LI was planning on springing a grand sounding post on our readers entitled the Crisis of the Liberal Order – sweet, eh? Alas, our schedule is a bit too crowded today for the erecting of such monuments (or tombstones). We’ve been rather surprised by the commentary that followed the French no. The crowd at Crooked Timber became apoplectic about the whole thing. Ourselves, we think that the comment made by John Rentoul in the Independent is on the mark:

“French voters have given all sorts of reasons for voting No, many of them contradictory, but there can be little doubt that in the longer perspective of history, it will be seen as a vote that said: 'So far and no farther.' I would not characterise the mood of European peoples as being satisfied with the state of the Union, but the French referendum suggests that the balance between the powers of the nation state and the centre is regarded as being about right. The expansion from 15 to 25 members last year was a huge change not just in the size but in the nature of the Union, which many in France did not like because it diminished their influence. They did not want to take the risk that the constitution would set the seal on that diminution.”

On the other hand, like most English and American commentators, Rentoul follows this with the usual fallacious economic analysis:

“For some time, the argument has been moving in Britain's favour towards labour market flexibility and against counterproductive social protection. Franco-German attempts to 'protect' people's welfare by loading costs on employers and by protection against imports has resulted in high unemployment at home and poverty abroad.”

This is, firstly, an analysis with which LI vigorously disagrees. The French and German malaise is only partly due to rigid labour markets – it is mostly a typical Keynesian crisis, too much savings, not enough demand. To jigger with the labour markets (and even LI can concede that some tradeoffs may be necessary) before doing something about the tendency of the French and Germans to save instead of consume (because – of course – they are afraid of what happens when labour market flexibility means sinking wages and more unemployment – as they should be) is typical Thatcherite nuttiness.

In any case, the effort to achieve a scale that will preserve the will of the people, however attenuated the echo, within governable unity, is viewed, by some soi disant lefty-libs, as a sin as mortal as smoking at the non-smoking table. Serge July, in his editorial in Liberation (the message of which was so mangled by Jefferson Morley in the Washington Post roundup of media reaction to the Non that it provides prima facie evidence for our suspicion that American papers are only correct about a third of the time when it comes to reporting events that happen in non-English) reacted like a typical Euro-zombie:

“Referendum on the enlargement. Between the specter of Turkey which unambiguously points to the Moslems and the unfortunate Polish plumber, foreigners have been invited to stay home. Le Pen xenophobe, you can bank on that, but letting the leaders of the left make a campaign on this terrain, as Chirac in 2002 did on crime, one believed that xenophobia unthinkable…”

The collapse of distinctions, here, is the basis of the somnambulism. The enlargement was not a triumph of cosmopolitanism, but a disaster created by a very old politics – the politics of the Cold war. Poland and Central Europe were engulfed en masse even though their economies are not a natural fit for the older economies of Europe – far from it. Just as France began the European project by making the move to ally with (and limit) its old enemy, Germany, thus cementing sixty years of unparalleled prosperity and peace, so, too, the natural thing for Poland and Hungary to do would be to ally with Russia. The very thought gives the Americans the willies. Hence, the pressure to do what the EU did – in the process, screwing the populations of Germany and France. Turkey, we think, should certainly be a target of massive EU aid – as Greece was in the sixties. But the EU shouldn’t be a monster clone. Blind to this, the political class has decided that protests against it should be met with moral shaming. July is typical, here.

The best response we’ve read was Neal Ascherson’s in the Independent.

“As a British citizen, I signed an open letter begging the French to vote 'Oui'. But if I had been a French citizen, I would have voted 'Non'. I signed because the impact of the French 'Non' in Britain could only be dire. It gives heart to Europhobes of right and left who want to dismantle the supranational structures of the European Union. It will close more windows in Little England, leaving it an even smaller, darker, more asphyxiating place.

For France, though, Sunday's vote was a much-needed explosion of liberty. Many passions burst through, some of them rational and others ugly. There was loathing of the Chirac government. There was fear for jobs as industry relocates in cheaper lands, and foreign workers ('the Polish plumber') compete to provide services. There was dislike of the neo-liberal, 'American' social model, seen by many French as a betrayal of the old 'social' caring principles of partnership around which the European project was built.
But above all, there was a sense that the constitution was an insult to French intelligence " all the more painful because it was prepared by complacent French statesmen. One of my French nephews told me: 'I voted No because this is such a bad text. This is not a constitution at all, which should be drawn up by a democratically-elected assembly. This is just a treaty.'”

