Philosophy of Science - Part II

Philosophy of Science – Part II

Einstein

Albert Einstein solved a central problem of science with his theory of special relativity and it was this that influenced philosophers of science to further understanding in the field. A principle of relativity refers to the idea that unaccelerated motion can be described only in respect to a specific frame of reference.

Einstein was associated with two specific principles that are germane to the present thread of philosophy of science: 1) the relativity of unaccelerated motion as well as 2) the non-relativity of the speed of light. Einstein re-examined the assumptions scientists made about space and time. Depending on their frame of reference two observers traveling relative to one another will have different opinions about when an event happened, or whether one event happened before another. Einstein asserted that the question “when did this event happen” is scientifically meaningless.

In a similar way, different observers in motion (as described above) will measure an object’s length differently. “All can be right provided we reject the notion that the object’s length is independent of the reference frame from which it is measured.” A lot of what Einstein accomplished hinged on his linking such concepts very tightly to experience and measurement, while he denied that they had “legitimate use when disconnected from experience and measurement.”

P.W. Bridgeman expanded upon the philosophical ramifications of Einstein’s innovations with operationalism, which entails defining each scientific concept solely in terms of the operations required to detect and/or measure specific instances of phenomena.

Classical Empiricism

To understand better the connections between experience and meaning that operationalism attempts to convey, we must examine the philosophical history of “reflection about experience, language, and belief.”  Locke, Berkeley, and Hume created a common tradition of empiricism—“the idea that experience sets the boundaries of, and provides the justification for, our claims to knowledge.” The classical empiricist began to reject the very notion of a useful metaphysics and to build knowledge upon the bedrock of that which can be observed by the senses and deduced by the intellect from these observations.

Broadly speaking, empiricism refers to the notion that all that we can know about the universe is only that which can be communicated by sensory input—observation of the external world. Locke wanted to determine the boundaries of our knowledge by investigating its sources. He asserted, “Nothing is in the mind that was not first in the senses.” Thus, for Locke, when the mind thinks, that is the substance of an idea. These ideas are mind-dependent. We perceive sights, sounds, textures, odors, etc. but we do not perceive actual objects. Also according to Locke, simple ideas come from experience and then our innate mental powers, such as pattern-recognition and abstraction, elaborate our simple ideas. “Abstraction lets us focus on a part of a presented idea… and these parts can be recombined to form ideas of things never presented in experience, such as unicorns.”

Despite his rejection of the label, many of Berkeley’s colleagues considered him a skeptic because he denied the existence of matter. Berkeley argued that we have no an idea of material substance. First, we have no direct experience of matter. We grasp to describe what matter alone might look or feel like. Second, Berkeley argued that it was impossible for us to construct a legitimate idea of matter based on our ability of abstraction. Without knowledge of a thing’s properties, how might we imagine it at all? Finally, Locke had admitted some confusion about how ideas are produced in us and according to Berkeley, “God simply produces ideas in us directly.” God does not need the intermediary of matter to produce in us ideas. According to Berkeley, our patterns of experience are the world itself. Science is reducible to the development of rules which predict our experiences.

Finally, David Hume demonstrated the devastating effects of this pure skepticism espoused within, if not by, Berkeley. Hume’s sought to bring experimentation to philosophy. However, this proved difficult because of the lack of “testable” hypotheses. According to Hume we have no inkling of causation, how one event might be observed to “make” another event happen. Experience simply shows us the correlation: the first thing happens, then the next. For us, their connections are not experiential. There is a lack of continuity as well. The only thing experience provides us with is that which is “currently perceived by us.”

This position as a starting point is deeply skeptical. Thus, Hume asserted that “all meaningful statements must concern either relations of ideas, as in logic and mathematics, or matters of fact, as in the empirical sciences. This influential dichotomy is known as Hume’s fork.” Hume thus felt that he was engaged in a kind of psychology, attempting to determine principles about the human mind in a manner like Newton had applied toward the cosmos. 

Logical Positivism and the Closely Related Logical Empiricism

Logical positivism and logical empiricism, together form neopositivism, a movement within Western philosophy that turned to verificationism, which tries to make philosophy a bit more like science. For example, under verificationism, statements that are verifiable either logically or empirically are the only ones considered cognitively meaningful. The Berlin Circle and the Vienna Circle propounded logical positivism starting in the late 1920s. It attempted to reduce confusion in language and method between philosophy and science.

