Nothing is Free

Nothing is free, not trade and not the market. There is no "Free Market" and there is no "Free Trade."

Redneck Bush Trashes the Queen's Gardens

What an inconsiderate, disrespectful redneck, idiot, son of an asshole we have for a president. Bush is the first president in years to be invited to stay with the Queen at Buckingham Palace. The queen was "less than chuffed" to learn that Bush had brought his own private chefs. Apparently the Buckingham Palace staff makes food fit for a queen, but that isn't good enough for Bush. Or perhaps Bush couldn't do without his usual hamburger and freedom fries.

To add insult to injury, Bush's security men trashed the Queen's gardens. They painted big H markers on the lawn for helipads. They trampled rare species of flowers, some of which were named after members of the royal family. Some shrubs and trees that were damaged have been there since the reign of Queen Victoria in the 19th Century. The Queen is said to be "furious." The Daily Mirror reports "The repairs will cost tens of thousands of pounds but the damage to historic and rare plants will be immense" and that 30,000 visitors for a garden party "did not do as much damage as the Americans did in three days." Show some respect Bush. Stupid Redneck asshole.

The reason Bush needed such unprecedented levels of security in the first place is that the English people think he is stupid and a danger to international peace. 100,000 English people protested his visit. Three cheers for the British people!

Idiot Son of an Asshole

I found a great new tune from NOFX. Idiot Son of an Asshole, have a listen. Clicking on this link will require downloading 750 kilobytes. After you hear the song, check out the rest of the website.

Bestial Marriage

I suppose Senator Santorum will say that the marriage rights victory in Massachussetts means we will allow people to marry their dog.

Bow WOW!

What Happened to the Rule of Law?

Richard Perle, a member of the defense policy board that advises Rumsfeld told a London audience, "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing." He went on to say, "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone" and that because of the French there had been "no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein."

Basically Perle admitted that the Administration violated international law by invading Iraq. Now those of you who don't take much stalk in international law ought to be reminded that our constitution says that any treaty the United States enters into should be treated as the law of the land. By admitting that the administration violated international Law, Perle is in effect admitting that the administration violated United States Law. Surely, that is impeachable. Where is all the conservative bluster about the rule of law we heard during Clinton's impeachment? We know what Bush thinks.

"I'm the Commander, see... I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the President... [I] don't feel like I owe anydbody an explanation." —President George W. Bush to the National Security Council.

Despite Bush's arrogance, he can and should be held accountable for things he says and does.

Kasparov vs. X3D Fritz

Match Drawn at 2-2. Man and Machine playing on a par.

Results:

Game 1: Kasparov - X3D Fritz 1/2 - 1/2
Game 2: X3D Fritz - Kasparov 1 - 0
Game 3: Kasparov - X3D Fritz 1 - 0
Game 4: X3D Fritz - Kasparov 1/2 - 1/2

You can find the scores to all the games in PGN format or view them on a Java viewer over at OneGoodMove.

Kasparov started his man vs. machine match Tuesday Nov. 11. The first game was covered in its entirety on ESPN2. Kasparov had the white pieces and the result was a hard fought draw. Although the result was a draw, it didn't even come close to being boring. Kasparov sacrificed a pawn for an initiative early in the game and did not shy away from complications.

Game 2 is a tragedy. X3D Fritz pressed the whole game. When X3D Fritz played the inaccurate move 28. cxd6 it looked as though Kasparov would be able to hold the position. Just a few moves later Kasparov made a horrible blunder 32. ...Rg7 giving up a pawn to an elementary tactic. One could see the despair on his face on the ESPN2 broadcast. After the game Kasparov was visibly upset. He said he was uncomfortable with the 3D glasses and the technology.

