Literal Truth Research Articles

Visions of the Millennium: Hopi and Mayan Prophesies of the “End Times”

This article looks at Hopi prophesies (and to a lesser extent Mayan and Tibetan Buddhist prophesies) about major changes occurring in the world within the next few years. In examining such prophesies, we need to remember, as the Hopi do, that these prophesies tell us less about literal changes in the world around us than about symbolic changes occurring in consciousness. Prophetic literature of all cultures speaks in symbols whose primary purpose is to capture inner, not outer, change. In a time of major transition, a time like today, we need to approach such prophetic literature as providing potential “containers” for our own new vision of reality. When something eternal in the human psyche speaks to us, the vehicle is not important. Something deep inside us can still experience symbols directly, without the need for intellectual interpretation. And, if prophetic material is psychologically true, questions of literal truth or falsity are immaterial. These prophesies offer not only an end, but also a new beginning.

Davanti alla legge: Exorde di Drieu La Rochelle

This paper aims to bring to light a short text by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Exorde, and to analyze its shifty belonging to various genres such as autobiography, political testament, or judicial defensive memorial. In doing so, the paper takes account of the historical background of the French collaboration with the Nazi occupant during the Second World War. A portrait of one of the major intellectuals of les annees folles emerged; a character who consumed to the end his involvement with the new totalitarian cult. Through the forms of the text, the concealing of the style, the singular alteration of the genres between judicial fiction and literary truth, some essential aporias have been unravelled: aporias between different perspectives on law in the debate around purges. The text’s scandal is therefore revealed before the court, in conformity with democratic law procedures, with democracy itself, and, more deeply, in the negation of the concept of history’s justice.

Arguing for Wisdom in the University: An Intellectual Autobiography

For 40 years I have argued that we urgently need to bring about a revolution in academia so that the basic task becomes to seek and promote wisdom. How did I come to argue for such a vast, wildly ambitious intellectual revolution? It goes back to my childhood. From an early age, I desired passionately to understand the physical universe. Then, around adolescence, my passion became to understand the heart and soul of people via the novel. But I never discovered how to tell stories in order to tell the truth. So, having failed to become a physicist, and failed to become a novelist, I studied philosophy at Manchester University and then, in 6 weeks of inspiration, discovered that the riddle of the universe is the riddle of our desires. Philosophy should be about how to live, and should not just do conceptual analysis. I struggled to reconcile the two worlds of my childhood ambitions, the physical universe and the human world. I decided they could be reconciled with one another if one regarded the two accounts of them, physics and common sense, as myths, and not as literal truths. But then I discovered Karl Popper: truth is too important to be discarded. I revised my ideas: physics seeks to depict truly only an aspect of all that there is; in addition, there is the experiential aspect of things—the world as we experience it. I was immensely impressed with Popper’s view that science makes progress, not by verification, but by ferocious attempted falsification of theories. I was impressed, too, with his generalization of this view to form critical rationalism. Then it dawned on me: Popper’s view of science is untenable because it misrepresents the basic aim of science. This is not truth as such; rather it is explanatory truth—truth presupposed to be unified or physically comprehensible. We need, I realized, a new conception of science, called by me aim-oriented empiricism, which acknowledges the real, problematic aims of science, and seeks to improve them. Then, treading along a path parallel to Popper’s, I realized that aim-oriented empiricism can be generalized to form a new conception of rationality, aim-oriented rationality, with implications for all that we do. This led on to a new conception of academic inquiry. From the Enlightenment we have inherited the view that academia, in order to help promote human welfare, must first acquire knowledge. But this is profoundly and damagingly irrational. If academia really does seek to help promote human welfare, then its primary tasks must be to articulate problems of living, and propose and critically assess possible solutions—possible actions, policies, political programmes, philosophies of life. The pursuit of knowledge is secondary. Academia needs to promote cooperatively rational problem solving in the social world, and needs to help humanity improve individual and institutional aims by exploiting aim-oriented rationality, arrived at by generalizing the real progress-achieving methods of science. We might, as a result, get into life some of the progressive success that is such a marked feature of science. Thus began my campaign to promote awareness of the urgent need for a new kind of academic inquiry rationally devoted to helping humanity create a wiser world.