The logical positivists were responsible for making philosophy of science a much more serious undertaking within the overall study of philosophy. Logical positivists were influenced by Einstein’s work and other physics developments but largely disregarded 20^th century German philosophy which was otherwise somewhat influential in other subfields.

Logical positivists were less worried than Popper had been about pseudoscience and focused more on metaphysics and philosophy’s potential for impeding progress in physics. Like Auguste Comte the logical positivists were largely disappointed with efforts at a metaphysics—this accounted for the positivist part of the name. The logical part of logical positivism concerns their belief that mathematical logic had tools which could give rise to a stronger version of empiricism and weaker version of metaphysics. “This new version of empiricism grasped the other option presented by Hume’s fork. For the positivists, the philosopher deals in relations of ideas, not matters of fact.” It is the job of philosophy to clarify linguistic problems and show signs of the relationships between scientific statements and experience.  

Basically, logical positivism holds that every cognitively meaningful statement falls into one of two categories:  1) analytic or, 2) a claim about experience. Cognitively meaningful statements are literally true or false. Thus commands and questions are not statements subject to this dichotomy. Analytic statements have to do with Hume’s relation of ideas. They are true or false based on their meaning and are not true or false statements. Thus, analytic statements are knowable a priori; empirical evidence is not required to know the truth of logical and mathematical propositions. Such analytic truths also hold necessarily. For example, “It is not merely true that no bachelor is married; it must be true.” It is true in all possible worlds. At this point, metaphysics is disregarded as a kind of “poetry” not beholden to truth or falsity.

As previously mentioned, logical positivists defined meaningfulness in terms of verification. “To be cognitively meaningful is to be either true or false; thus, a statement is meaningful if there is the right sort of method for testing truth or falsehood.” Analytic statements, on the other hand, are demonstrated true or false by mathematical or logical proof.

While operationalism and classical empiricism focus on the relation of a term to experience, the verificationism of logical positivists makes empirical meaningfulness a matter of a statement’s ability to meet experience, made possible partly due to advances in logic. As you can see, this is where philosophy really begins to take on a linguistic turn. Thus, a term can get its meaning from its role in making meaningful statements rather than being independently meaningful. Verification of a synthetic statement entails finding observations that speak to its truth. However, it is too stringent to require a sufficient number of observations to prove conclusively the verifiability of a synthetic statement. A weaker version of verification must suffice.

For logical positivists, theories need not get the world correct, but instead experience it right. Acupuncture is one example: One can respect reliable (at least within a certain domains) predictions that acupuncture theory makes and the cures that result, and avoid taking the theory’s assertions concerning energy channels and other pseudoscience seriously. Thus, for the logical positivists, the connections between theoretical terms are critical but for deriving observations, not for objectively describing reality. Often, statements that compose a scientific theory do not have to be true to be “good.” They do not attempt to describe the world but, instead, permit us to infer “this from that.”  “They can still play a needed role in a theory’s ability to take observational inputs and generate true observational outputs. This is the instrumental conception of scientific theories.”  

Philosophy of Science - Part I

Philosophy of Science

**WARNING: The following review of materials for a course in the philosophy of science is necessarily long and exhaustive, replete with the confusing jargon of both the fields of philosophy and science, as well as the unique jargon that emerges when the concepts of each field of study is unleashed upon the other. It will require patience and time to wade through these waters, but for those interested in this essential inquiry, the reward will be well worth the effort—S.I.P. Blogger. 

“Getting the Course” [Just skip the first 3 paragraphs if you only want to see material review.]

Around this time last year, my brother was looking for some intellectually challenging audio material to listen to during his daily commute, which is an hour and a half one-way. We’ve both been frequent listeners to audio books of non-fiction and literature; however, our true commute-driven audio passion has been for university lectures, particularly those produced by The Teaching Company under the titular series The Great Courses. I have reviewed other courses in this series frequently on this blog. Ironically, I discovered The Teaching Company and their excellent lectures in my last semester prior to graduating with my Bachelor of Arts degree.

Of course, I quickly introduced the lectures to my brother and we have been loyal customers ever since. At the time, The Teaching Company was the only source of recorded lectures readily available. These days, there are numerous sources of such lectures: The Modern Scholar, iTunes U, podcasts, and individual university offerings such as MIT’s Open Courseware—just to name a few. I mention all of this only to explain to you that neither of us is an amateur when it comes to consumption of recorded academic lectures and coursework. So, when my brother was looking for something challenging last year, we did some research and comparison and finally settled on The Great Courses’ Philosophy of Science. The outline indicated that the course addressed topics we had both encountered but not understood or studied in previous settings: logical positivism, the problem of demarcation, Karl Popper, axioms, a theory of everything, etc.

