waiting for since Adam. On a recent Report there was an inspiring item about an experiment at James Cook Boys Technology High School in Sydney. The boys are discovering that they can dance, sing, and play musical instruments and enjoy it - and still be boys. They are less inclined to truancy and aggression in the playground, and, judging by the interviews, don’t feel so limited to stereotypical behaviour. If we feel cudgelled into arguing for some kind of social usefulness for language- learning, getting rid of the barbed wire around dominant ideas of masculinity could be one area to explore. There must surely be more to being a man in Australia than is currently being publicly touted. To what is studying a foreign literature the key? Barry Jones famously suggested to John Howard that, in his case, reading War and Peace could open the door to being a

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 83 Theory of Knowledge better Prime Minister, but we don’t know the reasons he gave. In my case, reading Russian and French literature was the key to multiple ways of understanding the world. Its obvious: once you’ve read Tolstoy and Turgenev, for example, you will simply love differently. And talk differently, reason differently, tell different kinds of jokes, travel through life differently. You’ll become hungry for things you never knew existed. How many dollars is that worth? More importantly, perhaps, you’ll find spaces opening up inside you in which to become serious about the things you love. And those spaces will be gradually furnished by what you read in utterly unexpected, vivifying ways. Without these furnished spaces its hard to see how imagination can take root. And without imagination all the cleverness in the world will leave our lives empty. To study a foreign literature, or cinematic or artistic tradition, is to take part in a vast conversation across generations and borders. And conversing is what the humanities are all about, surely. Not conversing in order to arrive at a set of facts, or to install a fashionable ideology in the minds of the young, but conversing for its own sake, about the most important things in the world - as we understand it, of course. That - not technological sophistication - is civilisation. To do it with a healthy set of teeth in our mouths, or using computer technology is a very fine thing, but our professional business is the conversation. Its a brilliant way of being alive. High-minded arguments such as these will be sneered at by the book-keepers - by all those who think the life of the mind is a kind of effete luxury, or an entertaining adjunct to the real business of life. Those of us who think it is as much the real business of life as building casinos, maintaining an army, growing wheat and repairing the roads must start saying so - loudly. In these times old-fashioned values are suddenly radical again.

This is an edited version of an address given at a School of Languages , Postgraduate Conference at Melbourne University last month.

Japanese Politeness The Interplay of Language, Culture, and Thought

Inscrutable, evasive, insincere. Saying "yes" when they really mean "no," and smiling politely all the while. The image of the Japanese in the west is often of an incomprehensible

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 84 Theory of Knowledge culture, whose smooth and polished surface cannot be penetrated. It is perhaps through examining the Japanese language, though, that English speakers might gain a glimpse into the culture, as the language and culture are so reciprocally interconnected. The Japanese language shows some of the substance behind the polished surface, as it reveals a culture of politeness, of respectful treatment of others, and of highly tuned social awareness.

In Japanese, one can scarcely speak to another person, and certainly not correctly, without a highly developed sensitivity to relative social position, based on a fusion of factors such as age, gender, or importance in a company. The language provides different levels of politeness, so that the speaker must recognise whether to speak "up" to a superior, "level" to an equal - though never "down" to an inferior! "We can't say exactly what form for what occasion," writes former TOK student Misa Tanaka, "but we have to use our sensitivity."

This sense of relative position permeates the forms of the language. "If I want to say something very polite," comments another former TOK student, Junko Sagara, "I have three ways. One is to put the verb or sentence in the polite form. The second is to use the verb which is used only for a respected person for the action of the person I am talking to. The third is to put the verb which shows my own action into the modest form."

To complicate matters, modesty and humility are so much part of speech that one would refer indirectly to one's own group - one's family, for example - using a humble form which pushes them downward, and to the group of the person to whom one is speaking in an honorific form, raising them upward in comparison, in order to be respectful toward the other person.

The words for "I" and "you" likewise vary according to the relationship between people, to the point that Japanese students in an English speaking college describe responding quite differently toward bilingual teachers depending on whether they are speaking with them in English or Japanese. lzumi Sasaki (IB 1994) further describes her feeling that English gives her different possibilities from Japanese in forming relationships with families where she was a guest:

"I would like to give an example from my experience here. When I was in Japan, I went to stay at my friend's house for the weekend. Of course, I was talking to my friend using informal form of "you," and I was using polite forms (for which the exact translation in English does not exist, as far as I know now) for her parents and her grandparents. Although I had known all those people for quite a long time, I never got to talk to her parents and her grandparents about their private life as I do to her, because those polite forms that I was using would not go together with those questions that I wanted to ask them about their private life. I would

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 85 Theory of Knowledge never ask those questions in those polite forms unless I was their lawyer or something like that. If I actually did ask them, I might have been considered as being such a nagging teenage girl. Therefore, I never got to know how her parents met each other, or even about their childhood or adolescence at all. No matter how close the friend might have been to me, the relationship between with her family was always like this.

But when I stayed at my host's family's place for the first time in Canada, the condition was totally different. First of all the feeling that I had when I was asking them on the phone if I could stay or not, was the one that I had never experienced when I was talking to someone who I had met (or talked to) for the first time. Although we were talking to each other without even knowing the other person's face, we were talking to each other in such a way that people who overheard our conversation might have thought that I was talking to my friend. Actually, I myself couldn't believe that I was talking to my host family rather than my friend. It seems to me that this was because we were both using the same word "you".

Male and female speech also vary, with "I" and "you" in different forms and particular endings added to other words. The possibility for subtlety and innuendo, though, is not eliminated by such structure. Former student Saeko Hagihara comments, "If I as a woman use "ore" the word for guys, that means I'm wild or I don't feel feminine."

Japanese politeness, however, is not confined to this sense of relative social position. It also affects the openness or frankness of speech. Makiko Oyama (IB 94) describes the way in which indirectness can soften potential conflict in order to preserve a social harmony:

When talking in English, usually one can get the other's opinion as soon as that person starts talking, whereas in Japanese, one may have to wait for a longer time to hear the other's opinion since the verb which states the final conclusion is at the end. Therefore, in Japanese, since it is difficult when one has to respond negatively, one can start speaking a little bit in an affirmative way by stating one's reasons politely and, through explaining, one can reach the negative conclusion at the end. The Japanese are used to this kind of situation. However, it could cause a problem when English speakers have to deal with this since it is thought to be polite to answer straightforwardly for them.

This indirectness - a sidestepping of the confrontational or the too naked assertion - also characterises the content of what is appropriate to say. Akiko Koyama (I B 94) tells a story in one of her TOK essays of a romance which foundered on language:

"Once my Dad told me a funny story about his "miai." An arranged marriage starts not with love between the young man and woman but with an introduction, a "miai", set up by a go-between who thinks they would make a good couple. If they finally find that they hit it off, the go-between sees them through to marriage. Anyway, he had a "miai" with a lady who had been in USA for a long time, before he got married to my mom.

This is what he said to me. The lady to whom he was introduced seemed graceful and nice. This is a part of their conversation at the "miai" which is a very common and typical question at any "miai":

Dad: Do you have any pastimes? Lady: Oh, yes! I have lots. Especially I am really good at playing the piano. All my friends love me playing it. I'm sure you'll love it, too.

He was quite shocked by her words, and he found that there was no way to marry her, because he thought that she lacked modesty, which means for Japanese that she had no common sense. I wonder if non-Japanese can see what is wrong with this part of conversation. Probably not. But if the lady had been a typical Japanese, what would the conversation be like?

Dad: Do you have any pastimes? Lady: Yes I play the piano only a little bit. But I am too shy to play it in front of you.

These her words were expected to be said even if she was an amazing pianist. At the same time people would know for sure that she is a good pianist if she says that she plays it "only a little bit."

Clearly, Japanese, both in the content of what, is spoken and in the linguistic forms of the language, reflects and reinforces a culture in which group harmony is more important than individual self-expression, and in which politeness is a supreme value. Sylvia Cousineau, IB Japanese Examiner, emphasises that the politeness is much more than a veneer or a false mask, and that the linguistic forms are an integral part of the Japanese way of thinking.

"I was a grown individual, aged 21, when I learned Japanese, but even acquiring the language at that point of relative maturity, as an outsider, I found that it mediated my thinking. Perhaps it has not changed the filters through which I see reality, but it has modified them.

In Japan one is never determined by the self as an individual, but always as a member of a group, and the language is shaped by that. In learning Japanese, I had to come to a new understanding of myself, and of hierarchy and group, and the language forced me to internalise this new understanding, partly intellectually, partly organically.