From Babylon to Christianity: William Foxwell Albright on Myth, Folklore, and Christian Origins

The American Orientalist William F. Albright (1891–1971) is remembered as a leading voice of twentieth‐century “biblical archaeology,” a field that aimed to demonstrate empirically the Hebrew Bible's substantial historicity. Less well known is Albright's research on Christian backgrounds, which by contrast reflected modernist theology's scepticism about the gospel narratives' literal truth. Drawing ideas from the “Pan‐Babylonian” school of biblical criticism, Albright invoked the influence of ancient Near Eastern myth and folklore on the Christ story, this being the culminating theme of his magnum opus From the Stone Age to Christianity (1940). Originally Albright believed that this mythological interpretation would reestablish Christianity's intellectual credibility in the twentieth century and thus help revive New Testament theology. Yet in the latter part of his career he omitted the mythological thesis from his writings, apparently having concluded that it was harmful to orthodox Christian faith.

Strange Times to be a Jew: Alternative History after 9/11

Strange Times to be a Jew: Alternative History after 9/11 Margaret Scanlan (bio) The novelist Louis Begley recently noted that the War on Terror, though seemingly “limitless,” has “not been the theme of any great literature” (204). Begley’s scrupulous word choice suggests that novels such as Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World or Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, which prompt us to imagine what it was like to be in the World Trade Center when the planes struck or how that experience might transform a survivor’s life, open up reflection on what the September 11 attacks did to America. But such novels, however accomplished, cannot offer a historical perspective on what Begley sees as an even more compelling topic, “the nature of the damage done . . . to American society by the crimes and abuses of the Bush administration.” It is too soon to know if these abuses will be remembered or even judged criminal: “the great plays and novels that will open our eyes to the work accomplished by time and its great partner oblivion remain to be written” (204). Two novels of alternative history, however, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, move in the direction he suggests. Indeed, alternative history, which always plays with the way we remember, forget, and reinvent the past, proves an apt medium for interrogating America after 9/11, a time when renewed calls for old-fashioned patriotism and pride in the military clash with calls to remember that the nation was founded on the separation of church and state and on liberal views of the right to free speech and privacy. [End Page 505] Roth and Chabon are both regularly celebrated for memorializing American Jewish life and criticized for caricaturing it. Kyle Smith, the reviewer for the New York Post who remarked that The Yiddish Policeman’s Union was so anti-Semitic that “maybe Mel Gibson would like to direct” its film adaptation, echoed reviewers who have been calling Roth “self-hating” since the early 1960s. Both novels reimagine the American government’s response to Hitler’s persecution of Jews, and in doing so violate taboos about fictionalizing the Holocaust. When D. G. Myers chastises Chabon for ignorantly using “yids” as a plural instead of the correct “yidn” or for creating a fictional kosher restaurant in which people eating meat sit next to people having a dairy meal, he suggests that invention is sacrilege when a contemporary writer evokes a decimated culture. Real suffering, which is a form of sacred truth, demands scrupulous historical accuracy that fiction trivializes. Walter Benn Michaels betrays a similar concern when he criticizes Roth for inventing pogroms in Kentucky. Why, he asks, should we worry about American Jews, who were never seriously at risk in 1942, when African Americans lacked basic civil rights in many states and were subjected to social discrimination virtually everywhere? “Why should we be outraged by what didn’t happen rather than outraged by what did?” (296). This concern for literal truth, whether about Yiddish grammar or US civil liberties in the 1940s, elides the critical impulse so central to Roth and Chabon. As Gavriel Rosenfeld argues, alternative histories “are essentially defined by an ‘estranging’ rather than a mimetic relationship to historical reality” (5). A novel that juxtaposes the shock of 9/11 and moral outrage at the War on Terror with the Holocaust takes deliberate risks with history, challenging readers to bring new insight to their own times. Roth’s blasphemy in inventing an American president capable of making a pact with Hitler matches Chabon’s creation of another who plots with Zionist terrorists to bomb a distant shrine sacred to Muslims. The risks both writers take in imagining an alternative American history with a new relation to Hitler’s Germany permits them to explore a more current topic: the relationship of American Zionists, both Christian and Jewish, to their militant counterparts in Israel, as well as the implications of that relationship for the War on Terror and for the American Jewish community. Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, probably the earliest imaginative work to juxtapose...

