by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Argumentation is the term used to denote the activity of arguing with a real interlocutor, in real time, over claims that are actually in dispute. When argumentation is properly conducted, the parties involved exchange arguments, objections, criticisms, and rejoinders, all aimed at discerning the truth (or at least what one would be most justified in accepting to be true). To be sure, argumentation does not always result in a consensus among disputants; even when argumentation is impeccably conducted, disagreement often persists. But this is no strike against argumentation. This is for a few reasons. First, the open exchange of reasons, evidence, and criticism is, after all, the best means we have for rationally resolving disputes and pursuing the truth. Insofar as we want a rational resolution, this is not only our best means, it's our only means. Furthermore, even when argumentation does not dispel disagreement, it can provide disputants with a firmer grasp of precisely where they differ. So even if argument doesn't yield consensus, it does yield fecundity. And, as John Stuart Mill famously observed, understanding the views of one's critics is an essential element of understanding one's own views.

We have frequently claimed in this column that argumentation comes naturally to human beings. People aspire to form and maintain true beliefs and eschew false beliefs, and the central way in which they enact this aspiration is by arguing with each other. Of course, that people are naturally disposed to engage in argumentation does not entail that people are naturally adept at it. The pitfalls of human reasoning are abundant, and there is rightly a substantial academic industry devoted to identifying, studying, and cataloguing them.

Yet detecting argumentative pitfalls is itself part of the activity of argumentation. When we argue, for sure, we argue about things. And so most argument has all the vocabulary of any other talk about the world. But when we argue, we aren't just looking at the things we are talking about, we are evaluating what we've said as reasons. And so, we must have a vocabulary that doesn't merely track things we are talking about, but it must also track how we've talked about it. That's what it is to assess whether you think someone's reasoning is acceptable or not. The issue isn't always about whether you accept what an interlocutor says, but it's also about how the things they say logically relate to each other.

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by Daniel Ranard

Math works pretty well. We can count apples and oranges; we can scribble equations and then launch a rocket that lands gently upright. When an argument is indisputable, we colloquially say “do the math,” and we speak of events that will happen with “mathematical certainty.” Math works so well that you're forced to wonder: why, and what does it mean about our world? I won't fully answer these questions, but I'll offer a few perspectives.

You don't need to know much math to see it works. Say you go apple-picking with a friend; you count 12 as you pick them, and your friend counts 19 of her own. How many apples are in the basket? Maybe you crunch the numbers on a scrap of paper, just to be sure. You manipulate symbols on a page, and afterward you make a claim about reality: you know how many apples you would count if you pulled them out.

But was that math or just common sense? If you're not impressed by addition, let's try multiplication. I suspect many of us encounter our first real mathematical “theorem” when we learn that A times B is B times A. As Euclid wrote circa 300 BC, “If two numbers multiplied by one another [in different orders] make certain numbers, then the numbers so produced equal one another.” This fact may be so familiar you forget its meaning: 4 x 6 = 6 x 4, or rather 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 = 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4. It may be obvious, but a curious child would still ask, why? The equation demands proof, much like the Pythagorean Theorem. Euclid gave a proof in Book VII, Proposition 16 of the Elements. And though he proved an abstract fact using abstract symbols, the world seems to obey this arithmetic rule: if you have four groups of six apples, Euclid predicts you can always rearrange them into six groups of four.

Maybe it's no surprise we can use arithmetic to make these predictions. But what about the success of more sophisticated math and physics?

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by Misha Lepetic

“I got my own pure little bangtail mind and
the confines of its binding please me yet.”
~ Neal Cassady, letter to Jack Kerouac

One of the curious phenomena that computing in general, and artificial intelligence in particular, has emphasized is our inevitable commitment to metaphor as a way of understanding the world. Actually, it is even more ingrained than that: one could argue that metaphor, quite literally, is our way of being in the world. A mountain may or may not be a mountain before we name it – it may not even be a mountain until we name it (for example, at what point, either temporally or spatially, does it become, or cease to be, a mountain?). But it will inhabit its ‘mountain-ness' whether or not we choose to name it as such. The same goes for microbes, or the mating dance of a bird of paradise. In this sense, the material world existed, in some way or other, prior to our linguistic entrance, and these same things will continue to exist following our exit.