I had previously assumed that sincerity was something that one saw on someone's face. Not anymore. In Japan, the language is such that personal expression makes one feel quirky. It is rough, confrontational, In Japanese society, feelings are not displayed but intimated; it is not a culture of representation of the self but of representation by consent. In Japan, one generally deals with people completely in their social roles, where everything is codified, and smooth, with the support of the expected: one always knows what to do or to say.

The Japanese are thought of as hypocritical, but they are less hypocritical than people in the west, because no one is fooling anyone else. I find this more honest. The mask is a lie - but it is a socially true lie. In the west we also wear masks, but we pretend that it is our real self. In fact, we have a 'representational neurosis' - enhanced by television, with its emphasis on faces - whereby people are acting their own lives. "I feel joy. I feel anger. Can't you see it on my face?"

He comments, too, on the way that Japanese manners penetrated his own Canadian conduct-. "When I returned from Japan, I found that at first I was very formal with everyone -- and when I talked on the telephone, I found that as I spoke I kept bowing to the phone!"

Language, culture, and thought can scarcely be disentangled. Perhaps it is easier to recognise the union in a language which is not our own, as our own ways are so often invisible to us, simply assumed as the way things are and therefore must be. For English speakers, then, a consideration of Japanese might illuminate these interconnections and help us to raise some questions about our own invisible norms.

Eileen Dombrowski Lester B Pearson College

Definition

You may have been part of, or heard an argument which seems to go around and around in circles, with neither side seeming able to make any progress towards a conclusion. This is sometimes inevitable - agreement on certain topics may never happen. But sometimes arguments seem to be particularly frustrating when one or both sides seem unable to see what the other one is saying. This can sometimes be due to problems relating to the language we use, and in particular problems relating to definition.

You may have already seen that if we attempt to define terms like art or life or science then what initially seemed obvious very quickly becomes fraught with confusion and ambiguity. It's not (entirely) that we don't know what we mean when we say the terms, but pinning them down in a precise definition can be very difficult, and often other people will have a slightly different definition.

Even if we pick a very precisely defined word, we can see that difficulties arise. A bachelor is defined as an adult human male who has never been married. It seems clear enough, but now ask yourself if these people are bachelors:

• Anthony is seventeen years old. He attends school and lives with his parents. • Bertrand is seventeen years old. He left home at fourteen to start his own company and is now a millionaire. When not abroad on business meetings he lives in his own

house and has a playboy lifestyle.

• Charlie and Chris are homosexual lovers who have been happily living together for twenty years.

• David has been living with Daphne for the last ten years; they have three children. He has never been married and has no intention of ever doing so

• Edward is married to a lady who paid him $25,000 so that she could become a citizen of his county. He has met her once; they have never lived together. They will divorce as soon as it is possible for the lady to retain citizenship. Meanwhile Edward is seeing other women.

• Father Francis is a Catholic priest.

If you were to argue about any of these with somebody then it should be absolutely clear that your argument has nothing to do with the facts of the situation. If I think that David is a bachelor but you do not then there are no new pieces of information which would be helpful in solving the problem. It would be fair to characterise our disagreement as being more about the word bachelor than about David's status.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 89 Theory of Knowledge This sort of difference can happen a lot unless we are careful. Most often it happens when the terms are vague or emotionally loaded, but it can happen with even seemingly neutral and 'well-defined' terms like bachelor.

We might therefore distinguish between three different types of disagreement.

(i) The factual dispute. If I think that Singapore is south of the Equator, and you maintain that it is just north of the equator, then this is probably easily resolved by reference to an atlas. We almost certainly agree on the meanings of 'Singapore' and 'Equator' and we have a genuine disagreement.

(ii) The merely verbal dispute. This is where the presence of an ambiguous term conceals the fact that there is no real disagreement. Disputes like these are not always easy to spot, but once we recognise them we can usually resolve the problem by clearing up the ambiguity. As shown in the bachelor example - the ambiguity can arise even with words in common use.

(iii) The apparently verbal but really genuine dispute. When we misunderstand each others' use of terms there is likely to be confusion, and we may recognise that confusion. But it may be that the quarrel really goes well beyond the differing uses of terms. In such circumstances, resolving only the ambiguity will not settle the dispute, because there remains some genuine disagreement.

As an example of this third case, suppose I think a sexually explicit film is pornographic, but you think that the deeply sensitive and aesthetic aspects of the film mean that it isn't pornography at all. It might seem like we are arguing about the word pornography, and to a certain degree we are, but there are probably some deeper differences underlying the verbal dispute. In fact we probably couldn't agree on a definition precisely because of these deeper disagreements. For example I might insist that any explicit film is pornographic, while you might suggest that not all explicit scenes warrant such a term. Alternatively you might concede that the film is pornographic but say that this type of pornography is different from other, less artistic types - and I would disagree. The point is that the verbal ambiguity does exist, but so does a more fundamental disagreement.

Exercise What sort of disputes are these? If merely verbal, resolve it by explaining the ambiguity. If apparently verbal dispute but really genuine, locate the ambiguity and explain the real disagreement involved.

1. A: Dave is the best tennis player in the club. His serve is faster than

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 90 Theory of Knowledge anyone else's. B: No, Nick is much better! His volleying is amazing.

2. A: I read in the annual report that General Industrial's earning have increased again this year. B: No they haven't. They may say that they have, but they are currently being investigated for false reporting . Their earnings are actually lower.

3. A: National Conglomerate are doing well. Their sales so far this year are 15 percent up on last year. B: No, they aren't doing very well. Profits so far this year are 30 per cent lower than they were last year at this time. 4. A: Jenny is a great student. She always asks perceptive and intelligent questions in class. B: Jenny is one of the worst students I've ever seen. She never gets her assignments in on time. 5. A: Even though they are several hundred years old, Shakespeare's plays are enormously relevant. Love, death, duty, sacrifice and honour.. these themes are as important today as they were when the plays were written. B: I don't agree. What does Shakespeare have to say about over- population, environmental degradation and unemployment? Nothing. His plays are irrelevant today.

6. A: Alice finally got rid of that old computer of hers and bought herself a new one. She uses a Macintosh now. B: No, Alice didn't buy herself a new computer. That Mac is a good three years old.

How Proust can change your life.... Alain de Botton

Proust once wrote an essay in which he set out to restore a smile to the face of a gloomy, envious and dissatisfied young man. He pictured this young man sitting at a table after lunch one day in his parents’ flat, gazing dejectedly at his surroundings: at a knife left lying on the tablecloth, at the remains of an underdone, tasteless cutlet and a half-turned back table cloth. He would see his mother at the far end of the dining room doing her knitting and the family cat curling up on top of a cupboard next to a bottle of brandy being kept for a special occasion ...the mundanity of the scene would contrast with the young man’s taste for beautiful and costly things, which he lacked the money to acquire. Proust imagined the revulsion... [the young man] ... would feel at this...... interior , and how he would compare it to the splendours he had seen in museums and cathedrals. He would envy those bankers who had enough money to decorate their houses properly, so that everything in them was beautiful, was a work of art, right down to the coal tongs in the fireplace and the knobs on the doors.

To escape his domestic gloom...... the young man might leave the flat and go to the Louvre, where at least he could feast his eyes on splendid things: grand palaces painted by Veronese, harbour scenes by Claude and princely lives by Van Dyck.

Touched by his predicament, Proust proposed to make a radical change to the young man’s life by way of a modest alteration to the museum’s itinerary. Rather than let him hurry to galleries hung with paintings by Claude and Veronese, Proust suggested leading him to a quite different part of the museum, to those galleries hung with the works of Jean- Baptiste Chardin.

It might have seemed an odd choice, for Chardin hadn’t painted many harbours, princes or palaces. He liked to depict bowls of fruit, jugs, coffee pots, loaves of bread, glasses of wine and slabs of meat. He liked painting kitchen utensils, not just pretty chocolate jars but salt cellars and strainers. When it came to people, Chardin’s figures were rarely doing

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 92 Theory of Knowledge anything heroic; one was reading a book, another was building a house of cards, a woman had just come home from the market with a couple of loaves of bread and a mother was showing her daughter some mistakes she had made in her needlework.

Yet, in spite of the ordinary nature of their subjects, Chardin’s paintings succeeded in being extraordinarily beguiling and evocative. A peach by him was as pink and chubby as a cherub, a plate of oysters or a slice of lemon were tempting symbols of gluttony and sensuality...... There was a harmony too between objects; in one canvas, almost a friendship between the reddish colours of a hearth rug, a needle box and a ball of wool. These paintings were windows on to a world at once recognisably our own, yet uncommonly, wonderfully tempting.

