I presented the "Fallacy of the Excluded Middle" to an interactive audience of over 50 at The Villages Philosophy Club on 30 May. If you would like a copy of my animated Powerpoint slides send an email to me: ira@techie.com (my attempts to upload the slides to my Google site have been unsuccessful so far).

PASCAL'S WAGER
"Pascal's Wager" as to the existence of God is an early example of how the rhetorical FALLACY OF THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE may be used to push an unsuspecting audience to unwittingly accept an argument that is lacking in basic logic. Blaise Pascal, 1623–1662, was a French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist, yet even he was taken in by this fallacy! He argues as follows:

 

• God is, or He is not. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is.

• Wager, [that God] is ... There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, … against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite.

• And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain.

 

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's Wager Based on Pensées, part III, §233)

 

This argument seems reasonable at first glance, particularly if you are motivated to want to believe in God. Our life here on Earth is difficult, short, and FINITE while our potential life in Heaven after our Earthly existence passes is INFINITE in length and high in quality.

 

Reason alone cannot answer the question as to God's existence, so we should assume a 50% chance either way.

 

As the decision matrix above shows, existence of God is either FALSE (TOP ROW) or TRUE (BOTTOM ROW),  and we can take ACTION to CHOOSE TO BELIEVE IN GOD (COLUMN A) or CHOOSE NOT TO BELIEVE (COLUMN B).  We have no control over the rows, but we do have control over the columns.

 

If we pick COLUMN B (NOT TO BELIEVE) if we have chosen rightly we get "nothing lost, nothing gained" OR, if God exists and we have chosen wrongly, we get damned for disbelief in Eternal Hell.

 

On the other hand, if we pick COLUMN A (BELIEF IN GOD) if we have chosen wrongly we get to do some unnecessary prayer ritual and curbing of some pleasures OR, if God exists and we have chosen rightly, we get the ultimate reward of Eternal Life in Heaven!

 

On balance, it is clear that COLUMN A (BELIEF IN GOD) is the better wager by far.

 

WHAT IS WRONG WITH "PASCAL'S WAGER" ?

 

So, what is wrong "Pascal's Wager" argument?

 

The LOGICAL fault is that we have EXCLUDED a bunch of possibilities that lie between GOD is FALSE and GOD is TRUE.

 

For example, assuming God exists, WHICH GOD should we choose to believe in? The KIND, LOVING, and FORGIVING GOD of many branches of major religions, or the STRICT, VENAL, and UNFORGIVING GOD of, for example, the Spanish Inquisition or the Islamic Jihad?

 

If your answer is the KIND GOD, I invite you to set up a decision matrix where the rows are KIND GOD and VENAL GOD and the columns are belief in the VENAL GOD or belief in the Kind GOD. If you follow the logic, you will determine that your best bet is belief in the VENAL GOD! (My Powerpoint charts give the details, but, in short, the KIND GOD is more likely to forgive you if you happen to wrongly choose to believe in the venal God, while the venal God will not forgive you if you happen to choose wrongly!).

 

HOW THE FALLACY OF THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE WAS APPLIED TO THE GLOBAL WARMING DEBATE

 

In an earlier posting (here) I showed how "One Guy With a Marker" DID NOT  MAKE "the Global Warming Debate Completely Obsolete".

 

The decision matrix below shows what he wrote in each box (in Black) and my comments (in Red).

