Blind horses

Recently I have had the honour of being called a ‘blind horse with an intellectual defect‘. What did I do? Well actually my usual thing; point out the discrepancies in media reports about Moroccan-Dutch / Muslim youth and search for examples on the internet. But you have to admit (if you can read Dutch), it is actually quite funny, well-written and to a certain extent even true as my friends are telling me as well.

There is a lot to be said about ‘blind horses’ of course. First of all A nod is as good as a wink…to a blind horse. Second there are even jokes about blind horses:

One day a man passed by a farm and saw a beautiful horse. Hoping to buy the animal, he said to the farmer: “I think your horse looks pretty good, so I’ll give you $500 for him.”
“He doesn’t look so good, and he’s not for sale,” the farmer said.
The man insisted, “I think he looks just fine and I’ll up the price to $1,000.”
“He doesn’t look so good,” the farmer said, “but if you want him that much, he’s yours.”
The next day the man came back raging mad. He went up to the farmer and screamed, “You sold me a blind horse. You cheated me!”
The farmer calmly replied, “I told you he didn’t look so good, didn’t I?”

And third there are a lot of myths about blind horses. To name but five of them:

1. A blind horse can’t have a good quality of life. This is certainly not true in my case; I’m a happy man, have a nice job, nice friends and family and so on.
2. A blind horse is dangerous. In my case this is true. Not really by nature; by nature I’m quite innocent but I’m so clumsy I have been deemed to be a threat to my own life and that of others.
3. A blind horse takes a lot more work to care for than a sighted horse. This is both true and not true. I can be a hermit sometimes (yes in an ivory tower) and you know hermits actually need a lot of care. On the other hand however hermits are satisfied with small things.
4. You can’t put a blind horse on pasture. Certainly not true. I’m at my best on pasture.
5. Blind horses arent’t “good for anything”. That is also true to a certaint extent. As an anthropologist you are better off not having to much expectations with regard to people actually listening to you. Researching the (seemingly) obvious or from an oppositional framework is mostly the cause for that. On the other hand being good in not being good for anything is quite a unique position (see the hermit above).

There are therefore several tips to deal with blind horses

1. Get the best veterinary care possible. (Done)
2. Give it time to adjust to blindness (Pertains more to the people surrounding me than to me; I’m quite used to it.)
3. Keep it out of the herd (as if you can get me into it).

But there is more to a blind horse than meets the eye (no pun intended). Read for example Straw dogs, Blind Horses and Post-Humanism: the Greening of Gray? by John Barry. And what to think of this at Paul Jorion’s interesting blog on human complex systems, economy, anthropology, arts and fun (it is fun!):
Logic and semantics in Woody Allen’s “The UFO Menace”

The Hsiao Ch’ü provides numerous examples of valid and invalid inferences that could have served as templates to Professor Speciman:

“If you inhabit somewhere in a state, you are deemed to inhabit the state; if you own one house in the state, you are not deemed to own the state. If this horse’s eyes are blind, we deem this horse blind; if this horse’s eyes are big, we do not say that this horse is big. If these oxen’s hairs are yellow, we say that these oxen are yellow; if these oxen’s hairs are many, we do not say that these oxen are many” (Hansen 1983: 136-137)*.

“Why is it”, do the Mohists ask, “that if I say ‘This oxen is yellow’, I can infer from that that all his hair is yellow but not that every one of his eyes is yellow?” The answer is of course that the “yellowness” of an oxen derives from the collectively attained color of its individual hair but not from the color of his eyes. The same reasoning is easily transposed to the case of an outer space civilization: its being more advanced than ours by fifteen minutes does not derive from the collective outcome of each of its members being individually more advanced by fifteen minutes in everyday pursuits but by another of its features, e.g. in the present case, its technology being more advanced by fifteen minutes.

That such inferences need to be solved on a case by case basis underlines that their application does not derive from logic which can be formalized in a symbolic language, but from semantics. The incontrovertible presence of regularities in pattern turn out here to be deceptive.

So since the ‘incontrovertible presence of regularities’ often pertain to things we take for granted or misreadings of causes and effects or mistakes in logic, I thought it would be interesting to have a new category on this blog. One that pays tribute to me as a ‘blind horse with an intellectual defect’ (and the person who invented the phrase of course) and one that constitutes an attempt to bring about the deceptive nature of some patterns or general statements. See it as a combination of media watch, anthropology, media studies and me being a blind horse.

I need your help with that of course, so send me tips on Dutch or English articles that have something to do with the theme of this site. You can do that by using to comments section here or the mail form, or call me (since I have understood that my phone number has gone all over the world last night thanks to Abu L. ;)). Thank you in advance.

* Chad Hansen, Language and Logic in Ancient China, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1983