After an encounter with Chardin, Proust had high hopes for the spiritual transformation of his sad young man. Why? Because Chardin had shown him that the kind of environment in which he lived could, for a fraction of the cost, have many of the charms he had previously associated only with the palaces and the princely life. No longer would he feel painfully excluded from the aesthetic realm, no longer would he be so envious of smart bankers with gold-plated coal tongs and diamond studded door handles. He would learn that metal and earthenware could also be enchanting, and common crockery as beautiful as precious stones. After looking at Chardin’s work, even the humblest rooms in his parents’ flat would have the power to delight him, Proust promised:

When you walk around a kitchen, you will say to yourself, this is interesting, this is grand, this is beautiful like a Chardin.

Having started on his essay, Proust tried to interest Pierre Mainguet, the editor of the arts magazine the Revue Hebdomadaire, in its contents: I have just written a little study in the philosophy of art, if I may use that slightly pretentious phrase, in which I have tried to show how the great painters initiate us into a knowledge and love of the external world, how they are the ones ‘by whom our eyes are opened’, opened, that is, on the world...... Do you think this sort of study would interest the readers of the Revue Hebdomadaire?

Perhaps, but since its editor was sure it wouldn’t they had no chance to find out. Turning down the piece was an understandable oversight: this was 1895, and Mainguet didn’t know Proust would one day be Proust. What is more, the moral of the essay lay not too far from the ridiculous. It was only a step away from suggesting that everything down to the last lemon was beautiful, that there was no good reason to be envious of any condition beside our own, that a hovel was as nice as a villa, and an emerald no better than a chipped plate.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 93 Theory of Knowledge However, instead of urging us to place the same value on all things, Proust might more interestingly have been encouraging us to ascribe them their correct value, and hence to revise certain notions of the good life, which risked inspiring an unfair neglect of some settings, and a misguided enthusiasm for others. If it hadn’t been for Pierre Mainguet’s rejection, the readers of the Revue Hebdomadaire would have benefited from a chance to reappraise their conceptions of beauty, and enter into a new and possibly more rewarding relationship with salt cellars, crockery and apples.

Why would they previously have lacked such a relationship? Why wouldn’t they have appreciated their tableware and fruit? At one level, such questions seem superfluous; it just appears natural to be struck by the beauty of some things and to be left coud by others, there is no conscious rumination or decision behind our choice of what appeals to us visually, we simply know we are moved by palaces but not by kitchens, by porcelain but not by china, by guavas but not apples.

However, the immediacy with which aesthetic judgements arise should not fool us into assuming that their origins are entirely natural or their verdicts unalterable. Proust’s letter to Monsieur Mainguet hinted as much. By saying that great painters were the ones by whom our eyes were opened, Proust was at the same time implying that our sense of beauty was not immobile, and could be sensitised by painters, who would, through their canvasses, educate us into an appreciation of once neglected aesthetic qualities. If the dissatisfied young man had failed to consider the family tableware or fruit, it was in part out of a lack of acquaintance with images which would have shown him the key to their attractions.

The happiness which may emerge from taking a second look is central; it reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them. The gap between what the dissatisfied youth could see in his flat, and what Chardin noticed in very similar interiors, places the emphasis on a certain way of looking, as opposed to a mere process of acquiring or possessing.

...The incident emphasises once more that beauty is something to be found, rather than passively encountered, that it requires us to pick up on certain details, to identify the whiteness of a cotton dress, the reflection of the sea on the hull of a yacht or the contrast between the colour of a jockey’s coat and his face. It also emphasis how vulnerable we are to depression when...... the pre-prepared images run out, when our knowledge of art does not stretch any later than Carpaccio {1450 - 1525} and Veronese {1528 - 1588} and we see a two-hundred-horsepower Sunseeker accelerating out of the marine. It may genuinely be an unattractive example of aquatic transport; then again our

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 94 Theory of Knowledge objection to the speedboat may stem from nothing other than a stubborn adherence to ancient images of beauty, and a resistance to a process of active appreciation which even Veronese and Carpaccio would have undertaken had they been in our place.

Picador ISBN 0-330-35491-4 Art and Truth

Though not traditionally a major topic within aesthetics, the relationship between truth and works of art is of considerable interest in the context of Theory of Knowledge.

There are those who argue that artists (and we are still using the word 'art' in a wide sense to include literature, music, and other art-forms) have a special responsibility to convey the truth. This responsibility derives in part because the impact of their work gives them unusual power, but also from the special position of art - at least the visual and maybe of the performing arts in transcending language. The feelings conveyed by Rodin's Thinker or a great ballet are not restricted by language. One example of this is the way in which Picasso's painting Guernica (1937) alerted the world to what was going on in the Spanish Civil War by depicting a village and its people destroyed by bombs. Alexander Solzenhitsyn, in the moving speech in which he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature (the speech was read on his behalf as he was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union to give it in person) argued passionately for the way in which the truth expressed by the artist can defeat 'the lie'. "One word of truth outweighs the whole world".

Nevertheless, the claim that art can 'convey the truth' needs some examining. Of course, factually true statements can be found in a work of literature and a painting can give us correct information about the clothes, furniture, even the games of the era it is depicting. From Constable's Wivenhoe Park, Essex (1816) for example, we can learn something of the layout of parks and the breed of cattle kept in the period, and so on. But art is not unique in this respect - truths of this kind can be transmitted in many ways.

The claim that art 'tells the truth' surely means more than true statements are made in literature or that simple factual statements can be correctly deduced from observing a painting. There is a suggestion of something deeper, something unique to art. However, we need to ask what is meant by 'truth' of this kind. What kind of truth is it which cannot be expressed in the form of a simple sentence? And if a truth can be so asserted, it must be possible also to assert the falsehood which would contradict it. And what sort of truth can be derived from music or a dance?

What about a photograph of a film? Is the old cliché that 'the camera does not lie' really true? In one sense it is, but we all know that the photographer and the film-maker are selective in their choice of subjects. The photographer covering a violent demonstration can concentrate either on the demonstrators hurling missiles or the police vigorously making arrests. If a set of pictures is published showing only one of these activities, can it be said to be 'true'? And does not the caption beneath the photograph tell a story? Is the story ever 'true'?

Even if the greatest of care were to be taken in painting a fair, unbiased picture, is it possible to do so? Could two artists looking at the same scene produce identical paintings? Our experience tells us that, even if they could, they certainly do not. And of the two pictures, which one is the 'true' one?

Why, in any case, is there a need to find truth in art? Our age is so addicted to facts, to finding out the 'truth' about things that we are in danger of overlooking the real value of art. By trying to reduce art to a series of truth-statements, are we not diminishing it? Is there not a value of art of all kinds which goes far beyond the passing on of 'truth'?

As Douglas Morgan wrote, in a paper 'Must Art tell the Truth?' (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol 26, 1967):

Remember if you can that breathless final moment when you have moved intensively with heart and mind through a quartet of Brahms or Bartok. You have hoped, expected, feared, been lifted, lowered, fulfilled and disappointed, and now, inevitably, the voices together sing one rich climactic chord. You as a person vibrate, suspended, with the vibrating sound.

Now imagine your neighbour leaning towards you anxiously and expectantly, to ask "Quickly now, tell me what you learned from that music. What information did it communicate to you?" Such a neighbour deserves only an icy glare of disdain. He is projecting learning, knowledge, and truth into an area of human experience where it has no natural or necessary place. Learning, knowledge and truth are no less valuable because their value is not exclusive. There really are other goods in the world that these, and there really is no need to invent such bogus kinds of truth as poetic or pictorial or even musical truth for art to wear as certificates of legitimacy.

Life on the Mississippi

In the late nineteenth century huge steamboats sailed up and down the great rivers in America. Unlike today there were many dangers on the river from such things as changing channels, shallow areas and sharp rock on the river bed. with no government authority to monitor the river, and no signs along the course, it was the job of the pilot to navigate these dangers. The job took years to learn and the skill lay largely in 'reading' the state of the river from the surface.

The novice riverboat pilot and his friend were watching the sunset, and the friend found the river incredibly beautiful. But where the friend saw loveliness, the pilot in training saw something different. This passage is from Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi.

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book - a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it, painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading matter.

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something too. I had lost that which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river. I still kept in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steam-boating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came flowing, black and conspicuous; in one place a long slanting mark lay sparking on the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling rings, that were as many tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded and the sombre shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendour that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 97 Theory of Knowledge heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment with some new marvel of colouring.

