"One-Eyed Mocking-Bird" (1979/1982)
Updated: 17 hours ago
Philosophy today.
Lafferty pretty clearly distrusted attempts to draw a hard line between science and everything else. In the philosophy of science, the question of where and how to draw that line is called the demarcation problem. Today’s story gives it a suitably shaggy form: the line between sheep and goats, kids and lambs. People want such a line for all kinds of reasons.
A major one is rhetorical.
Scientists themselves may go on quite merrily doing their disciplinary work without worrying much about demarcation, but the question raises its shaggy head in public every day. Over here, someone wants to poke the chest of pseudoscience, metaphysics, or religion. Over there, another someone wants to protect domains from STEM.
One of my favorite philosophers, Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), gives us a useful way into this story. Quine was no fan of anything softish. In that regard, he is an anti-Lafferty from the same generation. Yet they make odd bedfellows. Quine argues that physical objects and Homer’s gods do not possess fundamentally different epistemological credentials simply because one belongs to science and the other to myth. Both enter our accounts as posits. Their comparative worth depends on what they help us do with experience. That does not reduce science to consensus, but it makes the distinction less comfortable than someone wielding “unscientific” as an insult might wish.
Famously, Quine put it like this:
As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. — From a Logical Point of View (1953)
A large chunk of twentieth-century philosophy of science is tangled up in that statement.
The logical positivists, including Quine’s mentor Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), explored verification and confirmation as ways of understanding empirical meaning and scientific knowledge. Karl Popper (1902–1994) proposed falsifiability as a criterion of scientific status: a theory must expose itself to possible refutation by observation. That gave him a hatchet to take to Marxism and psychoanalysis. His quarrel with Plato belonged to a larger political argument.
No single standard has won universal agreement among philosophers and working scientists. I doubt one ever will. Science is both a process and a set of deliverances. Its methods change. People die. So do research agendas. Communities of practice change. Scientific practices overlap with those of other fields. None of this makes distinctions impossible, but it makes a permanent dividing line harder to defend than the confident use of the word science might suggest.
That is where rhetoric comes in. What I am going to say next is about as insightful as the idea that beer goes well with pizza. Calling a thing scientific grants it epistemic authority. That authority, in turn, allows folks to influence public policy, legal rulings, educational curricula, and the rest.
Heady waters, these, but unavoidable sailing if we want to see what “One-Eyed Mocking-Bird” does with the demarcation question. Lafferty returns often to disputes about what counts as knowledge and who gets to decide. In this story, Tobias Lamb is a brilliant but polarizing scientist, a knot of mockery and unconventional methods.
He gathers a group of colleagues for an experiment involving a microscopic blob of reactive jelly. Inside it, he says, is a tiny nation composed of thousands of individuals. He places this molecular civilization into the hollow point of a rifle bullet. He intends to fire it at a cliff several kilometers away, giving its inhabitants only two and a half seconds to awaken, develop their civilization, and invent a way to change the bullet’s course.
To improve the odds, Tobias gives the micro-nation a heroic narrative meant to motivate it. Lafferty supplies one of his one-of-a-kind retellings of Genesis, the sort of thing he also did in “Adam Had Three Brothers.” Lamb claims descent from Cain, whose line, we are told, escaped the Great Flood eight thousand years ago by building a bronze space-ark and riding a volcanic eruption into orbit. Tobias turns that history into an inducement to invention, something Lafferty had explored years earlier in “Eurema’s Dam.” There is no necessity like the threat of extinction. The microscopic nation must invent its way out, as the Cainites did.
So Tobias aims the rifle out the window at a singing mockingbird. Inside the bullet is the nation. His colleagues stand by. He pulls the trigger. Approximately two and a half seconds later, the returning bullet strikes his right eye and blows out the back of his head, killing him dead on his feet. His body does not fall. It remains standing, stock-still, with his finger on the trigger. A coroner confirms that Tobias is biologically dead.
This does not stop Tobias. He continues speaking to his horrified colleagues, explaining his condition in terms of unelapsed time. The experiment, he insists, was a complete success. The micro-nation piloted the bullet home and survived the landing, though its inventor did not. Outside, the mockingbird, which also lost an eye, begins singing a new song, arrogant and mocking. Lafferty ends with students learning to motivate microscopic beings through myth. They have their own cultus and fraternity, with the one-eyed mockingbird as their mascot. Tobias’s experiment has become a research program.
And this brings us back to Willard Van Orman Quine. The connection is not that Tobias cannot distinguish physical objects from gods. It is that he gives myth a place in an experimental account of how physical things behave. Quine’s account makes room for comparing posits by what they contribute to our dealings with experience. Lafferty imagines circumstances in which storytelling makes an extraordinary contribution.