After getting the CDs, I waited about a week and then asked him how the course was going. Now, not to bloat his ego, but we’re talking about someone who has an IQ in the 160 range and a nearly eidetic memory. “It’s rough, man,” he responded. “I hate to say it, but I’m just going to have to quit it. It’s just too abstract and complex—I find it hard to follow.” So, he did quit it. The first time either of us had shied away from a course. I was thoroughly intimidated. The course just sat around for the next year. Then, finally, about a month ago, I decided it was time to slay this beast. “Good luck, man,” said my brother, when I told him of my intention.

“Experiencing the Course”

On 8/3/2014 I completed The Great Courses series on Philosophy of Science which was presented by Professor Jeffrey L. Kasser, PhD. He is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University. His undergraduate degree is from Rice University and his doctoral study was completed at the University of Michigan. My completion where my brother failed was, however, a far cry from a celebratory occasion. Understanding the philosophy of science requires one to move in a circular (perhaps elliptical?) orbit around the same pertinent questions that have plagued the study from at lwawt 

At first, the 18 hours might sound slim for a full course on the philosophy of science. I can assure you it is not.

With the production style of The Teaching Company, ideas come quickly and elaboration even quicker. These lectures are planned and efficient. If you went to a university where the standard sixteen week course was 3 classes of 50 minute lectures per week, with alternating Fridays, then you remember very easily that this does not translate into the following relationship: (50 min x 3 days) + (50 min x 2 days) / 2 = a mean average of 125 minutes per week x 16 wks = 2000 min / 60 min/hr = 33.3 hours of instruction. That is quite a fantasy. I attended three state schools and five private colleges during my extended academic career and always found the same thing: At least the first 10 minutes were concerned with review of the previous lecture material. Another 15 minutes were typically used for answering student questions throughout the lecture or at the end of the course as well as various administrative matters (announcements, anecdotes, etc.) Finally, there were almost always two entire class sessions devoted to review of the midterm and final exams and two for the actual conduct of those exams.

All of this means that the typical classroom student loses (let’s be conservative) around 20 minutes of lecture/instruction time for each class—bringing the actual time down to 30 minutes per class session. Then, we must account for the total of 4 completely lost classes concerned with examinations (100 + 100 = 200). Thus, we arrive at the following calculation of actual time devoted to lecture/instruction in a typical 3 semester hour credit course: (30 min x 3 days + 30 min x 2 days)/2 wks = a mean average of 75 minutes per week x 16 wks = 1200 min – 200 min (the 4 days devoted to exams) = 1000 min / 60 min/hr = 16.7 or approximately 17 hours of lecture/instruction time in the typical course. This explains why we all had to study so hard and make outside office appointments with professors to review critical course concepts.

The course consists of 36 different thirty-minute lectures, each of which builds upon the last and is available as a set of DVDs, audio-only CD packages (our medium of choice), or audio download. Each lecture addresses a different aspect of the philosophy of science. Lecture titles include the following:

1)      Science and Philosophy, 2) Popper and the Problem of Demarcation, 3) Further Thoughts on Demarcation, 4) Einstein, Measurement, and Meaning, 5) Classical Empiricism, 6) Logical Positivism and Verifiability, 7) Logical Positivism, Science, and Meaning, 8) Holism, 9) Discovery and Justification, 10) Induction as Illegitimate, 11) Some Solutions and a New Riddle, 12) Instances and Consequences, 13) Kuhn and the Challenge of History, 14) Revolutions and Rationality, 15) Assessment of Kuhn, 16) For and Against Method, 17)     Sociology, Postmodernism, and Science Wars, 18) (How) Does Science Explain? 19) Putting the Cause Back in "Because,” 20) Probability, Pragmatics, and Unification, 21) Laws and Regularities, 22) Laws and Necessity, 23) Reduction and Progress, 24) Reduction and Physicalism, 25) New Views of Meaning and Reference, 26) Scientific Realism, 27) Success, Experience, and Explanation, 28) Realism and Naturalism, 29) Values and Objectivity, 30) Probability, 31) Bayesianism, 32) Problems with Bayesianism, 33) Entropy and Explanation, 34) Species and Reality, 35) The Elimination of Persons? and 36) Philosophy and Science.

