Self-identification

I've been meaning to write a post about self-identification -- the idea that if you say you're X (a woman, gay, a feminist, etc) then you are an X, and no outside person can tell you you're wrong. While I was procrastinating, Ozy Frantz got there first and laid some of the groundwork for what I wanted to say. Ozy writes:

The problem with this is that it makes the word ultimately meaningless: if "geek" only means “the set of people who say that they're geeks," then "geek" doesn't mean anything at all. You might as well say "fleegash means people who say that they're fleegash."

This is a pretty good refutation of what I'd call the "ontological" understanding of self-identification. In this view, saying that you're an X is what causes or constitutes your X-ness. You make yourself an X purely by identifying as such. I think that for some identities, self-identification may be a necessary component of having that identity. For example, I don't think someone can really be a Christian if they don't accept that label for themselves (though their words and actions may still be compatible with, and helpful to, Christianity). On the other hand, self-identification is not always required -- for example, we can insist that a person is cis even if they don't know the term or even if they petulantly refuse to accept it. But making self-identification the sole component of an identity leads to the sort of meaning-destroying absurdity of Ozy's "fleegash."

Ozy goes on to defend what I'd call an "epistemological" understanding of self-identification. In this view, the self-identifier has better knowledge of their own identity than anyone else. Though they could be mistaken about their identity, nobody else is really in a position to know any better, and thus we should defer to the person's own self-identification. The problem with this is that in many cases an outsider does have access to good information. I could go around self-identifying as a natural-born Canadian citizen all I want, and I may believe it with my whole heart -- but someone else could order a copy of my birth certificate from the state of Ohio and disprove my claims. Moreover, the epistemological understanding doesn't account for disingenuous self-identification. Maybe I know full well that all my ancestors were from Sweden, but I've decided to self-identify as Native American so that I can go to a sweat lodge. If I'm not making honest use of my special self-knowledge, it doesn't carry any weight.

I think there's a lot of value to the epistemological understanding of self-identification, but I also think it doesn't give a full picture. I would add the importance of a "methodological" understanding of self-identification. In this view, it produces the most socially beneficial outcomes to defer to sincere self-identification. It's a matter of adding up the costs and benefits of deference to self-identification versus policing of identities. Deference will make sure to include everyone who legitimately has the identity in question -- but risks allowing people who are mistaken or disingenuous to claim that identity too. Policing excludes people who shouldn't actually have the identity in question -- but it also excludes some of those who ought to be able to claim the identity, both by directly incorrectly denying them membership, and by exerting a chilling effect on people who see the policing going on and don't want to expose themselves to it even if they would ultimately pass the test. These costs of policing fall particularly heavy on people who are new and just exploring the possibility of accepting a certain identity, and on people who have intersectional marginalizations and thus don't fit the policers' paradigm of a person with that identity. Weighing up these costs and benefits, it is usually (but not always) more harmful to engage in identity policing than to defer to self-identification. This is particularly true for public applications of policing, such as by organizers of events with restrictive attendance rules. A trusted friend may be able to take me aside and say "dude, I know you're not gay, so stop saying you are," but the people running a gay-only health workshop should err on the side of trusting anyone who shows up saying they're gay.

TT Professor is a relatively cushy job

CNBC recently did a fluff piece on the least stressful jobs of the coming year, naming "university professor" as number one. The story's description of professorial life is based on some tired stereotypes (no deadlines? really?), and so there was some backlash -- notably this piece by Audra of Facts and other Fairy Tales. But the fact is, being a tenure-track professor is a relatively low-stress job.

Note that I emphasized two things in my thesis. First, we're talking about tenure-track jobs. That's the kind of job the CNBC writer clearly had in mind, it's the kind of job Audra discusses, and it's the kind of job I have right now. However, my comments emphatically do not apply to the growing numbers of adjunct faculty (including my friend who linked me to these stories on Facebook). Second, what we're discussing is relative stress compared to other jobs. Being a professor is not easy and fun and relaxing when compared to, say, reading a pulp novel on the beach, or playing World of Warcraft, or going out for drinks with your friends. After all, if it was all fun they wouldn't need to pay anyone to do it! But compared to other jobs, tenure-track professors have it pretty easy.

