Dear Cyndy,

Thank you for your letter. As to the translatability of
text: objective "protocol" sentences are always translatable.
Lines of poetry never. The meaning of the poem is inseperably
bound to the semanticas and meta-semantics of each word.
To my mind _all_ language is primarily poetry.
E.g., the word "house" is not a definable, translatable abstraction:
it is the concatenation of my experience of all the houses
I have lived in, built, seen, imagined, etc.
The epistemological task is, if you will, to reconcile the tax
return with the poem, mindful that in a spiritual dimension all tax
returns are fraudulent, even if they pass the muster of the authorities.

You ask, why did I choose to translate Chapter Seven.
Blame it, - and everything else -, on epistemology.
I sent my cousin Marion a copy of my essay on the sources
of doubt. As an academic scientist, albeit a disappointed one,
she doubted my doubt, and that's what started the discussion.
I wanted to explain to my cousin my knowledge concerning the Holocaust.

Below are extracts from an exchange with her.
Lines marked with ">" are hers. The unmarked lines are mine.
The discussion concerned the question:
What am I able to "know" about the Holocaust.
What is the meaning of the phrase:
"Knowledge about the Holocaust".

> Yesterday I wanted to ask you about the significance
> of the distinction between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften,
> but thought I'd leave it till today, hurrying home instead. 
> But you apparently understood what would be puzzling me,
> so thank you for the unexpectedly prompt explanation.
> I plunge into this discussion incautiously,
> considering that I've not taken the time to think thoroughly
> about the points you raise. 
> But I want to start because it's so interesting;
> I hope you will forgive the unfinishedness (perhaps indefensibility)
> of what I write.
   
> Your approach to unraveling and understanding
> different kinds of knowledge is quite different from mine.
> Factors that appear critical to you
> (e.g. the chasm between knowing as an individual and public knowledge)
> seem relatively minor complications to me. 
> What seems the key to knowledge from my vantage point,
> the extent and reliability of empirical evidence,
> doesn't appear central in your way of looking at knowledge. 
   
> As I'm getting to know you a little through your letters,
> it intrigues me how you gravitate toward touching things,
> manipulating them, trying them out yourself.
> You privilege these experiences so strongly
> over reading about how things have been done,
> even though you read willingly, widely and deeply. 
> You're determined to be the repairman, the lawyer,
> the doctor, the plumber, the emergency rescue squad;
> determined to experience all this in person,
> rather than defer to "experts" and hear / read how they accomplish it. 
> You rail against specialization in medicine in part, I think,
> because you want to do it all.
> (I admit there are other sound reasons too.) 
> I view your privileging personal knowledge over public knowledge
> in the same light.
   
> I would guess that you were the opposite of me
> when it came to laboratory work. 
> I easily come up with creative ideas,
> but I don't feel comfortable doing things in the lab
> until after I've exhaustively studied the background information
> and how exactly I'm going to go about this. 
> This has been a serious flaw in my abilities as a scientist. 
> Individuals who plunge ahead in the laboratory, try things out,
> improvise on the spur of the moment,
> heedless to their lack of understanding,
> make much more progress I think. 
   
> Let's consider three candidates for "knowledge":
> (1) Margrit had a hernia. 
> 2) The ancestors of citizens of modern Turkey perpetrated
> an Armenian genocide.
> (3) The malleus and incus bones of the mammalian middle ear
> are homologous to the articular and quadrate bones
> of the reptilian jaw. 
   
> (1) You believe that Margrit had a hernia because,
> when you palpated the swelling she pointed out to you,
> it's location, it's size and texture,
> Margrit's reports of nausea and vomiting,
> matched what you had learned in medical school
> and medical practice about hernias. 
> But this was not enough to be sure,
> not for you or for the public. 
> That this was actually a hernia was further confirmed
> by Clemens and by other physicians in the emergency room,
> perhaps by scans of various sorts and, eventually,
> by the surgeon who was in a position
> to learn a lot about the anatomical details of the herniated intestine
> and its relationship to surrounding tissue. 
> The surgeon told you what he saw on the telephone. 
> To a large extent, I think, you believed that,
> had you been in the operating room,
> you would have seen the evidence in very much the same way.
> Thus your belief, Clemens' belief,
> the surgeon's belief that Margrit had a hernia
> are all based on a combination of personal experience of the hernia,
> plus accepting the reports of other trusted observers,
> modulated by prior education and experience
> (including the collective experience
> of the medical profession.....certainly less than 100% trustworthy).
> All of you are relying heavily on empirical evidence
> for knowledge of Margrit's hernia. 
> To me the difference among your personal knowledges on this matter
> is minor compared to the similarities.
   
