Possible Worlds Epistomology

 I was talking to J. Tuesday night at our men's meeting when the subject of husband and wife argumentation came up. When J. described how his arguments unfolded, I heard the frustration of someone inculcated with the a priori correctness of his position. Taking this certainty for granted, he could not consider his wife's position as a valid response to stimuli. It's not that she was just wrong and he was right for the best possible reason - the fact was that he could not allow the possiblity that he could back off of his position and land on another completely valid but slightly different good outcome.

I mentioned that one solution could come from a 'possible worlds' approach. I said that both J. and his wife, when finding themselves divided on the form of the solution, could briefly sketch in words or on paper what the end state - the solution writ large - in a defensible possible world would look like. The two versions could then be dispassionately examined and rationally differentiated.

Then we came to the barrier to J.'s imagination. "But what if I am right? I KNOW I am right!". He could not imagine the case that he could be 'less wrong' or even 'slightly less rational' or even 'possessed of an improvable correctness'. No, in his mind this was a clear choice between a good possible outcome and a bad possible outcome. My comrade D. chimed in with some pertinent information about Venus and Mars. "She will usually be guided by nurturing impulses and the male considers status and power." Again, no discernable difference in J.'s answer.

Then I said that I was using a 'possible worlds' construction to imagine multiple good choices and not just the 'he said; she said" trap of my good idea versus your wrong-headed idea. I felt like I had the wisdom of Moses.

Then I read this fine entry on J. Fallows blog about the international society theory. Traditional nations and states imagine that their individual Leviathan looks inward to compose a social contract. But neighbors, friends and associate states comprise a society that is without Leviathan. Relations between nations in the neo-Hobbsian view are nasty, brutish and short.

Strictly by Bayesian reasoning  (or reading the WSJ and Barron's) a global Leviathan has an astronomical probability of being true now and even more rational in the course of civilized time. This is "The End of History" that Fukayama described.

Fallows (actually his stand-in Sam R.) makes the case that China and America are no more outside of an international communality of civilizations than Texas and New York are outside of a communality of states.

The Meta-Leviathan is completely possible in principal. A coalition of kingdoms of the earth is a possible world in my reading of Leviathan. A Meta-Leviathan obtains.

His holiness Karl Popper addresses this issue in The Open Society and its Enemies by constructing the dynamics of the closed society in the grip of historicism pushing against the rational open society. What holds back the historicist is an undying love for ancient ideologies long past their usefulness.

The degenerate form of reactive conservatism in the GOP lives in Platonic rapture -- looking to some past utopia imagined as an earlier North American society inflated by the ghosts of Plato philosopher kings. In this imagining, the tablets of Mt. Sinai were carefully re-written by the holy spirit working through the minds and hearts of the founders. This received wisdom - directly from the stormy heavens instead of from the enlightened and empirical minds of English gentlemen - cannot be known except to the elect. Political Christians along with the Hebraic minds of  AIPAC are up to the task of interpretation of these scriptures.