Detroit, the movie

We saw the movie. It was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who also directed The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty that we had seen. It is based on an incident that took place at the Algiers Motel in Detroit in 1967.

The ratings on Rotten Tomatoes are pretty good. The critics’ ratings are higher than the audience’s. I thought it was pretty good. The average audience rating of 3.7/5 suits me. It hasn't fared well at the box office so far.

It is a story in which three black teens were killed and several others tortured and humiliated. Pretty clearly the Detroit policemen behaved badly, but none are found guilty in court. It is easy to sympathize with the victims and blame the Detroit policemen.

The incident occurred in a tense place and time, but what amazes me is that the incident was triggered by a misunderstanding. I won’t say what it was about since the reader might consider that a spoiler. The Wikipedia article about the Algiers Motel incident mentions it, but does not use “misunderstanding.”

One difference between the movie and the Wikipedia article is who killed Carl (Carl Cooper in the Wikipedia article; no last name in the movie per IMDb). Wikipedia says nobody was arrested for Carl’s murder and responsibility for the death is unexplained. In the movie Krauss does it and plants a knife by the body. (There is no Krauss in the Wikipedia article. The names of the Detroit police officers per Wikipedia and the movie are all different.) The Wikipedia page on the movie does say, "It has been noted that the film's depiction of the Algiers Hotel Incident was far more extreme than accounts which were given by survivors in a 1968 New York Review of Books article."

How We Know #14: Overview

In Chapter 11 Binswanger presents an overview of the history of philosophy. It is a striking contract of two perspectives on percepts, concepts, and knowledge. The major characters for one perspective are Aristotle and Ayn Rand. The major characters for the other are Plato, Descartes, and Kant.

“The root of the clash between Aristotle and Plato lies in their opposed views on a fundamental.”

“Aristotelians uphold the primacy of perception over conception: perceptual awareness precedes, and supplies the base for conceptual awareness; concepts are abstractions from perceptual material.”

“Platonists assert the opposite position – i.e., the primacy of concepts over perception. Platonists claim that some or all concepts are grasped by some unspecifiable, ineffable form of awareness of ”universals” dwelling in another “higher” reality.”

“Only extreme Platonists hold that the existence of percepts depends on concepts. E.g., Kant claims that perception is shaped by “categories of the intuition,” and in contemporary jargon, perception is theory-laden.” The result in either case is viewing perception as distorted, biased, “merely relative to us,” or not of “things as they are in themselves.”

“The primacy of perception leads to a wider point: knowledge is essentially “bottom-up,” not “top-down.” Conceptual knowledge is acquired by building up from perceptual data.”

A later section, The Kantian Reversal, critiques the ideas of Immanuel Kant. “Kant reversed a crucial distinction, between the what and the how – between what one knows and how one knows it. Kant turns the means of awareness into the only objects of awareness” (385).

Chapter 11 is the last chapter, so this probably is my last post on How We Know.

How We Know #13: Free Will

Chapter 10 is about free will or volition.

Free will has traditionally been thought of as the ability to choose among alternative physical actions. This is not false, but it is quite superficial. The actual primary is the rationality or irrationality of one's mental processes. It is this that is under one's direct volitional control. It is fundamentally an epistemological issue. "Man's free will consists in his sovereign control over how he uses his mind." But sovereign control is not omnipotence. Determinism denies this sovereign control. It claims that one's sense of control is illusory.

One's power to take hold of the mental reins is present as a choice. In Ayn Rand's terms, it is the choice between thinking or not. "Mental focus is wider and deeper than thinking; it is the precondition of thinking." Epistemologically, focus mean rationality.

"Perceptual processes are automatically in contact with the world; conceptual processes are not. Conceptual processes performed out of focus result in mental content that is invalid, subjective, out of touch with reality.

The basic choice of focus is independent of any specific motive.

"Fundamentally, consciousness is navigational: it is identification used to guide action. A prime example is the process of deliberating on alternative courses of actions." It is both intellectual and practical.

Man can reflect on and evaluate his own decision making process, including among others I am too tired now to decide or I need more information, or I'm uncertain but must choose.

A man's character is the net product of all of his choices. Every choice leaves its trace.

Volition is axiomatic. "Volition is not only self-evident -- directly introspectible -- it is fundamental to conceptual cognition" (355, my italics).

How We Know #12: Principles

Chapter 9 is about principles. He defines a "fundamental" as a causal factor on which a multi-level, branching series of effects depends, analogous to a tree. Examples given are the division of labor in economics and natural selection in biology. The only things that are fundamental simplicitur are the axioms of existence, identity, and consciousness. Knowing fundamentals is a source of immense cognitive power and unit-economy. Examples given are the heliocentric model and the decimal number system.