“It Was an Ancient Mariner”: Sir Ernest Shackleton Rewrites the Romantic Quest

While other critics have examined how Antarctic literature of the heroic age of exploration reflected masculine ideals and an imperialist agenda, this essay argues that Shackleton consciously structured South, his memoir of the Endurance's voyage, around Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” as well as other literary texts, to transform the failure of his quest for a transantarctic crossing into a glorious triumph. Shackleton's allusions and structural borrowings substitute the truth of literature for the reality of the polar experience. While this substitution is typical of “voyage of discovery” literature and other subgenres of the adventure story that inform South, Shackleton is distinctly more skillful at manipulating the genre's tactical potential to construct a fantasy of subjectivity based on the internal quest romance, thereby altering the definition of heroics that nourishes the ideologies sustaining the late British imperial adventure. The essay, which places this rhetorical analysis of South in the context of Britain's decline as an imperial power after World War I, argues that the tradition of internal quest romance operates in the cultural imaginary as a counternarrative to the experience of failure.

'There's probably no God; now stop worrying and enjoy yourself'

The above advertisement has appeared on the sides of about 800 national buses. It is sponsored by the Atheist Society, Richard Dawkins, and others. One bus driver in Southampton, who is a committed Christian, refused to drive his bus bearing the advert. Ron Heather said: ‘I felt I could not drive that bus. I told my managers, and when they said they had not got another I thought I better go home. So I did.’ He did not lose his job for making this stand. Perhaps two scientists who have most directly led to the views in this advertisement are Galileo (1564–1642) and Darwin (1809–82). Both made discoveries that directly contradicted the fundamental teachings of the Bible. Galileo obtained evidence that the geocentric (or Ptolemaic) view of the universe was wrong and that the heliocentric view was probably correct. Darwin obtained strong evidence that man evolved from the primates and was not created by God in his own image as the Bible affirms. Galileo under duress recanted his views and died a faithful son of the Catholic Church. Did Darwin, coming under duress from the Church, modify his views? Charles Darwin was brought up an orthodox Christian. His father, although himself a free thinker, considered the Church as a possible vocation for his son. Charles wrote in his autobiography that he liked the thought of becoming a country clergyman and read with great care Pearson on the Creeds and other books on theology. He did not doubt in the least the strict and literal truth of every word of the Bible. He duly entered Christ's College, Cambridge in 1828, where he was to take a preparatory degree for Ordination as a minister of religion. His travels interrupted this plan. At the time of the voyage of the Beagle (1831) his …

Atheistic Science: The Only Option?

