My Martin Gardner testimonial

The Martin Gardner Centennial was in 2014 and I commemorated it on this blog. I also submitted my own testimonial to the official web site and linked to it in this post:

Martin Gardner Centennial & Testimonials

Now I'd like to reproduce my contribution here:

Martin Gardner Testimonials: Testimonial 55: Ralph Dumain

As a teenager I discovered Martin Gardner in the 'Mathematical Games' column of the June or July 1967 issue of Scientific American, having innocently bought it at the corner drugstore on account of my boyhood interest in science. That column featured John Horton Conway’s game Sprouts. From then on I was hooked on Gardner’s columns and related books.

In his June 1968 column Gardner proposed a problem concerning Baker’s Solitaire, and followed up with readers’ solutions in subsequent issues. My name appeared with several others in the September 1968 issue. These acknowledgments were not included when the column was anthologized in Mathematical Magic Show: More Puzzles, Games, Diversions, Illusions and Other Mathematical Sleight-of-Mind from Scientific American in 1977.

Gardner’s columns radiated from the base of recreational mathematics to encompass quite a range of topics. Gardner stimulated my interest in the related hobby of abstract strategy board games, but that was only the beginning. Through Gardner I learned about the artist M.C. Escher, the 19th-century fad of four-dimensional space, anamorphic art, Raymond Llull (the godfather of the ars combinatoria), and numerous other fascinating topics reaching into obscure corners of intellectual history.

Gardner’s literary efforts were wide-ranging, but his other major claim to fame was his contribution to the 'skeptics' movement, decades before that movement was formally organized. I read Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science not long after I discovered Gardner. I returned to this book several times over the decades. I was never fully convinced of Gardner’s criteria for the demarcation of science and pseudoscience. In addition to dealing with obvious crackpots, he delved into fringe areas where rationality bleeds into irrationality, such as Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics, William Reich’s radical psychoanalysis and orgonomy, and Marshall McLuhan’s theory of the media. Still, the range of Gardner’s examples supplied a background I could draw upon throughout my adult life. This book can be said to have stuck with me, but I will forever be indebted to Gardner for all the wonders to which I was introduced via his work on recreational mathematics.

Like so many others I felt a serious loss when Gardner died. I paid tribute to him in my Reason & Society blog, in my podcast of July 19, 2010, and in my web guide to Board Games & Related Games & Recreations. Though my priorities have shifted over the decades, I can still say that Martin Gardner enhanced my life in a particular and unique way. He will always be remembered fondly."

         — Ralph Dumain, librarian and independent scholar, Washington, DC (22 May 2014)

Martin Gardner Centennial & Testimonials

This year marks the centenary of Martin Gardner's birth. Check out this new web site in homage to Gardner:

Martin Gardner Home Site (Martin Gardner Centennial 1914-2014)

There is also a web page for testimonials:

Martin Gardner Testimonials

My testimonial is #55.

Note also this National Public Radio broadcast:

Martin Gardner, Genius Of Recreational Mathematics
NPR, April 12, 2014 (sound file & transcript)

Weekend Edition's own "Math Guy" Keith Devlin calls the late Martin Gardner the greatest "math guy" of all time. As Devlin tells NPR's Scott Simon, Gardner had little formal mathematics training.

Why Stephen Bond left the "skeptics"

WHY I AM NO LONGER A SKEPTIC by Stephen Bond, Stephensplatz blog, 28 Aug 2011

While I share the impetus toward derision of the skeptics movement, for most of the same reasons, this hyperbolic argument is deficient in certain respects.The author is more philosophically perspicacious than 98% of the people who could be counted as having some relation to the atheist/humanist/skeptics movement, but the downward pull of bourgeois thought, even left bourgeois thought, is difficult to resist. This fellow is on the right track, but his reasoning and philosophical-methodological perspective need tightening up.

(1) The overblown accusations of sexism & racism, both in the way specific examples are addressed and the phenomenon is generalized to the entire movement, detract from the argument.

 (2) Neoliberalism: the author is missing something here: the way neoliberalism impacts skepticism is not that they are all neoliberals, but that neoliberalism has also pulled the left to the right.

(3) Feminism, etc.: the author doesn't see that bourgeois feminism and diversity management are also deficient & affected by the neoliberal order.

(4) The treatment of metaphor in science & its improper (and proper?) uses is badly handled. What other sources of knowledge other than science could be more useful are not specified. Had the author moved to the question of social theory & ideology critique, he would have done better.

(5) Politics: while the author is correct about pseudoscience (such as racist pseudoscience) flourishing in liberal democracies, he is rather vague about the relation between science & politics, other than the assertion than science is necessarily political.

(6) The author does not adequately address the relationship between liberal abstract ideals & their realization or non-realization in actual societies.

