Relabeling our Ignorance

When you hang out with medical students, you find yourself privy to all sorts of behind-the-scenes secrets of the profession, some of which make you feel like a savvy insider and others of which make you nervous about ever ending up in the care of a doctor. Somewhere between the former and the latter lies the following fun fact: When a doctor diagnoses you with an "idiopathic" illness, you might assume that implies he understands what's making you sick -- until you look up the definition of "idiopathic," and discover that it means "arising from unknown causes." That's right: when a doctor tells you that you have an "idiopathic T-cell deficiency," he's actually saying, "We have no idea why your T-cells are low." And if you doubt me, please allow me to direct you to the 1966 edition of Stedman's Medical Dictionary, which, to my immense amusement, describes the word idiopathic as "A high-flown term to conceal ignorance."

Having an official-sounding explanation that stands for "we have no freakin' clue" is just one particularly stark example of what I'm coming to see is a ubiquitous phenomenon: our tendency to believe we've resolved our ignorance when all we've really done is relabel it. Putting a name on the gaps in our knowledge gives us the feeling of knowing more, and if we don't think about it too hard, we might not notice that feeling is illusory.

Put another way, what feels like a solution to a mystery is often just a re-statement of the mystery itself. French playwright Moliere famously lampooned this phenomenon in his 1673 play La Malade Imaginaire, in which a character wonders why opium puts you to sleep, and the parody of a doctor explains that it is because the drug contains a "dormitive potency."

Actually, it's barely a parody. There's a rich tradition in the history of science of people attempting to explain a mysterious phenomenon by proposing a mysterious substance as its cause. For example, what causes life? The "theory" used to be that it was generated by a substance called élan vital (literally, "life force".) Saying "Life is caused by élan vital" felt more like a real explanation than saying "We don't know what causes life," even though we couldn't say anything else about élan vital other than the fact that it causes life. As evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley dryly remarked, "To say that a biological process is explained by élan vital is to say that the movement of a train is 'explained' by an élan locomotif of the engine."

There's nothing inherently wrong with using placeholders for what we don't know. "Dark matter" and "dark energy" play this role in astrophysics today. "Dark matter" is our label for whatever unknown substance is making stars orbit faster than we expected; "Dark energy" refers to whatever is causing the universe to expand faster than we expected. Physicists are well aware that "dark matter" and "dark energy" are placeholder terms, and they're actively trying to pin down what's really going on so that we won't need them anymore.

But placeholders become a problem when they fool you into thinking that you're finished with your explanation. And even though science as a whole may not forget that the phrase "dark energy" doesn't actually explain anything, I think individual people fall for this phenomenon all the time. We feel like we've explained something when we know the word for it, even if we don't know anything beyond the fact that this word is the "right" answer. When a kid asks, "Why does stuff fall down?" and his parents say "gravity", they think they've answered the question. But if someone asks them what "gravity" means, can they give an answer beyond "Uh... it's what makes things fall"? Knowing the right buzzword isn't the same as understanding.

Of course, any explanation you give for what gravity is ("an attraction between objects that is proportional to the product of their masses") immediately raises more questions ("What causes the attraction? Why did our universe have to work that way?"). No matter how much you understand about the world, you can keep asking "Why?" and you eventually have to fall back on "That's just the way things are" or "We have no idea." But being able to understand how a phenomenon is entailed by the natural laws of the universe, even if you can't explain why those particular natural laws exist, is a huge step up from merely knowing which label describes the phenomenon.

I'd venture a guess that our tendency not to recognize placeholders for what they are has its roots in the way our schools are structured, in the way we learn to learn. In school you get points for knowing the right answer, for writing the correct phrase on the test, and you learn to recognize that question X goes with response Y. What we come to think of as "learning" is often little more than a sorry blend of rote memorization and call-and-response; is it any wonder that we think merely knowing "gravity" is the word for "why things fall down" means we understand what's going on?