ONE PROFOUND REALITY confronting the contemporary Church is the revolution in science and technology that has occurred over the past several centuries. Scientific and technological advances have transformed the natural world in ways hitherto unimagined. They have also penetrated the very fabric of human culture and challenged our faith. progress of this transformation is not unfolding without conflict, especially between science and religion. In the past several years there has been a new burst of atheistic literature that invokes the authority of science deny the existence of God. (1) Proponents of this viewpoint are becoming increasingly aggressive in their scientistic zeal. authors take methodological naturalism an extreme, adopting it as a metaphysical stance. Recently on the Internet there was a brash advertisement for Amazon's Unholy Trinity, a trio of antireligion books published in 2006 including God Delusion by scientist and avowed atheist Richard Dawkins, Atheist Universe: Why God Didn't Have a Thing Do With It by atheist author David Mills, and Letter a Christian Nation by atheist author Sam Harris (who also wrote End of Faith). (2) express goals of the authors are counter religious forces that they believe are undermining genuine thinking and show God be a delusion; (3) point the way past religion; (4) and to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms. (5) Dawkins goes so far as argue that having faith precludes integrity. In a 2006 article in Time, he states bluntly: Once you buy into the position of faith, then suddenly you find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and your scientific--really scientific--credibility. (6) pro-atheism campaign of these men is no small effort, and their books are receiving wide readership. Dawkins's book, released in October 2006, was number 4 on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Bestseller List by December. (7) Harris's book, released in September 2006, was number 7 on the New York Times Bestseller List by October. (8) How is the Church respond these brash claims of atheism and authority? aggressiveness of their claims is in part a reaction against Christian fundamentalism, which in its extreme forms asserts the literal truth of the Bible and denies the validity of certain findings in science, including evolution. In response Christian fundamentalism, Dawkins and others adhere their own kind of atheistic fundamentalism. In his recently published book on evolution and faith, Archbishop Josef Zycinski calls their line of thinking ontological naturalism. (9) Roman Catholic physicist Stephen Barr calls it scientific materialism. (10) Leon Kass, medical doctor, biochemist, and bioethicist, refers it as scientism, meaning a distorted approach the enterprise in which empirical science is embraced as the sole method for understanding the totality of reality. (11) In the face of the polarizing scientism advocated by Dawkins and others, is it possible envision and defend a science that is compatible with faith? Or must the two be at odds? It seems that an integral Christian response should seek clarify the proper place of science and preserve what is good in the enterprise while at the same time countering its excesses. Throughout his pontificate, Pope John Paul II asserted that there is an integral place for science in the Church and that a dialogue between science and theology is essential bridge the divide between them. In an address the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1988, he stated: The unprecedented opportunity we have today is for a common interactive relationship in which each discipline [religion and science] retains its integrity and yet is radically open the discoveries and insights of the other. (12) In union with this approach, this article seeks counter alarming trends in atheism and argue that science is not necessarily a recipe for atheism. …

Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity (review)

Reviewed by: Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity Michael Ruse David Sedley . Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity. Sather Classical Lectures, 66. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. xvii + 269. Cloth, $29.95. The history of evolutionary theory is a little bit of a puzzle. Charles Darwin, the author of the Origin of Species in 1859, was the man who made evolutionary ideas reasonable—ideas that were generally accepted—and it was Darwin who provided the major mechanism of natural selection. He was not the first evolutionist, however. For at least one hundred and fifty years, starting with people like the French encyclopediast Denis Diderot, people had been speculating that organisms (including humans) had a natural origin, from primitive forms. But why did these speculations have to wait this long? It is true that Christianity, incorporating as it did the creation stories of Genesis—what the nineteenth-century English essayist Thomas Carlyle called "Jewish old clothes"—was not going to be friendly towards evolution. But what about the Greeks? Did not they get into such ideas? As a matter of fact we all know that they did, a bit. Empedocles had some fanciful ideas about pieces coming together to make functioning organisms, but these were ideas for which he was roundly scolded by Aristotle. Why? Ernst Mayr, the distinguished, twentieth-century evolutionist, used to argue that Plato was the culprit. (Mayr was good at making moral judgments.) Supposedly, the theory of forms precluded any sort of developmentalism. Jellyfish are jellyfish and cows are cows and humans are humans, and that is an end to it. But many have long suspected that Mayr is probably not entirely (or perhaps even partially) right. Apart from anything else, many nineteenth-century evolutionists (and [End Page 464] some today) have been ardent Platonists, seeing this as the clue to their evolution. There are shared forms (or archetypes, or Baupläne) between very different organisms, pointing to their common ancestry. Now, we have the definitive work on the Greeks and their thinking about origins. Meaning by 'creationism' creation by an intelligence and not the North American sense of sticking to the literal truth of the Bible, we now know why the Greeks passed on a creationist legacy. University of Cambridge Professor of Ancient Philosophy David Sedley delves into Greek thinking on origins with authority and understanding, throwing out mistakes, giving insights, and solving problems in highly convincing ways. Moreover, perhaps because his book, Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity, started as talks (the 2004 Sather lectures at the University of California, Berkeley), Sedley's writing spells things out for the layman clearly and without condescension. We start with Anaxagoras (mid-fifth century BCE), someone whom Sedley refers to as a "truly revolutionary thinker" (8). Anaxagoras held that there is a separation of mind and matter and that there was an organizing power or principle, Noûs. Sedley argues that Anaxagoras was truly a creationist in that he thought this Noûs was in some sense responsible for organisms and their natures. The interesting (although perhaps understandable) metaphor is of Noûs as a farmer, as one who grows things. Next came Empedocles. He accepted the four elements—earth, water, air, fire—arguing that they are constantly being moved and stirred by two competing forces, Love and Strife. The former builds things up; the latter tears them down again. Apparently, Love combines the elements into disembodied parts, which then come together in strange non-working forms, although then some begin to function as organisms as we know them. Then Strife takes over and we have the situation as we find it today. Empedocles was no great lover of humankind, and in particular he saw heterosexual activity as fraught with problems and something best avoided. Of course, it is easy to laugh at someone who believed that there were two-headed oxen and so forth, but as a world picture, one might think that now we are moving along to the truth. (The truth, that is, as we understand it!) What history shows you is that things are much more complex (and interesting) than this. Socrates and Plato were the philosophers who started...

