the doxa, orthodoxy and thinking we are right

I have been reflecting on the Boudrieu’s lessons about the doxa (see post 9/6/17) as any bona fide skeptic must. Remember that the doxa is the field of discourse that composed of two levels: the words and concepts we use to talk about the world, i.e., our culture or habitus, and the world, i.e., objective reality. Most of the time we casually assume that our cultural concepts match the world, i.e., they are isomorphic with each other. When intellectual rigor is important (and when is it not if we humans are to survive), we must carefully disabuse ourselves of that notion and so understand that what and how we think and talk bears only some indirect relation to reality (for most of us; for some politicians and their supporters the two seem never to be related at all).

This is analogous in physics to operating everyday according to Newtonian physics, e.g., we sent Cassini-Huygens to Saturn using Newtonian calculations, but physicists will tell you that Einsteinian and quantum mechanics are actually more accurate (but much more involved so Newton’s way of figuring wins out because it is adequate and much simpler). Now the important perspective here is that we have two or more symbolic systems that both correspond to the world reality and that we choose between them based upon utility, accuracy and their aesthetics. We do not assume that a particular cultural conception captures reality in a singular manner because we operate from the scientific axiom that our knowledge only approximates an ultimately unknowable world. The scientific method institutionalizes the disjuncture between our cultural conceptions and the world that compose the doxa and this leads to Monod’s important proposal towards an ethic of knowledge. We must seek to know in order to understand our conceptions, our world, and the relation between them.

Imagine yourself as an early Hominid maybe some 250,000 years ago as our kind embarked on symbolic thought and communication. An easy and relatively safe assumption is that we assumed that our culture and the world were one; the doxa was undifferentiated and so we had little capacity to see that our conceptions were arbitrary constructions about the world with many alternatives abounding. This would render our mentation magical: we think it and it is real. Oh boy! Over time with continued evolution, both genetic and cultural, Homo sapiens came to realize that the doxa was not undifferentiated, i.e., that our cultural conceptions were just and only that—they reflect the world but are not isomorphic with it, i.e., our concepts are at their base arbitrary. Plato’s parable of the cave is an astounding statement of that understanding. And I have to wonder about the role of writing in this evolution where the earliest examples are lists of things, then laws and then narratives before philosophy began to address the partition of the doxa into orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Our Greek forbears were especially important for the skepticism of their thought about our knowledge.


“Make it rain? Why, yes, I can, and for only $100” said the priest.

And now we come to religion, which does assume their conceptions are divinely privileged renditions of reality, and my recent encounter with the wonder that is St. Augustine. What a guy. Read his biography and you will see a good example of how mania fuels productivity along with some pretty maladaptive personal behaviors and relationships. That I have known for awhile; then I read last week this quote of his from the 4th century and knew wherein religion and science differed in critical detail: “unless thou believe thou shalt not understand.” Our skeptical, scientific, and modern ethic of knowledge stipulates that we understand before we assemble our beliefs (theories, etc.) while religion ala Augustine (and much of Christian thought follows his lead) stipulates that we must first believe the religious tenets because all knowledge follows therefrom and must be judged accordingly. This is what kept the Copernican solar system at bay for many years, what kept the earth flat, what put Galileo in house arrest, what promoted the inquisitorial methods, what sustains climate change denial, etc. And abandoning this has made modern medicine and science/technology possible.

I use ‘religion’ as a stand-in for all rigid orthodoxy and ideology, i.e., for all systems of thought that presume to know the facts beforehand and that assume that their cultural conceptions bear some special, even divine, relationship to some sort of truth, i.e., their facts cannot be invalidated. That is why religion can be dangerous, why heterodoxy and skepticism are critical to our intellectual integrity, and why the ethic of knowledge is now very, very important. This also why our political discourse suggests our culture is doomed. Travel on now and enjoy a respite visit to some noumenal realms of reality.

salient point

A skeptic’s guidepost, but follow or turn away, that is the heterodoxical question


WP on art and the brain





Arrivederci, Cassini

Tomorrow morning Cassini dives into Saturn and burns up to avoid contaminating any of the moons.  NASATV is running many programs about the mission and will broadcast the end of mission tomorrow beginning around 6 or 7 AM EDT.  Here is a picture of Cassini-Huygens as a brand new machine before launch so many years ago.