Then there's that mother of all placeholders, "God." In "The Perimeter of Ignorance," one of the essays in his book Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries, Neil deGrasse Tyson recounts how even the sharpest scientific minds throughout history have invoked divine providence when they reached the limits of their ability to explain the world. When Isaac Newton hit a stumbling block in his Principia -- why do all the gravitational forces between the objects in our solar system balance out to produce stable orbits? -- he concluded, "This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets and Comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." And 17th-century Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens explains the planets' motion and composition in great detail in his Celestial Worlds Discover'd, but falls back on God when he gets to less-understood phenomena, like the mystery of life: "I suppose no body will deny but that there's somewhat more of Contrivance, somewhat more of Miracle in the production and growth of Plants and Animals than in lifeless heaps of inanimate Bodies," he writes.

Of course, unless you can say something about how God created life, you haven't explained anything; you've just relabeled your ignorance. Which is not, in and of itself, harmful. The danger lies in forgetting that questions like the origin of life are still open questions, ripe for the solving -- and in clinging to your placeholder rather than gladly replacing it with a real explanation when one comes along.

“Anything is possible.” No, not really

There are a few phrases that really annoy the hell out of me, one being the oxymoronic “compassionate conservative,” which I will leave for another day. One of the most irritating is the disturbingly commonplace and superficially commonsensical “well, you know, anything is possible.” Now, I understand that this is often said by optimistic people who mean well, and that most of us don’t go around thinking precisely about what we are saying all the time, but that’s the point: perhaps from time to time we should think about what we are saying a bit more carefully.

Clearly, not anything is possible. It is pretty easy to come up with examples of things that are not possible: it is not possible for me both to be and not to be (pace Hamlet); it is not possible for me to levitate; and it is not even possible for me to be in Rome at this moment, because I’m in New York writing this essay.

Those three examples are not picked at random, they illustrate three distinct classes of impossibility recognized by philosophers: the first is an instance of something that is logically impossible; the second is an example of physical impossibility; and the last one is an illustration of contingent impossibility. These three types of impossibility are nested within each other, like this:

The idea is that some things are contingently impossible, but physically and logically possible. To go back to my examples, the reason it is not possible for me to be in Rome right now is because I happen, contingently, to be in New York. But if I were in Rome, I certainly wouldn’t be violating either the laws of physics or those of logic.

Levitation, on the other hand, falls under a stronger type of impossibility, because it would, in fact, violate the known laws of physics. It still wouldn’t be logically inconsistent, however, because there is no logical contradiction in imagining a universe with different natural laws, one in which levitation is, in fact, possible.

In this hierarchy, then, the strongest type of impossibility is the logical variety: if something is logically impossible (like me being and not being at the same time), it is a fortiori both physically and contingently impossible. There is a caveat here, pointed out by philosophers like Willard Van Orman Quine: we may, from time to time, discover facts about the universe that might make us reformulate our understanding of logic. For instance, while it is impossible (physically and logically) for a macroscopic object to both be and not be, there are quantum-level phenomena that seem to violate this type of logic (think of the dual nature of light, both particle and wave). However, the tricky thing with quantum mechanics (besides the fact that few people really understand it and many more regularly abuse it), is that it is still not at all clear how the equations ought to be interpreted. While the math is indisputable, and so are the empirical results, it may be that light, for instance, is simply something whose nature is so alien to us that the best we can do is to conceptualize it as dual, and is in fact something human thought and language can’t wrap themselves around.

As a philosopher, of course, my favorite type of impossibility is the logical variety, and as an atheist the example I get a particular kick out of is the paradox of omnipotence. The best rendition of it is by J.L. Mackie, in an essay entitled “Evil and Omnipotence” published in Mind back in 1955. It is superb, and still very hard to best. The basic idea is that there seems to be something paradoxical about the very concept of omnipotence, which may indicate that the idea of omnipotency is intrinsically incoherent.