I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. But as I have said, there came a day when... if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented inwardly, after this fashion: The sun means that we are going to have wind tomorrow; that floating log means that the river is rising; that slanting mark on the river reflects a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark?

No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. Since those days I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply comment on her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?

We are presented with two ways of looking at the river. We might call each way of looking at the river a 'paradigm'. The same facts are seen completely differently; the paradigm provides a way to interpret the scene.

• Are understanding something and appreciating something aesthetically, mutually exclusive as Twain suggests? Give an example to support your answer.

• Has the river-boat pilot 'gained most' or 'lost most' by mastering the language of the river?

• By speaking your native tongue, you have mastered the language of everyday life. Have you lost or gained anything by doing so?

• With this story Mark Twain illustrates the coming of vision that accompanies the learning of a new paradigm. When one learns a new paradigm, the world is quite literally seen anew. Describe an example of a paradigm shift that you have experienced yourself.

The Loss of The Creature

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 98 Theory of Knowledge From Walker Percy, 'The Loss of the Creature', Ways of Reading : An Anthology for Writers. Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, Boston, 1993.

An American couple, we will say, drives down to Mexico. They see the usual sights and have a fair time of it. Yet they are never without the sense of missing something. Although Taxco and Guernavaca are interesting and picturesque as advertised, they fall short of 'it'. What do the couple have in mind by 'it'? What do they really hope for? What sort of experience could they have in Mexico so that upon their return, they would feel that 'it' had happened? We have a clue: Their hope has something to do with their own role as tourists in a foreign country and the way in which they conceive this role. It has something to do with other American tourists. Certainly they feel that they are very far from 'it' when, after travelling five thousand miles, they arrive at the plaza in Guanajuato only to find themselves surrounded by a dozen other couples from the Midwest.

Already we may distinguish authentic and unauthentic elements. First, we see the problem the couple faces and we understand their efforts to surmount it. The problem is to find an 'unspoiled' place. 'Unspoiled' does not mean only that a place is left physically intact; it means also that it is not encrusted by renown and by the familiar (as in Taxco), that it has not been discovered by others. We understand that the couple really want to get at the place and enjoy it. Yet at the same time we wonder if there is not something wrong in their dislike of their compatriots. Does access to the place require the exclusion of others?

Let us see what happens.

The couple decide to drive from Guanajuato to Mexico City. On the way they get lost. After hours on a rocky mountain road, they find themselves in a tiny valley not even marked on the map. There they discover an Indian Village. Some sort of religious festival is going on. It is apparently a corn dance in supplication of the rain god.

The couple know at once that this is 'it'. They are entranced. They spend several days in the village, observing the Indians and being themselves observed with friendly curiosity.

Now may we not say that the sightseers have at last come face to face with an authentic sight, a sight which is charming, quaint, picturesque, unspoiled, and that they see the sight and come away rewarded? Possibly this may occur. Yet it is more likely that what happens is a far cry indeed from an immediate encounter with being, that the experience, while masquerading as such, is in truth a rather desperate impersonation. I use the word 'desperate' advisedly to signify an actual loss of hope.

The clue to the spuriousness of their enjoyment of the village and the festival is a certain restiveness in the sightseers themselves. It is given expression by their repeated exclamations that 'this is too good to be true', and by their anxiety that it may not prove to be so perfect, and finally by their downright relief at leaving the valley and having the experience in the bag, so to speak - that is, safely embalmed in memory and movie film.

What is the source of their anxiety during the visit? Does it not mean that the couple are looking at the place with a certain standard of performance in mind? Are they like Fabre, who gazed at the world about him with wonder, letting it be what it is; or are they not like the overanxious mother who sees her child as one performing, now doing badly, now doing well? The village is their child and their love for it is an anxious love because they are afraid that at any moment it might fail them.

We have another clue in their subsequent remark to an ethnologist friend. "How we wished you had been there with us! What a perfect gold-mine of folkways! We kept wishing that you were there! You must return with us". This surely testifies to a generosity of spirit, a willingness to share their experience with others, not at all like their feelings toward their fellow Iowans on the plaza at Guanajuato!

I am afraid this is not the case at all. It is true that they longed for their ethnologist friend, but it was for an entirely different reason. They wanted him, not to share their experience, but to certify their experience as genuine.

'This is it' and 'Now we are really living' do not necessarily refer to the sovereign encounter of the person with the sight that enlivens the mind and gladdens the heart. It means that now at last we are having the acceptable experience. The present experience is always measured by a prototype, the 'it' of their dreams. 'Now I am really living' means that now I am filling the role of sightseer and the sight is living up to the prototype of sights. This quaint and picturesque village is measured by a Platonic ideal of 'The Quaint and the Picturesque'.

Hence their anxiety during the encounter. For at any minute something could go wrong. A fellow Iowan might emerge from a hut: the chief might show them his Sears catalogue. (If the failures are 'wrong' enough as these are, they might still be turned to account as rueful conversation pieces: "There we were expecting the chief to bring us a churinga and he shows up with a Sears catalogue!"). They have snatched victory from disaster but their experience always runs the danger of failure.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 100 Theory of Knowledge They need the ethnologist to certify their experience as genuine. This is borne out by their behaviour when the three of them return for the next corn dance. During the dance, the couple do not watch the goings-on; instead they watch the ethnologist! Their highest hope is that their friend should find the dance interesting. And if he should show signs of true absorption, an interest in the goings-on so powerful that he becomes oblivious of his friends - then their cup is full. 'Didn’t we tell you?' they say at last. What they want from him is not ethnological explanations; all they want is his approval.

What has taken place is a radical loss of sovereignty over that which is as much theirs as it is the ethnologist’s. The fault does not lie with the ethnologist. He has no wish to stake a claim to the village; in fact, he desires the opposite: he will bore his friends to death by telling them about the village and the meaning of the folkways. A degree of sovereignty has been surrendered by the couple. It is the nature of the loss, moreover, that they are not aware of the loss, beyond a certain uneasiness. (Even if they read this and admitted it, it would be very difficult for them to bridge the gap in their confrontation of the world. Their consciousness of the corn dance cannot escape their consciousness of their consciousness, so that with the onset of the first direct enjoyment, their higher consciousness pounces and certifies: 'Now you are doing it! Now you are really living!' and, in certifying the experience, sets it at nought.)

Their basic placement in the world is such that they recognise a priority of title of the expert over his particular department of being. The whole horizon of being is staked out by 'them,' the experts. The highest satisfaction of the sightseer (not merely the tourist but any layman seer of sights) is that his sight should be certified as genuine. The worst of this impoverishment is that there is no sense of impoverishment. The surrender of title is so complete that it never even occurs to one to reassert title. A poor man may envy the rich man, but the sightseer does not envy the expert. When a caste system becomes absolute, envy disappears Yet the caste of layman-expert is not the fault of the expert. It is due altogether to the eager surrender of sovereignty by the layman so that he may take up the role not of the person but of the consumer.

Questions

1. We are all familiar with the phrases 'This is it' and 'Now we are really living'. At face value they seem to indicate little more than expressions of excitement. The author suggests draws a deeper conclusion. Describe what you think he means.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 101 Theory of Knowledge Is there anything from your own experience (not necessarily related to travel) which confirms or denies this?

2. How is this related to the notion that for the tourists their 'experience always runs the danger of failure.'? How can an experience fail?

Have any of your experiences ever failed? Have any ever succeeded?

3. Why does the author suggest that there is no way of avoiding what he describes as 'impoverishment'? Do you think he is correct?

4. In what, if any ways could animals feel 'impoverished' in the same way that we might do? Does this tell us anything about how language and culture relate to the human experience?

The Body-Rituals of the Nacirema

The anthropologist has become so familiar with the diversity of ways in which different peoples behave in similar situations that he is not apt to be surprised by even the most exotic customs. In fact, if all of the logically possible combinations of behaviour have not been found somewhere in the world, he is apt to suspect that they must be present in some yet undescribed tribe. This point has, in fact, been expressed with respect to clan organisation by Murdock. In this light, the magical beliefs and practices of the Nacirema present such unusual aspects that it seems desirable to describe them as an example of the extremes to which human behaviour can go.