Alas, the July response – symptomatic of the petrification of intelligence in the PS – still seems dominant among the left's European leaders. The anger that Fabius ‘betrayed” the left by moving to the popular no side is one of the great and peculiar things about the affair, with Jack Lang’s comments (all the old corrupt Mitterardians) particularly offensive. Fabius saved the credibility of the party. It is that simple. That the militants voted to support something that was total anathema to the constituency is viewed, from the July heights, as a betrayal – by the constituency! Yes, get rid of this people and get me another one -- which is, effectively, what the enlargement means. The problem with the PS is the problem of all liberal parties in the West – the Democrats, the SPD, the Labour party – a misalignment between leadership and constituency. Frankly, the rich, white male leadership of the Democratic party would like to be leading another sector of the population than the one most loyal to them – that old and unexciting one of the unions, the blacks, the divorced women, etc. How much groovier to cherry pick among the Republican constituency – those Chablis drinking urban professionals with the fabulous apartments who understand the need for flexible labor markets. That the glass ceiling for blacks in the Democratic party is harder than it is in the Republican party says a lot about the demoralized state of the former. In France, however, there is a mobilized and active left that can simply reorganize – and might – outside the holy precincts of the PS. If the Socialist leaders continue to think of themselves as the secret Tony Blair party in Europe, they are doomed.

war for the fans

The month began with great, obsequious stories in the NYT about how the war is now over (except for getting the native guards armed and trained) in Iraq. It ends with more than twice the number of Americans killed than were killed in March, with the latest being the four that went down in a single engine plane – bizarrely, the U.S. has apparently decided to outfit the Iraqi airforce with planes that you can also rent for birthdays and holiday travel. Must mean, according to the wondrous pretzel logic of the Pentagon, that we are winning. This logic has two sides. When casualties go down, it is obvious that we are winning. And when casualties go up, it is obvious the other side is desperate.

This logic is also used by six year olds to explain why they don’t want to eat the vegetables.

In fact, this has penetrated the Times enough that they are starting to question their own ludicrous headlines of last week. Remember that 40,000 Iraqi troops were supposed to be sweeping Baghdad this week. A week later, the wakeup is setting in – hey, they don’t have 40, 000 troops. Well, gee, that was hard to figure out.

In other post Memorial military news – there is a fascinating story in the Globe about Col. David Hackworth. He’s being buried at Arlington. One of the most decorated American soldiers, and one of the most hated by the Pentagon. He’s the guy who appeared on Dick Cavett in 1971, in full dress uniform, and said, hey, we should get out of Vietnam. We’ve lost. He’s also the guy who pulled the plug on the wearing of fake medals by chief of naval operations, Admiral Jeremy M. ''Mike" Boorda. Boorda committed suicide over the charge, showing – to put it delicately – that this was not a man one wanted in command of a unit that could come under fire.

“He earned a a chestful of medals, including two Distinguished Service Medals, 10 Silver Stars, eight Bronze Stars, and eight Purple Hearts. His adversary became the US military bureaucracy, which he railed against for 30 years on grounds that it failed to put the troops first. He also opposed military action in Bosnia, Kosovo, and especially Iraq.But while the military leadership may be absent from the funeral, hundreds -- and probably thousands -- are expected to attend. The numbers would be larger, except that many who consider him a hero aren't in Washington. Hackworth became a touchstone for soldiers in the Middle East who questioned the Pentagon but didn't feel comfortable raising complaints with superiors.''He had an incredible communication line to the barracks and the trenches," said Roger Charles, president of Soldiers for the Truth, Hackworth's organization, which has a website that averages about 1 million hits a day.

''He answered all the e-mails."