> (2) Some of the ancestors of modern Turkish citizens
> purposely engaged in large-scale murder of an enemy tribe,
> the Armenians, with the goal of eliminating them to the extent practical. 
> Clearly there are many factors that make it difficult
> to be certain that this statement is true. 
> Much of the empirical evidence consists
> of historical records and hearsay. 
> There are many conflicting assertions;
> it's not easy to decide whom to believe. 
> Different contemporary individuals and groups
> have strong psychological, political and financial interests
> in promoting a particular version of the story.
> Some of the historical evidence is open to alternate interpretations. 
> Many people with many different experiences and goals
> were involved in these events;
> they probably had different views on what they were doing,
> and on what had been done to them. 
> In conflict situations surrounding wars and the crumbling of states,
> such as this, many falsehoods are spread
> and become the motivations for actions.
   
> Thus truth is difficult to establish,
> not only because we are removed in time from these events,
> but also because of their complexity,
> because so many sub-groups with their own experiences,
> beliefs and motivations were involved. 
> The same is true when we try to understand
> what is going on in contemporary Iraq, Afghanistan,
> Pakistan, the U.S.A. 
> This problem of gleaning the truth
> from a very complex situation is not confined to events in history. 
> It is this complexity, and the inability to comprehend it all,
> let alone to "control for" it, seems to me the main difference
> beween Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften. 
> Admittedly in this kind of situation, individual experience,
> individual motivation and interpretation
> will play a larger part in distinguishing personal knowledge
> from public knowledge.
 

=========================================


Thank you for your letter, and especially for taking seriously my
interest in the theory of knowledge. I hope it doesn't disappoint
or even offend you, when I write that I think our respective
considerations about knowledge are quite different. I suspect we
are using the same words to address separate issues, and I don't
know whether it is polite for me to reiterate my point of view.

Let me begin, gently, by reminding you of Goethe's insight:
Das Hoechste waere zu begreifen, dass alles Faktische schon Theorie ist.
It's most important to understand, that facts are already theories.
I suspect here is one point of disagreement between us:

You would admit that some "facts" are inferences from theory, and are
therefore not empirical, but you would argue that many, if not most
"facts" are reflections of experience and are essentially empirical.

I interpret our difference as one of definition. My preference is to
stipulate as theory all symbolic expression, everything which is
described in words (or in mathematical formulas). To my mind, facts,
inasmuch as they are verbal propositions, "protocol sentences", are
inherently theoretical, and it is theory which is the target of my
doubt.  I define experience as the pre-verbal, pre-conceptual encounter
with nature.

By this definition the Armenian genocide issue is now pure theory,
- as is the history of the Holocaust. To argue that some sequence
of events in the past is "pure" theory, is not the denial of its
reality. On the contrary, to recognize the Armenian genocide or the
Holocaust as theory, as history, is to acknowledge a reality which is
inaccessible to us; while to claim that I have "empirical" evidence
of the Holocaust is to mock the experience of those who suffered,
by faking a claim to experience which was never mine.

===========================

You write:

>  Nothing would mock the victims of the Holocaust
>  more than to say "It's history.  It's past.
>  We, the living, are not in a position to determine what happened,
>  if anything, who was responsible.  What's past is past.
>  It's theory.  It's useless trying to apply evidence
>  to understand what happened."  There is evidence.
>  Lots of it.  We can study it, sort it, appraise it,
>  even though there are inaccuracies, contradictions,
>  missing data, and self-interested interpreters.

To study (the evidence) of the Holocaust, to sort it, to appraise it,
to determine what happened and who is responsible, is the most eloquent,
the most conclusive statement that the Holocaust _is_ history.
The analysis of evidence is what history is all about.
Someone for whom the Holocaust is real, someone for whom
the Holocaust is integral to his existence,
doesn't need to sort the evidence,
doesn't need to appraise it,
doesn't need to determine what happened.

Let me tell you a story: When I was an intern at the Pennsylvania
Hospital, I remember, on rounds one morning, aghast, when the attending
physician who happened to be the hospital's chief cardiologist,
Joseph P. Vander Veer, M.D., F.A.C.P. opined that a certain
young childless black woman with a heart murmur but no clinical
heart disease should be surgically sterilized because negroes
were unduly prolific and there were too many of them already.
Hysterically or otherwise, I thought that was concentration camp
logic and I vowed to myself that I would try to stop that kind of
abuse as soon as I had attained a professional position from which
I was able to do so.

