Recently there has been a growing sympathy for those hurt by offence. There seems to be a real need to take the offended seriously, to the extent that institutional efforts are underway to mitigate the effects of offence (for instance bill C-16 in Canada).
I find this incredibly weird; in fact, being part of what I consider a great liberal tradition, I’m offended that people would want to protect others from being offended! The question of what to do with people like me is a good prelude to the reductio ad absurdum that I have sketched out below. I propose that it is never possible to protect people from offence. Here I will outline my reasoning as to why this is the case. First of all, I presume that:
Let us imagine that we want to protect victims of offence using legislation. This legislation will have to adhere to the above mentioned principles. If this legislation is to be any good it also needs to be free of paradoxes. But there is at least one paradoxical situation innate in trying to implement such legislation. The paradox is as follows. Consider a possible victim of offence named Charlie. Charlie is offended when people try to protect him. Charlie is capable of being offended by such actions under principle 2) and it is our duty to take seriously his offence under principle 1). How do we protect Charlie from being offended? One could propose to refrain from protecting Charlie, but this refusal to protect him stems from a desire to not offend. In fact, by refraining from protecting Charlie we are protecting him from being offended. Thus, we will offend Charlie and fail to protect him. Our only other option is to protect Charlie, but this also leads to Charlie being offended. A contradiction. Any legislation that aims to protect the offended needs to either resolve the above paradox or find fault with either of the two proposed principles. I'm convinced that such a resolution of the paradox does not exists and consequently that the proposed legislation would not be worth considering.
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Particle physicists have long been searching for a ‘theory of everything’: a set of equations that describes the behavior of matter at the smallest possible length scale. It is assumed that by using these equations one could, in principle, explain all phenomena in the universe — hence the name ‘theory of everything’. Adherents of such a ‘theory of everything’ are reductionists, i.e. they believe that good explanations of the macroscopic world always consist of, or are dependent on, good explanations of the microscopic world. But – as I will explain in this post – this is a myth based on a fallacy. The Aim of ScienceReductionists are confused about the aim of science. Following David Deutsch, I conjecture that the aim of science is to produce good explanations. An explanation is a statement about what is out there, how it behaves and why. One necessary criterion for an explanation to be good is that it must be difficult to vary: optimally, altering any part of the explanation must result in spoiling it. Easy to vary explanations are rejected outright; they need not be considered candidates for objective truth. The supernatural is an example of an easy to vary explanation. The supernatural always lacks specifics and could be invoked to explain anything at all and because of this it explains nothing at all. Explanations of this type are of the form “a ghost did it”, without further mention as to what ghosts are, what they are made of and why they do the things they do. I shall use the term supernatural to denote the class of all easy to vary explanations, all of which are equally false*. Definition of ReductionismReductionists implicitly accept a 'supernatural theory’, albeit in a peculiar way. Before I get to this I will elaborate on my definition of a reductionist. As far as I have been able to discern, there are two types of reductionist. They are both typified by their overemphasis of the importance of the microscopic world. I try to encapsulate both of the reductionist by distinguishing between two different reductionist principles**. The first type of reductionist presumes that our best explanations refer to the smallest constituents of reality. Any good explanation of these constituents is also a good explanation of everything that is an assembly of these constituents. This I will call the weak reductionist principle. An example would be: if I know how atoms behave, then I will know how brains behave as well (by, for instance, simulating a brain consisting out of atoms). I also propose a strong reductionist principle, which states that all macroscopic explanations are dependent on the microscopic physics. An example of this principle would be: my explanation of how brains behave will depend on my understanding of how atoms behave; when my understanding of the physics changes so does my understanding of the brain. Whether the respective examples turn out to be right or wrong is besides the point here. It is primarily the principles that concern me for they are both false. This becomes evident when we consider that some of our best theories of the macroscopic world do not allude to microscopic physics at all. RefutationConsider the computer you are reading this blog post on. Specifically consider the keyboard. Why is there this rich array of symbols on each of the tiny square objects in front of you? One could allude to the particles the keyboard is made up of in order to explain this pattern. Reductionists of both kinds would presumably argue that these particles were subjected to various forces at different times in their histories which eventually resulted in them being organized in their current configuration. This is tantamount to saying: “the laws of physics did it”. It is a variant of the supernatural (although strangely enough a variant of the supernatural which refers explicitly to the laws of physics) and hence is a bad explanation for the same reason: it is easy to vary. We might criticize the reductionist by asking why we see this pattern on the keyboard and not another. Was it by chance? This cannot be the case because there are many similar keyboards connected to other computes. So why do the keys look like they do and are organized as they are? Any good explanation as to why this is so will have to mention computers, humans and languages. Such things as atoms, electrons and photons need not be mentioned. Here we see something remarkable and yet completely ordinary at the same time: a pattern in nature which is explained well in terms of macroscopic entities, but explained poorly in terms of microscopic physics. In fact, regardless of what the microscopic physics of my keyboard turns out to be, the macroscopic explanation will remain valid! The explanations are independent. Thus it not only refutes the weak but also the strong reductionist principle. In fact, had the strong reductionist principle been true, the world would have been inexplicable. For people are macroscopic entities, with experiences of the macroscopic world. They would only be able to find out about the microscopic world through experiments relying on the manipulations (and thus on the explanations of) macroscopic entities. However, by assumption these macroscopic entities cannot be explained without an explanation of the — as yet — unexplained microscopic entities and thus we would be incapable of explaining anything at all. ConclusionThere are, as it turns out, fundamental scientific theories which do not allude to microscopic physics at all. One such example is the theory of computation. Computations can be performed using circuits of logic gates, but the logic gates can be instantiated in many different materials. Another would be the theory of evolution; neo-Darwinism is formulated in terms of replicators, without specifying what the replicators are made of. These theories are independent of the theories that particles physicists are concerned with.
It is not to say that explanations of macroscopic phenomena can never depend on the microscopic details. The rigidity of crystals is understood through quantum mechanics. Nor does it seem possible to fully comprehend how the sun generates energy without considering the fusion processes that are occurring in its core. But the reductionist principles are false. They are based on the misconception that our theories of the world are hierarchical in nature |