Soldiers for Truth is an interesting site. It is written in that Military Speech so popular in paperback romances about Navy Seals and such –yes, there is a whole genre out there. And, of course, it bristles with conservative biases. But it is also informative. This article about deserters, for instance, is well worth reading. The author can’t understand why the army and marines aren’t going after deserters. LI can. This is an unpopular war already. Its continuation is built on what might be called the Memento premise. Assuming that America is subject to short term memory loss, the Bush agenda is to exploit the diminishing attenting span for maximum gain. Thus, the planned program of non-sacrifice – as long as the American population can be insulated enough to neither feel nor think about Iraq, it will begrudge the Neocon adventure. That means no draft, and no going after deserters in such a way that it would make the news. It means no pictures of coffins or the wounded. The whole point of the Bush administration is to coddle its constituency, which will ultimately be the victim of Bush policies, by moving the impact of those policies forward into the future. The IOUs for the tax giveaway to the rich and the abuse of the national and state guard are products of a unified political logic. In a sense, the Bush administration wants to make the war like a specialized cable channel – an ESPN war. In America, the war is only supposed to be for its fans.

the national imaginary

LI wrote a friend last night that we were proud of France. And indeed, we are. From the U.S. perspective, it might seem that the oui vote was a sad necessity. Creating a counter-balance to the mad, bad power of the U.S. seems like a good idea, if you live in a place where they broadcast excerpts of speeches by Bush on the radio. I was vaguely of that opinion. But a less heated perspective is in order. The peculiar U.S. move for a harsher and more direct hegemony is meeting its natural limits already. It isn’t just the fact that the U.S. economy is fueled by an unsustainable explosion of private and public debt – there is also the very real regionalisation of America’s natural peripheral economy, Latin America, with its tendency to turn its back on the U.S. and its face towards China – it is the fatal overstretch of military power, rapidly coming to the point at which Bush will have to decide whether to pull back or destroy his popularity by asking for (gasp!) such sacrifices as a draft would entail. And there is the silent, spreading collapse of pension plans, from the 300 billion dollar deficit for public employees in the states to the crisis in GMFordDaimlerChrysler. Plus, what does it mean to “create” a counter-balance? This is the kind of things elites jump on. So – the non campaign in France, as one sifts through the data, seems to have localized in the old left.

When the Left’s incubus, France’s answer to Tony Blair, Lionel Jospin, jumped in to support Chirac, it was a sign that the constitution was doomed. But the dooming of the constitution was merely a sign of a much deeper discontent with the dirigiste class. In truth, the consensus among Left and Right policymakers since around 1985 has been that Europe must adopt Thatcher lite policies. Which is why you could put in your input – vote – for either party, and you’d get the same output – liberalization. That nobody wanted it didn’t matter – the elites, who will benefit the most from it, decided that it was good for you. The Left honchos decided to disguise their adoption of the economics of Thatcher by annexing the ideology of a charity. In this way, not only could they destructure working class culture and destroy its economy, but they could also shame them for being racist. A moral two-fer! And thus was born that curious bird, the upper middle class liberal – absolutely passionate about preserving, say, Aborigine cultures in Australia, while at the same time profiting hugely from the destruction of manufacturing culture here at home.

While LI is on board with the civilization project – the destruction of racism, homophobia, sexism and the rest of the Unbehagen in our culture – we are maximally suspicious of the emigration of liberating rhetoric to support liberalizing (read – anti social insurance) projects. The winner in France could be the Fabius wing of the PS. It was Fabius (a sort of PS John McCain) who said the obvious about the constitution last year – what kind of constitution goes to five hundred pages? If only the PS can break with the essential defeatism of its leadership – who still dream of being the Third Way, Blair’s partners in an Anglo-Saxon Europe – they can fill the vacuum between Sarkozy (France’s scariest politician) and Le Pen (an old clown whose moment of prominence in the last election disguised the fact that he received pretty much the vote he always received – it was the Socialist collapse that made it appear new and startling). The two English analyses we liked best were by Larry Elliott and Will Hutton.

However, as a sample of elite opinion, we recommend, for those of you who read French, this article that first appeared in Liberation last year. “Derriere la social, la nation” by Francois Dubet is a perfect expression of elite contempt for the working class – time to liquidate the rednecks – in the form of a diagnosis of the ‘non’ mentality. For the elite, labor mobility is an essential and non-problematic part of capitalism. LI actually thinks that this is probably true – but we also think that it is a truth from which the elite is comfortably insulated, since, somehow, French companies don’t look for cheaper CEOs among Algerian immigrants. That the sector of society most insulated from competition is always urging the sector most exposed to it to just get over it somehow, gosh, gets the peons mad. Imagine that! The keynote of Dubet’s analysis is struck, here: “Everywhere [in Europe’ things seem “normal” save in France, where there is installed a no of the left identified with resistance to savage liberalism, the defense of public services and social attainments uprooted from the thread of its history and its struggles. In France, the claims and social worries traditionally borne by the left tip towards the defense of a national identity: the social becomes national. One could think that French particularity is enough to understand and justify this weirdness. [I can’t translate the full, rich flavor of that last sentence. In the French it is “On peut penser que la « spécificité française » suffit à comprendre et à justifier cette bizarrerie.”]