But what of the things that we make? Wouldn't these things somehow be more amenable to a more purely literal description? After all, we made them, so we should be able to say exactly what these things are or do, without having to resort to some external referents. Except we can't. And even more troubling (perhaps) is the fact that the more complex and representative these systems become, the more irrevocably entangled in metaphor do we find ourselves.

In a recent Aeon essay, Robert Epstein briefly guides us through a history of metaphors for how our brains allegedly work. The various models are rather diverse, ranging from hydraulics to mechanics to electricity to “information processing”, whatever that is. However, there is a common theme, which I'll state with nearly the force and certainty of a theorem: the brain is really complicated, so take the most complicated thing that we can imagine, whether it is a product of our own ingenuity or not, and make that the model by which we explain the brain. For Epstein – and he is merely recording a fact here – this is why we have been laboring under the metaphor of brain-as-a-computer for the past half-century.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

(this is the sequel to last month's 3QD essay on the Pancake Problems)

I frequently come across a rafter of wild turkeys on bike rides through the countryside near my home. This particular group is recognizable thanks to having a peahen as an honorary member. Just this morning I was treated to a startling surprise: the peahen was busily herding a brood of chicks! I would have thought peacocks and turkeys were too distantly related to successfully breed. Apparently nobody told the peahen. I haven't seen any other peacocks in the neighborhood, so it would seem that she is more than friends with one of her turkey buddies. According to the internet, peacock/turkey hybrids (turcocks? peakeys?) are a thing which can happen.

Going by looks and their natural geographic ranges, my wrong guess was that peacocks and turkeys should be pretty distant on the tree of life. In the not-too-distant past, classification of species depended on such observational data.

Nowadays we can dig directly into the DNA to look for answers about relatedness. In the past decade it became possible to sequence the entire DNA of an organism. Not only that, but it's become fast and cheap. In fifteen years we've gone from the Human Genome Project taking thirteen years and $2.7 billion dollars to sequence the human genome to now being able to do it in days for $1,000. The progress in this field puts Moore's Law to shame.

It's one thing to have the data, it's another to put it to use. To deal with the flood of information pouring out of DNA sequencers an entirely new field called computational molecular biology has sprung up. It's a wonderful combination of biology, mathematics, and computer science.

A good example of this is turnips. Looking at them in the garden you might guess that they are more closely related to radishes than cabbage. In the 1980s Jeffrey Palmer and his collaborators looked at the mitochondrial genomes of turnips and cabbage and found that the genes they contained were nearly identical. What was different was the order of those genes [1]. The random mutations which occurred over the years didn't change the genes themselves, only their position in the DNA.

Even better, Palmer and company saw that the kind of rearrangements which occur are of specific kind. When a mutation occurs, what happens is that a segment of DNA consisting of some number of genes is snipped out, flipped around, and put back in, now in reverse order. For example, if genes were the numbers one through five, a typical sequence of mutations might look like:

Here at each step the segment of genes to be snipped out and reversed is indicated with an underline. Because each mutation reverses the order of some of the genes, folks call it a reversal.

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by Brooks Riley

In the last year, two extraordinary events have indelibly changed the immediate course of history, for better or worse. In an utterly surprising move, Germany, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, spontaneously accepted over a million refugees, most of them from the war in Syria, only slightly changing the demographic landscape of that rich, stable, mature and responsible democracy, but making a much bigger splash.

This year, for reasons that are still unclear, America’s Top Wild Card has all but bagged the Republican nomination.

The two events are unrelated, and yet they serve to make one ponder the nature of nationhood and expectation. The two protagonists of these events could not be more different. So too their nations.

Trump has succeeded in the land of the free-for-all, a place where narcissism is rewarded with undivided attention. Trump has just about won the Republican nomination, not because he’s the best man, not because he knows jack all about governing, government, foreign policy or any other policy, not because he’s rich, not because he’s got a new vision, not because he’s promised the moon, not because he wants to help the poor, but because he’s loud. He’s so loud that we can hear him all the way over here on the other side of the Atlantic.

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by Jalees Rehman

Lingulodinium polyedrum is a unicellular marine organism which belongs to the dinoflagellate group of algae. Its genome is among the largest found in any species on this planet, estimated to contain around 165 billion DNA base pairs – roughly fifty times larger than the size of the human genome. Encased in magnificent polyhedral shells, these bioluminescent algae became important organisms to study biological rhythms. Each Lingulodinium polyedrum cell contains not one but at least two internal clocks which keep track of time by oscillating at a frequency of approximately 24 hours. Algae maintained in continuous light for weeks continue to emit a bluish-green glow at what they perceive as night-time and swim up to the water surface during day-time hours – despite the absence of any external time cues. When I began studying how nutrients affect the circadian rhythms of these algae as a student at the University of Munich, I marveled at the intricacy and beauty of these complex time-keeping mechanisms that had evolved over hundreds of millions of years.