The argument is usually presented as a variant of the following: can an omnipotent god create a mountain that he cannot move? If you answer “yes,” it looks like god can do something that he cannot undo, which means that he is not, after all, omnipotent. If you respond “no” then you are immediately acknowledging a limit to what god can do, so again it turns out that he is not omnipotent. Try getting out of it, you’ll either laugh all the way to your logic class (if you are an atheist) or get a really bad headache (if you are a theist). (The funniest variation of the paradox is due to that immortal philosopher, Homer Simpson: “Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it?”)

It would seem, then, that an omnipotent god is a logical impossibility. Since logical impossibilities are stronger than physical and contingent impossibilities, it follows that there cannot be such a thing as an omnipotent god. Oops. So the next time someone says something as inane as “anything is possible,” ask them about the paradox of omnipotence: you will kill two birds with one stone, showing both that not anything is possible and that the most common type of god worshiped nowadays is a contradiction in terms. Then go out for a drink to congratulate yourself on a job well done.

Massimo's Picks

* Massimo debates Mike Treder over at bloggingheadstv on the questions of immortality and technological optimism.

* The latest Rationally Speaking podcast: The Great Atheist debate on the limits of science.

* Jon Stewart makes fun of the Texas Board of (mis)Education.

* Couples fight openly on Facebook, so that they can "share" their lives with friends and relatives. Are people just insane?

* Massimo reviews Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's insane book, What Darwin Got Wrong.

* Skeptic challenges guru to kill him on live tv by just using his psychic powers. Guess what happened...

* Procrastination is not such a bad thing, at least in some respects.

* The unseen and unknowable have no place in science.

* A frank editorial about the Pope's involvement in cases of Vatican-condoned pedophilia.

* New York Times columnist David Brooks just makes up stuff as he goes to support his preconceived notions. And he is a reasonable conservative!

* Daylight "saving" is no such thing.

* Barry Lynn on the mess with Texas rewriting history books.

* What is "normal"? A philosophical take.

* Most Americans are convinced that God helps them make everyday decisions. Could it be that's why the country is in such a mess?

* Michael Ruse on What Darwin Got Wrong and why it ain't a good book.

* On April 24, make sure you don't miss the Center for Inquiry-Chicago conference on Dangerous Nonsense, I'll be there...

Welcome Michael De Dora as our newest author!

Dear Readers and Followers,

Rationally Speaking is expanding again! After having recently added Julia Galef, we are proud to announce the continuation of our tradition (based on a whopping two data points!) of featuring young and bright critical thinkers (except for yours truly, who is young only at heart).

We are pleased to welcome Michael De Dora Jr. as a regular contributor to Rationally Speaking (he will also have his "Michael's Picks" of course). Michael is executive director at the New York City branch of the thinktank Center for Inquiry (CFI), serving as a public voice for science, reason, and secular values.

Now get this: before joining CFI, Michael was a news writer and editor at FOXNews.com (as well as the City University of New York)! But don't blame him for the likes of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.

Michael spent his undergraduate years at SUNY-Albany, where he received a Bachelor’s degree in Rhetoric and Communication. He is now completing a political science master’s degree at CUNY-Brooklyn College.

Michael's contributions to RS will span the full gamut, probably concentrating on political and moral philosophy, which are particularly close to his interests, as well as broader issues of concern to the skeptical community.

Why love is like a personality disorder

I want to talk about love. But in order to do that, I have to first talk about strep throat.

If you have certain symptoms, like a sore throat and fever, you can guess that you might have strep. And you'll either be right or wrong; either the streptococcus bacteria are present in your body or they're not, and luckily you can go to a doctor to get a strep culture and find out the answer.

Now let's look at another health problem. (I promise I'll get to love eventually.) You can be diagnosed with "Narcissistic Personality Disorder" (NPD) if you meet at least five of a list of criteria specified by the American Psychiatric Association, including "requires excessive admiration," "lacks empathy," "shows arrogant, haughty behaviors," and so on. In other words, NPD is the name that we give to a loose cluster of related traits. With strep, your symptoms suggest the presence of the underlying condition; with NPD, your symptoms are the condition.