Having embraced the jet and been to New York, how are you gonna keep em down on the farm in Poitiers? seems to be the underlying message. The weird idea that you should defend a – shudder – nation, of all things, percolates through Dubet’s sociologue’s soul like a laxative. Everything is here. Professor Dubet would, himself, definitely be throwing caution to the wind and climbing the barricades himself, but alas, the ‘revolutionary project’ is dead. Rather convenient, actually. It means that the defense of the left’s successes, the social democratic state, can only be undertaken by a mutton headed left that doesn’t understand this central point and is obviously latently racist. The proof? Why, the incomprehensible idea that the scale of governance should be at the level of the traditional nation:

“Beyond the critique of liberalism, of which a constitution could always protect us more than an accumulation of free exchange treaties, the no of the left expresses the defense of a national republican model anchored in the heart of our “imaginaire politique.”” Actually, the first clause of that sentence is absolutely bogus. But the main thing, here, is the socio-psychoanalysis a la Lacan’s imaginaire – a handy scalpel suddenly appears in Dr. Frankenstein’s hand, and now he can go to work. “

"The sage alternativist appeals to international economic regulation don’t resist a radical anti-capitalism that is not even associated to a revolutionary project. Under the pretext of refusing ultraliberalism, all the “others”, from within or without, appear as potential enemies. The cultural claims are rejected from the outset into the hell of communitarianism, even if we become, us too, more and more communitarian, as a good part of the left finds itself silent in the face of demonstrations against “anti-white” racism or the banal xenophobia against the entry of Turkey.”

Never has the appeal to one’s virtuous adherence to the “revolutionary project” served a more abject goal as the shoring up of the constitution of Valery Giscard D’estaing. It is, depressingly, but not surprising, that this stuff was reprinted in Multitudes, the on-line outlet for the Badiou-wing of radical philosophy. This is Rawlsism with a Che Guevara face. And it stinks.

Memorial Day

H.R. 1815 SEC. 1223. WITHDRAWAL OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES FROM IRAQ. It is the sense of Congress that the President should-- (1) develop a plan as soon as practicable after the date of the enactment of this Act to provide for the withdrawal of United States Armed Forces from Iraq; and (2) transmit to the congressional defense committees a report that contains the plan described in paragraph

LI got this from Scratchings. The resolution was defeated, 128 to 300. However, it is the first time this kind of resolution reached the floor. Plus, the Republican who is most famous for having French fried renamed Freedom Fries not only voted for it, but he spoke for it. This is from Truthout:

Perhaps the most important speech in favor of an exit strategy came from Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC). His district in North Carolina is one that is very supportive of the military. His opposition to the continuation of the war is of interest because he had been a supporter of the war, a point he highlighted in his opening: "This is about a policy, that I believed when I voted 2 years ago to commit the troops that I was making my decision on facts. Since that time I have been very disappointed in what I have learned about the justification for going into Iraq." He explained:
" . . . all this amendment does is just say that it is time for the Congress to meet its responsibility. The responsibility of Congress is to make decisions whether we should send our men and women to war or not send them to war. What we are saying here tonight is we think it is time for the Congress to begin, to start the debate and discussion of what the exit strategy is of this government . . ."

If the antiwar movement – what there is of it – could just overcome its delusion that it should be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party and work for, well, the end of the American involvement in the war – work, that is, to create an anti-war wing in both parties, which we believe would be relatively easy to do – who knows, we might be able to save a ten thousand plus American lives, plus God knows how many Iraqi ones.

Our government knows what it is doing

In the great tradition of American government, only the truly important things get rushed though. Hence, the bankruptcy bill was the first thing herded through this year. It was an emergency. Credit card companies had recorded a mere 30 billion dollars in profits last year. Many of them, out of pure humanitarianism, were charging their customers a mere 29 to 34 percent after the inevitable late fees that did not have to be late fees on a specific card, but late on any payment. This is almost 0.5% percent less than the going rate Al Capone charged. We are, after all, talking about active Christians.

