Barack Obama has nominated Sonia Sotomayor to fill David Souter’s seat on the Supreme Court. I don’t know much about her on the merits; I was idiosyncratically rooting for Kathleen Sullivan, who I had met while I was a grad student and impressed me as uncommonly brilliant. One thing that immediately strikes you about Sotomayor is her personal history — raised in housing projects in the Bronx by a single Mom, she fought her way up to graduate summa cum laude from Princeton, and then to law school at Yale where she edited the Law Review. Doesn’t mean she’ll be a great Justice, but it’s an impressive record.
The opposition research has been out for a while, of course, because that’s how politics works. One of the things brought up by Sotomayor’s critics is this clip, where she talks about the difference in emphasis between a district court and an appellate court. (Appellate courts need to look beyond the facts of the case to consider implications of setting precedent for future decisions.)
This clip drives people crazy, because she says that the courts of appeals are “where policy is made.” You’re not supposed to say that! (As Sotomayor immediately jokes.) The legislatures make the laws, and the courts are merely referees, interpreting the words of the statutes by lights of their objective and unchanging meanings.
In reality, of course, Sotomayor is simply telling the truth — a cardinal sin in law as well as politics. In law and politics, and for that matter theology, we are presented with a sacred text of one form or another. And we are supposed to pretend that the text has a One True Meaning — we may, of course, argue at great length about the proper procedure for divining what that meaning actually is, but admitting that the text is inherently ambiguous (or even contradictory) is not allowed. We need to act as if the authors of Leviticus and the Framers of the Constitution were trying to say something very clear about contemporary debates, if only we had the interpretational acumen to figure out what it was.
Which is why, as much as I enjoy the rest of the world of human endeavor, science will always be my true home. Our job is to interpret the natural world, which really is unambiguous and non-contradictory, if only we can make sense of its behavior. Other fields have a professional obligation to pretend that there are right and wrong answers, but we actually have them. Yet another way in which being a scientist is so much easier than other jobs.
Ambiguity and contradiction are attributes of language and perception. They only exist in the natural world in so much as language and perception are a part of the natural world. You cannot have a liar’s paradox without language and you cannot have an “impossible object” (a la Escher) without perceptions (and expectations).
So science will always have ambiguity and contradiction because scientists must use perception and language to study the natural world. But those things creep in during observation and description and are not a part of the natural world (being studied) per se.
In law and theology, however, that which is being studied and applied exists only in language. So while ambiguity and contradiction will inevitably slip in during interpretation and application, it was also there from the beginning.
In this sense, Sean is right about science versus law and theology.
Hmm. I still think that the lack of ambiguity and non-contradictoriness of nature is an experimental phenomenon, not some sort of received truth about nature and science. We believe it to be true because it makes successful predictions, not because ambiguity and contradiction are excluded a priori. That is, “right and wrong answers” *might* not exist in some cases in nature — it is just that we don’t have any compelling case of that actually happening on our hands right now.
Justin — yes, indeed district-level precendent is not of the binding kind on other districts, but it is still regarded as “precedent” of the persuasive variety, assuming that it is in fact reasonable. Although I think Sotomayor is an excellent candidate, and this particular soundbite is just not her at her best, to say district-level opinions are “not precedential” sort of implies they can be ignored, obviously not the case. I know what she means and that’s fine, though.
The different interpretations lead to the same predictions because we cannot do reversible measurements. If you consider the general case of an observer that can implement arbitrary unitary transformations on a system, then one could verify that the Copenhagen interpretaion is false.
As David Deutsch has pointed out along time ago, you could do a measurement of a system, then forget about the result of the measurement, but not that you have measured the system, and the wavefunction of the system won’t have collapsed (one has to forget by dumping the information back on the measured system). That the wavefunction has not been affected can be verified.
When I lived in a housing Co-op back in the late 70s we apprehended a thief taking food from our larder. The police arrived an hour after our call which was unfortunate as the thief tried to escape several times. When we asked the officers why they took their time one of the explained that they had assumed that we would beat the thief, the frats always did, and they didn’t want to witness it.
Judge Sonia Sotomayor notion of judicial activism is so comfortable to her that she is willing to put it on tape. It reminds me of the quote that the law is a very human institution. What we today acknowledge as abuse through repetition and familiarity becomes method in time. In the future all judges of various political beliefs will be activists. One more restraint lost in the dust of history.