Professor Linton first brought the ritual of the Nacirema to the attention of anthropologists twenty years ago, but the culture of this people is still very poorly understood. They are a North American group living in the territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles. Little is known of their origin, although tradition states that they came from the east. According to Nacirema mythology, their nation was originated by a culture hero, Notgnihsaw, who is otherwise known for two great feats of strength - the throwing of a piece of wampum

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 102 Theory of Knowledge across the river Pa-To-Mac and the chopping down of a cherry tree in which the Spirit of Truth resided. Nacirema culture is characterised by a highly developed market economy which has evolved in a rich natural habitat. While much of the people's time is devoted to economic pursuits, a large part of the fruits of these labours and a considerable portion of the day are spent in ritual activity. The focus of this activity is the human body, the appearance and health of which loom as a dominant concern in the ethos of the people. While such a concern is certainly not unusual, its ceremonial aspects and associated philosophy are unique.

The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. Incarcerated in such a body, man's only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of the powerful influences of ritual and ceremony. Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses and, in fact, the opulence of a house of often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centres it possesses. Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, but the shrine rooms of the more wealthy are walled with stone. Poorer families imitate the rich by applying pottery plaques to their shrine walls.

While each family has at least one such shrine, the rituals associated with it are not family ceremonies but are private and secret. The rites are normally only discussed with children, and then only during the period when they are being initiated into these mysteries. I was able, however, to establish sufficient rapport with the natives to examine these shrines and to have the rituals described to me.

The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest which is built into the wall. In this chest are kept the many charms and magical potions without which no native believes he could live. These preparations are secured from a variety of specialised practitioners. The most powerful of these are the medicine men, whose assistance must be rewarded with substantial gifts. However, the medicine men do not provide the curative potions for their clients, but decide what the ingredients should be and then write them down in an ancient and secret language. This writing is understood only by the medicine men and by the herbalists who, for another gift, provide the required charm.

The charm is not disposed of after it has served its purpose, but is placed in the charm- box of the household shrine. As these magical materials are specific for certain ills, and the real or imagined maladies of the people are many, the charm-box is usually full to overflowing. The magical packets are so numerous that people forget what their purposes were and fear to use them again. While the natives are very vague on this point, we can only assume that the idea in retaining all the old magical materials is that their presence in the

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 103 Theory of Knowledge charm-box, before which the body rituals are conducted, will in some way protect the worshipper.

Beneath the charm-box is a small font. Each day every member of the family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution. The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure.

In the hierarchy of magical practitioners, and below the medicine men in prestige, are specialists whose designation is best translated 'holy-mouth-men'. The Nacirema have an almost pathological horror of and fascination with the mouth, the condition of which is believed to have a supernatural influence on all social relationships. Were it not for the rituals of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desert them and their lovers reject them. They also believe that a strong relationship exists between oral and moral characteristics. For example, there is a ritual ablution of the mouth for children which is supposed to improve their moral fibre.

The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite the fact that these people are so punctilious about care of the mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and them moving the bundle in a highly formalised series of gestures.

In addition to the private mouth-rite, the people seek out a holy-mouth-man once or twice a year. These practitioners have an impressive set of paraphernalia, consisting of a variety of augers, awls, probes and prods. The use of these objects in the exorcism of the evils of the mouth involves almost unbelievable ritual torture of the client. The holy-mouth-man opens the client's mouth and, using the above mentioned tools, enlarges any holes which decay may have created in the teeth. Magical materials are put into these holes. If there are no naturally occurring holes in the teeth, large sections of one or more teeth are gouged out so that the supernatural substance can be applied. In the client's view, the purpose of these ministrations is to arrest decay and to draw friends. The extremely sacred and traditional character of the rite is evident in the fact that the natives return to the holy-mouth-men year after year, despite the fact that their teeth continue to decay.

It is to be hoped that, when a thorough study of the Nacirema is made, there will be careful inquiry into the personality structure of these people. One has but to watch the gleam in the eye of a holy-mouth-man, as he jabs an awl into an exposed nerve, to suspect

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 104 Theory of Knowledge that a certain amount of sadism is involved. If this can be established, a very interesting pattern emerges, for most of the population shows definite masochistic tendencies. It was to these that Professor Linton referred in discussing a distinctive part of the daily body ritual which is performed only by men. This part of the rite involves scraping and lacerating the surface of the face with a sharp instrument. Special women's rites are performed only four times during each lunar month, but what they lack in frequency is made up in barbarity. As part of this ceremony, women bake their heads in small ovens for about an hour. The theoretically interesting point is what seems to be a preponderantly masochistic people have developed sadistic specialists.

The medicine men have an imposing temple, or latipso, in every community of any size. The more elaborate ceremonies required to treat very sick patients can only be performed at this temple. These ceremonies involve not only the thaumaturgy but a permanent group of vestal maidens who move sedately about the temple chambers in distinctive costume and headdress.

The latipso ceremonies are so harsh that it is phenomenal that a fair proportion of the really sick natives who enter the temple ever recover. Small children whose indoctrination is still incomplete have been known to resist attempts to take them to the temple because 'that is where you go to die'. Despite this fact, sick adults are not only willing but eager to undergo the protracted ritual purification, if they can afford to do so. No matter how ill the supplicant or how grave the emergency, the guardians of many temples will not admit a client if he cannot give a rich gift to the custodian. Even after one has gained admission and survived the ceremonies, the guardians will not permit the neophyte to leave until he makes still another gift.

The supplicant entering the temple is first stripped of all his or her clothes. In everyday life the Nacirema avoids exposure of his body and its natural functions. Bathing and excretory acts are performed only in the secrecy of the household shrine, where they are ritualised as part of the body-rites. Psychological shock results from the fact that body secrecy is suddenly lost upon entry into the latipso. A man, whose own wife has never seen him in the excretory act, suddenly finds himself naked and assisted by a vestal maiden while he performs his natural functions into a sacred vessel. The sort of ceremonial treatment is necessitated by the fact that the excreta are used by a diviner to ascertain the course and nature of the client's sickness. Female clients, on the other hand, find their naked bodies are subject to the scrutiny, manipulation and prodding of the medicine men. Few supplicants in the temple are well enough to do anything but lie on their hard beds. The daily ceremonies, like the rites of holy-mouth-men, involve discomfort and torture. With ritual precision, the vestals awaken their miserable charges each dawn and roll them about on their beds of pain while performing ablutions, in the formal movements of which the

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 105 Theory of Knowledge maidens are highly trained. At other times they insert magic wands into the supplicant's mouth or force him to eat substances which are supposed to be healing. From time to time the medicine men come to their clients and jab magically treated needles into their flesh. The fact that these temple ceremonies may not cure, and may even kill the neophyte, in no way decreases the people's faith in the medicine men.

There remains one other kind of practitioner, known as a 'listener'. This witch-doctor has the power to exorcise the devils that lodge in the heads of the people who have been bewitched. The Nacirema believe that parents bewitch their own children. Mothers are particularly suspected of putting a curse on the children while teaching them the secret body-rituals. The counter-magic of the witch doctor is unusual in its lack of ritual. The patients simply tells the 'listener' all his troubles and fears, beginning with the earliest difficulties he can remember. The memory displayed by the Nacirema is these exorcism ceremonies is truly remarkable. It is not uncommon for the patient to bemoan the rejection he felt upon being weaned as a babe, and a few individuals even see their troubles going back to the traumatic effects of their own birth. In conclusion, mention must be made of certain practices which have their base in native aesthetics but which depend on the pervasive aversion to the natural body and its functions. There are ritual fasts to make fat people thin and ceremonial feasts to make thin people fat. Still other rites are used to make women's breast larger if they are small and smaller if they are large. General dissatisfaction with breast shape is symbolised by the fact that the ideal form is virtually outside the range of human variation. A few women afflicted with almost inhuman hypermammary development are so idolised they they make a handsome living by simply going from village to village and permitting the natives to stare at them for a fee.

Reference has already been made to the fact that excretory functions are ritualised, routinised and relegated to secrecy. Natural reproductive functions are similarly distorted. Intercourse is taboo as a topic and scheduled as an act. Efforts are made to avoid pregnancy by the use of magical materials or by limiting intercourse to certain phases of the moon. Conception is actually very infrequent. When pregnant, women dress so as to hide their condition. Parturition takes place in secret, often without friends or relatives to assist, and the majority of women do not nurse their infants. Our review of the ritual life of the Nacirema has certainly shown them to be a magic- ridden people. It is hard to understand how they have managed to exist so long under the burdens which they have imposed upon themselves. But even such exotic customs as these take on real meaning when they are viewed with the insight provided by Malinowski when he wrote: Looking from afar and from above, from our high place of safety in the developed civilisation, it is easy to see all the crudity and irrelevance of magic, But without its

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 106 Theory of Knowledge power and guidance early man could not have mastered his practical difficulties as he has done, nor could man have advanced to the higher stages of civilisation.