Years later, during my ophthalmology residency at the
Harvard affiliated Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary, I observed
the residents performing experiments on "service patients" who
were socially too disadvantaged to have a private physician. There
was much experimentation going on, most of it inconsequential, some
however with devastating consequences. One patient whom I remember
vividly was a Chinese man with narrow angles, who was at risk for
developing acute angle closure if his pupils were pharmacologically
dilated.  There was no medical indication for mydriasis.
One of the residents had read somewhere that if one moistened a
strip of filter paper with the mydriatic agent and applied it to
only one sector of the corneal limbus, mydriasis could be achieved
without precipitating angle closure. It was a nonsensical approach
which was not in use at the Infirmary, but the resident was bright,
innovative and curious, and of course the patient was a Chinaman.
His pupil was dilated, the angle closed, the resident was rewarded
for is imaginative approach with a chance to get additional surgical
experience, the operation failed, the eye became blind. When it was
my turn to obtain a history from this patient, I became upset.

At the time, Henry Allen, whom I knew well and who had been
my ophthalmology instructor in Medical School,
was Chief of Ophthalmology at the Infirmary.
He was obviously the finest that Harvard could produce. 
When he died, the university recorded his prominence as follows:

HENRY FREEMAN ALLEN, Henry Willard Williams Clinical Professor of
Ophthalmology, Emeritus, died on December 23, 1993, at the age of 77.
Born in Boston, he graduated from Harvard College in 1939 and from
Harvard Medical School in 1943. A sixth-generation surgeon,
he was a descendant of the Warren family, whose members helped
found the Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital.
His great-grandmother was author Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Following service in World War II as a captain in the Army
Medical Corps in Germany, Dr. Allen did his residency in ophthalmology
at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. He was chief of
ophthalmology there from 1968 to 1973. President of the Channing
Home from 1956 to 1962, Dr. Allen helped to establish the Channing
Laboratory, the William Ellery Channing Professorship, and the
Harriet Ryan Albee Professorship at the Medical School.
He volunteered his surgical services at the Binder-Schweitzer Hospital
in Pucalpa, Peru, as well as in Haiti, Saudi Arabia,
and the Sioux Indian Nation in South Dakota.
He was a trustee of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge,
the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown,
and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.

Dr. Allen was the man to whom I addressed my protests.
I went to his office and told him the story
of the hapless Chinese cook. Dr. Allen thought it was funny:
"A Chinese Cook or a Chinese Crook?" he joked, as he brushed me off.
As a staff member of the Infirmary I was expected to assume nominal
responsibility for such patients, and to pretend, in Dr. Allen's
words, "that everything was being done in the best interests
of the patient." Dr Allen told me that if I didn't, I would be
dismissed from the staff.

I admit that it was somewhat hysterical of me to confuse Harvard
Medical School's Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary with a Nazi
concentration camp; but the Holocaust is unavoidably the cause
of a certain amount of hysteria, and arguably the Chinese cook
who was blinded in one eye by the Infirmary, sustained an injury
more consequential than what my father, who escaped without
physical hurt, received in Buchenwald.  My colleagues thought I
was a traitor.  One of my most congenial colleagues, a very literate
and urbane Jewish ophthalmologist, Abraham Pollen, tried to reassure me
that although what was going on might seem deplorable, it was justified
for being done "in a good cause." He didn't convince me, and I sued
in Federal court, Meyer v. Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary, 330 F.Supp. 1328,
for protection against being dismissed for refusing to collaborate.
Once I had filed the suit, the Infirmary was afraid to throw me off
the staff, I was relieved of the objectionable involvement, but
I was ostracized. The case dragged on for ten years. It
was finally dismissed as a result of a forged, back-dated
entry in the docket sheet. At the hearing, Judge W. Arthur
Garrity, a Kennedy appointee, recited the praises of his
Clerk as a person of consummate integrity. It was not until
years later that I understood what happened. I told the story to
a lawyer who explained it all. Clerks, he said, follow the
instructions of the Court. So much for one echo of the Holocaust
in my own life. I hope you agree that I'm not a Holocaust denier.
For the existential meaning of history, you should take a look at
Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments. It's a very small
book with which you will never be finished.

======================

As you can imagine, there's more. Such discussions can go on and
on. If you wish to read the sequel, just ask.

It's good that you should scramble together as much of your
family as you are able for Thanksgiving. After discontinuing
my sister's metranidazole medication on the assumption that
after 12 days of treatment her intestinal problem was cure,
it relapsed, but seems again to be responding adequately to
medication. She seems very content, even relieved, to be here.
We'll proceed as way opens.

You stay well, and be as happy as season and circumstances
permit. Give my best to Ned.

Jochen