Lingulodinium polyedrum (scanning electron micrograph Image Credit: FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, via Flickr)

Over the course of a quarter of a century, I have worked in a variety of biological fields, from these initial experiments in marine algae to how stem cells help build human blood vessels and how mitochondria in a cell fragment and reconnect as cells divide. Each project required its own set of research methods and techniques, each project came with its own failures and successes. But with each project, my sense of awe for the beauty of nature has grown. Evolution has bestowed this planet with such an amazing diversity of life-forms and biological mechanisms, allowing organisms to cope with the unique challenges that they face in their respective habitats. But it is only recently that I have become aware of the fact that my sense of biological beauty was a post hoc phenomenon: Beauty was what I perceived after reviewing the experimental findings; I was not guided by a quest for beauty while designing experiments. In fact, I would have been worried that such an approach might bias the design and interpretation of experiments. Might a desire for seeing Beauty in cell biology lead one to consciously or subconsciously discard results that might seem too messy?

I was prompted to revisit the role of Beauty in biology while reading a masterpiece of scientific writing, “Dreams of a Final Theory” by the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg in which he describes how the search for Beauty has guided him and many fellow theoretical physicists to search for an ultimate theory of the fundamental forces of nature. Weinberg explains that it is quite difficult to precisely define what constitutes Beauty in physics but a physicist would nevertheless recognize it when she sees it.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

At an Australian cricket club in Manhattan so dimly lit that I lift the nearest tea light so I can see the menu, I feel oddly at home; it is likely the haze of cultural nostalgia in these surroundings. As a Pakistani I grew up with cricket though I’m not much of a cricket fan and have had little direct exposure to it apart from a single visit to Lord’s Cricket Ground in London where I chose to talk to the gardener about the oldest trees on the premises instead of taking the famous cricket tour with my family, but here in New York, in the company of the Kashmiri-American poet Rafiq Kathwari, in the midst of cricket paraphernalia, framed action shots and lived-in colonial furniture, I’m on an unexpected bridge to a familiar time and place. I’m struck by the complexity of this nostalgia as I talk about life in our other countries, countries of birth, countries awaiting a rebirth, with the author of “In Another Country:” a collection of poems.

We talk about the personal-political in poetry. Cricket as a post-raj cultural idiom becomes even more poignant when I’m reminded of the traumas of Kashmir tied to the partition of India and Pakistan and of the intense political friction between the two countries that manifests itself every time the two countries are engaged in a cricket match against each other. Kashmir doesn’t play. It is played. And the political game is the ghost of the “great game” that the British began and that the Indian and Pakistani governments continue to play.

In South Asia, we know Kashmir as the land of immense natural beauty, mystics and poets, and a culture of great aesthetic delicacy and depth. In the West, Kashmir is synonymous with wool; not many know or care about the place or its long history of conflict.

As a voice of Kashmir and of the Kashmiri diaspora, Rafiq Kathwari’s most phenomenal gesture in this book of narrative poems that probe into psycho-social, historical and political, is his “protagonist” of sorts— the most haunting, fierce and charming persona in the book: his mother.

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by Paul Braterman

Glen Roy is a valley in the Western Scottish Highlands, just south of the Great Glen (home to Loch Ness), and draining through Glen Spean to Loch Linnhe, an inlet of the Atlantic. It is remarkable for the presence of the Roads, a series of parallel, almost horizontal, grooves in the hills on the sides of the glen. Clearly shorelines; but of what body of water? And why are there more than one of them?

Darwin thought the Roads represented vanished marine shorelines, one above the other as the result of vertical movement. Agassiz explained them, rather, as successive shorelines of a glacial lake, now vanished because the retaining glacier has melted away. If so, and if global warming is real, we might expect to see vanishing lakes today, as the glaciers retreat. We can, and we do, as my friend Peter Hess explains.