(7) Skeptics issues: note comments on alternative medicine, sociobiology, linguistics, economics. Aside from linguistics, I'm inclined to agree with the author. He could have said more about economics, since Michael Shermer is one of the leading purveyors of pseudoscience in this area.

(8) Harmlessness of paranormal superstition: this was my position in the '70s, but no longer. As for ridiculing the disenfranchised, their superstitious mindset is ripe for the pickings by fascism.

(9) Skepticism as dogmatism? Of course.

(10) Positivism: this treatment needs treatment. Positivism (in a loose sense) really is a problem. The fawning over every statement by Dawkins, the scientism of Harris, or the authoritative pronouncements of Hawking on the death of philosophy, are all indicators of how deeply uncritical & positivist in tendency is the whole atheist movement. Science, scientific method, etc. repeatedly endlessly, along with the obliteration of social theory & philosophy: this is how they do.

(11) Author's disillusionment: he had illusions in the first place. His were not mine.

Martin Gardner vs. Wilhelm Reich & Orgonomy (2)

There have been numerous attacks on Paul Kurtz's organizations, all now falling on the singular Center for Free Inquiry, from several directions. One is from advocates of parapsychology, who have expressed numerous complaints. I'm not to deal with them now. Wilhelm Reich's orgonomy does not belong to parapsychology, but it is fringe science nonetheless. Here is the second article I've found attacking Martin Gardner, and now Kurtz, Corliss Lamont, and the Amazing Randi along with him:

CSICOP, Time Magazine, and Wilhelm Reich by John Wilder, Pulse of the Planet #5, 2002, pp. 55-67.

Wilder links Time magazine and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in the scurrilous trashing of Reich's reputation. He reviews the attacks on Reich by the Freudians and the Stalinists.  Wilder accuses Einstein's secretary of sabotaging Reich's attempts to continue correspondence with Einstein. Historians of philosophy and ideas have not been kind to Reich, not Peter Gay, at least. Paul Edwards is claimed to have treated Reich favorably, except for his dismissing Reich's later orgonomy as crank pseudoscience. Edwards alleged Reich's American acolytes to be right-wingers:

Interestingly, Edwards now decries what he calls the ‘right-wing’ politics of [Elsworth] Baker and others of Reich’s students in America, as he believes they have missed the contributions of Reich’s ‘Marxist’ period. The reader should recall that Reich, himself, dismissed this part of his work as a ‘biological miscalculation,’ as immature, as being insufficiently aware of the of the extreme stubbornness of the Emotional Plague.

Wilder asserts that the Kurtz's skeptic organization is wedded to mind-body dualism:

Despite Edwards lukewarm admiration of Reich, CSICOP seems to be populated with men who adhere to modern civilization’s mind-body split, a split which underlies the mechanistic-mystical dichotomy that fuels CSICOP’s engines.

Wilder further complains:

The membership, organization, and style of CSICOP reveal its traditional patriarchal, ‘top-down’ authoritarian character. Its membership, according to Hansen, is 95% composed of ‘white’ males; and nearly 100% of its members are intellectuals, mostly drawn from the non-scientific disciplines, despite CSICOP claiming ‘science’ as its patron. Few active research scientists belong. The membership at large, the ‘Fellows,’ has little, if any, power to formulate or change policy.

Wilder likens Paul Kurtz to the Kurtz of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, who faces irrationalism with a psychological regression:

Facing these unexpected outbreaks of apparently irrational behavior in the masses [in the late 1960s], facing what Reich had faced in the early 1930s (due to what Reich termed the biological miscalculation), Kurtz struggles to reforge his Marxist-Humanism into a weapon of control and repression. While Reich had turned away from politics to supporting changes in child rearing, to advocating sexual reform, and to studying biophysics, Kurtz, still at his core a political man, seeks elitist political and social solutions to suppress these uncontrolled, ‘unscientifically’ emotional horrors emanating from the masses.

Kurtz is painted as a control freak—espousing one-world government, praising the behaviorist B. F. Skinner, engaging in scurrilous character assassination of scientific claims he disdains.

I need to point out a streak of anti-communist paranoia that runs through the article, not all instances of which I cite here. Corliss Lamont is excoriated for his pro-Stalinist position, for example.

Wilder moves on to attack Kurtz's skeptical colleagues, among them Wilder's arch-villain Martin Gardner. Gardner was apparently in his youth a fundamentalist and a radical socialist, later became a magician and eventually "the foremost advocate of atheistic scientific orthodoxy, of the science of his patriarchy." Wilder outlines Gardner's five symptomatic criteria for judging pseudoscience: according to those criteria, Reich and Einstein would be judged alike. Wilder finds these demarcation criteria (citing Popper for the term) unusable in practice.