First, the physical demands are almost nil. Professors have to lift a few books, and sometimes stand in front of a lecture hall for an hour at a stretch. Certain disabilities may make this still a challenge -- but those issues would arise in just about any job. The lack of physical demands in teaching tend to make professors forget just how stressful and exhausting a job with lots of physical activity can be (not to mention the health problems that can follow from, say, bending over to change spark plugs all day). Relatedly, there is almost no physical risk to professors. The outsized attention given to incidents like the Virginia Tech shooting belies the fact that overall, professors are exceedingly safe both from direct violence or from workplace accidents. At worst, having to interact with hundreds of students everyday means we're at heightened risk of catching whatever cold is going around. (This issue applies pretty much equally to adjuncts.)

Not only are professors not risking their own lives or health, but also nobody else's life is in our hands. A bad professor can be a pain, and can mess up people's plans for graduating. But ultimately, there's no way for a professor to make a little goof that costs someone dearly. We won't accidentally sever a nerve, or give someone the wrong drug, or jackknife into someone's car with a trailerload of hazardous chemicals, or invest someone's life savings in pets.com.

Being a professor also gives you a huge amount of control over your own work space and work flow. Lacking such control is one of the single most important sources of workplace stress. Other workers, from attorneys to supermarket cashiers, have computer systems monitoring their every move to ensure that they meet productivity benchmarks, and are subject to capricious oversight that often serves more to remind them that they are just cogs in the machine than to actually improve their output. Professors get to decide what they teach, how they teach it, and how they evaluate students, as well as on what and how they do research. Even compared to K-12 teachers, we have it made -- no school board or state board of education is going to require me to teach creationism or soft-pedal slavery. And I get my own office, which I can arrange and adorn as I please. (Adjuncts have it much worse here -- they typically have very little control over course content and structure, and often have no office at all.)

Being a professor also gives you comparatively flexible hours. While I don't have quite the same ability to jet off at any time as, say, a freelance writer (a job with other mountains of stress to contend with), it's a lot better even than the administrative assistants and janitors at my school. I'm tied down to specific-place-at-specific-time for about 20 hours a week during the school year (4 classes at 3 hours each, 6 hours of office hours, 2 hours of committee meetings). I have lots of other work to do at some point during the week, but if I need to take some time during the 9-5 slot to take my car to the mechanic or go to a doctor appointment or something, nobody will even notice. (Adjuncts, again, don't get the full benefit here, especially if they're teaching at multiple institutions.)

The pay for a tenure-track professor is also pretty good. Audra quotes a starting salary of $45,000-$55,000. That's just shy of the median income for a 2-person household in the US -- and remember, that's starting salary. She notes that given the number of hours a professor has to work, that comes out to an effective wage of $15-$20 an hour. That's not a wage that will make you rich, but it's hardly poverty level either, so professors' stress about the bills is not going to be up there with half of the country. The fact that it's a salary is important too -- it means you can count on that money, without worrying about having your hours unexpectedly cut. (Here adjuncts fall well short of tenure-track. The last proposal I heard from PASSHE in our current negotiations, for example, would cut adjunct pay to food-stamp-eligible levels if they have a family.)

Finally, there's tenure. Audra makes much of the fact that tenure-track professors can be let go anytime if the department no longer needs them or the administration takes away the tenure line. But that kind of insecurity faces every worker. Your boss can always fire you at any time for any reason, with no recourse unless they were stupid enough to send you a notarized letter saying "you're fired because you're black." And professors are actually more secure -- a dentist's office can hire a new receptionist any day of the week, but it would be a huge pain for a university to replace a professor in the middle of the semester when students are already involved in their classes. And the axe of capricious firing hangs over our hypothetical dentist's receptionist until the day they retire, whereas a tenure-track professor knows that in 5-7 years, their worries about being fired may be over. Whatever stress the process of getting tenure may bring, it is always balanced by the possibility of getting the sweetest job security deal in the country. Literally no other career (aside from K-12 teacher) has this arrangement. (The relevance to adjuncts should be obvious here.)

So yes, being a professor is a lot of work. But compared to just about every other job out there, those of us on the tenure track have it made. And it's important for us professors to keep this in mind and have some perspective on how much worse the average person's job may be.

Too much college, but it pays

C. Briem points to data showing a widening earnings gap between college-educated and non-college-educated workers, and argues that this is evidence against the "too many people are going to college" thesis. But I think the two are quite compatible.