The Philosophy of Literature * By PETER LAMARQUE

As a recent distinguished editor of British Journal of Aesthetics and a major contributor in his own right to recent debates on aesthetics and the philosophy of art – not least in the particular field with which this particular volume is concerned – Peter Lamarque is particularly well placed to author this survey of past and contemporary work on the philosophy of literature. Moreover, as those already familiar with Professor Lamarque's work will no doubt expect, this volume offers remarkably clear and extensive coverage of a wide and complex philosophical field in its relatively short space of under 300 pages. Following a short preface, the work is divided into seven chapters. The first, entitled ‘Art’, generally explores the relationship between philosophy, literary theory, art and literature and offers useful critical discussions of different concepts of aesthetics (as experience, ‘qualities’ and pleasure). The second looks more closely at the question of what it means to regard some texts as ‘literature’ and discusses a range of (essentialist and anti-essentialist) attempts to explain the special literary status of some texts. The third chapter examines the vexed question of the role and/or authority of the author in determining the meaning of literary works and offers some balanced and useful assessment of more extreme attempts of post-structuralists such as Barthes and Foucault to downplay this role. Chapter 4, entitled (a little vaguely) ‘Practice’, focuses more centrally on issues of literary meaning and interpretation, with some interesting exploration of the problems of taking discovery of meaning (at any rate, as this notion is often philosophically construed) to be the main focus of literary reading or criticism. Chapter 5 starts to open up difficult questions about the relationship of works of literature to reality and truth via exploration of the concept of fiction and attention to various attempts (from Meinong and Russell to more recent possible worlds semantics) to make sense of fictional or non-existent entities. Chapter 6 focuses more fully on important question of truth in literature and on the extent to or sense in which fictional or other works of literature might be regarded as sources of knowledge. Finally, Chapter 7 discusses different accounts of the value of literature, distinguishing between different conceptions of value as such, as well as offering a very useful (if somewhat sceptical) perspective on the moral significance of literature.

Thirty-six Hippocratic Aphorisms of Nephrologic Interest

In this article, we discuss the nephrologic content within Hippocrates' Aphorisms. Although similar attempts have taken place ever since antiquity, we believe that in each era new insights may be gained by examining the aphorisms through the prism of current medical knowledge. Of the 400 aphorisms in the Hippocratic text, we discuss the 36 that we consider to be most relevant to nephrology. We conclude that these aphorisms support the concept of Hippocrates as the "Father of Clinical Nephrology."

“El orangután le dijo a la orangutana”

As in other countries in which Catholicism is an important part of the cultural background, Mexican society as a whole is not only predominantly secular, but also takes for granted the existence of strong laical institutions. These include our public school system, where evolutionary biology has been part of curricula without leading to rejection from the Church. In contrast to fundamentalist groups, Catholics tend not to read the Old Testament as the literal truth, but as a depiction of the ways in which divine creation, when it is accepted, may have taken place. The high number of fundamentalist missionaries and the influence of American creationists must be acknowledged as a potential threat to Mexican public education, together with the reduced budgets for primary and secondary schools, poor libraries and laboratories and, equally significant, the reduced attention to teachers' working conditions and social appreciation.