Wilder also finds the presence of erstwhile and practicing magicians in the skeptical movement suspect. He deems magicians to be "cynical, nasty people" as someone else puts it. An illustration of this is the Amazing Randi's participation in Alice Cooper's sadistic spectacles.

I now skip to the author's Postscript of August 1, 2010. Here is the most telling statement of Wilder's position:

I want to clarify that I see Communism as a particularly vicious head of the Emotional Plague, a social pathology described by Reich. This Plague is a hydra that has many heads, like the Inquisition, the KKK, the NAZIs, and Al Qaeda. Cutting off these heads has not and will not permanently end the Emotional Plague, anymore than removing cancerous tumors, while necessary and important, ends an underlying cancer biopathy. There are right wing and left wing variants of the Emotional Plague. There are even middle-of-the-road and non-political variants. Read the studies of pathological mass action and inaction.

In judging all this I am not going to address any of Wilder's factual claims. Nor will I address his evaluation of magicians. I question his analogy of Reich and Einstein, but I have always had a problem with Gardner's demarcation criteria myself, so I will refrain from taking apart Wilder's ridiculous argument. I also don't think there is an infallible formal criteriology for labeling someone a paranoid, and in any case, sometimes real paranoia and real persecution overlap in the same suffering individuals. It is not the mere eccentricity of Wilder's argument that I criticize. It is his underlying metaphysical perspective, and the characteristically paranoiac way in which his systematizing reasoning proceeds. His copious historical references notwithstanding, historical reasoning is excised from his world view, recapitulating the late Reich's retreat to metaphysics. If everything is a result of the Emotional Plague, which is an ahistorical psychobiological category, then the real historical development of society and its ideologies is eclipsed by a metaphysics, and one which bears all the characteristics of a right-wing world view, and hence of right-wing paranoia, regardless of Wilder's actual apolitical politics. This bizarre indiscriminate linkage of communism with Kurtz, a Time editor, Einstein's secretary, Lamont, and Gardner is characteristic of a paranaoic world view, however one might rationally analyze possible deficiencies of any of these individuals.

Finally I must mention the Editor James DeMeo’s 2002 Postscript. DeMeo wrote the article I analyzed in my previous blog post on this subject. Here DeMeo attempts to link Prometheus Books with pornography and pedophilia. If this is not the paranoid mind in action, what is?

I imagine some readers will think I'm overly generous in even bothering to analyze a manifestly crackpot view as seriously as I do. But this is not a randomly generated piece of craziness: there is a conceptual structure underlying it which needs to be analyzed. The more astute and acute our analytical capability becomes, the better will be be able to distinguish the merely eccentric and marginal from the fundamentally distorted framework of a wrongheaded world view, whether or not there are partial truths in it.

Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions

Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions by Ronald H. Fritze (London: Reaktion Books, 2009)

See the author's web site, linked above. Here is the publisher's description:

Invented Knowledge is an exploration of the murky world of fake science and pseudo-history: fields that generally rely on lost continents, ancient super-civilizations, conspiratorial cover-ups, preternaturally daring and undocumented discoveries, and even vast Satan-inspired plots to offer an alternative version of the past.

At once lively and authoritative, Ronald H. Fritze illuminates the phenomenon of false history by telling the story of a select group of pseudo-historical ideas. He explores legends such as the lost continent of Atlantis, and the original settlement of the Americas by a European people, who established a glorious civilization only to be supplanted by the invading ‘Red Indian’, and whose only remains are the many mounds scattered across the eastern United States. He also discusses the beliefs of more recent religious groups, such as the Nation of Islam and Christian Identity. Fritze shows that in spite of, or perhaps because of, the strongest rejections of mainstream historians, and the lack of scientific evidence, some of these ideas have proved very durable, and gained widespread acceptance in the public mind. Such ideas can also be deadly – the Nazis, for example, believed in a false version of European history in which the German people were a superior race destined to conquer the world.

With many diverting examples of spurious narrative, artificial chronology and ersatz theory, Invented Knowledge also unravels the disputes and debates surrounding controversial books such as 1421: The Year China Discovered America, Black Athena, The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code.

Howard L. Parsons: East meets West = New Age + Stalinism (1)

The 20th century was replete with the literature of the meeting of the East and West, in respectable philosophical literature, in pop philosophy, New Age thought, and popular culture. As the ideological trend of postmodernism gained ascendancy in the 1980s, the older literature gave way to a whole new basis for combining the most obscurantist currents in Western and Asian thought. Under the postmodern dispensation, it is easy to forget what the older literature looked like.