 

Let us review the boxes (again with his writing in BLACK and mine in Red:

1. L GLOBAL DEPRESSION: This box is included to make it appear he is being “fair” to Skeptics. He assumes that taking Action to stop GCC will be so costly that, if it turns out to have been unnecessary, the result will be a “Global Depression”. Certainly, maximum environmental spending will damage the world-wide economy, but I doubt that type of spending, alone, will trigger a “Global Depression”. When we get to box #3 we will see that he doesn’t really think so either! HIGHLY UNLIKELY
2. J SMILEY FACE: GCC is “False”, we take No Action, so all is well! But, is it? Does his “GCC” include NATURAL PROCESSES and CYCLES that have caused Global Warming (and Cooling), Floods (and Droughts), and Violent Storms (and Blessed Rain) prior to the advent of Humans on Earth, and before we Humans had the capability to affect the climate? Apparently not, else “GCC” could not be totally “False”. Therefore, by “GCC” he is referring ONLY to the HUMAN-CAUSED variety, totally ignoring the evidence from the geological, ice-core, and historical records of NATURAL Global Climate Change and some Catastrophes. WHAT ABOUT -- NATURAL -- GCC ?
3. J SMILEY FACE: This box is totally inconsistent with box #1! If Action to stop Human-Caused Global Warming is so costly as to cause a Global Depression in the first box, would it not also cause such a Global Depression in this box? So, why the Happy Face? Realistically, even if we in the US and other nations in the Developed World take maximum Action to reduce our CO2 emissions, it is totally unrealistic to expect those in the Developing World to do the same. Indeed, China, India, and other countries will continue to build power plants, nearly all of them coal-fired. CO2 levels are bound to continue their rapid increase for at least the coming several decades, no matter what we do. CONTRADICTS BOX #1 (GLOBAL DEPRESSION)
4. L GLOBAL DEPRESSION:  This box is filled with terrible consequences and is intended to scare us into taking maximum Action. He assumes the worst-case Global Warming of several degrees predicted by Climate Models despite the failure of those Climate Models to predict the past 17 years of absolutely no net Global Warming. (The most realistic prediction is continued moderate change in Global Temperatures, mostly NATURAL but some small part HUMAN-CAUSED. As standards of living continue to improve world-wide, populations will stabilize which will allow reasonable action to be taken to moderate CO2 emissions, and Human Civilization will ADAPT to inevitable Natural and Human-Caused Climate Change as we have throughout history.) BASED ON -- FAILED -- CLIMATE MODELS

 

The following chart of Warming Predictions vs the Real World traces temperatures from 1979 (when satellite-based global temperatures first became available) to the present. It shows how badly these THEORETICAL Climate Models have failed to agree with the REAL WORLD measurements.

 

 

 

The black and green wiggly lines are ACTUAL measurements. Over some 34 years, they show a net Global Warming of less than 0.2° C (about 0.3° F), and a "PAUSE", since 1997, of 17 years with no net Global Warming at all.

 

The red line is the AVERAGE of 102 OFFICIAL IPCC CLIMATE MODELS. Note that it predicts Global Warming of more than 0.8° C (about 1.5° F), OVER-ESTIMATED by more than 400% !

 

NONE of the 102 models predicted the "PAUSE" ! The model that predicted the least Global Warming was about 100% high, and the one that predicted the most Global Warming was about 1000% wrong! Please note that during the entire 34 year period, CO2 (carbon dioxide), which Global Warming activists say is the major cause of temperature increase, has continued to rise rapidly!

 

SUMMARY OF THE LOGICAL PROBLEM OF THE FALLACY OF THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE

ABSOLUTE DICHOTOMIES: All or nothing … Camelot or Catastrophe 

EMOTIONAL: Powerful in political rhetoric, but dangerous in science

HIDDEN ASSUMPTIONS: Each choice is perfectly TRUE or FALSE, Action is totally YES or NO 

NOT LOGICAL: The real world is mostly shades of

DICHOTOMIES ARE USEFUL IF WE UNDERSTAND HOW WE ARE SIMPLIFING REALITY 

 

As long as we understand that almost all measurements are continuous and our classifications are made for convenience, dichotomies can be useful.

 

For example, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator divides all humans into some 16 different "Personality" types, using four dichotomies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator).