Substantial Truth in Defamation Law

Truth is a complete defense to a defamation charge, but a defendant does not have to prove the literal truth of a defamatory statement to prevail. An effective defense can rely on the substantial truth doctrine. Under the substantial truth doctrine, a defamatory statement is First Amendment-protected if it is factually similar to the pleaded truth, and does not differ from the truth by more than immaterial details. This article presents and analyzes the theory, application, and constitutional foundations of the substantial truth doctrine. It concludes that the doctrine promotes the values of the First Amendment by reducing the risk of self-censorship, yet preserves defamation law's reputational protection and compensatory function.

Two new challenges for the modal account of the progressive

The progressive in English appears to be inherently modal, due to what Dowty (Word meaning and Montague grammar: The semantics of verbs and times in generative semantics and in Montague’s PTQ, 1979) terms the imperfective paradox. In truth-conditional accounts, the literal truth of a clause with the modal progressive hinges on the possibility of the described outcome. The clause’s truth under such accounts has also been tacitly assumed to describe its felicitous use. Two challenges for this strategy are discussed. First, a progressive clause exhibiting the imperfective paradox can occur felicitously even when the described outcome is not possible. Second, a progressive clause exhibiting the paradox can occur felicitously with an accompanying unless-clause, yet the analysis of unless-clauses directly contradicts the modal analysis of the truth-conditional behavior of the progressive clause in such cases. If the analysis of unless is not flawed, then the modal progressive will require reanalysis.

Prawda cytatu, czyli o grze alegacjami (na podstawie cyklu „Paryskie pasaże" Krzysztofa Rutkowskiego)

The aim of this article is to consider the relationship between the practice of quoting and truth on the example of Krzysztof Rutkowski's oeuvre. In an obvious way such an interpretation of the subject brings reflections closer to the analyses of intertextuality, however, that which distinguishes intertextual references in the texts discussed from the postmodernistic play with conventions is a different function of the hypotext present through quotations. First of all, it has to validate, i.e. also to axiologically mark the essayist's exposition. The practice of quoting reminds an act of allegation, however, with the reservation that it allows the element of the dialogue. Thus, this article is both an attempt at an analysis of the ways of functioning in the composition of an essay of attempts at imitation as textual strategies as well as - and mostly - combination of the allegation game with the problem of literary truth, the truth of the subject of the essay, but also of the truth expected in the reception by the readers.

Early years goes all the way up to 11

FOR SOME, the headline will read as a literal truth – children are in their early years until they reach secondary education. For fans of the 1984 movie Spinal Tap, this will have other connotations – when the group's guitarist explained to the film maker that his amplifier went beyond the normal volume of 10, and all the way up to 11! Hold on, you may be thinking, why the spurious link between the early years and a funny, albeit fictional, documentary about a rock band? Well, let me clear the waters for you – and rest assured, it has nothing to do with my one brush with rock superstardom at my college's ‘battle of the bands' – I have never taken to the stage since!

Truth values and truth-commitment in interdiscursive dating ads

In this article, I explore issues of commitment to truth in dating ads that use apparently impossible categorizations to project identities for ad writers and their desired others. The article begins with a brief overview of relevant aspects of Text World Theory (especially Gavins's work on dating ads), Sinclair's model of fictional worlds and Routledge and Chapman's account of truth-commitment in discourse, and proposes the need for a framework that allows for a partial suspension of commitment to truth. I then draw on the work of Ivanič and Weldon on identity in writing, in order to develop an account that offers a discourse- and genre-based discussion of how the intertextual metaphors in such ads are interpreted in relation to truth values. I suggest the default stance is that of positive commitment to literal truth and that, when this is not possible, a fall-back mode of negative commitment to metaphorical truth is preferred over an interpretation in which questions of truth are truly suspended. Finally, I consider a related category, of apparently negative dating ad identities, in order to suggest a functional motivation for the inclusion of elements that cannot be interpreted in truth-committed mode.

