"One-Eyed Mocking-Bird" (1979/1982)

Philosophy today.

Lafferty pretty clearly rejected what the philosophy of science calls the demarcation problem, the idea that one might establish clear, objective criteria separating real science from non-science. Put simply, it is the benighted hope that there exists a line, discoverable in principle, between science and everything else. Today’s story signifies it as the line between sheep and goats, kids and lambs. People want such a line for all kinds of reasons.

A major ones is rhetorical.

Scientists themselves may go on quite merrily doing their disciplinary work without worrying much about demarcation, but the demarcation problem 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. An all-star rejector of demarcation is one of my favorite philosophers, Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000). Quine was no fan of anything softish. In that regard, he is an anti-Lafferty from the same generation. Yet they are odd bedfellows, for they agree that what gets chalked up as demarcation comes down to consensus, not special epistemological footing.

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 culminates in that statement.

Early attempts by the logical positivists focused on verification, including Quine’s mentor Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), while ninety years ago Karl Popper (1902-1994) argued for falsifiability, the idea that a theory must be capable of being proven wrong in order to count as scientific. That was how Popper later struck Marx and Freud, not to mention Plato, with a hatchet.

No single standard has ever satisfied philosophers or working scientists alike. No standard ever will. The prevailing view, outside the circle of people who reify Science as such, is that science is both a process and a set of deliverances. Its methods change. People die. So do research agendas. Communities of practice change. All the while, science practices overlap with those of non-scientific fields. Permanent division turns out to be impractical to maintain, even if one does not reject demarcation on formal grounds in the way a Quine or a Lafferty does.

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.

Quine’s view

Heady waters these, but unavoidable sailing because “One-Eyed Mocking-Bird” is about the demarcation problem. Lafferty wrote quite a few stories about it. In this one, Tobias Lamb is a brilliant but polarizing scientist. Everyone knows him for being harsh. He can be summed up as a knot of mockery and unconventional method. Tobias gathers a group of colleagues for a new 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 then explains that he intends to fire the bullet at a cliff several kilometers away, giving the microscopic civilization only two and a half seconds to wake to consciousness. In that time it will have to evolve a society, invent space travel, and steer the bullet back off course if it wants to avoid destruction.

To improve the odds of success, Tobias gives the micro-nation a narrative of heroic history meant to motivate it. Lafferty then supplies one of his one-of-a-kind retellings of Genesis, the sort of thing he also did in “Adam Had Three Brothers,” because Lamb claims descent from Cain. The Cain 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. From this, Tobias draws an inference, one Lafferty had already explored years earlier in “Eurema’s Dam,” about necessity being the mother of invention. There is no necessity like the threat of extinction. By placing the micro-nation goop into a literal life-or-death scenario, Tobias intends to force it to develop.

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, Tobias is struck in the right eye by a bullet that blows out the back of his head, killing him dead on his feet. His body does not fall. It remains standing, stock-still, in a state of cataleptic rigidity, with his finger still on the trigger. A coroner arrives and confirms that Tobias is biologically dead, citing the absence of breath and heartbeat and the massive trauma to the brain.

This does not stop Tobias. He continues speaking to his horrified colleagues, explaining that he is inhabiting unelapsed time, a paradoxical condition produced by the micro-nation’s excursion outside standard temporal duration. The experiment, he insists, was a complete success. The micro-nation piloted the bullet back to its point of origin. The landing was soft enough to preserve its own survival, though not his. Outside, the defective mockingbird, which also lost an eye to the bullet’s passage, begins singing a new song, arrogant and mocking. Lafferty ends the story by telling us that a new fraternity of students has formed around Lamb’s theories, and that they use the one-eyed mockingbird as their mascot.

And this brings us back to Willard Van Orman Quine. In “One-Eyed Mocking-Bird,” Lafferty comes very close to Quine’s claim that physical objects and gods are epistemologically comparable posits by having his protagonist refuse to distinguish between them at all. Given how far apart the two men were in temperament, this convergence is odd, but not especially surprising. Quine was an adherent of coherentism, the epistemological view according to which beliefs are justified not by direct appeal to foundations or privileged givens, but by their mutual support within an overall system. On this view, coherence is not a proxy for truth; it is the best criterion of justification available to finite knowers. Lafferty gives us something like this in narrative form, with some constraints. His consensus realities depend on moderate coherentism. They are held together by strange conceptual architectures. These architectures are coherentist with the minimal foundationalism compatible with Christian revelation. Lafferty is extraordinary for the amount of coherentism he would allow into his epistemology while remaining an epistemological foundationalist. I think he was forced into this epistemology against his will, out of his pained recognition that consensus worlds are highly fragile, even ones like European Christendom. One reason I reject the dominant ways of reading Lafferty’s is they turn his take on consensus reality into full-blown epistemological coherentism.

The minimum conditions look something like this, after which consensus can spin out of control, as it often does in Lafferty:

It is worth narrowing our focus here. Why? Because if you read a Lafferty story and miss his minimal epistemological foundationalism, you miss his anti-secrets. It’s why so many people are happy being drunk on the Lafferty flavor at the expense of the cognition behind it. Lafferty’s most unruly inventions make better sense when read against a small set of steady considerations that hang from his minimal foundationalism like a wrecking ball at the end of a chain. The correlates of this minimal foundationalism are 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 ignores the boundary between the objective laws of motion and the subjective power of belief. And that boundary is exactly what the demarcation problem tries to enforce.

What is subjective belief, after all? To the person who believes in the demarcation problem, the answer is simple. When a belief is true, it is fact or science. When it is false, it is mere opinion. Subjective belief, on this view, is whatever the demarcation problem attempts to wall off as categorically distinct from science. Myth as falsehood.

At this point it is worth being careful. This is not to say that all beliefs are equal, or that some beliefs lack justification. It is to say that all beliefs are the same in kind, though not in degree. Degree matters tremendously. Much of Lafferty’s work consists in having fun with what happens when that degree is intensified and twisted far beyond what polite epistemology is willing to entertain, as a way of signaling what he takes to count as warranted belief under sufficient existential pressure. Contemporary thought has a term for it: conceptual engineering. Following Kant, a concept is a rule. You follow it.

Is this an epistemological loophole? If so, it is a fun one, especially in a story that is built out of loopholes. The largest loophole in the story is biblical. It is the claim that 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. To return to Quine, on one hand, Quine said there was no reason in principle that one might not reject the law of the excluded middle. That is bold but paraconsistent logic makes a case of it. On the other, Quine waved away the Olympians because he had a Humean point to make: he did not think that the gods of Homer were worth retaining as posits because within science-activity they do little work. You cannot “instrumentalize” Zeus or Aphrodite the way you can ideas about electrons, as it were. You cannot do much with those two in the laboratory. This is, in the end, a utility argument.

So what does Lafferty do in response the situation? He mockingbirds the utility of demarcation by imagining a pseudoscience that produces results. I say pseudoscience deliberately because rejecting the demarcation problem does not mean one cannot use the term. Both Quine and Lafferty believe in science because science just means knowledge. Using the word “pseudoscience” only means recognizing that the word is an insult, not a special epistemological category. It is 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. Pseudoscience is goatish, and goatish is an insult. So it is not for nothing that Tobias’s last name is Lamb.

One-Eyed Mocking Bird Notes.pdf

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