Game 3 is redemption. Kasparov locked up the position with a big pawn diagonal extending from f2 to b6. The computer was helpless in a closed position. Move's like 14...Bd6 and 15...Be7 were as amusing as the King shuffle in the corner towards the end the game. Signs of the computer's impotence in a closed position. Kasparov sacrificed a pawn in order to weaken X3D Fritz's pawns and create a passed pawn on b6. After that it was over. Some people may have felt that the X3D Fritz team resigned prematurely. I was a little suspicious myself. However, after setting up the position on my computer and playing just a few obvious moves, the computers evaluation went from a pawn advantage to well over a piece. I think it is clear that Kasparov's position was dominating and the resignation wasn't premature.

Game 4 ended peacefully. X3D Fritz opened the game with 1 d4 this time. This is a move that generally leads to more strategical battles. It is surprising that the X3D Fritz team decided on this opening as it seems to play away from the computer strengths. Equally odd is Kasparov's choice to choose the Queen's Gambit Accepted. This is one of the few Defenses to 1 d4 that can lead to very open positions. These are just the sort of positions the computer thrives in. The computer surprised Kasparov with 12. d5, a move that Kasparov's human nemesis Vladimir Kramnik plays. Kasparov went into a twenty minute think. He decided on a safe route. Several pieces were exchanged leading to a simplified position with no winning prospects for either side. Kasparov's blunder in game 2 looms large now. If he had held a draw in that game, he very well might be celebrating victory in the match.

Commentators on ESPN2 were Maurice Ashley, Yasser Seirawan, and Paul Hoffman. The first two are Grandmasters themselves, while Paul Hoffman is a Science journalist who was formerly the editor of Scientific American and Discover Magazine. They did a very good job commenting on the games and making it exciting for a broad audience. Guests interviewed during the match include Bruce Pandolfini (Josh Waitzkin's former coach), Susan Polgar (a former Women's World Champion), and Joel Lautier (a strong French Grandmaster who actually has a plus score versus Kasparov). Let ESPN know they did a good job and that we want more chess on TV.

An amateur statistician has written a five part article on man vs. machine chess, and has some surprising things to say about humankind's prospects against computers in the future. Take a look. Part V has Sonas' predictions for the current match. Part I. Part II. Part III. Part IV. Part V.

You Decide, Not the Media

You get to decide who wins the Democratic Primary, not the Media.

Can God Explain Anything?

The following is an article published in the Summer 2003 edition of Think. "Think" is a quarterly philosophy magazine aimed at the non-specialist reader as well as professional philosophers. It is published by the Royal Institute of Philosophy. Contributors include the likes of Richard Dawkins, Simon Blackburn and Alvin Plantinga. I encourage anyone with an interest in philosophy to subscribe. You get a hard copy of each edition as well as access to the website archives.

I chose the following article for its provocative content. I found it to be well reasoned and am curious to hear your responses. Not all articles in "Think" are critical of religion. In fact, many defend religion quite well. The idea in posting this article is not to offend anybody, but to promote conversation. I hope you will take it in that spirit.

CAN GOD EXPLAIN ANYTHING?
Theodore Schick

Suppose you’re an engineer charged with explaining why a bridge collapsed. Suppose further that someone comes to your office insisting that he knows what destroyed the bridge. Not wanting to leave any possibility unexplored, you agree to hear him out. ‘I know why the bridge collapsed,’ he says. ‘An invisible gremlin used black magic on it.’
Somewhat taken aback, you politely inquire, ‘Can you tell me more about this gremlin?’
‘No,’ he responds. ‘Not only is the gremlin invisible, but he is also extremely shy. If you go looking for him, he will hide where you can never find him.’
‘Well, then, can you tell me more about the black magic he used?’ you ask.
Again, the answer is ‘No.’ ‘The black magic is unlike any force at work in the universe,’ he explains.
At this point, you thank him for his help and show him to the door.

Is this an explanation that needs to be included in your final report? Of course not. In fact, if you did include it, your days as an investigative engineer might be numbered, for it is such a bad explanation that including it might call into question your professional competence.

The attempt to explain natural phenomena by appealing to supernatural entities (gods), I believe, is no better than the attempt to explain the bridge collapse by appealing to gremlins. In both cases one is trying to explain the unknown in terms of the incomprehensible, and that can never increase our understanding. As Plato realized, to say that god did it is not to explain anything, but simply to offer an excuse for not having an explanation. (Plato, Cratylus, 426a) In what follows, I will explicate the inadequacies of the God hypothesis.