The entire East-West paradigm formed the basis for the suppression of Marxism as an analytical approach, and Marxism gave the lie to the ahistorical metaphysics underlying the concepts of East and West. While individuals might embrace elements of both, disciplined intellectual inquiry never did so. As bad an influence as Soviet Marxism was, it was not ethnocentric in limiting its purview to Western philosophy. Marxism has a long history of engagement with Indian and Chinese philosophy, for example, and from an entirely different perspective than East-meets-West literature.

I have always been averse to Marxist philosophers who were part of or gravitated to the Soviet camp. In the 1970s and 1980s the Amsterdam publisher B.R. Grüner was a major outlet for their writings. Examination of their output reveals both highs and abysmal lows. Over the years I largely passed by the American philosopher Howard L. Parsons, both in print and in person. Recently, however, picking up one of those old Grüner volumes I had perused several times before, I found something by Parsons I found worthwhile:

"Theories of Knowledge: A Dialectical, Historical Critique" by Howard L. Parsons

I wrote the following on 23 October:

I was surprised to find Berkeley getting credit for something, not to say that pleases me much, but Parsons is dealing with philosophical reactions to the inadequacies of contemporaneous thought, not just for the obscurantism of the alternatives. I find especially interesting his take on mysticism, which he probably polished in his other writings on Eastern philosophies (e.g. Man East and West), which I've passed over until now, but now I think I'll return to them. The weaknesses of bootlickers of the USSR are all too evident to me (and I used to see several of them in action in person), but this essay showed that in certain respects, some of them do have something to offer. B.R. Grüner published all these people, and their offerings were mighty uneven, but still there is some salvageable material. I should also say that material like this provides a perspective that the American atheist/humanist movement has entirely excluded, and which Marxist literature such as this implicitly criticizes.

Then I came across this book, which had been lying about for years, unread:

Parsons, Howard L. Man East and West: Essays in East-West Philosophy. Amsterdam: B.R.Grüner, 1975. xi, 211 pp. (Philosophical Currents; v. 8)

While this took me back in time, I don't recall reading anything on this theme quite like this book. Neither New Age literature nor various Marxist analyses of religion produced this sort of thing in my experience. It reads like a fusion of historical materialism and metaphysical typology, or Stalinism and New Age.

Actually, Parsons' writing style is quite vivid, and this is a plus. There are a number of oddities in the book, though. For example, Parsons deploys Sheldon's physiognomic typology (ectomorph-mesomorph-endomorph, certebrotic-somatotonic-viscerotonic), a peculiar scheme I've not seen promoted since the days of Aldous Huxley. Mao is alleged to possession feminine facial features. Socialism is victorious in the East, which presumably is a plus for the Eastern mindset.

Parsons is not an unqualified partisan of Eastern philosophy; his perspective is congruent with the popular notion of the complementarity of East and West, akin to that of female and male, that both supply qualities the other lacks. Unlike New Agers or other advocates of East-Meets-West, Parsons is critical of the authoritarian, hierarchical, feudal social institutional and ideological dimension of Eastern thought. This deficiency is incorporated into his complementarity model. In other ways, Parsons fails to be critical of the metaphysical conceptions of Indian and Chinese thought he incorporates into his framework.

Parsons provides some detailed analyses of the development of Indian religion and Chinese thought. Oddly, he relates Lao Tzu to social class and revolution (95-97), in contrast to the patriarchal, hierarchical disposition of Confucianism. Incredibly, Parsons relates Sheldon's body typology to differentials between Eastern and Western civilizations (98). (Mesomorphy is Western?) The book is like this, painting a vivid picture in which sociohistorical analysis is fused with pseudoscience and metaphysical fragments.

Generative Anthropology: BS alert!

Is there any end to the pseudo-intellectual diarrhea excreted from France? Is there any academic discipline more devoid of integrity than anthropology? Political Science maybe? Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse: Generative Anthropology.

I have blogged about René Girard before: the author of Violence and the Sacred exposes what he considers to be the root cause of the sacred—sacrificial ritual as the regulator of violent impulses—only to promote Christianity as something legitimate and distinct from all other superstitious belief systems. Eric Gans singles out the genesis of language as the driving causal force—the originary event—behind the evolution of the human race. Isolating this as a single factor both reflects the postmodernist semiotic-fetishist agenda and constitutes a radical form of idealism once again converting anthropology to a pseudoscience. And note how the term "originary event" resonates with religious origin myth.

Here is a particularly revealing as well as sickening specimen of this ideology:

Eric Gans, "The Unique Source of Religion and Morality," Anthropoetics I, no. 1 (June 1995)

Why doesn't it surprise me that Gans is in the French Department (of UCLA)? Anthropoetics, what a steaming load: there are no atheists in foxholes, and all religion is an outgrowth of semiotics. Postmodernism has been exploiting religion for some time. Opportunists of a feather . . . Get a load of footnote 1:

Generative anthropology articulates our postmodern dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment version of secularization, which either denies the transcendental altogether or reduces it to the most abstract version of the metaphysical "first mover" (Deism), without ever explaining the transcendentality of the language it uses in the process. Revolutionary atheism is an inverted religious fundamentalism that makes use of verticality to tell us that the vertical does not exist.