Roads of Glenroy, L., from Darwin, C. R., Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 129: 39-81, 1839. Observations on the parallel roads of Glen Roy, and of other parts of Lochaber in Scotland, with an attempt to prove that they are of marine origin

Charles Darwin visited the Glenroy area in 1838, two years after his return from his round the world voyage on the Beagle. During that voyage, he had examined the geology as well as the plants and animals of the places he visited, and among them was the coastal area of Chile. This is marked by raised beaches inland where once had been shoreline, and Darwin correctly described these as the effects of uplift, which we now know to be driven by plate tectonics. So it was natural that Darwin should have applied a similar explanation to the Roads, suggesting that the Cairngorms, like the Andes, were a zone of uplift, and that the Roads were ancient beaches of the Atlantic, now some ten miles away. The alternative theory, that they represented shorelines of an ancient lake, ran up against a seemingly conclusive objection; such a lake could only have formed if there had been a barrier across the valley, but there was no trace of this.

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by Elise Hempel

Almost in my late fifties now (and possibly having a touch of ADHD), I've grown impatient with the whole glacial process of getting a poem published, which can sometimes mean more than a year between submitting a poem and seeing it in print. I no longer submit to journals who accept only snail-mail submissions, and I'm submitting more and more to online journals, for their overall speediness. You can't beat having your poem published within a month or week, or even a single day, of having submitted it. There are exceptions, of course: One particular online journal took longer than any print or online journal I've ever submitted to over the last 30 years, and one recently took the time to send me paper proofs (go figure).

One of the online journals my poems have recently appeared in (on?) posts a new poem every day, with rejection or acceptance occurring within one week. Though I don't always agree with the editor's choices, I like the journal very much. I like the editor. All the more reason for me to dislike what this editor says in the “About” section of the website: “Poems are selected on the whim of the editor and are not indicative of quality (a subjective concept).” The editor means to say, of course, that his/her acceptance or rejection of a poem is no indication of its quality or lack thereof, but you get the drift. When I first read this “disclaimer” I actually went to my dictionary and looked up the word “whim,” just to be sure my annoyance/amazement was founded. Whim: “1. A sudden or capricious idea; a fancy. 2. Arbitrary thought or impulse.” I'd rather this editor actually meant definition number 3: “A vertical horse-powered drum used as a hoist in a mine.” (What would this journal's slush pile be called?)

What's wrong with standards, with being someone who has them?

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by Katrin Trüstedt

Faced with a looming terrorist threat from the self-proclaimed Islamic State, attempts throughout Europe are being made to reclaim one's 'own identity.' While the conception of war between equal nation states is questioned by the structure of international terrorism, the dynamic of national identity experiences a comeback. A desire for given group identities is growing all over, regarding nation states with their supposed German, French or Polish identity, alliances of states such as Europe, or even more extended coalitions such as 'the West' or 'the Occident.' This desire is situated within a struggle for the dominance of one's own given 'values' and 'identities' against an antagonist: 'We' defend our way of life against those who attack it. Such claims become especially prevalent in the aftermath of attacks like the ones in Paris and Brussels. But what this form of self-assertion serves, is above all the goals of ISIS. Their terror seems not to be directed primarily at an opponent whose identity is already fixed, and who must be overwhelmed because of it. Instead, the specific form of ISIS terror should be understood as one of provocation, intended to prompt the formation of opposing identities, to evoke antagonism. From this perspective, the highly staged terrorist acts are the attempt to force a complex and diverse world into a framework of unambiguously opposed fronts.

Even before the proclamation of an “Islamic State,” a textbook was published with the telling title The Management of Savagery/Chaos, which openly stated its political objective: to force America, or 'the West,' out of its latent opposition to Islam and into the position of an active and identifiable foe (“Force America to abandon its war against Islam by proxy and force it to attack directly.”) The strategic management of chaos was aimed initially at the immediate sphere of influence of ISIS, the 'Muslim gray zone' in the Middle East, whose shattered condition was to provide the basis for a progressive polarization by violence (“dragging the masses into battle such that polarization is created between all of the people.”) Invoking the alleged original battle of the pioneers for the establishment of Islam, violence is conceived as a means of creating opposing fronts (“This was the policy of battle for the pioneers: to transform society into two opposing groups, igniting a violent battle.”) The particular brutality of such acts of terror thus should be attributed less to an existing antagonism and more to forcing and creating enmity. The violence aims at tearing apart a murky gray zone by establishing a front line across which two warring parties can confront each other. The supposed 'hardliners' who promote a 'relentless crackdown' on ISIS are actually following ISIS' script in executing the role ascribed to them.