I. Inference to the best explanation
The earliest attempts at explanation were couched in terms of the supernatural. The Greeks, for example, believed that thunderstorms were caused by Zeus, earthquakes by Poseidon, and volcanoes by Hephaestus (the Roman Vulcan). Few today would attribute thunderstorms, earthquakes, or volcanoes to the actions of gods. Some, however, believe that phenomena such as the creation of the universe, the design of the universe, and the existence of humans can best be explained by appeal to the traditional God of theism, who is considered to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. (See Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1979). If so, then there is just as much reason for believing in the existence of God as there is for believing in the existence of other theoretical entities such as electrons. Electrons cannot be directly perceived by means of the senses. (That’s what makes them theoretical entities.) Nevertheless, we are justified in believing in them because they provide the best explanation of a number of phenomena. Similarly, God cannot be directly perceived by means of the senses. Nevertheless, we would be justified in believing in Him if He provided the best explanation of something.

The inference that sanctions such belief is known as
‘inference to the best explanation.’ It has the following form:
1. Phenomena P.
2. Hypothesis H, if true, would explain P.
3. No other hypothesis can explain P as well as H
does.
4. Therefore, H is probably true.

Making an inference to the best explanation, then, involves
not only coming up with a hypothesis but comparing it with competing hypotheses. If a hypothesis explains a phenom- enon and explains it better than competing hypotheses, we’re justified in believing it.

There’s more to evaluating a hypothesis than determining how well it fits the data, however, because hypotheses are underdetermined by their data: for any set of data, an infinite number of explanations can be constructed to account for it. To see this, consider another gremlin hypothesis: Suppose that someone wanted to know what makes florescent lights work. One hypothesis is that inside each tube is a little gremlin that creates light (sparks) by striking his pickax against the side of the tube. In addition to the one gremlin hypothesis, there is the two gremlin hypothesis, the three gremlin hypothesis and so on. All of these hypotheses fit the data. So if we are going to choose among them, we must appeal to something besides the data. What we appeal to are called criteria of adequacy.

II. Criteria of adequacy
We seek explanations because we seek understanding. The best explanation, then, is the one that produces the most understanding. The amount of understanding produced by an explanation is determined by how well it systematizes and unifies our knowledge. We begin to understand something when we see it as part of a pattern, and the more that pattern encompasses, the more understanding it produces. The extent to which a hypothesis systematizes and unifies our knowledge can be measured by various criteria such as: consistency, freedom from contradiction; simplicity, the number of assump- tions made by a hypothesis; scope, the amount of diverse phenomena explained by the hypothesis; conservatism, how well the hypothesis fits with what we already know; and fruitful- ness, the ability of a hypothesis to successfully predict novel phenomena. Let’s take a closer look at how these criteria are used to evaluate hypotheses.

The first requirement of any adequate hypothesis is consistency. Not only must an adequate hypothesis be internally consistent – consistent with itself – but it must also be ex- ternally consistent–consistent with data we’ve gathered. If a hypothesis is internally inconsistent – if it’s self-contradictory – it can’t possibly be true. Thus one of the most effective ways to refute a theory is to show that it harbors a contradiction. If a hypothesis is externally inconsistent – if it doesn’t fit the data – there’s reason to believe that it’s false. The data, of course, could be mistaken, but until we know that, we shouldn’t accept the theory.

Other things being equal, the simpler a hypothesis is – the fewer assumptions it makes – the better it is. If phenomena can be explained without making certain assumptions, there’s no reason to make them. So a theory that makes unneces- sary assumptions is unreasonable. Medieval philosopher William of Occam put the point this way: ‘Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.’ In other words, you shouldn’t assume the existence of anything that’s not needed to explain the phenomena. This principle has come to be known as ‘Occam’s razor’ because it’s used to shave off unneeded entities from theories.