Then there were the earthshaking investigations into steroid use among home run hitters. America simply stopped in its tracks, since, as is well known, nothing effects every household in America like a distorted home run record. It causes little children to cry and grown men to hurl themselves from tall buildings.

But though grave issues require speed, other issues – like paying the trash that die or are wounded in Iraq and can’t figure out how to game the system like our President once did – can go on the backburner.

Here’s a story from the Boston Herald – a two bit paper obviously so desperate for news that it pays attention to a wounded military guy

“Winthrop Marine Lance Cpl. James Crosby's effort to give combat-wounded soldiers special pay while they recover moved closer to becoming law with a U.S. House vote last week.

``It will make such an impact,'' said Crosby's father, Kevin. ``My son is in constant pain 24 hours a day. No amount of money can ever make up for that, but at least there's something for these people and their families who have been torn apart.''

A rocket attack in Iraq last year left the younger Crosby, 20, paralyzed from the waist down. When he left Iraq, his combat pay was cut while he fought for his life.

The measure, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Malden), would give $430 a month to soldiers who are wounded and evacuated from the combat zone.”

Supposedly, if it goes through in the House, the Senate might debate it in July, and who knows, Bush might even sign it by September, if he has nothing better to do. That will be after another, say, 800 to 1,000 are wounded in the war for our wonderful freedom lovin’ Iraqis, trusting the averages from the Iraqi coalition casualties page.

It is a bit much to give to the trash. On the bright side, what with the new tools given to the Credit card cos. in that Bankruptcy bill, it will probably be absorbed as late fee detritus by the investors in Discover, Visa, MBNA, Citibank and Bank of America who could really use it. Who says America isn’t still the land of opportunity? It's the ownership society, baby.

Atlas finally shrugs

Last night LI wrote Paul a semi apology. Starting this series of posts three days ago, we intended to obliquely angle into Paul’s post on ethical individualism. However, we admit the degree of obliquity seems a bit, well, excessive. An unkind critic might call it multitudinously losing the point. Paul wrote back:

“Yeah, I was gonna write you an email from work today, with the subject of "Atlas - start shrugging"! I'm not sure what crazy scheme you have in mind - neither, apparently, do you (though your daimon does!) - but I look forward to reading the resulting opus.”

LI will sniffily ignore the reference to that appalling novel and try to get down to brass tacks in this post. Paul’s post is an enthusiastic appreciation of a book by David L. Norton entitled Personal Destinies: a philosophy of ethical individualism. We thought this was among the best bits we’ve ever read on his site:

“Of especial interest is the fact that Norton understands his account to ground a kind of individualism - an "ism" in disrepute with both Left (collectivism) and Right (communitarianism). Those two poles are often likeminded in taking individualism necessarily to be of the "atomistic" (Hobbesian; sc., merely numerical) variety. Norton's eudaimonism claims to establish "qualitative" individualism: each person, ex hypothesi, is obliged to actualize an excellence uniquely his own; to live in truth to his daimon. The social entailment of this doctrine is the "complementarity of excellences," implying the need for counterparts. Hence an individualism is possible which at once celebrates independence and affirms interdependence and sociality of a kind.”

Our response to this has been to consider a certain set of adventures of the concept of the “ratio,” (oops -- the Germanic amplification of the genitive -- the curse of philosophical class. Sorry) insofar as the human individual is supposed to embody it. If one is to “live in truth” to one’s daimon, it is important to think about the various ways one usually lives – unlike some purists, we like Weber’s term, “lifestyle”, for this. The truth, here, seems to do double duty: it implies, on the one hand, some standard of authenticity to which one can compare one’s lifestyle, and on the other hand, it seems performative – the criteria of authenticity is not prefigured, but is constituted in the living. That doubleness isn't incoherent -- a set of truths can be constituted over time in such a way that future acts can be judged against it -- but it does imply a limit on one's liberty that may, in time, become onerous. No more lighting out for the territory, no more second acts.
…
One of the perennial philosophical worries is the degree of error inherent in these various lifestyles. This is why we think the match between Gigerenzer vs. Tversky and Kahnman is fascinating, and casts a certain light upon the qualitatively different points of view that are each haunted, in Paul’s view, by a daimon.