This article is equally delicious:

McKenna, Andrew. (2001). "Signs of the Times: Rorty and Girard," Paper read at COV&R Antwerp.

Here is a bibliography of this trash:

Bibliography of Generative Anthropology

There are no standards and there is no accountability. Academia is like the rest of society: a zoo with all the cages open and the dumb beasts running amok.

Martin Gardner vs. Wilhelm Reich & Orgonomy

"Response to Martin Gardner's Attack on Reich and Orgone Research in the Skeptical Inquirer" (1989)
by James DeMeo, Ph.D.; Director, Orgone Biophysical Research Lab; Ashland, Oregon, USA.

Wilhelm Reich's orgonomy was an object of attack in Gardner's (Fads and Fallacies) in the Name of Science. This is one illustration of the demarcation problem, i.e. distinguishing criteria between science and pseudoscience, a problem about which Gardner attempted to generalize, though I don't think that this can be adequately accomplished as a formal matter. As I recall, Gardner speculated whether the early Reich--the Marxist psychoanalyst and author of such notable works as The Mass Psychology of Fascism--was as discreditable as the later Reich who initiated orgonomy as a research programme. This particular twist is symptomatic of the inadequate treatment of the demarcation problem, as the field of psychoanalysis was doubly politicized as a putative science--in its orthodox Freudian and various heterodox incarnations. The earlier Reich was emphatically not a crackpot, but the criteria for judging the validity of his theories at that time may not be so straightforward as what is taken to be scientific method in the physical sciences. What constitutes deviant professional behavior in the cases of psychoanalysis and orgonomy may not be the same sort of thing. There are two dimensions to such evaluation: (1) how seriously the theory in question can be taken, given our background of scientific knowledge at some historical moment; (2) whether the pursuit of research outside accepted channels is an indicator of a pseudoscientific enterprise. We can attempt to formulate some general criteria as to what constitutes crank science, but actually, we have to approach specific cases from the standpoint not of formal criteria but of specific real-world knowledge.

For my own take on Reich, see my essay:

The Late Vitalism of Wilhelm Reich: Commentary

We may also ask now whether James DeMeo has a valid complaint or whether he is a crackpot. The author claims he rigorously follows the scientific method, and that the body of research he cites has been marginalized by the scientific community in a politicized context. DeMeo writes more or less in the style of a rational person, but whether he exhibits paranoia or a persecution complex (another reasonable interpretation) demands that we have a prior sense of both legitimate science and the scientific community.

DeMeo has a bone to pick with both the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, later absorbed into the Center for Free Inquiry) and Martin Gardner. DeMeo complains about smear tactics and censorship for being denied a forum. He complains that CSICOP violates its own stated principles. He establishes that he has scientific credentials but emphasizes that Gardner has none. The immediate occasion for irritation with Gardner is Gardner's article:

"Reich the Rainmaker: the Orgone Obsession", Skeptical Inquirer, 13 (1): 26-30, Fall 1988.

There is a history that begins with Gardner's article:

"The Hermit Scientist", Antioch Review, Winter 1950-1951, pp. 447-457.

There is one charge that is more serious:

Gardner's first attack against Reich appeared in the Antioch Review of 1950, though he was then more restrained in his linguistic distortions and vituperation. In 1952 he attacked Reich, with similar clever wit and fervor, in a chapter in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. His articles helped fuel the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) pseudo-investigation, which has since been demonstrated, through at least three different Freedom-Of-Information-Act searches of FDA files, to have been conducted in a most shabby, antiscientific "get Reich" manner.

One would have to look over the FDA files to ascertain whether in fact Gardner effectively contributed to the persecution of Reich, which led not only to his imprisonment but to an unprecedent government-instigated book-burning.

Whether or not Gardner in any way distorted Reich's claims, there are additional issues raised here. In addition to the nutty alternative science, there are philosophical arguments. DeMeo denies that orgonomy is a religion and reiterates Reich's war on all "mysticism," in which natural science as we know it is also implicated. DeMeo purports to find the root of Gardner's hostility in his own dualistic world view, in which Gardner affirms, sans attempt to justify himself rationally, his own theism. Now while this is indeed a noteworthy point upon which to dwell, DeMeo, following Reich, claims to have surmounted the dualism that plagues the modern world.