NASA has released some numbers about the mission:

4.9 billion miles traveled, 294 orbits of Saturn completed, 2.5 million commands executed, 635 gigabytes of science data collected, 453,048 images taken, 3,948 science papers published, 27 nations participating and two oceans discovered.  At a cost of $2.5 billion to build and launch Cassini and Huygens, split between NASA, E.S.A. and the Italian Space Agency, and another $1.4 billion to run them for 20 years in flight, that seems money well spent.

The NY Times has composed a magnificent set of pictures illustrating the mission:  Make sure to watch the video at the end.  Wow!  Thank you again Cassini and NASA.

culture and the connectome

I have finished, sort of, Pierre Bourdieu’s A Theory of Practice. I say ‘sort of’ because towards the end his prose became quite ridiculous and somewhat redundant so I skimmed. My wife is fond of quoting W. C. Fields, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” Truth be told, Bourdieu does both in this book. Also, to be clear, I do not think he had any real notion of seeing his work in the light of biological science, but I sure do.

First, consider his idea of the culture as the habitus, i.e., an acquired set of predispositions that guides our actions in new situations according to socially developed and learned ways of responding. These predispositions would cover quite a variety of activities, from body language and emotional expressiveness to methods of farming and cooking to ritualized social actions like marriages and hospitality to sex and gender roles, to, well, the list goes on quite a while. Bourdieu studied and found great differences between traditional agrarian societies and modern ones as well as among those dominated by industrial capitalism and ones more conscious of social equality. The habitus changes as each generation encounters new kinds of experiences, and the rate of cultural change seems to have accelerated over the past 120 years for obvious reasons.


Our connectome with many systems lit

Remember the connectome, that patterning of neural connections and firings responsible for virtually everything we do and are, like when a young lady dies in icy waters and is resuscitated several hours later and then over time recovers her pre-morbid functioning, i.e., her identity, her habitus and her professional abilities (see post 1/10/15 ‘Death and the connectome’: She had acquired her cultural predispositions mostly early in life; they were maintained in some sort of invariant form and then implemented flexibly and this was carried out through the connectome over her life span before and after dying. Our language and its pragmatic use, our personality and its acculturated form, and our habitual ways of engaging in important social activities are manifestly inherent in our biology.

Next, consider another idea from Bourdieu, the doxa, and this is a mite subtle, so please bear with me. The doxa, in Bourdieu’s view, is the realm of discourse. It has two contributing components, one the natural reality of the world and the other our social, i.e., cultural, conceptions. In the doxa in its plain, simple, and incipient state, these two components are identical, or close to it, but this is based upon a shared illusion, a lie as it were, because our cultural conceptions are arbitrary constructions. They could be, and indeed are, composed any number of ways, while natural reality is simply that, real and without versions (or such is the orthodox view but don’t get me started). With the doxa we pretend that our concepts are identical with reality; that is the source of their truth and validity, but that is a lie we share, e.g., it goes without saying people are free and god grants them their freedom. In natural fact people are quite constrained and god contributes nothing except what we create in our cultural domains.

When people realize that the cultural conceptions are arbitrary and that there is more than one way to go about inhabiting the realm of discourse, say through contact with strangers or travel to foreign lands, the doxa becomes segregated. Now the predominant cultural view is orthodoxy while the rebellious alternative is heterodoxy. Like the doxa, orthodoxy determines the realm of discourse, e.g., what is considered true, possible, probable, etc., and thereby relevant for discourse while heterodoxy challenges that arbitrary conceptualization with another deemed more accurate or valid, or at least corrective. We can see this in many examples from the religious domain, e.g., Martin Luther, and we can also see this in politics, where conservatives and progressives each see their views as orthodox with some 3rd parties being heterodox, in social movements, e.g., Realpolitik where aggression and war are natural and necessary vs. the Peace movement (I like John Lennon’s “Imagine”) and in science, e.g., different paradigms like Ptolemaic vs Copernican.

