Comment on Rebecca Costa's The Watchman's Rattle

Oct. 24, 2010

Reviewer James T. Kenny

Geri Spieler's review of The Watchman's Rattle provides us with a pithy and insightful analysis of Rebecca Costa’s credible and very important work. The social impulse to see unproven beliefs and perceptions becoming substitutes for reality is as true today as when they were described to us in Plato's “dancing shadows on the cave wall” metaphor. How do we discover "what is real" in the face of so much fiction, conventional wisdom, urban legend, or what Costa calls “Counterfeit Correlations?" F.S.C. Northrop, former Sterling Professor of Philosophy” at Yale, spent an academic career on such. The epistemological gap he noted in peoples’ thinking was part of what he described as the “epistemic correlate.” He was interested in the bridge from the “is” to the “ought”, that which is fact versus that which we value. As thinkers and as concerned participants in a civic society we are enjoined by such intellectual leaders as Costa and Northrop to verify facts and to be sure to predicate conclusions drawn from said facts on sound logic. It’s an old thought, though not necessarily a trite one. Our clearest thinking is, as Geri Spieler poignantly reminds us, may be “our way out
of extinction.”