Life on the Mississippi Mark Headlee

In the late nineteenth century huge steamboats sailed up and down the great rivers in America. Unlike today there were many dangers on the river from such things as changing channels, shallow areas and sharp rock on the river bed. with no government authority to monitor the river, and no signs along the course, it was the job of the pilot to navigate these dangers. The job took years to learn and the skill lay largely in 'reading' the state of the river from the surface.

The novice riverboat pilot and his friend were watching the sunset, and the friend found the river incredibly beautiful. But where the friend saw loveliness, the pilot in training saw something different. This passage is from Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi.

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book - a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it, painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading matter.

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something too. I had lost that which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river. I still kept in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steam-boating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came flowing, black and conspicuous; in one place a long slanting mark lay sparking on the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling rings, that were as many tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded and the sombre shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long ruffled trail that shone

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 107 Theory of Knowledge like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendour that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment with some new marvel of colouring.

I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. But as I have said, there came a day when... if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented inwardly, after this fashion: The sun means that we are going to have wind tomorrow; that floating log means that the river is rising; that slanting mark on the river reflects a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark? No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. Since those days I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply comment on her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?

We are presented with two ways of looking at the river. We might call each way of looking at the river a 'paradigm'. The same facts are seen completely differently; the paradigm provides a way to interpret the scene.

 Are understanding something and appreciating something aesthetically, mutually exclusive as Twain suggests? Give an example to support your answer.

 Which of the two paradigms leads to a better, deeper understanding of the river?

 Has the river-boat pilot 'gained most' or 'lost most' by mastering the language of the river?

With this story Mark Twain illustrates the coming of vision that accompanies the learning of a new paradigm. When one learns a new paradigm, the world is quite literally seen anew. Describe an example of a paradigm shift that you have experienced yourself.

The Myth of the Machine

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 108 Theory of Knowledge from: Illusion and Reality by David Smail

There is one particular mechanical medium - television - which shapes the nature of our reality more than almost any other, though most of us, I suspect, hardly notice the pervasiveness of its influence since it has become such an established part of our experience. In fact, television is the near-perfect expression of our self-deceiving urge to take our mythology for the truth. Its greatest asset in this respect is its plausibility: seeing is believing, the camera cannot lie. And yet, in so credibly putting before us the world in which we wish to believe, it distorts and betrays just about every truth and value of the non-magical, non-mechanical world in which, unless we actually do turn into machines, we are still constrained to live. Television pacifies, deludes and bemuses us to such an extent that we can scarcely even look at the real world without wanting to adjust its contrast and colour balance (looking at some slightly purple coloured fields not long ago, I found myself actually thinking that something must be wrong with the colour control).

Television fulfils our wildest magical dreams while appearing to present us with reality. Everything which offends our mythology can be laundered out of what is presented to us through the process of editing: the aged and ugly, the sick and deformed will not be invited to appear as contestants on the quiz shows; the unscripted outburst can be cut out of the recording, the camera can pick and choose what it wants us to see. The relatively unbounded money and power available to television production, combined with its technical possibilities, mean that we are bombarded with magical images - ordinary people can be transported from their ordinary world and find themselves suddenly confronting their relatives in Australia, being flown to New York, or presented after fifty minutes of inane entertainment with a shining new car which is driven into the very room where they stand by a girl in a bikini.

If asked, of course, we would claim to have insight‚ into our addiction to this cultural diet; we would claim to know that it is ‘only entertainment’.. But this is as self-deceiving as saying that one knows one’s ‘symptoms’ (of psychological distress) are ‘silly’, for what we fail properly to notice and take account of is that we are indeed addicted, and that there must be reasons for it. Why, for example, does so much highly expensive ‘peak viewing time’ get spent on presenting to us the odd and the quirky: astrologers who foretell the lives of royal babies, eccentric ladies who feel that they can communicate with their cats, vicars who imitate the sounds made by railway trains? Could it not be because these and others like them have their own special place in constructing for us a kind of comfortably whimsical world in which we like to believe (continuous perhaps with the fairytale world we like to create for our children)?

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 109 Theory of Knowledge Television is not, however, particularly concerned not to offend our traditional moral values (it is our mythology it preserves at all costs): the endless stimulation of voyeuristic sexual interest, prurience and violence (epitomized in the official speculation that, with the advent of cable television, shift workers could have the benefit of one or two channels of non-stop pornography) testify to the fact that television is not a conventional moral concern. The tacit aim of television, rather, is to keep us from catching a glimpse of the world in which we actually live, the world in which real pain, real love, actual death, loss and despair, real struggle and conflict, economic and social deprivation play such a prominent part. Instead, television feeds our passive torpor by permitting us to sink into the semi- conscious world of our most primitive dreams and fantasies, in which we may indulge the half-formed urges for personal, tribal and sexual conquest which slosh about in the sumps of our minds. Any visiting Martian anthropologist intent on gauging our values from the way we spend our spare time would surely be appalled at what television reveals as our major preoccupations.

Time and space are, in television, also given distorted, magical dimensions, the unspoken aim of which seems to be to insulate us from, and eventually blunt, our natural emotional reactions. Images of corpses crawling with flies will be followed in a flash by one of an old lady winning the football pools. Hardly has one had time to focus one’s eyes on a scene in which desperate citizens are being bludgeoned by riot police when the image is replaced by that of the arrival at some airport of an international superstar dressed in a glittering suit. We may be reassured that none of this is real because it flits across our consciousness so rapidly that we have not time to digest its significance before our emotions are jerked away and engaged in some quite different sphere. With a kind of convoluted hypocrisy, television can even remove from us the responsibility for looking at what it shows us - I remember a news reporter, even as the cameras dwelt on the tattered remnants of people and their personal effects at the scene of an appalling air crash, berating in tones of the highest moral indignation those ‘ghouls’ who had driven out to inspect the event for themselves.

The exigencies of programme timing mean that no issue, however complex or interesting, can be aired beyond its allotted span. In fact, this means that complexity and interest become extinct qualities: the pundits and personalities, the ‘experts’‚ who will be invited and reinvited to present their views, are those for whom interest, profundity, scholarship, moral sensibility and complexity can be sacrificed to ‘image’. The real people may only be glimpsed occasionally, and then by mistake, but the images we see are of instant people with instant ideas and instant reactions to the imperious demands of television technology; they bear as much relation to real people as instant potatoes do to real potatoes. Our mythical world demands blandness in all things, easy solutions, the ability to flit as fast as light from the potentially painful to the reassuring.

Television feeds our passivity through its ability to remove from us the need for patience and attentiveness. Because of the technical possibilities offered by editing, replays, etc., the actual texture of experience is altered, both on and off the screen. For example, sporting events become ‘action-packed’ series of incidents, and real, non-televisual sport has to be changed - simplified, made more ‘spectacular’, less ‘boring’, more instantly consumable - in order to accord with the expectations generated in both spectators and players by television. Again, we approach in this way the binary, all or nothing world of the computer, in which there is no time for subtlety, patience or ambiguity.

Attending to detail, effortfully trying to understand, is an active process, and like all active processes relatively painful. Attention to content, to detail, is in television sacrificed to fascination with style. Politics becomes a gladiatorial spectacle in which the struggle for power, or the occurrence of ‘splits’, absorbs all the interest which might otherwise be invested in how and for what that power might be used. What people have to say becomes far less important than how they say it. Partly to preserve us from the ‘heaviness’ of their subject matter, and partly perhaps to enhance their status as magicians, the pundits must display strange gestures, quirky mannerisms or funny voices if they are to be able to ‘explain’ to us the mysteries of botany, or astronomy, or ‘science’ in general. There is no place on the television screen for the serious and the concerned (unless it is mock seriousness and concern) for these are the kind of qualities of spontaneous subjectivity which demand hesitant, often ambiguous complexity. The fabricated personae of television ‘people’ are the necessary outcome of the posed self- consciousness which the medium demands, and yet for most of us these are the ‘people’ we ‘know’ best, the acquaintances we have in common with millions (this, of course, gives a quite bogus, simplified structure to our social existence, distracting us from the painful complexity of our relations with real people who, in comparison, are likely to be enigmas to us).

The pace of ‘serious’ programmes is, in terms of what we are asked to digest, extremely easy. Again, the lumps are ironed out, the contentious issues ignored. Even with the aid of a video recorder, you cannot easily flick back and forth through the material (as you can with a book), so that the effort has to be taken out of understanding through repetition and over-simplification, and your being offered nothing which demands questioning or reflection. The television viewer exists in a world which is complete and finished, ready to be transmitted in easy stages. He or she is there to consume the world, not to create it.

