I was listening to David Horowitz justifying his persecution of Social Sciences departments. He made a comment that a particular course was not factual, but expressed opinions. He justified his attack on the professors truthfulness on the grounds that the views expressed were "false". He claimed that the views were false because they were similar to ones expressed by Karl Marx. His reasoning was that if the view was discredited that the view must therefore be false.
I can't find the URL or I already would have posted on this earlier. His reasoning is wrong and his facts are wrong.
However, I'm glad I waited, because it turns out this is a larger issue than some right wing (or left wing) ideologue playing ad-hominem politics. After chewing on it a while I'm glad I couldn't find the URL because it doesn't matter the exact wording of his attack, this is a much larger issue that goes to the heart of how Science and human understanding march forward.
This all goes to the classic "blind man and the elephant" conundrum.
In my opinion; David Horowitz acts like a man wearing blinders. Like a donkey with a carrot dangling in front of him, and blinders to block any other view, he's charging ahead on his crusade to "get back" at all the people he thinks lied, betrayed, or hurt him, and he doesn't even realize that the issues are larger than the carrot dangling in front of his face and the faceless people hitting him with a stick as he moves forward.
The mistake he makes is to assume that if the conclusions of a view are incorrect that the view is incorrect. But science doesn't advance that way. A view is like a blind man encountering an elephant, or a human being encountering God, The Universe, everything. If something is "too big" to describe adequately then any one view is likely to be false by itself.
To describe this para-mathematically. If a system consists of a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z....etc. Any temporal description of the view that consists of less than all the members will be incorrect (false). A person who says that the alphabet is only a and b, has it wrong, even if literally he is on the money (alpha=a, beta=b). Therefore most views of complex systems; science, philosophy, politics, economics, history, are by themselves false views in the aggregate. That doesn't mean that a detailed description of "a" or "b" is wrong.
However, a person who describes a-f, has done the world a great service, if limited. A view is any description of a complex system that is less than complete. This can be either from focusing on a small region's details, or from focusing on describing the entire system in generalities. In either case information is sacrificed in order to form the view. In the overall view detail is lost. In the detailed view, connectedness, and overall information is lost. An expert on the Elephant's ear may see a parasol. Another expert may see a snake. The person generalizing may see a zoo.
Each view is a listing of attributes and actions, (a "scenario") and involves descriptive "approximations" of what is seen. A person looking at an Apple tree might draw a circle when he actually saw an apple. Each view contains falsifiable information. A circle only approximately looks like apple. A person (like Horowitz if he were more honest) might come along and say "that doesn't look anything like an apple!" The criticee should respond to criticism with improvement. That is the difference between science and Dogma. With practice, eventually that person might draw a good apple. His view of the forest may still be limited, but it is getting better. Eventually he might even see the worm chewing through his model. His drawing will never be good enough to eat, but it is still a apple from the tree of knowledge.
To get at the "whole truth" about life, therefore, one relies on increasingly accurate approximations or descriptions of reality. The information in those views is falsifiable, but that doesn't falsify the entire view. A painter drawing an apple on a hill can draw tiny circles for apples (or spots) and come up with a highly accurate view of that tree on the hill. A camera might not be able to do better, because views are limited, even when they are mechanical.
General descriptions depend on views too. Usually views that involve some kind of transformative description. For example, a view of a universal electronic health care record imagines some guy or gal going to a hospital and not having to tell his or her history all over again, the doctor having all his records at his fingertips so he doesn't have to redo X-rays taken the day before, and travelors and others being able to get needed health care without much more delay than if they were visiting their own doctor. The views result in a series of idealized actions.
A view in which one constructs an idealized scenario is called a "thought experiment." These kinds of thought experiments guide most generals when they are fighting a war, Einstein when he was figuring out relativity, and unfortunately defined Marxian and other economic views. A whole tree of apples is approximated by a "symbol" for a tree. The symbol couldn't exist without the tree, but once it is turned into a symbol it can be used to "abstract" or generalize about the subject "tree." An example of how to be environmentally friendly might image "Johnny Appleseed" who in the story planted apple trees all across the country for future travelors.
Since science flows by views. One improves them by falsifying the elements in them or by falsifying the results of the scenario and then looking to see which elements caused it to fail. An improved view of the apple is recorded in a progression from circle, to still life, to the wax apples in a restaurant advertisement, to Monsanto genetically engineered apples. Science is about describing reality. It is our blind attempt to "image" a massive elephant called life.
So Horowitz is practicing demagoguery not science, when he goes around attacking as "opinions" the analysis of professors in Social Studies and history. He is attacking views on the basis of their general failures, or failures in description. He doesn't realize (or maybe he does) that even though some of the conclusions of the original model might be false, the individual observations; the a,b,c,d... can still be true.
His unwillingness to falsify views based on their aggregate truthfulness is demonstrated by him claiming that "creation science" is real science while claiming that whole bodies of knowledge are false because some of the applications of its views are false. Rather than falsifying the individual elements or explaining why models as a whole are inadequate, he simply is engaging in the logically fallacious reasoning of saying that a system of a,b,c,d elements is false because it doesn't explain a,b,c,d,e,f. Worse he falsifies a system that describes a,b,c,d accurately because another system that posited a,b,c,d,e,f was false. It just doesn't work that way.
This doesn't advance anything except oppression, because he's simply laying the groundwork for others to remove those views (and the people who hold them) from the classroom. Horowitz isn't aiming at reducing or eliminating indoctination. He seems to be interested in replacing one form of indoctrination with another.
Marx was a thinker of the early to mid 19th century. His economic ideas are basically generalizations from observation, and they are still true, no matter how badly his opinions about those generalizations proved to be. It turns out that working people are more akin to Orwell's Horse (Animal Farm) than to the noble person that Marx thought he was championing, and that "class, cast, and tribal identity" are more intractible than he imagined them to be. But that doesn't mean that an analysis that employs some of this terminology is false, which he maintained in that speech I heard. The professor he attacked was probably more interested in recent work than Marx anyway.
The sad thing is that guys like Horowitz are practitioners of a kind of logic that is deadly to thinking, progress, and social peace. It masquerades as criticism, but it because of its cleaver/hammer mentality it actually simply muddies understanding. It is as if the various scientists studying the Elephant fell to fighting over who is right based on the adequacy or inadequacy of their explanations, even though all their views were each limited and incorrect.
Social Science and complex mathematical models are only as good as the assumptions and which factors are emergent at the time the view is taken. Views are like snapshots of reality. Combine enough of them and you can get a real narrative. One still studies Newton. His mathematics isn't falsified within the "view" it applies to. Right now large scale things are governed by "Einstein's theories" but small things involve quantum science. Clarifying the mathematics of the bridge between the two has proven a massive challenge because this is a complex system. It is even harder in other fields where the mathematics and experimentation aren't so easy to link.
Economics that relies on a stable banking system, for instance, is useless when the banking system is destabilized. A painkiller that works for you or me won't work for an addict already addicted to that painkiller. His attack on "science" is like attacks on "religion", "politics", "politicians". It is confusing the view with the elements of that view.
If he were genuinely interested in science he'd get involved in the debates.
Further reading:
http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/news/2702/a-universitys-decline
Chris
Posted by cholte at June 9, 2009 08:50 PM