Reviews for Norms, Logics and Information Systems: New Studies on Deontic Logic and Computer Science

The average rating for Norms, Logics and Information Systems: New Studies on Deontic Logic and Computer Science based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-05-24 00:00:00 Irene Isbister I really wish I had read this book years ago when my mate George told me he was reading it. For years I've been arguing with people, even here on Good Reads, that Dawkins' idea of memes has to be treated as a metaphor. It turns out that although a meme clearly is a metaphor, it might be that that is not how Dawkins intended it to be understood and so therefore there is more to this story than simply that the absurdities that come flowing from such a simple-minded understanding of social science, humanities and, dare I say it, poetry that is meme theory, and that these absurdities are even more fundamental than a mere misunderstanding of the nature of metaphor implies. The problem is not only with applying genes to social science metaphorically - even Dawkins idea of genes is deeply problematic for biology, never mind philosophy. This is a book with a lovely title, but one that is also a little misleading - this is certainly not a book about poetry, this is a book about science. And so that is a bit of a problem, as I think if I was writing this book I would have had more to say explicitly about poetry - particularly about metaphor, that most central of poetic ideas, and I presume the reason for the title in the first place - and I would certainly have had more to say on how inescapable metaphor is. Don't get me wrong, that is clearly a central theme of this book, but I think it really did need to be expressed much more forcefully and, given the title, should have been repeated early and often. That, however, is about my single criticism of the book, and is hardly a criticism at all - read it. People tend to confuse metaphors and similes. And, look, with good reason. 'He is like a lion' doesn't really seem all that different from 'he is a lion'. But the difference isn't really all that subtle. With a simile you are expected to list off all of the ways that 'he' and 'lion' are similar. And this is a one-way relationship, with the lion as the provider of adjectival content, if you like. With a metaphor you don't only say something new about 'him', you also say something new about 'lion'. The two concepts aren't really compared, they are smashed together. A metaphor is a kind of bizarre equals sign. But this isn't the same as one-plus-one-equals-two. Saying 'he is a lion' only works as a metaphor if you also know that, in actual fact, he isn't a lion at the same time. Metaphors are stepping-stones - they support us as they help us understand things we don't currently understand. They provide us with things we do understand as the pathway to that understanding. The problem is that metaphors are more powerful than we are often able to realise. Far too often we forget we are dealing with a metaphor and think we are dealing with equations and identities. Metaphorical assistance becomes metaphorical hegemony, the metaphor stops being a prop we can use to understand something more complex, it becomes something simpler that replaces the complex. Is light a wave or a particle? It is, and can be, neither, that is because it has to be both. But whatever a particle is, it is certainly not a wave, and whatever a wave is it is not a particle - but whatever light is cannot be understood without the stepping-stone metaphors we use to understand it - wave and particle - that is, that we use to help us understand what we can't understand otherwise - light. Dawkins' memes are metaphors because they are trying to do to culture what genes do for biological systems. For years I have been attacking this idea because genes clearly have a physical existence and memes really, really don't - really don't even if you can hum remarkably well the first few bars of Beethoven's Fifth, memes don't have a role in anyway similar to gene's 'expression of proteins' - hum as much as you like. But this was completely the wrong line of attack - something this book makes all too clear. Genes too do not stand alone - genes too are abstractions and need an entire world for them to make sense. Our love of atoms not withstanding, looking at the world though a microscope is never enough. The Enlightenment sought to develop what we today would call a scientific vision of the world. So much so that to call any other vision 'non-scientific' was the same as to call it 'wrong'. This meant that people like Marx and Freud sought to align their theories with 'science'. There are a number of reasons why this might not have been a great idea - but the main is that science seeks to be 'purely objective' - and while this is great when you are dealing with the motion of billiard balls, it is much less useful when you are dealing with people or society. For many 'scientists' the way of overcoming the difficulties that 'being objective' entailed denying subjective reality at all. Behaviourism is the example given here - where since we can't see the internal motivations of people, we are advised that we should simply ignore or deny that these even exist and instead look purely at what we can see - behaviour. This is the 'it worked with billiard balls, it will work with people too' line of attack. This is the idea that if you reduce everything down to atoms, its fundamental bits, there is nothing left over that needs to be explained. The beautiful refutation given in