A "principle" is a fundamental generalization that serves as a standard of judgment in a given domain. Principles are needed for an economical long-range view of consequences. Similar to concepts, principles are integrations. They are formed by abstraction by observing similarities and differences. They are contextual and should be treated as absolutes within a context. An example he elaborates is individual rights. They are frames of reference as a to guide a diagnosis of concretes, and should not be imposed mechanically on unexamined concretes. 

How We Know #11: Proof and Certainty

Chapter 8 is about proof and certainty. To prove an idea, one needs to link it back to perceived fact. The Objectivist term for this process of going back down the hierarchy to prove an idea is reduction. Contrary to contemporary notions, there is only one logic, not both one of discovery and one of proof. Instead, there are two different directions of motion along the same logical, hierarchical structure – derivation moves "up" from the perceptually given, while proof moves back "down" to the perceptually given.

"New knowledge can contradict old mistaken beliefs, but not old knowledge." He gives the example of when black swans were discovered in Australia. "The generalization "Swans are white" could not logically have warranted making the assertion: "There are no black swans anywhere in the world." That is not what was known at the earlier stage. The new knowledge is: "Swans are white, except in Australia where some are black." Thus, the end result is more knowledge, not less."

The three sources of cognitive errors are illogic, false premises, and incomplete information.

Knowledge and certainty are distinguishable concepts. Knowledge is differentiated from ignorance; certainty is differentiated from states that are less so. "Certainty" refers to cognitive status. Knowledge has both a metaphysical and epistemological component. "Fact" is purely metaphysical. Certainty is contextual.

Binswanger's formulation of the Law of Rationality is: In reaching conclusions, consider all the evidence and only the evidence.

There are sections on arbitrary ideas, the ad ignorantiam fallacy, and the burden of proof principle. He presents Ayn Rand's concept of objectivity. The final section is on the intrinsic-subjective-objective trichotomy. He illustrates it in regard to concepts. Most of that is covered in Chapter 3, on which I commented in #3 and #4 of this series. 

How We Know #10: Logic

Chapters 6 and 7 are about logic -- theory and practice, respectively.

The three laws of logic are the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, and the law of excluded middle. His more economical formulations of these in the same order are: Everything is something. A thing can’t be everything. A thing can’t be nothing.

The nature of man’s consciousness include two facts central to logic: (1) Perception is the base of all conceptual cognition. (2) Only a few distinguishable units can be held in one frame of awareness.

Context is important. “The contextual nature of knowledge reflects a metaphysical fact and as epistemological one.” Metaphysical: reality is an interconnected whole. Epistemological: human consciousness works by detecting similarities and differences (198).

Hierarchy pertains to a number of ways in which things exist in an order of dependency. There is a hierarchy of learning and one of inference. Regarding the latter, Quine is sharply criticized for his flippant dismissal of hierarchy.

The section The Spiral Process of Knowledge echoes Leonard Peikoff.

Logic is not concerned only with inference or the manipulation of symbols as often presented. It is the means of keeping conceptual cognition connected to reality. On to logical practice, it is often assumed that logic is only about inference, but logic exists for all conceptual functions subject to volitional control (213).

About logic and concepts, he gives rules for definitions, reformulating traditional negative ones in positive terms. The traditional one of stating the essential attributes of the concept’s referents becomes the rule of fundamentality.

He addresses several things to avoid such as misclassifying. “Carving nature at the joints – i.e. on the basis of fundamentals – provides the most unit-economical system of classification.”  As an example of misclassifying would be to divide all living organisms between "stripes" and "solids." Besides excluding organisms that are neither, it is non-essential and explains nothing else. He comments on Rand's Razor: concepts are not to be multiplied beyond necessity or integrated in disregard of necessity (230- 232). 

A proposition is “a grammatically structured combination of concepts to identify a subject by a process of measurement-inclusion.” Concepts are not properly described as true or false, but as valid or invalid. (239). 

Venturing beyond Ayn Rand he addresses non-referential propositions and the “fallacy of pure self-reference” (248-51).

JARS 17.1

The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 17.1 is now available. I received my paper copy very recently. It contains my article “The Beneficiary Statement and Beyond.” A link to the abstracts for it and the other articles is here. It also contains my reply to Roger Bissell’s article about volition in an earlier issue. If you are not a subscriber and don't want to pay, then you will need to see a payer’s copy or wait about 5 years when it becomes freely available on JSTOR.