The reason all this is relevant to love is that I think most people consider love to be analogous to strep throat. People observe their symptoms -- attraction, obsession, dependence, contentment, admiration, and so on -- and wonder whether they are "really" in love, the same way you might observe symptoms like a sore throat and fever and wonder whether you really have a streptococcus infection. Unfortunately there's no conclusive test for whether you're in love the way there is for strep, but many people are still convinced that there is a right answer even if they can't be sure of what it is -- sort of like an invisible Love switch that's either flipped to ON or OFF.

I think this is all fundamentally misguided. Instead, I'd argue that love is actually more analogous to NPD: it's a word we use to refer to some collection of properties. "Love" isn't the underlying condition of which those properties are symptoms, as with strep; "love" is the name we give to those properties, as with NPD.

(You might be tempted to ask how I can claim love isn't a distinct underlying condition, but I think the burden of proof is on those who claim it is. We all agree on the existence of the feelings of attraction, obsession, dependence, and so on, but to posit the existence of an additional underlying property causing those feelings is to add a hypothesis with no explanatory power.)

How did the American Psychiatric Association pick the particular criteria required for an NPD diagnosis? Partly, the reason is that those traits tend to appear in combination with each other (if you "lack empathy," you're more likely than the average person to also "show arrogant, haughty behaviors"). But picking that particular list of traits and picking "five" as the magic number needed for a diagnosis was really somewhat arbitrary; we just needed some cutoff to standardize our use of the word.

Of course, there is no official checklist specifying which feelings need to be present in order for something to qualify as "love." People use the word in vastly different ways, even within the context of romantic love. Some people might use it to refer to a feeling that other people would instead describe as a crush or an infatuation. Some people would use the word love to describe a feeling that other people would call possessiveness (i.e., "That's not love because he doesn't care whether she's happy, he just wants to control her"). And some people might use the word love where others would say "No, that's not love -- that's codependence." Given the wildly contradictory "checklists" we are all carrying around in our heads, it's no wonder that most disagreements over "Is this love?" boil down to people using different definitions of the word.

If this line of reasoning is starting to sound familiar, it should. My previous post discussed how different people use totally different criteria for deciding what counts as art, and that when people disagree about whether a particular object "is art," they're really just arguing about the definition of the word. For any given case, you can usually find definitions of art that would include your case, as well as definitions that would exclude it. And the same is true with the question "Is this love?"

But if you're wondering whether you're in love, and someone shrugs and says, "Depends how you define love," that probably won't feel like an answer. I suspect that's because "Is this love?" is really a disguised query just like "Is this art?": people associate various characteristics with the idea of being in love -- i.e., love lasts forever, or love is the ultimate emotion, or anything is worth sacrificing in the name of love -- so what they're really wondering is whether their situation shares those characteristics. So, "Is this love?" could be a way of asking "Is what I'm feeling going to last?" or "Would it be possible for me to be happier in another relationship?" And of course, those are important questions. But you're not getting any closer to answering them by deciding whether to affix the label "love" to what you're experiencing.

(Does all this make it sound like I "don't believe" in love? I sure hope not, because judging from the movies, the girl who "doesn't believe in love" is inevitably forced to admit the error of her ways after enduring a brutally cheesy montage involving snowball fights, paddleboating and/or impromptu karaoke. So, please: don't tell Hollywood I said this.)

Podcast Teaser: On fluffy thinking

The next episode of Rationally Speaking, the podcast, will be on instances of “fluffy thinking.” I have written a bit about it recently in my entry on Krista Tippet and her new book, 'Einstein's God'. There I quoted not only Tippett herself, but eminent physicists Paul Davies and Freeman Dyson. Another example would be author Karen Armstrong, who recently published 'The Case for God'.

What I claim all these - and many others - have in common is a peculiar type of uncritical thinking, which I refer to as “fluffy.” This is distinct from downright irrational positions, like creationism, for instance, or fundamentalist religious beliefs, or the belief that vaccines cause autism, or that homeopathy can possibly work. In all of these cases one can point either to clear empirical evidence (vaccines do not cause autism, homeopathy does not work, the earth is much more than a few thousand years old), or to the sheer incoherence of the belief (if you read the Bible literally, which of the two distinct stories of creation do you believe?).

