Jun
11
Billy, last night
“It was a bleak, rainy afternoon with only two colors: wherever the light fell it was white, everywhere else it was black; and the doctor’s mood was one of the same bleak simplification unsoftened by transitions or halftones.” (Pasternak, p. 292)
That refers to “mood”, but it quickly occurred to me that people who assert “shades of gray” in epistemic or metaphysical matters are actually only confessing to incompetent thinking: failure to sort through logical chains diligently enough to evaluate and/or apply all the data —
Correct. Consider what I told Henke some years back:
I would suggest, Jon, that there’s a serious problem with the idea that everything is always in shades of grey, an idea that you seem to have signed onto, here. I dare to suggest to you that there are nothing but absolutes… black and white. Now before you start calling me crazy, consider, please;
Grey does not exist as a color, but rather a very complex pattern of black and white spots, which are often very small and arranged in very complex and bewildering patterns. If you’re seeing grey, you’re not close enough to your question, to understand it’s true nature.Put another way, All questions, broken down far enough can be answered in binary fashion…. black or white. If all you see is grey, you’re not looking close enough…and you don’t have an answer.A hypothetical for this would be the question of killing people and if it should be allowed to do so. There are certainly different answers to the question, but most of the differences in the spectrum of answers you’ll get to the questions hinge on the conditionals.Offhanded and admittedly extreme examples:Killing someone because they stole my parking spot might not fir in with some people’s idea of a justified killing.On the other hand, let’s say we have a kidnapper who has a gun to a victim’s head, threatening to kill his hostage if he’s not allowed safe passage out of the area. I suspect most people would agree that taking out such a slimeball would be an appropriate action.These are larger pixels of black and white. There are many smaller pixels that create a more bewildering picture when viewed from afar. I’m sure you can think of such hypothetical questions on your own. When these pixels of black and white are summed, they then create a clearer answer to the question at hand.Someone using the phrase “Shades of grey” is an admission that the issue at hand is a complex one. When the answer STOPS at “shades of grey” it’s an admission that the speaker really isn’t realy interested in finding the answer, and perhaps that they benefit from the question continuing to exist, unanswered.Short version, and perhaps a little brutal:‘Shades of grey’ is intellectually vapid; the lazy way out, and possibly the corrupt way.
Back in the late nineties, I used to use that as a tag line:
There is no such thing as ‘shades of grey’,no ‘grey areas’, only black and white spots, some of which are very small. If you see grey, you’re not getting close enough to what you’re looking at to know it’s true nature.
Caught hell for it, too. As I expected I would… mostly from liberals who tend to shy away from hard and fast definitions of words or of anything else.
One line in Billy’s point strikes me :
who assert “shades of gray” in epistemic or metaphysical matters are actually only confessing to incompetent thinking:
I would point out, that in the matters of the metaphysical, it’s quite possible to have a belief, and not really understand all the aspects of that belief. That’s because believers operate at a level other than logic as we understand it.
I point out to you, that one of the most difficult things for a scientist to say , are the words “I don’t know.” which, is why even in the realm of science it gets said so seldom. Yet, those three words are the basis of knowledge. “I don’t know” is in fact a statement of understanding ; we don’t know it all; we are not omnipotent. It’s that way discussing the metaphysical world, as well.
Before you start, the those two situations are not in conflict within the realm of the metaphysical or within the realm of the scientific; the key in both situations is not knowing it all, but rather admitting that we don’t... and in the search for understanding. It seems to me in neither case does use of the phrase ‘shades of grey” admit that lack of full understanding. If you know it all, why look further for answers?
And that’s where the paths of the “real world” and the metaphysical split; in all my years of religious upbringing, do not believe that I was ever given an answer to any question that included the words “shades of gray”. The answer would come back “I don’t know”.
And that was all right… because we were on a search for understanding of the question, the first step of which is “I don’t know”.
Yet, we hear that phrase, that “shades of grey” answer, all the time in what we are pleased to call “the real world”.
Tags: BitsBlog, other blogs/bloggers
June 11th, 2007 at 8:15
As I see it, shades of gray, or black and white, are not descriptions, but perceptions. We can see the world any where a on continuum between stark black and white, and a total blur of gray. Again this is only our perception, not necassrily reality. I find the extreme views, total black and white, or a gray, to ueeless.
The essenensce of being a civilized being is being able to discern reality and make value judgements. This is inherently difficult. Those only see a blur of gray and those see all black and white are not capable of making good value judgements.
The only easy answer is that there no easy answers.
June 11th, 2007 at 9:38
I’ve never suggested that making value judgments was easy. Merely required.
Please don’t make the mistake of suggesting that because one sees black and white, that the questions being so answered, are not complex. Indeed, they are usually very complex. Granny, however, it is merely a collection of black and white spots that are out of focus. One must focus closely to be able to determine the true nature, and thereby how we should react to it.