 

As the graphic illustrates (according to Jung as interpreted by Myers-Briggs) each of us is somewhere along a continuum between:

• Being an EXTROVERT (outward-turning) or being an INTROVERT (inward-turning), 
• INTUITING (viewing information in an abstract, theoretical way) or SENSING (viewing information in a tangible, concrete, present way)  

• THINKING (in a detatched, logical, reasonable way) or FEELING (in an empathizing way seeking hamony) and  

(added by Myers-Briggs)

• JUDGING (Detailed thinking or feeling) or PERCEIVING (Contextual sensing or intuition )

 SO WHAT PERSONALITY TYPE AM I ?

• When I was tested I was married, with children and a successful career. I scored as an Extrovert, but close to the border with being an Introvert. Had I been tested while in college, I would probably have tested as an Introvert.
• I scored as rather solidly iNtuiting (rather than Sensing, and solidly Thinking rather than Feeling, and would probably have scored about the same while in college.
• Finally, I scored as slightly more Perceiving than Judging, and I am not sure how I would have scored on this dichotomy while in college.

One of my favorite graduate school professors, the late Walter Lowen, wrote a wonderful book about "Dichotomies of the Mind", where he utilized and adapted the Myers-Briggs methodology, and added his own spin to it. (See http://www2.binghamton.edu/news/inside/news.html?issue=2006may11&id=9 and http://www.amazon.com/dp/0471083313/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=32558223871&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=s&hvrand=4187338426078731296&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=e&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_5598tj0ph5_e)

As the graphic indicates, while I score as an ENTP (which is called an "Inventor" by Myers-Briggs or a "Suspector" by Lowen), my personality extends a bit on all sides, particularly to the INTP ("architect" or "theoretician"),  ENTJ ("General" or "Analyst"), ENFP ("Journalist" or "Perceiver"), and ESTP ("Promoter" or "Operator") categories.

Bottom Line: Dichotomies are OK to use for convenience and for compacting lots of information into a single package (like a "Personality type") as long as we recognize that we are not really confined into a single discrete box!

Ira Glickstein

Toyota Runaway = "Creative Destruction"

[Update 13 Mar 2010. In my original posting I wrote: "...I believe some of the reports are 'copy cats' looking for publicity." Well, the incident pictured above may be one such Copy Cat.] As those who follow this Blog may know, my wife and I have been driving a 2004 Toyota Prius hybrid -our only car- and have been very happy with it. So, quite naturally, we have been following the controversy about runaway Toyotas very closely.

The photo above shows a runaway Prius. On 8 March, this car raced up to 90 mph on a California freeway when the accelerator pedal apparently stuck. The terrified driver tried to slow the car using the brakes but they were ineffective.

He called 911 and a CHP trooper came alongside. Using his bullhorn, he told the driver to stand on the brake pedal and also apply the emergency brakes. Finally, with both brakes on and a steep uphill section of roadway, the car slowed sufficiently for the driver to turn off the ignition and coast to a safe stop.

TOYOTA'S INEFECTIVE RESPONSE

When runaway incidents began being reported by the press and TV, Toyota claimed that the runaway incidents were due to improperly installed floor mats that jammed the pedal in the full-on position. They fixed that by asking users to secure floor mats properly and not to use double mats.

Then, they admitted that the innards of some accelerator pedals could corrode and stick in the full-on position. They fixed that by installing a metal shim.

Nevertheless, the incidents keep occurring. I believe some of the reports are "copy cats" looking for publicity. Some are from people who mistakenly pressed the accelerator instead of the brakes and are falsely trying to shift the blame to a hardware defect. However, many, if not most, are genuine failures and not in any way the fault of the drivers.

WHY DIDN'T TOYOTA APPLY A SOFTWARE FIX?

When the news first came out a month or so ago, my first reaction was that -whatever the actual cause- Toyota should immediately install a software over-ride that would disconnect or limit the accelerator signal, or shift the car into neutral, if the brakes were applied while the accelerator was on.