Now, this idea of the daimon is interestingly ambiguous in terms of its site. Where, exactly, is it? this parallels the question we have been pursuing – where exactly is the innate tendency to error – if there is one? Where, that is, is its systematic place?

The early moderns were all very anxious about error. However, until Kant, error was conceived as a thing exterior to the subject. Among other of his functions, Descartes malin genie embodied the exteriority of deception. Hume inflected this line of thinking in a way, insofar as he showed that induction was not logically grounded. However, his intent wasn’t to delegitimize induction – rather, it was to estrange us from our mania about the framework of error and falsity. Induction, being on the side of life or habit, couldn’t be turned off, or doubted in any practical way. All of which went into Hume’s project of showing that reason was and should be the slave of the passions. It is important to note that at the same time that the natural philosophers were worried so about the Pseudodoxia Epidemica, the rising merchant/professional class was increasing sensitive to original sin. But let’s bracket that circumstance.

It was Kant, I think, who first interiorized error as an inevitable formation of the reason itself. There’s a famous passage in the Critique of Pure Reason from the section on the transcendental semblence (Schein). That semblence is the idea that one can deduce how the world is (for instance, whether the world has a beginning or not) from what I would call logic – that is, a conceptual analysis of beginning. Kant writes:

“The cause [of the transcendental semblence (Schein)] is this, that in our Reason (perceived, subjectively, as the human capacity to know) lie fundamental rules and maxims of its use, which have the total appearance of objective principles, and through which it appears, that the subjective necessity of a certain conjunction of our concepts, supported by the understanding, can be maintained. This is an unavoidable illusion, as much one as the illusion, that the sea seems higher on the horizon than on the shore, because we see the former through higher beams of light than the latter; or, even more, so little as astronomer can keep the moon from seeming greater in its setting, even if he is not deceived by this appearance.”

It isn’t surprising that Gigerenzer, too, uses visual illusion as an analogy for cognitive illusion. In Gigerenzer’s work, the necessity he is looking for is ecological – what living function does illusion serve? – rather than metaphysical.

The notion of an error inside (the logical equivalent of Jim Thompson's Killer Inside Me) might seem, at first glance, to have nothing to do with Norton (and Craddick’s) qualitatively different demon. And yet that demon seems inherited from the most famous of all daimons – Socrates. And Socrates is definitely a corrective daimon – a negating spirit. It is not a constructive one:

In the Apology, Socrates says: “…something divine and spiritual comes to me, the very thing which Meletus ridiculed in his indictment. I have had this from my childhood; it is a sort of voice that comes to me, ("some divine (theîon) and spiritual (daimónion) [thing] comes to me...")
and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward. This it is which opposes my engaging in politics. And I think this opposition is a very good thing; for you may be quite sure, men of Athens, that if I had undertaken to go into politics, I should have been put to death long ago and should have done no good to you or to myself. And do not be angry with me for speaking the truth; the fact is that no man will save his life who nobly opposes you or any other populace and prevents many unjust and illegal things from happening in the state. A man who really fights for the right, if he is to preserve his life for even a little while, must be a private citizen, not a public man.”

If Socrates is speaking truly, then perhaps the daimon is insufficient to ground Paul’s desire that “an individualism is possible which at once celebrates independence and affirms interdependence and sociality of a kind.”

So -- this is the end of this series of posts. A null-set end? An irony? Not really. LI is neither playing the village explainer or the answer guy, here, but simply responding to an interesting idea with a bunch of his own questions.

clearing the table

Yesterday, we lined up things for Gigerenzer’s first shot.

Okay, to briefly reprise – although to follow this post, you will have to read yesterday’s post: Tversky and Kahnman claim to have shown a pattern of illogical response to problems that transform sets into the language of probability. The conjunction problem, or what’s wrong with Linda, was one of those conundrums.

Here’s the problem as T and K present it:

Linda is 31, outgoing, single. She majored in philosophy in college. As a student she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination.

Which of the two alternatives is more probable:

Linda is a bank teller
Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement?