The problem with fluffy thinking is that it sounds much more sophisticated, and it is next to impossible to criticize frontally both because it barely has anything to do with empirical evidence, and because it is hard to articulate what, exactly, these people are saying. So, for instance, when Freeman Dyson - who is a really smart guy - says things like “Science is full of mysteries. Every time we discover something, we find two more questions to ask, and so that there’s no end of mysteries in science. That’s what it’s all about. And the same’s true of religion,” what are we supposed to do with that? Besides the trivial observation that the one-for-two ratio is entirely made up (sometimes science does settle questions, and that’s the end of the line), in what sense could this possibly be like religion?

Or when Paul Davies, another guy who ain’t exactly an intellectual lightweight, states “Augustine was onto this already in the fifth century because he was addressing the question that all small children like to ask, which is, What was God doing before he created the universe?,” can we ask Prof. Davies on what, exactly, was Augustine “on”? Certainly not on Einstein’s conception of time (which is the context of this quote), and more likely on nothing at all, since god is a human made construct, and therefore it is rather silly to ask what he was doing “before.”

Or consider Tippett herself: “From a religious perspective, there’s something intriguing, though, in how these ideas of physics might seem to echo spiritual notions that you can find in Eastern and Western religious thought.” No there isn’t. This reminds me of one of the most awful “documentaries” in the history of humankind, “What the Bleep Do We Know?” a mushy concoction - not unlike pretty much every episode of Tippett’s National Public Radio show, Speaking of Faith, where scientific notions are distorted and mixed up with barely intelligible mystical “insights” that are put forward as profound truths.

The question we will be tackling in the podcast is not only the obvious one of whether there is anything interesting in what these people are saying (there isn’t), but rather the much more difficult issue of why it is that smart individuals, who make their living thinking and writing about science and philosophy, are attracted by fluffy thinking. And moreover, why is it that this sort of thing appeals to so many listeners and readers on the grounds that it seems to strike a “balance” between obvious bunk and “cold” reason? Your opinion?

Julia's Picks

* Belief in a higher power as a function of scientific education, summed up by SMBC comics.

* Episode #4 of the Rationally Speaking podcast is out: The Great Atheist Debate on the Limits of Science.

* In a controversial study, scientists rank all the common drugs according to how harmful they are.

* Our bodies intuitively find physical metaphors for abstract concepts.

* What a great idea for a new scientific journal -- the Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results (JSUR).

* An intriguing twist on the anthropic principle: the "entropic principle."

* Easy = True: a discussion of the hot-button psychological concept of cognitive fluency.

Massimo's Picks

* Participate in online philosophical experiments (not an oxymoron).

* Liz Cheney shows herself to be as unprincipled as her father.

* Apparently, women who drink (moderately) gain less weight. Gotta remember to schedule that sex-change operation...

* Rationally Speaking podcast: Julia and I talk to Peter Turchin about doing history as science.

* Is physics ontologically basic?

* Philosophy Talk covers the concept of infinity.

* Home schooling is a really, really bad idea across the board. Here's one reason why.

* Do atheists have a problem with Ken Miller? Well, I do.

* Alleged "holy man" kidnaps disciple who doesn't want to marry him.

* Scientology and homepaths invade Haiti, selling snake oil.

* God is good for your health, if you ask for the generic brand.

* One in four parents believes vaccines cause autism. Thanks Ophra and Jenny.

* The Tea Party is scary, really scary.

* The Nation talks to philosopher Martha Nussbaum.

* The axis of the obsessed and deranged.

Podcast Teaser: Neil DeGrasse Tyson and the need for a space program

Our next podcast will feature as guest Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist by training, and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. His latest book is “The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet.” We will touch on a variety of issues with Dr. Tyson, including the surprisingly controversial decision to downgrade Pluto from planet to Kuiper Belt Object (and you thought definitions of concepts don’t have practical consequences).