Here is the technical detail for the CTS pedal used by Toyota. The accelerator pedal sends an analog voltage to the onboard computer. The brakes also send a signal to the computer. Toyota has the ability to update the computer software. Therefore, a software fix could limit the accelerator signal to some minimal value whenever the brake is on, perhaps by shifting to neutral. (The engine should not be shut down because that would disable the power brakes and power steering.)

Even if, as Toyota still claims, the problem is strictly mechanical, a software over-ride, to prevent acceleration when the brakes are applied, would prevent most of the accidents we have read about.

AUTOMOTIVE SOFTWARE HAS A LONG WAY TO GO

Before we retired, my wife and I worked on aircraft electronics systems and software. We currently teach online graduate courses on those subjects for the University of Maryland University College. Aircraft systems and software are developed, tested, verified and validated in a very controlled environment. Our methodology is based on "lessons learned" over the past few decades. Automotive engineers have only been in the software game for about a decade. They could learn alot from us.

It is clear to me that either the Toyota engineers and software developers are incompetent, or -more likely in my opinion- their management has restricted their efforts either due to cost concerns or legal liability, or both.

While I have no inside knowledge, I cannot believe that no engineer at Toyota ever suggested a software over-ride when brakes are applied. I can imagine some Toyota engineers, when the runaway acceleration incidents were first reported to Toyota several years ago, suggesting a software patch to over-ride whatever mechanical failures were the actual cause. "No," I can hear some anal manager say, "If we fix the software that will be costly and will imply that we are legally liable for not having the brake over-ride in the original design." I can imagine a room full of managers and lawyers nodding their heads like so many bobble-dolls!

HASN'T ANYONE HEARD OF BASIC ERROR CHECKING?

I think the press has been pretty responsible, although they have been taken in both by Toyota appologists and some publicity-seeking "experts". Brian Ross (ABC News) has done a good job but I believe he was a bit off when he rode along with a college prof who shorted the accelerator pedal wires. That made the car accelerate out of control, as Brian Ross stood on the brakes. The prof then showed that the computer in the car did not display any error codes.

A week later, Toyota engineers did the same wire-shorting experiment on several cars from different manufacturers, and they too did not display any error codes. Toyota did the demo to show they were blameless. But, all it indicates to me is that the other automobile manufacturers are also incompetent!

I know exactly what the prof did. There are three wires to the pedal: 1) Ground, 2) Vin, (voltage input, probably 12 volts DC) and 3) Vout (voltage output that varies from zero volts to 92% (+/- 3%) of Vin as the accellerator pedal is pushed all the way down). If, due to loose insulation (or the actions of the prof), Vin (wire 2) happens to short to Vout wire (wire 3), the computer will get a Vout equal to 100% of Vin and will interpret it as a signal that the accelerator is pushed all the way down.

If the pedal and software had been designed the way aircraft electronics is designed, the computer software would recognize that Vout was 100% of Vin, exceeding the limit of 95%, and would have set an error code. Beyond setting an error code, had the system been designed to aircraft electronics standards, exceeding 95% of Vin would have been recognized as shorted wiring and should have initiated speed limiting.

Apparently, the automotive system and software engineers have not implemented even the most basic error checking! This applies not only to Toyota but also the other manufacturers whose cars were part of the Toyota wire-shorting demo!

WHERE WERE THE REGULATORS? THE COURTS?

Toyota, the world's leading auto company, has turned out defective products that killed some customers and endangered others. Until a week ago, they did not even let the National Highway Transportation Administration (NHTSA) have access to their internal "black box" codes. NHTSA seems to have gone along with Toyota's arrogance. The regulators were either "asleep at the switch", or incompetent, or in the pocket of the industry they were regulating, or all three!

Based on the Toyota wire shorting demo, the other auto companies are nearly as incompetent. (To their credit, however, the other companies do make their "blackbox" error code translator units available to regulators and dealerships.)