Because we may consider the camera lens as objective and impartial, we may feel it scarcely rational to entertain the idea that television embodies values of its own (ultimately, of course, these are the values with which our split-off and denied - inverted -

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 111 Theory of Knowledge subjectivity has invested it). Television imposes, certainly, its own unwritten etiquette, and its unstated but almost absolute power to determine our reality leads to a quite general and apparently unquestioning acceptance of its manners. Central to these is precisely television’s implicit claim to objectivity, so that the interviewer, who, largely unseen, becomes the camera’s voice, is enabled to ask questions which would in any other context be considered offensive, impertinent, or stupid. But, so it seems, his (or hers) is the voice of objective inquiry and may not itself be questioned. The objects of such inquiry, transfixed by both camera and voice, thrown perhaps suddenly into the bright arena of ‘real’ reality (as against the shoddy world of everyday life), stutter and stammer and search their verbal repertoire for any kind of idiocy or irrelevance rather than fail to answer, or ask a question of their own. The camera, in other words, exacts the instant and willing abandonment of the person’s last shred of subjectivity. The grief-stricken widow will actually pause in her weeping to tell the voice ‘how she feels’; the cornered politician will overlook the hectoring moralism of the voice in order to try to justify a position which, between them, the voice and the camera have already rendered untenable. Association with a television camera seems to justify almost any kind of intrusion. Occasionally, presumably, a person may rebel against the insolent impositions of the camera-voice (by asking it a question, for example), but if so, no doubt this evidence of subjective power will be edited from the tape before it gets a chance to subvert us.

The passivity of the person in relation to television is expressed in almost beautiful symbolism by the development of cable television. Like a great umbilical cord, the cable snakes to your set from some huge central placenta, promising to relive you of the necessity for activity, creativity, thought, or even, eventually, movement. Passive consumption as opposed to active involvement is already the keynote of pre-cable television but the multiplicity of channels offered by the cable means that you can be almost infinitely capricious with the choice of your diet if too heavy demands are made on your digestion. And eventually, once the potential for ‘information technology’ has been realized through your cable, you will not have to move from your sofa to order your breakfast.

Television is the world of the ‘image’, and the camera constitutes the eye of the Other which renders self-conscious all those who become aware of its gaze. Television’s ability to turn us into objects - to realize, that is, one of our most profound magical wishes - may go some way to explaining our readiness to accord its world a fundamental reality and to accept the necessity it imposes upon us to make the world of our experience fit in with its technical constraints and demands. People will distort the natural space-time of their experience in order to accommodate the needs of television - even ‘spontaneous’ expressions of joy or sorrow may be delayed until the cameras arrive on the scene. The dimensions in which ordinary activities take place, the timing of celebrations (as in pre- recorded ‘Christmas’ shows), the appropriateness of human conduct (as when junior school

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 112 Theory of Knowledge children are taught - no doubt as part of a ‘training’ in ‘media skills’ - to smile at cameras or talk to ‘people’ they will never meet) may all be altered to conform to what once might have seemed the limitations of television technology. But those limitations now come to be accepted as the prestigious accoutrements of a manufactured reality which promises to provide us with objective being. We are ready, it seems, to trade in the natural world of our experience, to sacrifice spontaneity and unreflective absorption with each other and the world, for a self-consciously fabricated image of how we should like things to be done. In doing this we have failed to notice the quite untrammelled licence we have given to our magico-religious dream of escaping from our subjectivity. We smile indulgently at those ‘primitive’ peoples who refuse to be photographed for fear of losing their souls, when in fact we might envy their still having souls to lose. As for us, we become the mechanical terminals of the machines we have created.

Indeed, it is hard now to believe that in many ways we have not actually achieved the state of affairs in which the machines control us rather than we them. Quite apart from television, which hypnotically draws people out of interaction with each other, there seem to be endless ways in which we become plugged into machines which render us oblivious to our human surroundings. It is scarcely possible any longer to find a pub in which conversation is not drowned out by the juke box, the electronic explosions of the space invaders and the bleeping of the fruit machines. Like automata ourselves, we stand in front of these machines, the movements of our eyes and limbs stereotyped and repetitive, controlled by a mechanical program which determines precisely the limits of our freedom. Already quite possibly slightly deafened by discos, young people walk or cycle down the street with headphones clamped to their ears cut off from any possibility of mutual relationship with their world. Girls in offices sit with docile attentiveness before the balefully glowing green screens of computer terminals and word processors which type fake ‘personal’ letters to potential customers whose names have been swallowed up into the software (no ‘neurotic’ dislocation of words from reality could be more poignant than the way in which we have learned to speak about the ‘personalized’ communications of computers).

Almost every human ability and characteristic which can be mechanized has been siphoned off from our subjectivity and translated into plastic and electronic circuitry. And we, enslaved to the machines, passively consume from them the fruits of the very abilities of which they have robbed us - more accurately, of which we have robbed ourselves and built into them. With our willing connivance, the machines, and of course the professionals and experts whose interest it is to tend them, have taken over and objectified the subjectivity of ‘ordinary’ people‚ who become emptied-out objects unable to reintegrate what is rightfully theirs but who can, for a price, effortlessly consume what once they might have been able effortfully to create. No longer needing, for example, to make music, people can

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 113 Theory of Knowledge surround themselves with stacks of stereophonic gadgetry from which they can hear music as digitally faultless as technology can make it. ‘Entertainment’, as well as ‘communication’, have become the prerogatives of a tiny minority of professional experts (the globally familiar celebrities and pundits) whose already highly practised abilities are electronically perfected and offered for mass consumption to us, the public, who no longer see music, art, discussion of even thought as any part of our own ‘skills’, and who, as unprotestingly as battery chickens (themselves, let it be noted, animals we have mechanized), accept an ever more narrowly standardized cultural diet fed to us through our brushed aluminium hoppers.

In this way we become mere shells, passively consuming via a highly evolved technology an artificial world which is increasingly insulated from any effort we might make to impinge upon it. This is not the result of the evil machinations of any particular group or class (though clearly some people’s interests will be served by this stage of affairs more than others‚), but rather the upshot of a magic-infused mythology in which to a greater or lesser extent we all collude, and which may well have its roots in the greedy passivity we all experience as infants.

Since, however, the real world continues to exist, we find ourselves from time to time rudely awakened from our wishful dreams to confront issues which cause us unexpected and incomprehensible pain. Far from being an indication of our own malfunctioning, this may yet provide us with the spur we need to recognize and confront the reality of the world, to accept responsibility for the mechanized impoverishment of our lives, and to reassert our subjectivity. But, predictably, our first impulse is to look for ‘technical solutions’ to our troubled dreams.

The Soul of the Mark 3 Beast Hunt is an attorney working for Anatol Klane. He is discussing Klane’s attitude to life with Dirksen.

"Anatol’s attitude is straightforward enough," Hunt said. "He considers biological life as a complex form of machinery." She shrugged, but not indifferently. "I admit being fascinated by the man, but I can’t accept that philosophy." "Think about it," Hunt suggested. "You know that according to neo-evolutionary theory, animal bodies are formed by a completely mechanistic process. Each cell is a microscopic machine, a tiny component part integrated into a larger, more complex device."

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 114 Theory of Knowledge Dirksen shook her head. "But animal and human bodies are more than machines. The reproductive act itself makes them different." "Why," Hunt asked, "is it so wonderful that a biological machine should beget another biological machine? It requires no more creative thought for a female mammal to conceive and give birth than for an automatic mill to spew forth engine blocks." Dirksen’s eyes flashed. "Do you think the automatic mill feels anything when it gives birth?" she challenged. "Its metal is severely stressed, and eventually the mill wears out." "I don’t think that’s what I mean by ‘feeling.’" "Nor I," Hunt agreed. "But it isn’t always easy to know who or what has feelings. On the farm where I was raised, we had a brood sow with an unfortunate tendency to crush most of her offspring to death - accidentally, I imagine. Then she ate her children’s corpses. Would you say she had maternal feelings?" "I’m not talking about pigs!" "We could talk about humans in the same breath. Would you care to estimate how many new-born babies drown in toilets?" Dirksen was too appalled to speak. After some silence Hunt continued. "What you see in Klane as preoccupation with machinery is just a different perspective. Machines are another life form to him, a form he himself can create from plastic and metal. And he is honest enough to regard himself as a machine." "A machine begetting machines," Dirksen quipped. "Next thing, you’ll be calling him a mother!" "No." Hunt said. "He’s an engineer. And however crude an engineered machine is in comparison with the human body, it represents a higher act than simple biological reproduction, for it is at least the result of a thought process." "I ought to know better than to argue with a lawyer." she conceded, still upset. "But I just do not relate to machines! Emotionally speaking, there is a difference between the way we treat animals and the way we treat machines that defies logical explanation. I mean, I can break a machine and it really doesn’t bother me, but I cannot kill an animal." "Have you ever tried?" "Sort of," Dirksen recalled. "The apartment I shared at college was infested with mice, so I set a trap. But when I finally caught one, I couldn’t empty the trap - the poor dead thing looked so hurt and harmless. So I buried it in the backyard, trap and all, and decided that living with mice was far more pleasant than killing them."