The "too much college" thesis holds that, from a college-as-job-preparation perspective, there is a society-wide irrationality in the amount of people we expect to earn college degrees. Many of the jobs that college graduates take do not actually require a college education to perform successfully. By creating an expectation of universal college attendance, we waste people's time, generate frustration among people who aren't good at formal academic learning, and run up huge student debt.

Now consider the causes of the college wage gap. Certainly a good portion of it is due to the fact that certain higher-paying jobs really do require higher education. There's really no easy way for someone to become a good lawyer, nurse, or engineer without some type of postsecondary education.* But another significant portion of it occurs because employers use college credentials as a screening mechanism even when a college education doesn't actually make you better at the job. Imagine you have an opening for a receptionist. In this economy, you might easily get 500, or even 1000, applications. There's no way you're going to carefully read them all and give each person attention to the nuances of their qualifications. You need a quick and dirty way of chopping the pile down to a manageable size. Screening for a college degree is an easy way to do that.

The core of the "too much college" thesis is that college credentials -- both the official diploma as well as the cultural capital (mannerisms, etc.) acquired during college socialization -- are used as employment criteria even when they're not materially relevant. Yet it can remain perfectly rational for individual employers to perpetuate this irrationality, when 1) the job is not one that puts a high premium on having the absolute best individual employee, i.e. someone that's "good enough" is nearly as valuable as someone who is "totally awesome," and 2) screening based on credentials is far easier than trying to assess directly job-relevant skills.

Likewise, a college education is still potentially a totally rational choice for the individual job-seeker. From a social perspective, more people getting degrees doesn't improve anything -- it just shuffles those college-degree-job earnings around to different people and piles up more student debt, without increasing overall social productivity. But from the perspective of the individual job-seeker, getting a degree means getting a shot at those jobs that you might be perfectly good at but are irrationally barred from due to your lack of a degree.

I realize that it's dangerous for someone who works as a college professor to endorse any aspect of the "too much college" thesis. However, I would counter by pointing out that "too much college" gives a partial picture by focusing only on college as a job preparation mechanism. I think college has a much broader value, for example in personal growth and preparation for citizenship. I have the one job that most clearly requires formal college education as preparation -- and yet I would also say that the most important things I got out of my college experience (undergrad and grad school) were not what I learned in the classroom or how it prepared me for a job. Indeed, my first job after getting my PhD was one (newspaper copyeditor) that I could have done successfully straight out of high school (barring any irrational degree screening by my employer!). Unfortunately, the pressure in the world of higher ed administration is very strongly toward reconceiving college as a pure job training program.


*Though even there there's wiggle room -- law school for the most part doesn't really teach you any useful information or skills for lawyering, and it's possible to be a successful autodidact in most technology fields.

An allegedly polyamorous poster

A Toronto school board recently put up posters proclaiming "Love Has No Gender" as a way of promoting LGBT tolerance. I find the image they chose to illustrate this point very interesting.

The posters depict a series of overlapping hearts on which various bathroom-sign-symbol couples are depicted, mixing same-sex and opposite-sex pairings. The main controversy over the posters has centered on two hearts which depict three people -- one a man flanked by two women, the other a woman flanked by two men. Parents and other community members were outraged at this apparent endorsement of polyamory. Whether that was the original intention of the sign's makers is not clear. They have not given a definite statement, and some people hypothesize that the threesomes were meant to illustrate bisexuality. This raises several issues:

1. The conflation of polyamory with the LGBT movement. Many LGBT people are quick to condemn polyamory, both for its own sake and as a defense maneuver against attempts to use "slippery slope to polygamy" arguments to deny LGBT rights. At the same time, it's very common for polyamorists -- of all orientations -- to try to draw parallels between themselves and LGBT people, and to appropriate LGBT analyses and concepts for pro-poly uses. The proper relationship between the polyamory movement and the LGBT rights movement is still a very contentious question even among people who support both. (My own position is that polyamory is not in and of itself a form of queerness, nor should straight polyamorists appropriate LGBT ideas and analysis for their own situation, but I'm also not in a position to tell LGBT poly people that they can't see these parts of their lives and identities as inseparably connected.)