The b is, as Gigerenzer points out, rather like the question Piaget posed to children: here is a picture of flowers, 6 of which are daisies and four of which are not. Are there more daisies or flowers in the picture? In the Piaget case, by the time children are eight, they recognize that the daisies are flowers, and that the confusing thing in the question is really that it makes it falsely appear like daisies are categorially equal to flowers, instead of a subset of them. (well, they realize this in child-brain speech, as in, that’s a trick question). But T and K consistently found that college students would chose b. So what gives?

“I argue that the irrationality is not to be found in adult reasoning but in the logical norm. Consider what the norm is: the probability of an event A is larger than (or equal to) the probability of the events A and B, that is, p(A) > P(AAB). This conjunction rule is used as a
content-blind norm for judgment: the content of the As and Bs is not considered relevant to evaluating good reasoning. All that counts is the mathematical probability p and the logical '^ and correct judgment is attested when people use the English terms probable and and in this and
only this way. This amounts to a purely syntactic definition of rational reasoning, and therefore, of an error in judgment.”

Putting his money on the table, so to speak, Gigerenzer rearranges T and K’s question to this one:

“Consider the following version of the Linda problem. Here the polysemy of the word probable is eliminated by using the phrase how many:

There are 100 persons who fit the description above (that is, Linda's). How many of them are:

Bank tellers?

Bank tellers and active in the feminist movement? '^

This change is sufficient to make the apparently stable cognitive illusion largely disappear. In one experiment, every single participant answered that there are more bank tellers {Hertwig and Gigerenzer, 1999; for similar results see Fiedler, 1988; Tversky and Kahneman, 1983). The
experiment also showed that the majority of participants interpreted how many in the sense of mathematical probability, but more probable as meaning "possible," "conceivable," or one of the other nonmathematical meanings listed in the OED.”

If Gigerenzer is right, he is onto something major – like, Meno style major. Like, maybe education is actually possible – confounding the cynics among you. Alas, T and K have tinkered with rephrasing the question in terms of “how many,” discovering that simply changing the b phrase slightly (to “bank tellers and active feminists”) can again dramatically change the responses.

All of which leads Gigerenzer to ask whether the problem, here, is that T and K are abstracting the mind from our ecology. This is how the Great G puts it:

“What have we learned from some 20 years and hundreds of experiments on the conjunction fallacy? We have leamed more about the limits of logic as norms than about the workings of the mind. In fact, I do not know of any new Insight that this activity has produced. Logical norms distract us from understanding intelligent behavior.”

At this point, LI is tempted to go down the trail, shooting up the Bush age obsession with testing as education, and the foreseeable result (further cretinization of a vulnerable population) by the No Child having anything to think with but their Behind Act. But we will simply lay down a marker for future reference.

To return, however. Our topic, in our last post, was supposed to be the individual, considered as an autonomous thing – the person, in short. Since Kant – at least, that is how the intellectual history story goes, but in actuality Kant simply codified what was in the child-speak of the Western mass mind for a long time – we’ve operated on the assumption that the autonomy of the individual is the bedrock of ethics. Philosophy’s safecrackers – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, etc, etc – have found it pretty easy to break into that concept and show up its flaws, just as Marx found it easy to point to the historical trajectory of class interest that produces the “character mask” of the subject under capitalism. Old Kant’s original formulation of the autonomy thesis is notably eccentric, since it excludes the sensibility – the animal collective that howls around the noumenal X that we proudly bear through our trials and temptations. While Gigerenzer is no overt Kantian, his theory does lend credence to the idea that the sensibility can, indeed, breach our autonomy – or, to put it another way, that the way in which we perceive things is so framed by elements given by the sensibility that “logical norms distract us from intelligent behavior.” To illustrate which, Gigerenzer cites a psychological experiment created from a cliché:

“Consider an experiment in which a full glass of water and an empty glass are put in front of a participant (Sher and McKenzie, 2003). The experimenter asks the participant to pour half of the full glass into the other glass, and then asks the participant to hand him the half empty glass. Which one does the participant pick? Most people picked the previously full glass. When they were asked, however, to hand over the half-full glass, most participants picked the previously empty one. This experiment reveals that the two statements are not pragmatically equivalent (see also McKenzie and Nelson, 2003). People extract surplus information from the framing of the question, and this surplus information concems the dynamics or history of the situation, which helps to guess what is meant.”

Okay, one more post on this topic, tomorrow.