According to press reports, a former Toyota liability defense lawyer, who said he alerted the company to systemic problems several years ago, and who has the emails to prove it, has recently come forward. According to him, Toyota had a "book of knowledge" that detailed known design defects. Company lawyers used that information as part of the decision process of whether to fight a lawsuit or settle. Where were the courts?

Of course, now that the facts are coming out, NHTSA and the courts will take action. Liability lawyers on both sides will get rich and some victims will be compensated.

"CREATIVE DESTRUCTION"

The term "Creative Destruction" applies here. In its normal meaning, it signifies the way, under capitalism, new technology, products, and services push out the old. As an inevitable part of the process, some backward industries and companies go bankrupt, stockholders lose their investments, employees lose their jobs, and entire communities may fall into poverty. That is the "destructive" part. At the same time, some pioneering industries and forward-looking companies rise and create newer and often better jobs, investors make money, and entire communities enjoy prosperity. That is the "creative" part.

I'd like to apply the term to the "Creative Destruction" of the now tarnished Toyota brand. It is a once valued brand that has been devalued by their coverup of known defective designs and failure to fix them promptly. They would rather stonewall and fight in court than do the right thing. I believe this will sour most consumers on the Toyota brand.

My wife and I had planned to replace our 2004 Prius with a newer plug-in Prius in a couple years. No more! I doubt we will ever buy a Prius again.

That is a pity because we have been very happy with our Prius and love their dealership in Ocala, FL. That dealership may be forced out of business and some Toyota employees will lose their jobs and stockholders will lose their investments. That is the "destructive" part.

I only wish the regulators at NHTSA and the lawyers and the court system that failed in this case would also go out of business. But no, perversely they will be rewarded with more power and more court cases.

The "creative" part is the business that will flow to Ford and other auto manufacturers who have behaved better. I am following the Ford Fusion and we may purchase their plug-in electric-only version that is expected to come out in a couple of years. (Besides, we have owned Ford stock for many years.)

MEANWHILE WE ARE DRIVING OUR TOYOTA PRIUS GINGERLY

Today, for the first time, I got up the courage to practice stopping the car by shifting to neutral. With my foot on the accelerator, I pushed the gear shift to the left. I had to hold it for about a second, but then I could feel the accelerator disconnect and the car coasted to a lower speed.

From reading news stories, I now know that the ON/OFF button must be held for three seconds to take effect. In case shift to neutral does not work, that is how I will stop my Prius if it happens to run away.

[Update 13 Mar 2010. The person involved in the runaway incident reported above seems to have some baggage. He apparently owes lots of money. Parts of his story do not ring true. The Prius he was driving supposedly has the brake over-ride software I described above. This raises two quesions: 1) If brake over-ride has been available on Prius cars for so long, why isn't it on all Toyotas? 2) If the car involved in this incident had brake over-ride, did it fail or did the driver purposely work around it? Assuming the car actially had brake over-ride and it was working, the driver would have had to alternately press the accelerator to speed up, then release it and press the brakes to get them to heat up and smoke as reported, and so on. According to the 911 tape, the 911 agent told him to put the car into neutral but he refused, saying he feared it would cause the car to flip.

According to Toyota from FAQ issued 3 Feb 2010: "the Prius, and all hybrids for that matter, already have a version of the override system. The override system will be standard by the end of 2010." Thus, the runaway problem does not exist for our Prius nor any other hybrid. The brake override will be standard on all newly-manufactured Toyota automobiles after 2010. According to this, the brake override will be added to previous model years of some non-hybrid Toyotas back to 2005 .]

Ira Glickstein

Bias In Global Warming Data?

Late one evening a policeman came upon a man who was crawling on hands and knees under a lamp post. "Whatch doing?" asked the cop. "Looking for a quarter I lost." "Where'd you drop it?" "Oh, in the alley back there." "Why you look'in here?" "THE LIGHT IS BETTER!"