Scope – the amount of diverse phenomena explained by a theory – is also an important consideration in theory evaluation. If two theories do equally well with respect to the other criteria of adequacy but one has more scope, it’s clearly the better theory, for it has greater explanatory power.

Conservatism – fit with existing theories – is a mark of a good theory because if accepting a theory requires rejecting a good deal of what we’ve already established, then it may diminish our understanding. Instead of systematizing and unifying our knowledge, it may fragment it. A theory can make up in scope and simplicity what it lacks in conservatism, however. In that case, it may be worthy of acceptance.

Fruitfulness – the ability to make successful, novel predictions – is an indication of the truth of the hypothesis because the best explanation of a theory’s ability to predict new facts is that it’s true.

Unfortunately, there is no formula for applying the criteria of adequacy. We can’t quantify how well a hypothesis does with respect to any particular criterion, nor can we rank the criteria in order of importance. At times, we may rate conservatism more highly than scope, especially if the hypothesis in question is lacking in fruitfulness. At other times, we may rate simplic- ity higher than conservatism, especially if the hypothesis has at least as much scope as any other hypothesis. Choosing among theories isn’t the purely logical process it is often made out to be. Like judicial decision making, it relies on factors of human judgment that resist formalization.

This doesn’t mean that the process of theory selection is subjective, however. There are many distinctions we can’t quantify that are nevertheless perfectly objective. The point at which day turns into night or a hirsute person becomes bald can’t be precisely specified. But the distinctions between night and day or baldness and hirsuteness are as objective as they come. There are certainly borderline cases about which reasonable people can disagree, but there are also clear- cut cases where disagreement would be irrational. It would simply be wrong to believe that a person with a full head of (living) hair is bald. It would be equally wrong to believe that a theory that does not meet the criteria of adequacy as well as its competitors is the better theory.

III. The God Hypothesis
So how well does the God hypothesis do with respect to these criteria? Consider first its consistency. Parmenides realized over 2500 years ago that anything that involves a logical contradiction cannot exist. We know that there are no married bachelors, no square circles, and no largest number because these notions are self-contradictory. They violate the most fundamental law of logic – the law of non-contradiction – which says that nothing can both have a property and lack it at the same time. If the notion of God is self-contradictory, it can’t explain anything.

Traditional theism defines god as a supreme being – a being than which none greater can be conceived, as St. Anselm would have it. We know, however, that there is no supreme number because such a notion involves a logical contradiction. Every number is such that the number one can be added to it. If there were a supreme number, it would be such that the number one can and cannot be added to it, and that’s impos- sible. Many believe that the notion of a supreme being is just as incoherent as the notion of a supreme number.

Consider, for example, the claim that god is all-good and thus both perfectly merciful and perfectly just. If he is perfectly just, he makes sure that everyone gets exactly what’s coming to them. If he is perfectly merciful, he let’s everyone off. But he can’t do both. So the notion of a supreme being may be internally inconsistent.

This is just one of many inconsistencies that have been found in the traditional conception of God. (For a more com- plete review of these arguments, see Theodore Drange, ‘Incompatible-Properties Arguments: A Survey’ in Philo 1, Fall-Winter 1998.) Anyone promoting the God hypothesis, then, must show that their conception of God avoids such inconsistencies. If they fail to do this, their hypothesis has no explanatory power.

Some, including Swinburne, consider simplicity to be the main virtue of the God hypothesis. What could be simpler than the hypothesis that God did it? According to the God hypothesis, God brings things about by a direct act of will. But simplicity is not a measure of the complexity of the causal relations posited by a hypothesis. Rather it is a measure of the number of assumptions made by a hypothesis. The God hypothesis makes at least one more assumption than any naturalistic hypothesis, namely, that God exists. Because the God hypothesis postulates a type of entity that naturalistic hypotheses don’t, it is inherently less simple.