I included this long list for a quite obvious reason: Simply looking at the titles of lectures in the course provides quite a bit of information about what you can expect as you progress through the 18 hours of philosophical and scientific material.

The first thing that stands out is that the title of the first and last lectures in the series are very similar, simply transposed. What you can deduce from this is that philosophy not only influences scientific practice but the relationship is “give and take” with science having a strong influence on developments in philosophy as well. Another glance at the titles will reveal some of the major names involved in the development of a philosophy of science: Popper, Einstein, and Kuhn. Finally, by looking at the last several lecture titles we can reasonably predict that probability, and particularly, Beysian probability figure prominently in the later trends of thinking in philosophy of science.

We often place an intrinsic faith in science seen in our acceptance and integration of technology into our daily lives. Yet we also know that science is sometimes done poorly and its theories proven to be accepted erroneously. So it’s good to think about science—how it relates to our society, culture, as well as to us individually. A course in the philosophy of science attempts to use the tools of philosophy to reflect on these things.

Furthermore, philosophy can be used to evaluate the assumptions upon which science is based. Should we accept as axiomatic the assertion that there is a material world and furthermore that we can know, that is, predict its behavior based on historical observations) anything about it?  Many scientists would obviously argue that we should and we can, based primarily on the value judgment that doing so has proven useful—that it’s pragmatic—based on the outcomes of scientific advancement.

In their recent book The Grand Design, physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow (2011) argued that philosophy of science is dead. Indeed, Dr. Kasser allows that most of the philosophy of science was done prior to the 20^th century and what remains today is largely semantics. However, a truly curious and skeptical mind should be cautious about accepting statements like Hawking’s and Mlodinow’s.

Yes, our materialist perspective has proven very useful in examining our little corner of the universe, and yes, it is the best explanation we have now. Yet, failing to keep an open mind about the possibility that we are wrong (and there is always, always the possibility that we are wrong) can lead to the kind of dogmatism in science that has been so vehemently criticized in religion. The first time this really hit home for me was (no, not when I was watching The Matrix) several years ago when I happened upon Dr. Nick Bostrom’s (2003) paper, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”Bostrom’s thesis is presented so clearly in the paper abstract, there could be no better summary:

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.

Note that the definition of posthuman is somewhat contentious. Bosterom generally refers to posthumanity in terms that it has developed the capability to exceed material and energy constraints due to technology. While this topic is a slight digression from the main focus at hand, the point I wish to make I that philosophy still has plenty to say about science and technology and their applications.

“Philosophers & Philosophy in Science”

Chances are, if you’ve ever had a course or series of courses in research methods, you will have had at least some exposure to our first prominent philosopher of science: Karl Popper. (Please resist the urge to call him John Popper, the singer/songwriter and supernatural harmonica player for Blues Traveller. Karl Popper was a teacher at the London School of Economics and he was originally from the lively intellectual city of Vienna. Popper’s unique insight was the concept of falsifiability. Inductive reasoning presented a difficulty in that no matter how many confirmatory observations a scientist makes, he or she can never prove something to be universally true, such as all ravens are black. However, according to Popper our hypothesis can be falsified. One observation of a white raven falsifies the hypothesis: All ravens are black.

This was also Popper’s answer to the demarcation problem—we’re doing science if and only if our hypotheses are falsifiable. This helps us to further distance genuine scientific inquiry from pseudoscience. Unfortunately finding this distinction continues to be a problem for those in the general public—such as people who buy “magnetic energy bracelets.”

In the concluding post, Philosophy of Science II, I will look at the following topics and how they relate to our basis of the philosophy of science: Einstein, Classical Empiricism, Logical Positivism (such as A. J. Ayer’s), Holism, Hume and Induction, Kuhn’s historical perspective, sociology of science, postmodernism, laws, reduction and physicalism, scientific realism, probability, Bayesianism, and entropy.

The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman

Just as I was finishing business school, three-time Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman published the book The World is Flat.. This book seemed to be very popular among many of my graduating fellow MBAs, some of the professors, and a lot of people in the business community. I turned my back on the business world and put my MBA to use in public service management. I had also been working on an MA in Philosophy at a Thomistic Catholic College, so Friedman’s work was the last thing on my priority list at the time.