Enter holism. Our beliefs face experience as an interconnected system, with considerable room to adjust its parts when something goes wrong. That does not make coherence alone sufficient for justification. Experience still constrains the system. The comparison with Lafferty is useful precisely because it lets us ask what constrains his apparently unruly consensus worlds.
My answer is that Lafferty permits considerable freedom in the arrangements while retaining a small set of commitments that those arrangements cannot finally abolish. His worlds can be held together by strange conceptual architectures. They can also come apart. Their inhabitants’ agreement does not make them sovereign over truth. I read this as a kind of minimal foundationalism, though Christian revelation by itself does not establish an epistemological theory. The claim needs to be demonstrated in what his stories allow to change and what they insist must remain.
What interests me is how much instability Lafferty permits while retaining those foundations. I suspect that tension owes something to his recognition that consensus worlds are fragile, even one as apparently comprehensive as European Christendom. This is where I part company with readings that make consensus the final authority in his fiction. A world can depend on agreement without truth depending on it.
The minimum conditions, as I understand them, look something like this. Within them, consensus can spin out of control, as it often does in Lafferty:
Lafferty’s most unruly inventions make sense when we attend to the few commitments that hold steady beneath them. These anchor the chain; the inventions are the wrecking ball. It is easy to get drunk on the Lafferty flavor and miss the cognition behind it, including the constraints that give his inventions their force. The consequences of those commitments appear in the final column. Imagine the freedom they permit, and you will feel the momentum behind his most adventurous thoughts. The wrecking ball:
We see that Tobias succeeds not by adhering to the sanitary control of variables his sheepish colleagues demand, but by injecting raw myth directly into physics. When he speaks to the molecular smudge and motivates the goo with the legend of the Cainite space-ark, he treats subatomic matter as a conscious entity responsive to storytelling. Willard Van Orman Quine would have found this ridiculous and entirely unwarranted by his web of belief, unsupported by the empirical impingements on his sensorium. But he would not have seen it as a mistake of a fundamentally different kind from his own posits. It would have struck him as bad science, not as something outside science altogether.
By refusing to demarcate between the hard reality of ballistics and the soft reality of destiny (such things are a matter of degree), Tobias makes his experimental gamble. He wants to show that myth is not different in kind from science, but rather a function of the universe that can, under certain pressures, be operationalized. Science is myth, Lafferty said:
To burrow in here, the experiment works because Tobias makes storytelling part of physics. He tells the microscopic nation a story that motivates it to invent its way home. Belief does not simply cancel the laws of motion. It prompts the invention that changes the bullet’s course.
That is where the demarcation question becomes interesting. Distinguishing science from non-science does not mean sorting true beliefs from false ones. Science can be wrong, and a myth can contain truth. But the distinction can be used rhetorically to dismiss something before considering what it might explain or accomplish. Myth as falsehood. Tobias gives myth a job inside the experiment.
This is not to say that all beliefs are equally justified. Quine’s comparison concerns their epistemological footing: physical objects and Homer’s gods enter our accounts as posits, but they differ enormously in how well they organize experience. Lafferty gives that comparison a grotesque experimental form. What happens when a myth becomes useful in the laboratory? The pressure on Tobias’s microscopic nation is existential. Its members have to invent their way out of destruction, and the Cainite story supplies a pattern for doing so. Its usefulness does not establish its truth, but it makes dismissing it as useless considerably harder.
Is this an epistemological loophole? If so, it is a fun one, especially in a story built out of loopholes. The largest loophole is biblical. The descendants of Cain survived the Flood without contradicting what the Bible says about all living things on earth dying. Jabal, Jubal, and Tubal-Cain were not on earth. They were in their metal space-ark. And surely we can demarcate the boundary between space and the earth. Let us call that atmospheric science.
Of course, by real-world pragmatic standards, the story cheats. How improbable, that goo. But the cheating lets Lafferty rearrange the terms of the comparison. Quine prefers physical objects to Homer’s gods because they have proved more useful in organizing and predicting experience. You cannot do much with Zeus or Aphrodite in the laboratory. Lafferty imagines a laboratory in which myth has work to do.
So what does Lafferty do with the situation? He mockingbirds the confidence with which we decide in advance what can count as useful knowledge. He imagines an experiment that looks like pseudoscience and produces results. A defender of demarcation could reply that those results warrant scientific investigation. Fair enough. But that concession is part of the joke: the thing dismissed as myth has helped bring the bullet home. Calling it pseudoscience can become a way of saying you don’t get to use the lab beyond the doggone scientific door. It’s why Lafferty has so much use for Charles Fort’s damned facts.