The God hypothesis seems to have unlimited scope because supposedly there’s nothing that God can’t do. But if a hypothesis raises more questions than it answers, its scope may be quite limited, and the God hypothesis raises a number of them. Why did God create a physical world? How did God create a physical world? How does God interact with the physical world? And so on. What’s more, the answer to these questions seems forever beyond our ken. Duane Gish explains:

We do not know how the creator created, what processes He used, for He used processes which are not now operating in the natural universe. This is why we refer to creation as Special Creation. We cannot discover by scientific investigation anything about the creative processes used by the creator. (Duane Gish, Creation Life Publishers, 1979, p. 40.)

If we can’t discover anything about how God does what he does, the God hypothesis imposes a fundamental limit on our ability to understand the world. In so far as naturalistic hypotheses do not impose any such limit, the God hypothesis inherently has less scope. Conservatism is the measure of the extent to which a hypothesis fits with what we already know. The God hypothesis, however, doesn’t seem to fit at all. Everything we know about the world indicates that only physical forces can have physical effects. But God is supposed to be non-physical. As Swinburne informs us, ‘That God is a person, yet one without a body, seems the most elementary claim of theism.’ (The Coherence of Theism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, p. 99.) If a non-physical being can interact with the world, then some of our most fundamental laws must be mistaken. Consider, for example, Newton’s law that F=ma (force equals mass times acceleration). If God is non-physical, He has no mass. But if He has no mass, it’s unclear how He can exert any force on the world. Furthermore, if He does exert a force on the world, He must inject some energy into it. But that would violate the principle of the conservation of mass-energy which says that the total amount of mass-energy in the world remains constant. The God hypothesis, then, is inherently less conservative that naturalistic ones because accepting it requires rejecting a number of scientific laws.

Fruitfulness is the ability of a hypothesis to make successful, novel predictions. The God hypothesis, however, has no successful predictions to its credit. That’s not to say that it makes no predictions, however. The God hypothesis makes at least one testable prediction, namely, that there should be no evil in the world. This prediction can be derived from the God hypothesis as follows: If God is all-knowing, He knows that there’s evil in the world; if He’s all-good, he doesn’t want there to be evil in the world; and if He’s all-powerful, he can eliminate the evil in the world. So if God exists, there should be no evil in the world. Since this prediction seems to fly in the face of the facts, a number of hypotheses (known as theodicies) have been proposed in an attempt to square the existence of God with the existence of evil. All of them are ad-hoc, however, and none has received widespread acceptance. ‘Ad hoc’ is Latin for ‘to that’ or ‘to the fact.’ An ad-hoc explanation is one that is constructed solely to save a hypothesis from the facts; it has no independent justification. Any hypothesis can be saved from negative evidence by constructing ad-hoc hypotheses. The more ad-hoc hypotheses needed to prop up a claim, however, the less plausible it is. In any event, because the God hypothesis tells us little about how or why God does what He does, it’s difficult to derive any predictions from it. Consequently, it is inherently less fruitful than naturalistic hypotheses.

On every criteria of adequacy we’ve canvassed, the God hypothesis does worse than naturalistic ones. Little wonder, then, that scientists avoid it. Some believe that scientists’ rejection of the supernatural is due to their irrational faith in materialism. (See Phillip Johnson, ‘The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism,’ First Things 77, November 1997, pp. 22-25.) Our analysis suggests, on the contrary, that it’s due to their unwavering search for understanding.

Given the inherent inferiority of supernatural hypotheses, would we ever be justified in accepting one? It might seem that we would be justified when we can’t find a viable naturalistic hypothesis for a phenomenon. But our inability to find a naturalistic hypothesis may simply be due to our ignorance of the operative natural forces. Many phenomena that once seemed inexplicable – such as thunderstorms, earthquakes, and volcanoes – now have a purely naturalistic explanation. As St. Augustine realized, something that appears to be contrary to nature may simply contrary to our knowledge of nature. (See his The City of God, XXI. 8)

We would be justified in accepting a supernatural explanation of a phenomenon only if it could be shown that it’s in principle impossible to give a naturalistic explanation of it. But it’s doubtful that such a demonstration could ever be given for we cannot predict what the future will bring. Many of those who have predicted that something was unknowable have proven to be wrong. August Comte, for example, predicted in 1835 that we would never know the chemical composition of the stars. A few years later, the spectroscope was invented and made such knowledge possible. During his life, Lord Rutherford maintained that we would never be able to unlock the energy contained in the atom. Five years after his death in 1937, physicists produced the first chain reaction. Science seems perfectly capable of explaining not only why the universe exists, but why the laws of nature are what they are. Even St. Thomas Aquinas recognized this. He says, ‘it seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist.’ (Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 2, Third Article, Objection 2.) Thus the burden of proof on the theist is quite high, and it is a burden that no theist to date has shouldered.