But perhaps the most interesting current debate to have in light of recent political decisions is whether we need a space program at all, and if so, with what priorities. Many scientists (and most people in the skeptic community) simply assume that funding outlets like NASA are a good idea, that space exploration is justified by a combination of scientific results and technological spinoffs, to which some add inspiration for the young as a further bonus.

Indeed, a similar question could be raised concerning much basic science: do we need, as Sarah Palin (in)famously asked recently, to do research on “pet projects” concerning fruit flies? Why should this be a societal priority, especially in times of economic crisis when we have practical problems that science should be addressing instead, from curing cancer to arresting climate change? (Yes, we at Rationally Speaking believe that human-caused climate change is both real and dangerous.)

Much scientific research in the US is in fact paid with public money, and the amount is certainly not negligible. It seems fair, therefore, to ask scientists to justify these expenses not just in terms of their personal curiosity, but as a matter of tangible and intangible benefits to society at large. Can Dr. Tyson do that for the space program? Should we go back to the Moon and establish a permanent base? Is it worth the expense and likely risk to human life to attempt a mission to Mars? What is a space station for, anyway?

Krista Tippett does it again

Readers of this blog know that I am not fond of Krista Tippett, the fuzzy thinking host of National Public Radio’s “Speaking of Faith” (it really ruins my early Sunday mornings). She and New York Times’ columnist Stanley Fish make for entertaining targets when I feel like venting at irrationality disguised as profundity. And now Tippett has done it again.

On her show she promoted her new book, Einstein’s God, and if the show is any indication, this new enterprise promises to be a fun fest for people inclined toward pseudo-metaphysics. I will give just a few examples of what I mean, taken both from Tippett’s own comments and from those of two of her guests, noted physicists (and Templeton prize winners) Paul Davies and Freeman Dyson. (Incidentally, why is it that so many physicists think they are qualified to talk about metaphysics? I mean, I don’t see a lot of metaphysicians sputtering nonsense about general relativity and the like.)

Here is a typical quote from Dyson: “Science is full of mysteries. Every time we discover something, we find two more questions to ask, and so that there's no end of mysteries in science. That's what it's all about. And the same's true of religion.” Really? The same is true of religion? And when, exactly, was the last time religion answered any question at all?

Again, Dyson: “These equations [general relativity’s] are quite miraculous in a certain way. I mean, the fact that nature talks mathematics, I find it miraculous. I mean, I spent my early days calculating very, very precisely how electrons ought to behave. Well, then somebody went into the laboratory and the electron knew the answer. The electron somehow knew it had to resonate at that frequency which I calculated.” Ok, first of all, nature doesn’t talk anything, mathematical or not. Mathematics is just a language we use to represent to ourselves certain facts about nature. Second, in what sense is mathematics “miraculous”? Is it the result of an intelligent designer who flouts the laws of nature? Because that’s the definition of miracle, you know. Lastly, the bit about electrons that ought to behave in a certain way, and knew how to behave is nonsense on stilts. Yes, of course Dyson is (presumably) talking metaphorically here. But that’s the point: why use these tendentious and absolutely unenlightening metaphors, especially within the context of a radio show called “Speaking of Faith”? Does it not occur to these people that they will be reinforcing fuzzy notions about science supporting the existence of god and similar nonsense?

Now, here is Tippett herself: “If Albert Einstein can be said to have had a spiritual side, this expressed itself in part in his love of music. He played the violin from a young age and was a passionate concertgoer. He attended the stunning debut in 1929 of the 13-year-old Yehudi Menuhin with the Berlin Philharmonic. Menuhin played as soloist in a daunting program of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms concertos. Einstein was so moved that, as one story goes, he rushed into the boy's room after the performance, he took him in his arms and exclaimed, ‘Now I know that there is a God in heaven!’” Oh for crying out loud! First of all, this isn’t even a first-person account by Einstein, it’s a “as one story goes” kind of thing. Second, even if it did happen that way, the man was probably just expressing his deep appreciation of a particular rendition of some of his favorite pieces of music. I guess we’ll all have to watch out every time we say “Oh God!” in response to something, or we may find ourselves on YouTube with a subtext of endorsing religious beliefs.