2. The visual representation of bisexuality. It has become a cultural commonplace to represent heterosexuality with a picture of a stick man and a stick woman, and thus to represent gay and lesbian relationships as two stick men or two stick women respectively. This framework leaves us with two basic choices for representing bisexuality. On the one hand, since a bisexual monogamous partnered person will be in either a same-sex relationship or an opposite-sex relationship at a given time, they are covered by representations of both of those relationships -- at the cost of erasing any explicit acknowledgement that their orientation is broader than their current specific partner. On the other hand, one could (as some speculate the Toronto poster was trying to do) show a person in two relationships with partners of different sexes. This surely highlights their bisexuality, but in doing so it risks feeding a biphobic narrative that says bisexual people can't make up their minds, or can't be monogamous because they need "one of each" to be satisfied.

But beyond the question of the sign's (alleged) pro-polyamory message, I notice several other issues with the way it represents relationships:

3. The use of bathroom stick figures. The stick man and woman are widely recognizable symbols of maleness and femaleness. But they're also problematic. First, they establish a clear gender binary -- you're either a man or a woman, with no other shades or flavors of gender available. This effectively excludes non-binary people from representation in the very tolerance campaign that ought to be supporting them. The stick figures used in this poster also reinforce the idea of male as an unmarked norm -- the unadorned, basic stick figure is the male, while the modified stick figure (with a dress on) is the female. Men are thus framed as the default or standard human, while women are a variation on the model.

4. "Handicapped" is apparently a gender now. Several of the hearts show a standard male or female figure paired with a stick figure in a wheelchair. This is perhaps understandable as a way of trying to promote diversity, but it ends up backfiring. For one thing, disability is the only other axis of difference that is inserted into the picture -- race is entirely absent, for example, as is class. By making the wheelchair symbol the third type of person in the picture, it separates people with disabilities from the gender system. This is particularly problematic because there are cultural narratives about disabled people being non-sexual and falling short of gender ideals.

Why would we grant a rape exception to an abortion ban?

Republicans are falling all over themselves to say stupid things about whether they would allow an exception to an abortion ban in the case of pregnancies resulting from rape. But the idea of a "rape exception" strikes me as largely incoherent.

Let's take the pro-life side at their word that their overriding concern is the protection of human life, and that in their judgment the fetus's right to life outweighs the mother's interest in not having it. Given such premises I think it makes absolute sense to say, as a number of prominent Republicans have, that a person's right to life is not contingent on the circumstances of their conception. After all, after the child is born -- when pro-choicers would agree that the child has a right to life that trumps the mother's interests -- we would not condone infanticide if the child was a result of rape. "It sucks that you got raped, but don't punish the child for that" seems to be the only coherent position for someone who puts a fetal right to life above all else.

But of course the point of bringing up the rape exception is to push people to question whether a fetal right to life should trump everything else. Imagining the horror of being forced to carry your rapist's baby ought to lead a person to think that the mother's interests should sometimes override whatever rights or interests the fetus has. The "problem" here is that once you start down this road of emphasizing the mother's interests, there's no good reason to stop at just allowing an exception for rape. There are lots of non-rape pregnancies that can be just as traumatic, difficult, and negatively-life-altering as a rape pregnancy. It seems exceedingly unlikely that the moral weight of the various interests are so perfectly balanced to make rape, and only rape, the case where the mother's interests take precedence. This line of thinking on its own does not necessarily lead all the way to a policy of publicly-funded abortions for anyone anytime for any reason*, but it certainly takes us to a much more liberal place than just a narrow rape exception. In this light, support for a rape exception starts to look like a political ploy to cut off the effectiveness of this line of pro-choice logic, rather than a principled position on what abortions are acceptable.

Moreover, even if rape were the only situation in which the mother's interests took precedence, establishing that as a rule would backfire. The point of a rape exception is to spare the mother the trauma of carrying a child conceived through rape. Since people desperate enough for an abortion to resort to unsafe methods like coathangers would also surely be desperate enough to lie about having been raped, you would need a system to verify that an abortion-seeker had actually been raped. This system would necessarily exacerbate the trauma of rape -- forcing the victim to recount her story to an unsympathetic and stereotype-bound justice system. There are good reasons that many rape victims are reluctant to go to the police, after all. A more liberal abortion policy would spare rape victims this additional burden.

Nevertheless, I think there are two ways of looking at the abortion issue that do provide a foundation for a rape exception. Unfortunately, neither is a particularly attractive philosophy to espouse in public (though there are people who do).