However, I recently ran across a copy of The World is Flat at a used book sale for fifty cents. I decided that it was time to take a look at Friedman’s book. There have certainly been a number of macroeconomic changes in the almost ten years since this book’s first publication (2005), most notably the housing bubble and the Great Recession begun in 2008.

Friedman’s theme is not hard figure out: the flat world is a metaphor for globalization “gone wild,” where a high school graduate in the United States competes for jobs not only with other Americans but also with hard-working Indians, Chinese, and other new global economic players. The author devotes page after page of anecdotes in support of this thesis. His second thesis is that to be competitive with foreign labor (physical, mental, and technological) the American worker must learn to be constantly evolving, using an almost paranoid sense of impending change as the driving force for “rebranding” themselves at roughly the same rate as the increase in computing power.

My main criticism with The World is Flat is that it seems desperately to want to be a book of social science. Unfortunately it is not. Therefore, when we put down the text we feel as though we have learned something about the proliferation of economic and cultural globalization—but we haven’t. What we have learned is Thomas L. Friedman’s opinion about these things based upon the anecdotal evidence he has collected in his own life.

This is not to say that Friedman’s theses are not correct, but I can offer only the support for them that Friedman offers in the text itself—which is very little. The World is Flat does have many redeeming qualities, however. It is well written with a unique voice. Friedman does manage to cram in a lot of little facts and figures (perhaps to make up for the lack of a proper scientific basis for support) which are interesting. Yet, by far the most interesting parts of the book are those that give a brief glimpse into the inner workings of corporations like Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Dell, and the company founded by all-around unique individual Ross Perot.

While there are some compelling aspects to the case Friedman makes with his “flat earth” metaphor, the book is too flawed to be of any serious use in guiding economic and public policy. Where it fails in its descriptive aspect (to provide any sort of scholarly research to support its main conclusions) it necessarily fails in its prescriptive methods.

I believe that if a journalist is going to undertake the type of project represented by the content of The World is Flat, he or she must work in collaboration with at least one social scientist. Much of the progress of the last 100 years has come about through the use of the scientific method to propose and then support or refute these proposals through a rigorous academic process. Without such standards, all we are left with is conjecture. It might be exquisite, well-written conjecture—but it is conjecture nonetheless.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

My wife and I regularly read a book together, typically a classic from American literature, and discuss it as we go through the pages. Some past selections are The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and The Catcher in the Rye. Recently, we finished William Faulkner’s As I Lay  Dying.

We approached the novel with some trepidation. I had previously tried reading it when I was in my late teens but I found its labyrinthine first-person, stream-of-consciousness multiple narratives almost entirely incomprehensible. This time, reading it with another person proved to be much more fruitful.

Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying over the course of only 6 weeks while he was employed at a power plant. It was published in 1930. The title is taken from Homer’s The Odyssey: "As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades." Chapter lengths vary, each one presented in the first person by a new narrator.

The plot centers on the Bundren family in rural Mississippi at what seems to be the turn of the 20^th century. The mother of the family, Addie, is dying. She is presented at first in a somewhat pious fashion, we learn about her demons later. Her husband, Anse, is self-pitying opportunist whose first comment after his wife passes is something like, “Well, maybe now I can get them teeth.” (He claims to have been edentulous for 15 years.) Her children are Cash (a carpenter), Darl and Dewey Dell (twins), Jewell (foul-mouthed and ill-tempered), and Vardaman (who is still at least an adolescent).

The basic plot seems to be inspired by ancient epics although in a more absurdist vein than a heroic one. Addie’s dying wish was to be buried miles away among “her people” in Jefferson, Mississippi. Recent rains have left the rivers flooded and as the family loads her into the coffin and onto their wagon it becomes quite apparent that the journey will be fraught with misadventure.

I will not recount the entire plot here. Instead I will give some general impressions that both my wife and I took from the novel. First and foremost, Anse Bundren is a despicable, annoying, and pathetic human being. Second, Faulkner’s contrast of the simple vernacular of these people with rich, complex inner monologues serves to demonstrate that just because they might seem simple-minded doesn’t mean that they actually are.

Darl is particularly articulate and there are hints that he has a “second sight” that is off-putting to most of his neighbors and even family members. He stands in stark contrast to his younger brother Jewell, who was the “apple” of his mother’s eye. Darl is thoughtful, Jewell is pragmatic. Darl is analytical, Jewell plays his cards close to his chest.

In the end, however, each of these strong characters portrayed in the children gives some part of their very being to see that their mother receives a proper burial. Only Anse gets away clean, looking dirtier than ever.