‘Indigenous Knowledge’ and ‘Science’: Reframing the Debate on Knowledge Diversity

Responding to Kai Horsthemke’s call for the valorisation of universal knowledge within the debate on indigenous knowledge, the paper argues for an understanding of knowledge that is based neither universalism nor relativism. Arguing against the dualisms of ‘indigenous knowledge’ and ‘science’, the paper proposes that the debate be focused rather on knowledge diversity. Drawing on the work of Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin, the paper argues that diverse epistemologies ought to be evaluated not on their capacity to express a strict realism but on their ability to advance understanding. Such an approach allows for the evaluation of the advancement of understanding without necessarily requiring the expression of the literal truths that divide ‘belief’ from ‘knowledge’.

Ackoff's Fables revisited: stories to inform operational research practice

This paper considers Ackoff's Fables, a set of short stories published by Ackoff in 1978 as guides to creative problem solving. The paper argues that storytelling of this kind contributes usefully to management and MS/OR education, before addressing how such Fables might be interpreted. It is demonstrated, using one of Ackoff's Fables, The Smart Jackass, for illustrative purposes, that interpretation of even apparently straightforward stories such as these is not unambiguous. The Fables can be interpreted in a multitude of different and sometimes contradictory ways, and the truths they might contain are not self-evident. Yet, as the basis for discussion, they still have much to offer as educational tools. The paper concludes with a discussion of literal truth in stories, and presents a classification of story types according to their relationship to literal truth.

Language of science II: Degrees of knowing

Quinn replies: The range of responses in a way illustrates my point: Words mean different things to different people. If we wish to be understood we must explore the meaning our listener is taking from what we say, and not just repeat our words. I doubt that elevating certain theories by calling them laws will help, though my suggestion that we say we know these things has a similar didactic bent. In the end we can only attempt to communicate better and, as Lincoln Wolfenstein points out, to do a better job of education about both the power and the limitations of scientific knowledge.“Know” and “knowledge” are just examples of words that have different meanings in everyday usage, in the discourse of scientists, and in that of philosophers. I think most people are quite happy to say they know that the Sun will rise again tomorrow, though from a philosophical point of view that is merely a well-grounded hypothesis. When I recommend that we say we know some things based on well-established scientific theories, I am suggesting that for the sake of better communication, we accept our audience’s idea of what it means to know something. I disagree with Fritz Rohrlich that we must teach the “correct meanings” of words. One usage is no more correct than another, language being a fluid thing. Instead, we must be willing to carry on the discourse long enough and with enough respect for our audience, be they students, interested members of the public, or other scientists, that we come to a shared understanding.All our scientific knowledge rests on a set of conjectures or postulates that we cannot prove a priori; in this I agree with Kurt Huddleston. I argue, and I think he would agree, that a posteriori, these provide a very useful way to interpret the world around us. This approach has led to many medical and technical developments that we now depend on, as well as deep and interesting insights of a less practical nature. What one concludes about the world certainly rests on the assumptions one takes as primary. There is a direct contradiction between the conclusions from certain versions of religious belief, particularly those based on the belief that the Bible presents literal truth, and scientific conclusions about evolution, whether of the universe or of the species that populate Earth. When a student struggles with that contradiction, we should acknowledge and respect the struggle. We cannot avoid the contradiction; instead we should admit it and continue down the path of science, presenting students not only with its conclusions but with its primary assumptions, and with some understanding of the multiple strands of evidence that support the scientific conclusions given those assumptions.Thus I argue that we should teach science as science, and religion as religion. When we teach science, we need to do the best job we can of teaching both fundamental assumptions and practices and the conclusions to which they have led us. The key idea that experiment and observation are the arbiters of scientific conclusions differentiates the scientific worldview from others. That idea certainly has a power of its own. In the modern world, every student should have the chance to learn about it. Informed decisions on issues that involve scientifically derived information can only be made by consumers and citizens equipped to judge the value—and the uncertainties—of that information. Our job as science educators and communicators is to make the scientifically equipped portion of the public as large as possible. It is no mean task, and we do not achieve it better by disrespecting either the intelligence or the beliefs of those with whom we wish to communicate.© 2007 American Institute of Physics.