Defense of Truth

It's been enlightening for me reflect upon some of the different types of marital relationships that I observed in such a multicultural tapestry as the Côte d'Ivoire. I say multicultural because there are over 60 different languages spoken by the different peoples within the nation's borders, and though many of their traditions are similar if not analogous, there are also competing varieties of modern European and Eastern traditional types of marital arrangements there also. There was an amazing complexity compared with what I had always assumed was the almost binary choice of cohabitating couples in Western cultures (marry, or live together, with few other socially sanctioned arrangements possible), and yet there seemed to be no confusion. If there was any confusion, it didn't come from the culture, but rather from recent successive changes in the state's legal definition of marriage. As with many African nations there existed a long history of traditional marriage...

Please excuse me the incredible hubris of deigning to disagree with René Descartes: the heart of science is NOT doubt, it is doubt's opposite--faith. The scientific method describes the process of learning any empirical truth as beginning with enough curiosity to ask a question, then to doubt your own intuitions or the established "truth" enough to force yourself to experiment and prove whether your hypothesis is correct or incorrect. It's the self-doubt, or doubt of intuition, or even previous explanations (doubt of which leads to curiosity) that is meant when scientists talk about scientific skepticism. The problem, for me, is that I think it is falsely labeling the desire to find out for certain if something is true as a doubt, rather than as a form of faith. Is faith not the evidence of things not seen, the substance of things hoped for? If you hope to know something, and invest thought and effort into designing an experiment that would reveal your hypothesis as e...

My advisor recommended a book to me by a comparative lit theorist by the name of Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, called Theory in an Uneven World . Like the bulk of literary theorists, he is an unashamed Marxist, but I've been reading that type since I arrived here at grad school. It's proved to be an enlightening intellectual exercise to try to read this kind of theorist, holding their false premises in suspension in my mind and thinking through only their internally justified and internally logical merits until it becomes appropriate to remember the false premises and sweep away the entire theory. It's a sort of coping strategy I've developed that I think actually helps me engage with theories I'll have to deal with as an academic, while maintaining my core conservative values and principles. In a way, it's a bit of a Sun Tzu "know your enemy" kind of way of studying, but I find it fruitful. Anyway, Radhakrishnan is concerned with making Marxist theory wo...

Have you ever played 20 questions with one of those "stories with holes"? I remember as a kid I had a teacher pull some of us aside to challenge us with these while the rest of the class worked on something we had already mastered. The idea was to tell a story with seemingly neutral facts and with a key part of the narrative missing so that by asking 20 or less yes/no questions you could deduce the key to the narrative. Almost always, the seemingly neutral description contained a critical clue that triggered the game-players' assumptions in a way that led them down a false path, and hindered their deductive process until they could hone in on the assumption, question it, and break out of the consequences of the assumption. Maybe a few concrete examples, if I can remember some: A man is driving in his car and is killed by a gunshot, but there's no hole in his vehicle. Most people start asking about whether the windows were open (nope, all closed up), and about passenge...

I didn't want to become one of those grad students who takes forever to find out what he wants to study, so I entered the Masters program at PITT with an idea what I wanted to do as a dissertation: national identity in the Ivory Coast. It sounds like a straightforward enough concept, but I encountered an article while I was taking a history course which looked at several case studies of the construction of racial, ethnic, and gender identities over a variety of geographical locations and historical periods that made me radically re-think the entire concept of identity . It's a concept that makes intuitive sense to most people, I would imagine. It means who you are, right? The layperson could also probably understand quite readily that there seem to be many different levels at which our "identity" can be determined or constrained. A black person may feel more of a racial component to identity than a white person, for example. My religious identity takes primacy over my...

I've been promising part 2 on polygamy for a long time, but it's such an in depth topic that I postpone thought on it so I can give it it's full due in time and treatment. And today's no exception: I need an easy one. PBS's modus operandi for the entire 4-hour documentary "The Mormons" is to frame elements of LDS belief and practice as controversial, then proceed to give an accurate, but cursory glance at what Mormons believe followed by an extended critique or contrary view. In the case of the legions of young missionaries in the field today, the controversy was more contrived and less sinister than most other issues, in my view. Essentially, PBS was following the tack that so many people sacrificing so much of their youth, time, freedom, and money, were obviously numb of mind and victims of a controlling leadership, whose effectiveness at creating such a deep social pressure to conform bordered on Stalinist. OK, maybe I'm exaggerating a little there,...

The meat of my liberal friend's reply on gas-gouging: I make no excuses for signing the petition to stop gas price gouging. Exxon (and whoever else) was doing just fine without $15 billion profits 5 years ago. Why the price hike now? Maybe a certain war has to do with it. For simplicity's sake, big oil just doesn't need that much money, and they shouldn't have to rely on the consumer for it. On top of that, (note: the following is speculative only) if we hadn't invaded Iraq, prices would still be at ~$1.19, and everyone would be happy. To my liberal friend, You have brought up a few objections that I should have anticipated before sending my first message. So thank you for giving me another chance to address them. So let's think about your objections together seriously for a minute here: big oil * doesn't need * that much money??? How do YOU know how much money they NEED??!! And most importantly, what makes YOU, or the GOVERNMENT, or anyone else besides Exxo...