Here's a fragment of the metaphysical justification for Reichian science:

[. . .] Reich's functional, bioenergetic works stand in clear opposition to both a dead, machine-like universe, and a dualistic, "spirit-versus-flesh" anthropomorphic deity. Indeed, Reich argued persuasively that the mechanistic-mystical world view was the result of a perceptive splitting-off of organic sense functions, caused by the chronic damming-up of emotional-sexual energy within the body of the observer. For these reasons, he argued, animistic peoples, who lived a more vibrant and uninhibited emotional and sexual life, and who consequently remained relatively free of neuroses, could feel, with their sense organs, the tangible energetic forces which shaped and created the universe.

It gets worse. See for yourself.

Now before I add my own generalizations, I must point out that others have accused the orgonomy advocates themselves of falsifying Reich's legacy by altering his earlier Marxist psychoanalytical writings in accord with his later orgonomy.

A few conclusions of my own, some of which are explicated in my essay noted above:

(1) Taken all together, this is a nutcase alternate "scientific" world-picture, false not only in theoretical or empirical particulars but false as a total package in light of accumulated scientific knowledge, not to mention the tacit background assumptions of methodological naturalism and experimental replicability.

(2) Part of DeMeo's essay reads like scientific experimental empiricism, but if you read some of Reich's own reflections on experimental research, there is indeed a regression to animism in violation of the canons of experimental procedure. (I.e. a certain kind of personal vibe skews results.)

(3) Furthermore, in spite of the eschewing of "mysticism" and affirmation of naturalism, all of Reich's late writings are imbued with a metaphysics which indeed reads like mysticism. Reich's quest to overcome the alienated, fragmented experience of life in the modern world is derailed by a pseudoscientific, illegitimate holism.

(4) While accusing Gardner of harboring an implicit dualism, DeMeo himself vacillates between empiricism and metaphysics in his characterization of his own scientific claims and of the scientific community allegedly engaged in a conspiracy of silence against him.

Gardner, whether wearing the hat of methodological naturalist or theist-in-hiding, was simply not up to the philosophical task of analyzing the tragic turn in Reich's intellectual preoccupations. He was as incapable of profound analysis of ideology as the rest of the secular humanist/skeptical movement, which of course never sees itself as ideological. These folks can spot what's obviously pseudoscientific (unless it concerns memes, evolutionary economics, human sociobiology or some other pet non-paranormal pseudoscience of their own) in fringe science, but to delve beneath the surface, that's not their forte.

Martin Gardner takes on Oprah before his final departure

Somebody had to do it.

Oprah Winfrey: Bright (but Gullible) Billionaire by Martin Gardner
Skeptical Inquiry, Volume 34.2, March / April 2010.
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/oprah_winfrey_bright_but_gullible_billionaire/

I think he was too kind.

Martin Gardner Dead at 95

Martin Gardner is no more. Say it ain't so. I discovered Martin Gardner in the Mathematical Games column of Scientific American, having innocently bought it off the newsstand because of my boyhood interest in science. I think the issue I bought was June or July 1967: his column that month was about John Horton Conway's game "Sprouts". And then I was hooked. My name was published in one issue of Scientific American for my solution of some problem involving "Baker's Solitaire". Names were omitted though, when said article was reprinted in one of Gardner's anthologies. Gardner's columns radiated from the base of recreational mathematics to encompass quite a range of topics. Gardner stimulated my interest in the related hobby of abstract strategy board games, but that was only the beginning. Through Gardner I learned about the artist M.C. Escher, the 19th-century fad of 4-dimensional space, anamorphic art, the godfather of the ars combinatoria Raymond Llull, and numerous other fascinating topics reaching into obscure corners of intellectual history. I also read several of Gardner's books in addition to his collections of Mathematical Games columns, most memorably Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.

Gardner is also known for The Annotated Alice and other volumes, but his two biggest claims to fame are probably his contributions to recreational mathematics and to the "skeptical" movement. I returned to Fads and Fallacies several times over the decades. I was never fully convinced of Gardner's criteria for the demarcation of science and pseudoscience. In addition to dealing with obvious crackpots, he delved into fringe areas where rationality bleeds into irrationality, such as Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics, William Reich's radical psychoanalysis and orgonomy, and Marshall McLuhan's theory of the media. Still, the range of Gardner's examples supplied a background I could draw upon throughout my adult life. This book can be said to have stuck with me, but I will forever be indebted to Gardner for all the wonders to which I was introduced via his work on recreational mathematics.

Martin Gardner, 95, a journalist, provided in-depth analysis of Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat

Jacques Vallee's "Passport to Magonia": addendum

The preface and table of contents of the 1969 edition are now on my web site:

Jacques Vallee: Passport to Magonia (Contents & Preface, 1969)

Michael Shermer, racism & social "science"

I can't believe I forgot to blog on this priceless specimen of pseudoscientific obscurantism. The following, constructed from old e-mails, is fragmentary. I don't think I ever wrote out my entire analysis of why this article by Shermer is utterly bankrupt. Perhaps you will be able to see it for yourselves.