As I've stated in previous postings (Carbon Tax, Definitive Guide to Global Warming, Nuclear Power in France, Correlation and Causation) I know Global Warming is a real phenomena, a substantial fraction of which is due to human release of sequestered carbon (oil, coal, natural gas). However, I believe the problem has been hyped by those who have their own agendas and are therefore "looking where the light is" to find evidence to back up their theory that we are near some kind of "tipping point" to global disaster.

I never imagined that the basic data record for the surface temperature of the Earth over the past few decades might be biased. However, that seems to be the case, at least for some measurements.

The top photo from http://wattsupwiththat.com/ (with annotations by me) shows the official NOAA Climate-Monitoring site in Clarinda, Iowa. Note that it is adjacent to a wastewater treatment plant, where warm water vapor could distort the readings. It is also quite close to what appears to be a methane gas burnoff torch associated with the wastewater plant.

The second photo is of the official NOAA Climate-Monitoring site in Fairbury, Nebraska. Note it is adjacent to a barbeque. It is also close to a house and a roadway where car exhaust could disort temperature reading.

Furthermore, a major data-reporting error occured early this month. According to http://wattsupwiththat.com/ as well as http://www.realclimate.org/ the official NASA GISS (Goddard Institute of Space Studies) worldwide surface temperature readings for October 2008 contained 90 sites (all or mostly in Russia) where September data was reported instead of October data, ressulting in errors of several degrees.

This data error affected a small percentage of worldwide sites. Due to this error, the average worldwide surface temperature for October was interpreted to be the warmest October on record. The worldwide surface data set goes back to 1880. GISS has corrected the error, see http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/.

There are a number of responsible and reasonable internet sites that report on climate change, some of which generally support the consensus that human activity is responsible for most global warming (particularly the http://www.realclimate.org/) and others that are skeptical (such as http://wattsupwiththat.com/). It is the skeptical sites that first noticed the error in the October data from Russia as well as the inappropriate locations of some official climate-monitoring stations.

It seems NASA simply took the reported October data without sufficient examination. How could they overlook such a drastic increase in temperatures from Russia when other sites in Europe and Asia reported little change? How could they miss 90 sites that had the exact, digit-for-digit data as in the previous month? Perhaps they were so pleased to have their theory of global warming confirmed that they failed to investigate further?

What if the faulty dataset had been of the previous January rather than September? I'll bet that if the dataset showed significant cooling rather than warming someone at NASA would have noticed the error!

It seems to me there should be standards for placement of official NOAA Climate Monitoring stations. For example, they should be at least 100 meters from a direct source of heat. Government employees regularly visit these stations for maintenance and they should notice if someone has placed a barbeque right underneath one! Of course, sometimes civilization may encroach on an existing site with a new house or a new factory or power plant or road. They should notice and move the site! According to http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/19/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-74/#more-4209 there are dozens of official sites that are located in highly questionable places, many put there within the past decades.

By the way, the site in the second photo was placed in 1998, obviously after that old house was already there. The site in the top photo was placed in 1985, most likely also after the wastewater treatment plant, with its methane burnoff torch, was already in place!

Ira Glickstein

L/C Minds and Temper

Since none of you seem to be interested in writing an article about our method of L/C analysis, I'm doing the job myself. Here's a draft of the introduction. In writing this I realized that there is an analogy that I have difficulty working out. I would appreciate contributions.

Introduction

The logic behind the L/C method of analysis is based upon the following principles.
1. Fallibility is common.
2. Roughly half the population have L-minds. Roughly half have C-minds.
3. Each half thinks that the other is irrational with respect to the issues that divide them.
4. Both halves are wrong about the other's rationality.
5. Analysis of the situation requires the participation of both C-minds and L-minds and must be non-partisan and non-confrontational.
6. Any consensus concerning the nature of L-minds and C-minds requires symmetrical dichotomy and neutral language.