First, if restricting abortion is about punishing sluts, then a rape exception makes sense. Abortion is wrong, in this view, because having sex outside of married heterosexual procreation is wrong, and it's women's responsibility to put the brakes on. So illicit sex ought to carry a risk of pregnancy, and someone who has illicit sex ought to suffer the consequences. Rape is an exception because a rape victim did not choose to have the pregnancy-causing sex. This exception has to be limited to a small category of "legitimate" (Akin) or "forcible" (Ryan) rapes, since many alleged rapes are held to be products of the victim's own sluttiness and thus her own fault. But in the abstract, a rape exception makes sense as a way of not punishing those who truly aren't responsible for the illicit sex they had.

Second, if restricting abortion is about control over other people's uteruses, then a rape exception makes sense. In this way of thinking, a uterus doesn't really belong to the person whose body it resides in, it belongs to society as a whole, and specifically to the dominant male class of that society. To get an abortion, in this view, is to exercise your own selfish control over a public uterus -- a sort of insubordination. But rape is also insubordination, this time by the rapist, who is claiming access to a uterus "out of turn," in contravention to the prevailing social order's rules. (Again, this logic is limited to "legitimate" or "forcible" rapes that fit this acting-out-against-the-hierarchy model.) A rape exception allows this insubordination to be wiped away.

In summary, a pro-lifer who genuinely thinks the fetus's right to life is paramount has to bite the bullet and hold that the mother's interests are trumped even in the case of rape. Someone who wants to give real consideration to the mother's interests has to allow abortion much more broadly than just in the case of rape. But people who want to punish sluts and control uteruses can make a case for a rape exception.

*"Publicly-funded abortions for anyone anytime for any reason" pretty well describes my own position on the issue.

Own your non-vegan desserts

A friend recently sent me a link to this short article about Vegan Divas, a vegan dessert company. While Vegan Divas' wares look delicious, I want to push back on the way they're framed in the article. The title describes the desserts as being able to "fool your non-vegan friends," and the text describes veganism as "pretty much murder on your sweet tooth" -- but luckily Vegan Divas can supply sweets that "don't taste vegan at all" (italics of amazement in the original!)

I don't agree that vegan desserts are especially difficult to make or especially bad-tasting. My baking skills are merely passable, yet I've been able to easily find and execute vegan recipes, from chocolate chip cookies to tres leches cake*, that receive rave reviews from hardcore omnivores. None of them require specialized ingredients out of reach for an ordinary middle-class US person** -- any store that has eggs also has applesauce, and almond milk is in pretty much every full-scale grocery store.

The myth of the difficult vegan dessert is a comforting one. Veganism is threatening to many people -- witness the immediate vocal reaction of ridicule and warnings not to be preachy that so often follow a mere mention of veganism. People are lazy and want to take things for granted. Veganism asks you to think about what you're eating, forcing you to defend (if only in your own conscience) your choice of foods. Believing that vegan food is gross and difficult to make gives you an escape clause. You can say "well, even if vegans are right that it's better not to eat animal products, a vegan diet is a difficult challenge. More power to you if you want to be a saint, but ordinary people can't be expected to bear that cross."

My overarching philosophy lately has been "own your shit." That is, be aware of what you're doing and what its consequences are, and be willing to take responsibility for that. You can't give a friend or partner what they want in your relationship? Fine, just be honest about that and don't make it their problem to solve. You want to watch a TV show that's got lots of stuff in it that's sexist or racist or whatever? Fine, but be honest that that stuff is there. And you want to eat non-vegan food? Fine, but do it because you think raising animals for food is OK, not because vegan food is supposedly too difficult.


*Tres freaking leches. It has milk right in the title, so if you can veganize that then you have no more excuses.

**I don't want to minimize the difficulties faced by genuinely poor people living in food deserts -- but they're probably not going to be able to order from Vegan Divas either. And the limited selection available in food deserts is as much a product of wider cultural assumptions about what are basic foods as it is a product of pure economic considerations.

Neoliberal tweeting

I find it interesting the way "neoliberal" has become a term of disparagement in much of academia. It is true that "neoliberal" can be a useful term in organizing our understanding of the economic trends underway in higher education and the wider world. And I agree that many of the changes driven by neoliberalism are worrisome at best. But once we have made this clear identification of neoliberalism with bad stuff, it becomes easy to trash other behaviors or ideas by labeling them neoliberal.