08 Jan 2007
We're all racists, unconsciously: Kramer just blurted out what unfortunately comes naturally to all of us.
By Michael Shermer, L.A. Times, November 24, 2006
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-shermer24nov24,1,5226012.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

. . . Stumbling on this old article, I find myself amazed that Shermer has the cheek to pronounce himself a scientific expert on matters such as these. He makes some remarkable extrapolations from these little experiments and declares, based on his expert knowledge of evolutionary theory, that the biases he lists are simply natural in-group out-group programming instilled in us by evolution. And that's his explanation in toto. This, from an alleged skeptic. With friends like Shermer, Harris, and Dawkins to explain sociopolitical realities to the world in the name of science as childishly as they do, who needs enemies?

16 Jan 2007

While a couple other people [on the now-defunct Freethought Forum] expressed skepticism viz. the psychological experiments in question, nobody saw the essential problems with Shermer's

BS. The secular humanist community is simply not prepared to move beyond its shallow scientism to a wider methodological basis for explaining social phenomena. And these postmodernist shits have only made the job more difficult.

I find I can't get through a single day of intellectual work without addressing the fundamental dichotomy at the highest level.

I am operating with this duality of scientism and irrationalism at a very high level, because in fact even those few who recognize the duality have not refined their analysis sufficiently or applied it to contemporary situations. I've been addressing it in the secular humanist/atheist community, and these people are not prepared to deal with it. I've been questioning their heroes Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Shermer, Wilson, etc. and they can't deal with it. The one person I found [in this particular forum] who admits of my fundamental criticism is a dingbat who's into postmodernism and queer theory. This is the ideological landscape we're living on.

Skepticism, naturalism, materialism: they're talking about me

The Center for Naturalism's Currents in Naturalism March-April 2007 listed my blog entry on naturalism vs. materialism on my Freethought Forum blog as a good source on the subject.

Picking up on this, The Mindful Hack then quoted me, twisting my criticism of the skeptical movement to justify psi phenomena as a legitimate field of inquiry:

Thinkquote of the day: Skeptical of "skepticism".

This was in turn picked up by The ID Report.

There's no way of controlling how other people are going to use information. Hopefully someone will learn something from the material I put out.

See also my initial commentary on naturalism.org.

God, the Failed Hypothesis

Stenger, Victor J. God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007.

Written 16 Mar 2007:

I gave Victor J. Stenger's book God: The Failed Hypothesis a quick read yesterday. It is far superior to Dawkins's latest book and I'm hoping it will ride the wave of the alleged "new atheism" to gain a wider readership than such books would likely have garnered in the past. I have some philosophical nits to pick with the book, but it is an excellent springboard, or baseline, to work from, and then work out some of the more esoteric philosophical issues as a follow-up.

The book focuses on scientific arguments pertaining to all aspects of the God hypothesis, and while not attempting to "prove" a case for atheism, it trashes the basis for any belief in a god exhibiting the standard divine attributes. Thus, while some God could conceivably survive such a treatment, its alleged properties would be constrained. For Stenger, what would be left would be nothing more than a weak deism with no real explanatory consequences.

Fortunately, Stenger does understand the difference between science and philosophy for the most part, and he supplements his science-based approach with some strictly philosophical considerations as to the coherence of certain god concepts on purely conceptual (rather than empirical, i.e. scientific) grounds. This is an improvement over Dawkins.

The most important thing to understand here is the demolishing of a scientific, empirical basis for belief in gods, paranormal phenomena, and nonmaterial self-subsistent entities. Or to put it any other way, God as an explanatory device for scientifically investigated phenomena. The other philosophical arguments are icing on the cake, and they take us a good part of the way to demolishing a rational case for any kind of God 99% of humanity including intellectuals would lay claim to. As I say, there are more refined philosophical issues remaining to be treated, but this is a good basis to work from for general public purposes.

Stenger references two books unfamiliar to me which seem to be central to addressing these purely philosophical issues: The Non-Existence of God, ed. Nicholas Everitt; The Impossibility of God, ed. Michael Martin & Ricki Monnier. I think such approaches are indispensable, as the basic conceptual problems with the god concept are as central as those involving empirical proof of such an entity.

I made pages and pages of notes and outlined a detailed review which I should publish online or perhaps better yet in print. In it I would also address what I consider to be the unfinished business of this genre.