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by Aasem Bakhshi

Why does an apple fall when it is ripe? Is it brought down by the force of gravity? Is it because its stalk withers? Because it is dried by the sun, because it grows too heavy, or the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it? ‘None of these is the cause. They only make up the combination of conditions under which every living process of organic nature fulfills itself. In the same way the historian who declares that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, will be just as right and wrong as the man who says that a mass weighing thousands of tons, tottering and undetermined, fell in consequence of the last blow of the pickaxe wielded by the last navy. In historical events great men – so-called – are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free-will, is in the historical sense not free at all but is bound up with the whole course of history and preordained from all eternity.

―Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Wouldn't you visualize Livia Drusila ― the wife of Roman emperor Augustus ― as a cunning and venomous political mastermind if your sole introduction to ancient Roman history is Robert Graves' engrossing autobiographical tale of emperor Claudius? Haven't you always visualized the last Roman emperor of Julio-Claudian dynasty, the infamous Nero, playing fiddle while Rome was burning in 64 AD? Can anyone have a more predominant image of Abu Sufyan's wife Hind Bint Utbah than the one represented by Irene Papas through her revengeful eyes and blood-dripping lips in the film The Message (1976) when she was shown chewing the liver of Prophet Muhammad's uncle Hamza after the Battle of Uhud?

These are all overpowering images, sustained over time, and hard to erase from the slate of our memories. It doesn't matter much if we argue, for instance, that it was not Hind but the black slave Wahshi who actually gouged out Hamza's liver according to a traditional Muslim historian Ibn Kathir's narrative or else that the earliest recording of the incident by the historian Ibn Ishaq is a dubious attribution because of broken chains of narration. Similarly, does it matter that fiddles were non-existent in first-century Rome and it is probably an anciently preserved metaphor, as Nero was famous for his love of extraordinary indulgence in music and play? It would not transform these images the least if we juxtapose the contradicting accounts of Suetonius, Cassius and Tacitus and present evidence that Nero even returned immediately from Antium and organized a great relief effort from his own funds, even opening his palaces for the survivors. And it is pretty much futile to argue ― after BBC popularized Graves' autobiographical account of Claudius by adapting it into a TV series ― that Livia might not be a such a thorough Machiavellian character, and in fact it was not her favorite pastime to scheme political upheavals and poison every other claimant to Roman throne.

Thus after centuries of dust settling over innumerable layers of narratives, the quest for historical certainty, for that which actually happened, is overpowered by popular images that refuse to erase themselves from collective memory.

And this, of course, is also the single most important contribution of British-American psychologist Lesley Hazleton's narrative history of Shia-Sunni split: refreshing and reinforcing some already held soppy images.

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by Max Sirak

It's happened to us all. Maybe it was a meet-and-greet cocktail hour. Perhaps a dinner party at your neighbors. Or, the dreaded first family holiday at your new boyfriend's or girlfriend's place…

“Oh, Max…it's so nice to finally meet you. We've heard so much about you. I'm Sara,” your girlfriend's sister says. Then, with her glass of rose′ as a pointer, she continues around the room. “That's my husband, Bill. Over there, chasing Monk, the dog, around the table are Eva, Clara, Jack, and Charlie. Playing cards in the living room are Jeff, Lindsay, Carl and Kate. Our other sister, Caitlyn, should be here with her husband, Will, and their two kids, John and Jim, any minute now. Please, come in. Get a drink. Make yourself at home.”

Two thoughts race across your mind: “There's no way in hell I'm going to remember all these people's names…”

And: “That poor dog.”

Now – remember – this is your new significant other's family you're meeting here. You've never seen any of them before. And, let's assume you're really into the person you're dating. You can see building a future with him or her. You want to make a good first impression on the family.

What do you do?

You go in, grab a drink, insinuate yourself into a conversation (or run around and chase Monk with the kids), be yourself, and have a good time – just like Sara said. That's a no-brainer, right?

How do you remember the names and faces of all these people in hopes of not making a complete ass of yourself at the next family get-together?

That's a full-brainer. And, also what we're going to talk about today. With help from our friend, Joshua Foer, we're going to learn a five step process adapted from professional memoirists (yes, that's a thing) to help us better remember names.

But before we learn the five steps for remembering names and faces, let's take a look at why it's so difficult…

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