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 115 Theory of Knowledge "Yet you do eat meat" Hunt pointed out. "So your aversion isn’t so much to killing per se as it is to doing it yourself." "Look," she said, irritated. "That argument misses a point about basic respect for life. We have something in common with animals. You do see that, don’t you?" "Klane has a theory that you might find interesting." Hunt persisted. "He would say that real or imagined biological kinship has nothing to do with your ‘respect for life.’ In actual fact, you don’t like to kill simply because the animal resists death. It cries, struggles, or looks sad - it pleads with you not to destroy it. And it is your mind, by the way, not your biological body, that hears an animal’s plea: She looked at him, unconvinced. Hunt pushed back his chair and stood up. "Come with me." …………………………………………………………………

A half hour later Dirksen found herself entering Klane’s house in the company of his attorney, for whose car the entrance gate had automatically moved aside, and at whose touch the keyless front door had immediately opened. She followed him to the basement laboratory, where Hunt opened one of several dozen cabinets and brought out something that looked like a large aluminium beetle with small, coloured indicator lamps and a few mechanical protrusions about its smooth surface. He turned it over, showing Dirksen three rubber wheels on its underside. Stencilled on the flat metal base plate were the words MARK III BEAST. Hunt set the device on the tiled floor, simultaneously toggling a tiny switch on its underbelly. With a quiet humming sound the toy began to move in a searching pattern back and forth across the floor. It stopped momentarily, then headed for an electrical outlet near the base of one large chassis. It paused before the socket, extended a pair of prongs from an opening in its metallic body, probed and entered the energy source. Some of the lights on its body began to glow green, and a noise almost like the purring of a cat emanated from within. Dirksen regarded the contrivance with interest. "A mechanical animal. It’s cute - but what’s the point of it?" Hunt reached over to a nearby bench for a hammer and held it out to her. "I’d like you to kill it." "What are you talking about?" Dirksen said in mild alarm. "Why should I kill . . . break that . . . That machine?" She backed away, refusing to take the weapon. "Just as an experiment," Hunt replied. "I tried it myself some years ago at Klane’s behest and found it instructive." "What did you learn?"

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 116 Theory of Knowledge "Something about the meaning of life and death." Dirksen stood looking at Hunt suspiciously. "The ‘beast’ has no defences that can hurt you," he assured her. "Just don’t crash into anything while you’re chasing it." He held out the hammer. She stepped tentatively forward, took the weapon, looked sidelong at the peculiar machine purring deeply as it sucked away at the electrical current. She walked toward it, stooped down and raised the hammer. "But . . . it’s eating," she said, turning to Hunt. He laughed. Angrily she took the hammer in both hands, raised it, and brought it down hard. But with a shrill noise like a cry of fright the beast had pulled its mandibles from the socket and moved suddenly backwards. The hammer cracked solidly into the floor, on a section of tile that had been obscured from view by the body of the machine. The tile was pockmarked with indentations. Dirksen looked up. Hunt was laughing. The machine had moved two meters away and stopped, eyeing her. No, she decided, it was not eyeing her. Irritated with herself, Dirksen grasped her weapon and stalked cautiously forward. The machine backed away, a pair of red lights on the front of it glowing alternately brighter and dimmer at the approximate alphawave frequency of the human brain. Dirksen lunged, swung the hammer, and missed… Ten minutes later she returned, flushed and gasping, to Hunt. Her body hurt in several places where she had bruised it on jutting machinery, and her head ached where she had cracked it under a workbench. "It’s like trying to catch a big rat! When do its stupid batteries run down anyway?" Hunt checked his watch. I’d guess it has another half hour, provided you keep it busy." He pointed beneath a workbench, where the beast had found another electrical outlet. "But there is an easier way to get it." "I’ll take it." "Put the hammer down and pick it up." "Just . . . pick it up?" "Yes. It only recognises danger from its own kind - in this case the steel hammer head. It’s programmed to trust unarmed protoplasm." She laid the hammer on a bench, walked slowly over to the machine. It didn’t move. The purring had stopped; pale amber lights glowed softly. Dirksen reached down and touched it tentatively, felt a gentle vibration. She gingerly picked it up with both hands. Its lights changed to a clear green colour, and through the comfortable warmth of its metal skin she could feel the smooth purr of motors.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 117 Theory of Knowledge "So now what do I do with the stupid thing?" she asked irritably. "Oh, lay him on his back on the workbench. He’ll be quite helpless in that position, and you can bash him at your leisure." "I can do without the anthropomorphisms," Dirksen muttered as she followed Hunt’s suggestion, determined to see this thing through. As she inverted the machine and set it down, its lights changed back to red. Wheels spun briefly, stopped. Dirksen picked up the hammer again, quickly raised it and brought it down in a smooth arc which struck the helpless machine off-centre, damaging one of its wheels and flipping it right side up again. There was a metallic scraping sound from the damaged wheel, and the beast began spinning in a fitful circle. A snapping sound came from its underbelly; the machine stopped, lights glowing dolefully. Dirksen pressed her lips together tightly, raised the hammer for a final blow. But as she started to bring it down there came from within the beast a sound, a soft crying wail that rose and fell like a baby whimpering. Dirksen dropped the hammer and stepped back, her eyes on the blood-red pool of lubricating fluid forming on the table beneath the creature. She looked at Hunt, horrified. "It’s . . . it’s…" "Just a machine," Hunt said, seriously now. "Like these, its evolutionary predecessors." His gesturing hands took in the array of machinery in the workshop around them, mute and menacing watchers. "But unlike them it can sense its own doom and cry out for succour." "Turn it off," she said flatly. Hunt walked to the table, tried to move its tiny power switch. "You’ve jammed it, I’m afraid." He picked up the hammer from the floor where it had fallen. "Care to administer the death blow?" She stepped back, shaking her as Hunt raised the hammer. "Couldn’t you fix --" There was a brief metallic crunch. She winced, turned her head. The wailing had stopped, and they returned upstairs in silence.

The Parable of the Gardener Based on an idea by Anthony Flew

A brother and sister return to their family home after a long absence. Nobody has lived there for years, but they go back for a holiday every now and then. In the garden they find, to their surprise that among the weeds a few of the old plants are surprisingly vigorous. In fact as they look at the other deserted gardens around them, theirs seems very different indeed. It seems almost planned and tended.

NSA : Theory of Knowledge Geneva 2004 118 Theory of Knowledge The brother says “A gardener must have been coming and looking after these plants” but when they ask their neighbours they find that none of them have ever seen anyone working in the garden. The brother says that the gardener must have worked while people slept, but the sister replies “Why would he do that? Someone would have heard him and besides, anybody who cared about the plants would have kept down these weeds." The brother looks around, sees how beautiful it is and says “But it’s so lovely here! There is purpose and design in this garden. If we look carefully enough I am sure we will find evidence that the garden has been tended lovingly,” And so they examine the garden ever so carefully. It is a very big garden, and as they look they find that while some of it is ever so beautiful, there are parts which seem untended, perhaps even ruined on purpose. The brother takes both parts as evidence of the gardener, but the sister remains unconvinced. “I am sure that this is just natural” she says. “We do not need a gardener to explain this” The brother and sister sit up at night and watch the garden carefully, but no gardener is seen. “Perhaps he is an invisible gardener” says the brother. So they set up an electrified barbed-wire fence. But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The brother is still convinced. “There is a gardener” he maintains “a gardener who is invisible, intangible, insensitive to electric shocks, a gardener who makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves. Otherwise how do you explain why this garden is so different to the others?” The sister replies “I can’t explain why it is so different, but just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?” Consequently, after all this, when the brother says “I still believe a gardener comes” and the sister says “I don’t believe there is a gardener” their different words now reflect no difference as to what they have found in the garden and no difference as to what they would find in the garden if they looked further. Is there really much difference between the belief of the brother and the sister?

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