Consider the issue of live-tweeting academic conferences. Tamara Nopper, a critic of conference tweeting, is quoted in the above-linked story as saying "we need to consider how live-tweeting at conferences is a form of neoliberalism, with scholars employing social media to increase name recognition in and outside of the academy in hopes of getting more paid opportunities."

Certainly live-tweeting can be done in a self-promotional way, which is a useful strategy for success in a neoliberal environment. But we could just as easily flip it around and show how restricting live-tweeting has parallels in neoliberalism. After all, one of the notable features of neoliberalism is how a variety of things -- resources, genes, skills, etc -- are taken out of the "commons" and turned into exclusive, patented property so that they can be controlled and commodified. Conference tweeting is a technologically mediated version of the discussion of ideas that has long been a sort of "commons" that academics could draw on. Restricting such discussion serves to keep a presenter's ideas more completely under their own control (for example, so as not to get "scooped" and thus deprived of the professional profit from them). This comes to resemble the heavy-handed use of copyright and patents by multinational companies in a neoliberal environment, squashing such things as traditional use of now-patented species, or fanfic and other sorts of media that work with copyrighted characters.

"Mary's room" tells us nothing

I have a low tolerance for philosophical thought experiments that posit strange situations that nobody has actually encountered -- "experience machines," violinists hooked up to innocent people's kidneys, planets where water's chemical formula is XYZ, etc. I think they make a fundamental mistake about what intuition is. Intuition is a practical skill. Therefore it is rooted in actual experience of encountering decisions to be made in real life. Intuition has some weight in those situations. So I have no in-principle objection to philosophical arguments that demonstrate that one's beliefs about one situation must be wrong because they imply a counterintuitive result in some other familiar situation. But there seems to me to be no reason to think that an intuition about an unfamiliar case should carry any weight at all.

Consider the classic "Mary's room" thought experiment. The point of this scenario is supposed to be to demonstrate that subjective experiences ("qualia") exist in addition to the physical facts about the universe. Here's how Ian Pollock summarizes it:

Mary is a genius neuroscientist. She knows everything there is to know empirically about how the mind and brain work, and in particular she exhaustively knows every single scientific fact that bears on color vision: optics, how the retina works, how the retina’s signals get processed in the brain, et cetera.

However, Mary has had an unusual upbringing. Raised by philosophers (a sketchy proposition in the best of times), she has been kept in a monochrome room for her entire life and has never seen primary colors — never seen a red rose, or a green leaf, or a blue sky. (Nitpicky readers will notice that this would be actually pretty hard to accomplish — for one thing, she would have to have her skin painted monochrome, never look at a bright light through her closed eyelids and see the red color that results, never dream in color... but never mind. This! Is!! PHILOSOPHY!!!)

Eventually, her philosophical zookeepers take a day off from heroically pushing obese people off bridges, and they take her out of her monochrome cage. She comes out into the world and sees a dandelion for the first time, saying “Wow, so that’s what yellow looks like! Cool!” You can imagine all her other epiphanies for yourself.

The gotcha being that she appears to have learned something new — what it’s like to see yellow — on being released. But we stated that she already knew all the scientific facts! Therefore, there must be facts out there that are beyond the reach of science, even in principle — mental facts, or subjective facts, perhaps. Facts about what it is like to have certain experiences. That’s the idea, anyway.

Here's the problem: To decide whether Mary learned anything new upon first seeing the color yellow, we have to try to imagine knowing everything about color without having seen it. But that's not something any of us have any experience with. So our intuitions are going to be dominated by imagining what it's like to know quite a lot about something. But in the latter case everyone would agree that direct experience teaches you something new. Intuitions about "Mary's room" are useless in demonstrating whether qualia are non-physical facts. At best, this thought experiment can just illustrate the opposing positions. And perhaps some enterprising scientist with no respect for the IRB could use it to design an empirical test of the issue. But probing the thought experiment conceptually does nothing because we haven't had the right kind of experiences to callibrate our intuitions with.

(As a side note, my heavily Pragmatist outlook leads me to doubt the conceptual coherence of the idea of complete scientific knowledge of some topic, of the sort Mary is hypothesized to have. Scientific knowledge is a matter of approximate yet useful models. The idea of a complete cataloging of every fact strikes me as a sort of naive "mirror theory" of truth.)