Perhaps those who advocate the God hypothesis are offering a personal explanation instead of a causal one. A personal explanation explains why a person did something rather than how something came about by citing the goal that the person intended to achieve. For example: we can explain why Joe went to the movies by hypothesizing that he wanted to see his favorite movie star. But a personal explanation of something is appropriate only if know that a person made it happen. It would be inappropriate to seek a personal explanation of why a radioactive atom decayed, for example, because presumably no person made it decay. So personal explanations are parasitic upon causal explanations. We must first establish that a person was the cause of something before we can accept a personal explanation of it. So theists are bound by the same criteria of adequacy that scientists are. If they want us to take the God hypothesis seriously, they must first show that it provides the best causal explanation of something.

Ted Schick is professor of philosophy at Muhlenberg College.

Betrayal of Trust

What President Bush has done is worse than a lie, it is a betrayal of trust. George Lakoff writes:

But lying, in itself, is not and should not be the issue. The real issue is a betrayal of trust. Our democratic institutions require trust. When the president asks Congress to consent to war – the most difficult moral judgment it can make – Congress must be able to trust the information provided by the administration. When the President asks our fighting men and women to put their lives on the line for a reason, they must be able to trust that the reason he has given is true. It is a betrayal of trust for the president to ask our soldiers to risk their lives under false pretenses. And when the president asks the American people to put their sons and daughters in harm's way and to spend money that could be used for schools, for health care, for helping desperate people, for rebuilding decaying infrastructure, and for economic stimulation in hard times, it is a betrayal of trust for the president to give false impressions.

It doesn't matter if Bush made an "honest mistake" in pursuit of a "good cause". The president is responsible for giving Congress and the American people information they can trust when it comes to the most dire of decisions, the decision to go to war. Regardless of whether Bush lied or was simply incompetent he betrayed our trust and that is worse than merely lying.

Lincoln Call

Katrina vanden Heuvel has written about a very interesting new organization called Lincoln Call which has an interesting new solution to the campaign finance system.

That means full public funding for candidates once they gather a large number of relatively small contributions--not a never-ending money chase where our clean public dollars are used to match contributions from private givers. And it means making more public money available--say $75 million for the primaries--and giving some of it out earlier and getting rid of the state-by-state spending limits, which everyone evades anyway, and instead distributing the public funds in timed chunks, to force the candidates to spread their spending across the primary calendar. It also means, as is the case in Maine and Arizona, making additional funds available to match big-spending privately financed candidates, since there is no Constitutional right to drown out your opponent with your wallet.

Signing the "Lincoln Call: A Presidency Of, By, and For the People" issued last week by Public Campaign and Public Campaign Action Fund is a step in the right direction. Thousands already have signed on. I have.

If our campaign finance system is not fair, we lose nothing less than our democracy. Sign on to the Lincoln Call

Where Do They Stand?

I came across an interesting website called Political Compass. The creators of this site have developed a graph of political positions much like a Cartesian plane. The y-axis measures social views such as abortion, civil liberties, etc. The x-axis measures economic views such as taxation, welfare, etc. You can take a test at this site to find out where you stand according to the site. I was at about (-8, -7) putting me in the libertarian-left camp. Here is their graph of the 2004 Democratic primary candidates.

Its interesting that Kucinich and Sharpton are the only candidates who are on the Libertarian-left. This is more evidence for dende blogger's view that Sharpton ought to be given more consideration by progressive pundits.

Let me know if you think this is an accurate graph and where you place on it if you took the test.