Postscript, 26 March 2007:

There are two ways to conceive of the existence of god: (1) as an empirical entity like any other, (2) as a concept, bearing various definitions and attributes. The "proofs" of the impossibility of God do not pertain to (1), as such proofs are impossible. Rather, the philosophical proofs of God's non-existence would be based on the incoherence, self-contradiction, vacuousness, etc. of the concept. I presume such proofs would have to do with the alleged attributes of God's perfection.

The Dawkins approach, I would say, is rather simple-minded, but since it is addressed to a nation of simpletons who don't understand the nature of scientific explanation, I guess I shouldn't complain. In my view, though, (2) is as important, fundamentally even more important than (1).

The existence of a god as an empirical entity is the anthropological god, of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Muhammed, yo mama. But the other god is the god of the philosophers, an abstract concept, the god the theologians attempt to hang on to, craftily shifting back and forth from the anthropological to the metaphysical god.

Scientism of the Gaps & the ‘Two Cultures’

See also my original post on the Freethought Forum with a series of responses.

Written 1 January 2007:

It is essential to note that both pseudoscience under the aegis of legit science and pseudo-science or anti-science under the aegis of supernaturalism both rely on scientism and illicit projections based on gaps. Scientism is a disputed term, but here I am using it to mean a quasi-ritualistic aping of the methods of science in misapplication to an object of inquiry. Because there are always gaps in knowledge, these gaps are exploited to provide pseudo-explanations or denials of the scientific explicability of phenomena. The mirror-image of “Intelligent Design” is the pseudoscience of Dawkins’s memes. All of modern society is trapped in irreconcilable dualisms. A culture capable of generating the one in a scientific age invariably must generate its complement. Over a century and a half of philosophy and broader intellectual currents can be mapped as a competition and vacillation between the currents variously nameable as positivism (scientism) vs. irrationalism (Romanticism).

The religious Right represents one wing of reversion to irrationalism, its power in the USA derived from the decline of liberalism in the 1970s. The liberal wing of irrationalism (misconstrued by its opponents and many of its proponents as radicalism) is vaguely characterizable under the umbrella term of postmodernism, whose intellectual roots are derived from the political Right but have undergone political mutations in the course of their development. The ascendany of this tendency is concommitant with and derives from the same social conditions as the New Right. The attack of the postmodernist wing on rationality and science should be considered as much an assault on secularism and atheism as the attack of the religious Right, and in spite of the mutual cultural and political hostility of these two camps, the postmodernist assault on science serves the cause of the new fascism.

Meera Nanda has documented the problem in relation to India:

Meera Nanda Online

For those who can brave the waters of philosophy and intellectual history, my study guide provides a number of sources for exploring this dichotomy:

Positivism vs Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie)

A more easily digestible approach to the problem can be found in C.P. Snow’s 1959 initiation of a debate on the “two cultures”:

The Two Cultures: C.P. Snow, Literature and Science

The ‘two cultures’ problem plagues us today: specialization and fragmentation allow educated people to remain ignorant of huge swaths of information needed to make sense of our world. Dennett, who is a professional philosopher, ought to know better, but philosophy is as divided as everything else, and Anglo-American philosophy is particularly narrow and provincial. Dawkins is an ignoramus outside of evolutionary theory, and he has impermissibly extended his knowledge by instigating the pseudoscience of memes, an illegitimate metaphorical extension of notions from genetics and natural selection to the cultural/social/ideological sphere. This is a repetition of the nonsense to which the new evolutionism was put in the second half of the 19th century.

Just as there is a god of the gaps, there is a pseudoscience of the gaps, which can be tailored to naturalistic and well as supernaturalistic world views. A naive conception of how science can be applied as a universal method, especially to social and cultural phenomena, constitutes scientism, or the fetishistic application of scientific methods and notions to an object of investigation without comprehension of how the two match up.

Sam Harris presents us with a somewhat different version of the problem. First, he presents a new twist, making ridiculous claims for Eastern mysticism, reincarnation, and similar New Age nonsense. Secondly, freaked out by 9–11, he purports to explain social behavior merely as an effect of belief, rendering an understanding of the springs of behavior in both the Islamic world and in our society impossible. Thirdly, he is so politically and sociologically naive that pernicious consequences flow from his public interventions. Harris himself amalgamates aspects of the two cultures, with the New Age gloss, but as he has no basis for explaining social, cultural, and ideological phenomena, he ends up doing as much harm as good.

Missing in all of this is a huge range of possible contributions from social theory, cultural theory, sociology, anthropology, history, and the full range of philosophical traditions, along with the crucial concept of ideology. Where are the representatives of these domains of expertise in the secular humanist, atheist, freethought, and skeptical communities? How is that the two cultures are somehow segmented such that activist atheists and secular humanists seem to be conversant only with one of these two cultures, both on the production and consumption ends of the culture industry?