More fluff from Tippett: “From a religious perspective, there's something intriguing, though, in how these ideas of physics might seem to echo spiritual notions that you can find in Eastern and Western religious thought.” This is an argument that goes back to the (in)famous Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra. There seems to be a persistent wish to validate mystical or ancient thinking by way of modern science — which I suppose is a backhanded compliment to science itself. Another example is the idea that somehow the ancient Greeks “anticipated” atomic theory. No, they didn’t. They had the intuition that the world is, at bottom, made of one type of stuff. Whether that intuition is correct or not is still open to discussion, but in no way does it represents a “theory” or anything like what modern physics has put forth through a lot of sophisticated math and beautifully carried out experiments.

A similar problem underlies this bizarre statement by Paul Davies: “We know this [the Big Bang] is now 13.7 billion years ago. Einstein's theory of relativity says this was the origin of time. I mean, there's no time before it. And Augustine was onto this already in the fifth century because he was addressing the question that all small children like to ask, which is, ‘What was God doing before he created the universe?’” Are you serious? So Augustine gets credit for the theory of relativity because he asked the rather obvious (and totally unconnected to relativity) question of how god was spending his non-time there before time was created? (Wait, does that question even make sense?) As I said before, why do these people think they can get away with this sort of pop metaphysics just because they sport a PhD in physics?

And of course no fluffy discussion about the ultimate origins of the universe could possibly be complete without a mention of the anthropic principle. Here is Davies again: “For me the crucial thing is that the universe is not only beautiful and harmonious and ingeniously put together, it is also fit for life.” Ingeniously put together? By whom? And by what criterion of “ingenuity?” The universe seems more like an empty mess to me, with a lot (and I really mean a lot!) of stuff going on that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the supposed pinnacle of creation, us. I find the anthropic principle not only philosophically untenable and scientifically silly, but an egregious example of the tendency of human beings to vastly overestimate their place in the cosmos.

One final gem from Davies, in direct response to a question by Tippett: “There are interstices having to do with quantum certainty into which, if you want, you could insert the hand of God. So, for example, if we think of a typical quantum process as being like the roll of a die — you know, ‘God does not play dice,’ Einstein said — well, it seems that, you know, God does play dice. Then the question is, you know, if God could load the quantum dice, this is one way of influencing what happens in the world, working through these quantum uncertainties.” First of all notice the totally vacuous and non committal “if you want to insert the hand of God.” Davies is saying nothing of substance, again. And, once more, we’ve got bad metaphysics emerging straight out of his fluff: so if god works through quantum mechanics, do we have Pseudo-Random Design of the universe? If he needs to tweak the laws of physics (which, presumably, he put in place to begin with), does that mean that he is not after all omnipotent? Or is he trying to hide from a super-god who doesn’t want him to mess around with creation? What, exactly, is Davies saying here?

More generally, what is this type of talk contributing to social, scientific, or philosophical discourse? My guess is: nothing at all.

Is this art? ...and why that's the wrong question.

Once it became de rigeur for artists to try to subvert museumgoers' expectations, by exhibiting everything from blank canvases to dead sharks, the world started seeing a lot of heated arguments of the "This-is-art"/ "No-it's-not" variety. You've probably had, or heard, these arguments before. They tend to go something like this:

Person A: That's not art! The artist didn't do anything, he just found that urinal and wrote his name on it.
Person B: No, it is art, because it's making a statement.

or, alternatively:

Person C: That's not art. It's just an advertisement -- its sole purpose is to sell things to people.
Person D: No, it's art; it's visually striking and it evokes an emotion.