Read this novel.

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce

Mr. Pierce is a freelance writer and I am most familiar with his work from Esquire magazine. His writing is witty, acerbic, and very insightful on subjects ranging from sports to current affairs. It is the latter that is the subject of this book.

Pierce describes the contemporary United States as something of an intellectual wasteland. He begins by painting a vivid picture of the inherent absurdity of the so-called Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. Men ride dinosaurs fixed with English saddles. A couple of triceratops are lined up (baby ones to conserve space) on Noah’s Ark. Elephants are rescued from the Hindu religion and its god Ganesh.

Pierce described “Idiot America” (undefined, but probably best understood as the mass of the public, the aggregate of US opinion) acting as follows: “It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. In this “new media age” (the 24-hour news cycle), “everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is,” (p. 8). He uses controversy over teaching “intelligent design” in public schools and the “debate” over the same. Pierce lambasts press coverage regarding the undermining of the teaching of evolution through pseudo-scientific propaganda.

In a country pulsing with technological innovation, how do such misguided ideas gain popular support, or even an audience? Pierce asserts three premises that guide the commoditization of ideas which allows them to flourish in contemporary American society: 1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units. 2) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it. 3) Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough. His unique talent, in this text, is in chronicling the decline of the informed and educated citizenry sought by James Madison. Pierce’s recollections of Madison’s idealism feels like a sad lament, one with which most thoughtful Americans might closely identify.

One of the saddest comments recorded in Pierce’s text is from a minister in Pennsylvania, Pastor Ray Mummert: “We’ve been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture.” This is a comment that is difficult to stomach, yet one can easily identify this sentiment as pervasive in our popular culture. Intelligence has almost become some kind of stigma in public life. Recall the election of 2000: Bush vs. Gore. Gore, the soft-spoken intellectual was consistently skewered by both the media and by his jovial, from-the-gut common-man opponent. This is not to say that either candidate’s party or platforms were superior to the other’s, or to criticize or condemn anyone who supported either candidate. The point is that logic, facts, or ideas were marginalized in favor of emotional, gut-level appeal.

Pierce also gives a short biography of a crackpot (he calls a “crank,” in fact “The Prince of the Cranks”) named Ignatius Donnelly. Donnelly lived from 1831 to 1901 and in this stretch of time completed a large collection of popular works on topics ranging from Atlantis to politics to Shakespeare as well as a plethora of pseudoscientific and pseudohistoric ideas. He was also intimately involved in politics in Minnesota and the US. Pierce’s point is to contrast the way in which fringe ideas and movements developed in the 19^th century versus their pervasiveness in contemporary life. Donnelly, although popular and not without a following, was largely relegated to the fringes of public discourse where he belonged. However, these days we are inundated from every corner by pseudoscience and pseudohistory, ranging from Dr. Oz to Ancient Aliens.

In another amusing segment of the book, Pierce discusses so-called reality television. He recalled a mid-2000s Writer’s Guild strike that led to the temporary stoppage of reality television shows such as survivor. According to Pierce, there was no one available to “write” reality. Reality itself has become a more twisted concept than ever. I am struck by the way in which individuals carefully craft a multi-media narrative about their lives through the use of social media, particularly Facebook. Thus, now more than ever, we truly are authors writing the story of our lives; only now, it is more literal than figurative.

Idiot America is a solid, well-thought argument about the “dumbing-down” of popular culture in America. The major problem that I found with the book is that it is mostly descriptive of cultural maladies and rarely offers anything in the way of prescription. Also, by the time the reader has finished the majority of the text, Pierce has reviewed copious supporting examples. I think some of the space the author used to present examples of his cultural critique could have been better used to examine the origins of our reactionary, apathetic, and ultra-conservative culture.

Likewise, the conclusion of the book would have been more effective, to me, if the author had presented some of the ways in which Americans have gotten it “right.” For example, the same country that produced the absurdist Creation Museum is also the only nation to have landed a human being on the moon. The same people that fight and squabble over whether homosexuals should be allowed to contractually enter into a monogamous union was able to struggle, strategize, and protest until women and African-American citizens had equal rights and protections under law. While current affairs might tend to make one despair, it is a better use of the intellect to inspire true social change. With that said, I still would certainly recommend Pierce’s book to anyone seeking to attain a better understanding of where our culture is at present as well as how our government’s various functions have become quite dysfunctional in many respects.

Happy learning!