this book is money. Everyone agrees money is socially constructed - I mean, there was no fifth day when God said, 'let there be money, and there was money and it was good, or the root of all evil, take your pick'. No, money requires agreement - but it requires the agreement of all of society as to what will be accepted as money and what will not, it isn't arbitrary, it is conventional. Today money is very much less a physical reality than probably at any time in history - it is mostly a string of ones and zeroes bouncing down an optical cable - but would anyone really think they could learn anything interesting by getting say a hundred dollar bill and analysing the physical construction of that bill, looking at what atoms constitute it or what inks have been used? Do you think you would have understood the nature of credit, fiscal austerity, interest rates, rents and so on from such an analysis of a physical manifestation of money? Perhaps you might want to think about your answer to that the next time someone finds a gene that 'explains' homosexuality or a brain region that 'shows' why women can't read maps. Fundamentally, this book is a call for a return of the subjective, not a call for irrationality, but a call to acknowledge the subjective as equally part of our reality - but even that is far too simple a reading - it is actually a call for a rejection of the binary between objective and subjective. The problem is that we are not just brains in a vat - which in the end seems to be our preferred notion - and we are certainly not 'individuals' in any meaningful sense. These are real problems for us to grasp, as our subjective experience seems to confirm both of these - we feel we are fundamentally alone. But everything that makes us human only exists because we are us, not because we are I. Language is meaningless without an us. The pitiful achievements we are capable of alone pale when compared to the assistance we all received from each other because we are together. We are deeply embedded in society and in the world. As she points out here - people love to say that the brain is the most complex lump of matter in the universe, but the brain is impossible without the human body - so by definition that body must be more complex than one of its parts - that isn't subjective irrationalism, it is simple logic. That body would not exist without being in a society - by definition, then, society must be more complex than any of its parts too. That society only exists because of this planet - one we seem remarkably keen to destroy - go individuals! Why is it that we seem to assume that all of the things that are by definition more complex than individual brains are somehow to be explained away by simple reductionism or assumed not to exist? Remember Thatcher saying society doesn't exist? Why do we think we can so easily be held apart from this world and take on a god's eye view? The nice example given here of how we are embedded in the metaphors of our age is again to do with Dawkins - the fact that his selfish gene is really little more than Thatcherite Biology. Not unlike what Foucault does in his Order of Things, it is hard to escape the connection between 'greed is good' and 'selfish genes'. By seeing such metaphorical connections between ideas does much to illuminate the constraints those metaphors impose on our thinking. To expect that such might make Dawkins more humble is, obviously enough, far too much to ask. But if it does anything to overcome the simpleminded reduction of complex human social and cultural realities to the operation of supposed meme-plexes - such is to be welcomed. This is a really lovely book. Read it.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-01-19 00:00:00 Kenneth Harl 201227: i have upped the rating from four as it has persisted through the years (decades...). it is not dated. though it is just past enough i can remember the ideological popular culture of the times, or the early 2000s anyways, when everything was 'genes' and 'memes' strenuously misinterpreted as active, living, personality-characterised forces in human life ie 'selfish'. midgley traces lineage of these ways of scientism all the way back to atomic theory of ancient greeks, but suggests it is the modern dualism of descartes that creates our current, mistaken, separation of ways of thought. this is not a book of science or of poetry alone. this is book of philosophy... she notes the poetic paradigms scientists used at given evolutions, how, for example, gender inflects early modern science. gravity cannot be 'attraction' at a distance, let alone 'love', because those are female, and francis bacon was concerned in creating a 'masculine' science and rather than nurtured an understanding of nature conceived of investigations as attack, subjugation etc... she also notes how more modern scientists, physicists in particular, are able to see their pursuit of understanding as ultimately religious, fully aware that one sort of methodology, that of natural sciences like physics, is not applicable to all sorts of science such as sociology, simply because there is no causal minimalism, no final units... 201221: great, basic idea is confusion of dualism and ideological wars between ways of thought, science and poetry. must be first read nineteen years ago, after intros to philosophy of art, of science, of language etc... and my ideals of sartrean existentialism. this is anglo philosophy that led me to phenomenology of merleau-ponty and 'freed' me from thinking science was omnicompent way of thinking... read twice