Basically, Digby is Wrong

Bloggers such as Body and Soul, Melanie at KOS, Cal Pundit , and Digby have written about George Lakoff recently. They have been critical of his Nurturant Parent/Strict Father metaphor theory. However, they misunderstand a fundamental distinction. The distinction is between a descriptive theory and prescriptions for rhetorical discourse. It is important to distinguish between cases when Lakoff has his scientist's hat on and when he has his liberal partisan's hat on. These bloggers would do well to read Lakoff's book, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, before being so quick to criticize an important contribution both to science and the liberal cause.

In the introduction of his book Lakoff writes.

"Contemporary American politics is about worldview. Conservatives simply see the world differently than do liberals, and both often have a difficult time understand accurately what the other's worldview is. As a student of the mind and of language, I think we can make much better sense than has been made of the worldviews and forms of discourse of conservatives and liberals."

He is describing the world views of liberals and conservatives. This is not a partisan endeavor. It is an attempt at a scientific account of the psychology behind liberals' and conservatives' worldviews or ways of seeing. Lakoff has generated a theory about this, the nurturing parent/strict father theory, and he is now making use of the understanding it provides for partisan purposes at the Rockridge Institute. The labels "nurturant parent" and "strict father" aren't intended for partisan rhetorical speech. They are categories in an objective scientific theory. Nurturant Parent/Strict Father is a theory about how framing works, it is not an attempt at framing itself. The difference here is like the difference between a tool and its uses. Nurturant Parent/Strict Father framework is a hammer, not a nail.

Having made that distinction clear let me address individual comments from Digby. Digby writes, "It’s not that he’s wrong in his analysis, it’s that he’s used the wrong terms to frame it." It's not important to use framing for a descriptive scientific theory. Lakoff isn't using the terms of the theory as rhetorical tools, he suggests using the understanding that the theory provides to develop new frames of political issues. Digby further writes, "I don’t think it’s a very good frame to begin with because it isn’t honest. Let’s not pretend that the real frame isn’t "strict father" vs "nurturant mother." The frame doesn't really make sense otherwise." Again this isn't intended to be a frame. Nurturant parent and Strict father are labels for categories in a theory. Moreover, parent is a more accurate description because both mothers and fathers can be nurturing parents. One might say mother's could be strict, but this doesn't fit in the conservative world view as well as a strict father does. Lakoff's descriptions aren't attempts to be politically correct or to frame, but to accurately describe worldviews.

Jeanne D'Arc has similar misunderstandings of Lakoff's theory. She writes, "Let me explain. Part of Digby's criticism is that the frame is dishonest; it sets up a dichotomy -- father and mother -- but doesn't carry through. I agree. Lakoff is trying to use a gender metaphor that the Republicans created, but he's afraid to go there." Again, let me emphasize that Nurturant parent and strict father aren't frames. They are labels for categories in a theory. Lakoff doesn't intend them for rhetorical discourse. The same point applies to comments such as this, "The second part of the criticism is more disturbing though -- if you set up a frame that has clear gender implications, leaving Democrats with the feminine role, Democrats lose, because, fair or not, most Americans still don't think of women as leaders." Republicans would be smart to use this as a frame, but Lakoff doesn't intend it to be a frame and Democrats shouldn't use it as one. Those who would use it as a frame, haven't learned the lessons taught by Lakoff's book. Finally, Jeanne writes, "It occurred to me, though, that we can't entirely take gender out of the picture." This seems a very sensible thing to do, and Lakoff would most likely agree.

Cal Pundit has written that he agrees with Digby and furthermore disagrees with Lakoff as to which values are most important for liberals. He then lists a mixed bag of liberal and conservative values. This is evidence that Calpundit is less liberal than many of his readers, which he readily acknowledges, and this is further evidence that Lakoff's categorization is accurate. Just as an aside, Calpundit lists "Group Identity - Us vs. Them." as a value. This sounds like Dubya. "Your either with us or against us." This appeals to conservatives. Whose side are you on anyway Kevin?