I would add here that how we view humanity is important for both the habitus and the doxa: are we a member of the animal world or something different. Are there ghostly spirits? Are there subspecies of humans? I remember during my graduate work in clinical psychology (late 80s) some faculty and many students thought studies from other animals were irrelevant to human psychology. The most glaring example was in ADHD where much work is necessarily done with other species if we are to understand the neurological processes of attention and concentration and their dysfunction. There were times I felt like a congenital heterodox because not only did I think animal research applied to humans, it included humans, and in what I am sure was viewed as absurd, that the department of psychology should be in the school of biology. Oh well, crank or ahead of my time, their imaginings or mine? Neuroscience has had a lot to say on this matter since then.

Two final points here. First is that the cultural doxa, along with its segregation into orthodoxy and heterodoxy, determines what is admissible into the realm of discourse and this channels how we think about the world. This entails that the connectome functions more fluidly with orthodox notions [lights up with many more and more stable connections] and must accommodate its habitus in order to consider any such heterodoxy [lights up with far fewer and less stable connections and even those deemed at least somewhat invalid] fully. An example from our history is that enslavers held the orthodox view that people of color were an inherently different and substandard species. In fact many who were against slavery held some version of that view. The heterodoxical view that Africans were equal in their humanity, both in intelligence and capability of culture, was inadmissible to many, especially to the enslavers in the south. Who espoused the heterodox view that blacks were like us? Abe Lincoln had his doubts; John Brown did not. His plan at Harper’s Ferry was to foment slave rebellion and include the enslaved in the process because they could be equal contributors. Not many, even on the Union side, held that opinion. The connectomes of the people back in the day, like everyday, were bound by the constraints of the habitus and the doxa’s admissibility of concepts into discourse.

My second point is this: THE PRESUMPTION OF CONCORDANCE BETWEEN NATURE (or reality or god’s way) AND THE TERMS OF CULTURAL DISCOURSE (i.e., the doxa) IS DANGERGOUS, because that presumption leads to the ideological and fanatical disregard of the arbitrariness of cultural conceptions and of another’s truth. Someone can bring up a heterodox challenge but it is disregarded because with that presumption of concordance, the essentially arbitrary nature of our cultural constructions is ignored and false beliefs are sustained. (Science is important because it institutionalizes the discordance between our conceptions and nature.)  Consider again the historical example of enslavement. Some of my relatives some 100 years after the Civil War still held that African-Americans were inferior and they could not, i.e., would not, admit any difference between their orthodoxy and reality. Still to this day consider the rise of white nationalism.

Boudrieu’s dazzlement with the habitus and doxa is a brilliant achievement and most helpful as we try to understand humanity today and its biological roots. And remember Mark Twain’s words: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” Travel on then.

Thanks, Cassini, for the data

and thanks to your team who worked so assiduously and intelligently for this most successful mission.

On September 15, 2017 our Cassini spacecraft with its energy almost out will crash into Saturn, sending data back until the very end. Here is a link to an EarthSky post that gives a good timeline for the event:  Here is composite photo from Cassini images.


Saturn from Cassini

More than a decade in design and construction, Cassini launched in 1997 and traveled millions of miles flying by Venus and Jupiter on the way, indeed using Jupiter’s gravity to sling around and pick up speed, before arriving at Saturn in 2004. In December 2004 Cassini released a probe, name of Huygens, that landed on the moon, Titan. Huygens sent back data to Cassini that relayed it back to earth. Since that time Cassini has been assaying Saturnian phenomena and now its nuclear fuel is running out so the last data will be collected on a suicide mission. Over 13 years of data gathering! That is truly remarkable ingenuity. Consider one more detail. Huygens landed on Titan within a kilometer of its planned site 1.2 billion kilometers away from Earth after a 7 year trip. Some people with excellent math skills worked together very hard to accomplish something incredible.


Surface of Titan photographed by Huygen probe

An astounding number of beautiful photographs have been sent back and enough data, I am sure, to keep scientists busy for awhile. I try to imagine how the Cassini team feels as their long term endeavor comes to an end, a remarkably successful project that shows the power of math, engineering and science, not to mention human cooperation. I don’t think ‘bittersweet’ would be the apt term but I am sure they will miss the work of tending their craft way out in space even as they celebrate the remarkable accomplishments of their mission. I hope NASA televises the control room on 9/15—I will watch in the early morn if they do.  Here is a photo Cassini took this year of our home planet.


Bright dots are Gaia and moon photographed by Cassini from just below and behind Saturn and its rings. Beautiful photo and beautiful work to take it.