Fallibility

As a thinking machine, the human brain leaves a lot to be desired. Living is about making decisions, most of them evolved from binary choices or can be converted to binary choices. Do I go left or right? Do I eat this plant or not? Do I release my arrow now or do I wait for a better shot? We seem to have evolved special mechanisms for making this type of survival related decision. Those mechanisms often get in the way of more complex thinking. In fact, I propose to you that what we call thinking is only an artifact of our primitive decision making skills, thereby creating the illusion that we can reason accurately. Our ability is so faulty that large fractions of the population, given the same facts about a situation will still come to quite different conclusions as to what to decide. That's why in almost every public policy issue which ultimately comes down to voting yea or nay, the population will split very roughly in half, and each half will think the other is mad. The train of decision making starts with faulty perception, proceeds to erroneous communication, a distorted problem statement not to mention bad modeling, optimization and implementation.

L-Minds and C-Minds

Not only does the population split roughly evenly on almost all issues requiring thought, the same people will group together resulting in the establishment of political parties and ideologies. For the most part, we will assume that the L-Minds and C-Minds are hard wired that way. This is not to say that sufficient propaganda, self-interest and concerted effort cannot cause C-minds to behave like L-Minds and vice-versa. Modern L-minds and C-minds can be discerned through the use of a series of questions concerning public policy and personal responsibility issues.

If you grant the above, then our task is to determine a truth using two instruments both of which have a distorted output. In science, the usual way to accomplish this is calibration against a standard for which the ground truth is known. However, in this case the truth is unknown, so what do we do?

An analogy is in the use of thermometers. Temperature is odd in that it isn't a quantity but rather a ranking. It's like the pecking order ranking in a yard full of chickens. We can observe that a chicken is "higher" than another by the fact that it can peck the other chicken on the head, but how much higher is not possible to tell. Physical measurements on a single isolated chicken will not tell us it's rank in the pecking order. We might keep a barnyard full of chickens and see where a new arbitrary bird fits in the pecking order. Similarly, temperature is a rank measurement. To determine an arbitrary body's rank we must bring it in contact with another body in order to see whether or not heat flows to one or the other. Then we can say that one body has a higher "temper" than the other. When no heat flow occurs the two are said to have the same temper. A thermometer is a device we can use for such testing. In the most fundamental sense, we should have a storage place where we keep a large number of standard bodies (or thermometers) maintained at different tempers. Every time we wish to measure the temperature of an arbitrary body, we should take the thermometers out of storage and test which one of them fails to transfer heat to or from the body under investigation. They are then at equilibrium and can be said to have the same temper. The standard thermometers can be assigned any symbol you like so that we can compare temperatures of a body under investigation. Fortunately, in the real world we can save on storage facilities by the use of a single thermometer and secondary measurable properties like expansion, voltage, resistance, etc.) However that doesn't change the arbitrary nature of a temperature scale.

Now let's connect the temperature analogy to L-Minds and C-Minds. Two popular arbitrary temperature scales are the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales. When examining the temperature of something each yields a different number. Suppose there are two people who have grown up using these scales. On a balmy spring day one might say that it's 20 degrees while the other says it's 72 degrees. They disagree about the numerical value of the temper, although they're both correct. However, we aren't concerned with the number as such. Rather we are concerned with the subtile influence the numbers may have on their opinions about the weather or room conditions. For instance, the celsius scale has coarser degrees. A child brought up using celsius might have a coarser perception of temperature than a child brought up using Fahrenheit. In other words, the children senses are calibrated against two different scales and learn to express two different verbal reactions to temperature change. The Fahrenheit calibrated child might say the temperature has changed a lot, while the Celsius child says the temperature has changed very little. (In fact, psychologists find this kind of difference occurs when preparing survey questions about estimates of distances.) Each is sure they are right and believes there must be something wrong with the other's perception.

I'm not at all satisfied with this analogy. Can anyone help?

With respect -Joel