I think the first thing to recognize here is that when people disagree about whether a particular object "is art," they're almost never disagreeing over what properties that object possesses. In the first example I gave, Person A and B agree that the artist found a urinal and wrote his name on it, and they agree that it is the artist's way of making a statement. They just disagree over whether those facts are sufficient to call the object "art." In the second example, Person C and D agree that the object is visually striking, has the potential to evoke an emotion, and was created with the sole purpose of selling something. They just disagree over whether those qualities are sufficient to call the object "art."

So what they're really disagreeing about, whether they explicitly realize it or not, is the definition of the word "art." But does it make sense to disagree about the definition of a word? In one sense, it's an empirical question; you can ask what most people mean when they use the word, or how the word was originally used. But those questions are pretty easily addressed by consulting a dictionary or doing a survey.

And in another sense, you can define a word to mean whatever you want it to mean, as long as the person you're talking to understands what you mean by it. If Person A uses the word "art" to mean "something beautiful that required skill to create" and Person B uses the word "art" to mean "something intentionally created to make a statement," then it seems like their debate over whether the urinal is "art" should be resolved as soon as they clarify what they meant by the word.

So why does the debate, "What is art?" still rage if it's just a semantic question? Why does it feel like we're disagreeing about more than definitions?

Because we are. I think "Is this art?" is a great example of what Eliezer Yudkowsky calls a "disguised query." As Eliezer explains, when we are arguing about how to categorize something, it's immensely clarifying to ask: Why does it matter? For instance (and this is my example, not Eliezer's), is a 16-year-old an adult? Well, it depends why you're asking. You might be asking whether a 16-year-old is capable of bearing children. Or you might be asking whether we should let a 16-year-old make life-changing decisions. In either case, the argument over whether to classify a 16-year old as an adult is beside the point once you recognize why you're asking. As Eliezer says, "But people often don't realize that their argument about where to draw a definitional boundary, is really a dispute over whether to infer a characteristic shared by most things inside an empirical cluster."

So when we ask "is this art?" we can get at the disguised query by following it up with, "Why does it matter?" As far as I can tell, the disguised query in this case is usually "does this deserve to be taken seriously?" which can be translated in practice into, "Is this the sort of thing that deserves to be exhibited in a gallery?" And that's certainly a real, non-semantic debate. But we can have that debate without ever needing to decide whether to apply the label "art" to something -- in fact, I think the debate would be much clearer if we left the word "art" out of it altogether.

If the reason we're arguing about how to define art is that we want to decide what sorts of things to devote our attention, money, and gallery space to, then we should just address that question directly. Do we want our museums to contain things many people find interesting to look at? Things that required skill to create and are visually interesting or express a sentiment? Of course people have very different preferences, and we would also need to settle on a way of collectively making those decisions. But what we're currently doing is: we all agree on the statement "museums should contain art" and then each of us defines "art" to mean "objects possessing those traits which I consider sufficient to warrant display in a museum." How is that remotely helpful?

Massimo's picks

* Conservatives without shame: to get blacks on board with the anti-abortion movement they now claim that abortion is a tool for genocide against blacks.

* My review of Philosophy: Basic Readings, by Nigel Warburton.

* Jon Stewart and John Oliver get it right on what's wrong with American democracy.

* Paul Krugman on what the Republicans brought to the health care debate: nothing.

* Can't run for office in North Carolina if you are an atheist. Apparently, there it's still the 17th century.

* Obama politely tells Lamar Alexander that he is a liar.

* The line up for the 2010 The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas includes yours truly...

* Stolen letter by Rene Descartes found.

* You knew this, right? Liberals and atheists are demonstrably smarter than conservatives and religious.

* Scathing review of Fodor and Palmarini's book "What Darwin Got Wrong." Stay tuned for my review to appear in Nature.

* If you can't find a boyfriend, it may be your parents' (genetic) fault.

* eSkeptic's Harriett Hall on mythbusting psychology.

* Debunking the environmental skeptic.

* Cult starves boy to death because he didn't say amen before a meal.

* The importance of historical data in philosophy of biology.