On Rationality: The Unconventional Views of Noam Chomsky and Paul Feyerabend

A couple of books by Paul Feyerabend have radically changed my perspective about knowledge and rationality. I highly recommend his "Three dialogues on Knowledge" and "Science in a Free Soceity". Especially if one's rationality prevents one from appreciating something, say for example, the dance of the whirling dervishes, I think the Three dialogues is a very good antedote for it. I have never read a book which changed/freed my perspectives more than this one. It basically shows that there is nothing pure about reason except perhaps some bit of logic; that mostly what matters is aesthetics and taste (bias/intuition/insight/baseera). Thus our beliefs are based on our prior proclivities, rather than the purported deductions from axioms of rationality to logically justified conclusions.
In my reading this is consistent with what Ghazali(ra) has to say about faith based on reason:
‘Whoever supposes that faith is realized through speculative theology, abstract proofs, or academic divisions is an innovator. On the contrary, faith is a light that God, the Sublime and Exalted, casts in to the hearts of His servants with bounty and grace from His presence. Sometimes faith is evidenced internally and is impossible to express; sometimes, through a vision while asleep; other times, by witnessing the state of a pious man and receiving the emanation of his light as a result of his companionship and presence; and there are times when faith comes by the concurrence of circumstance. Indeed, a Bedouin came to the Prophet denying and disavowing him. But when his eyes fell upon his radiant aspect—may God increase its dignity and nobility—he saw in it the light of prophethood and exclaimed, “By God! This is not the face of a liar!” He then implored the Prophet to explain Islam to him and immediately embraced it.’
Realizing what one thinks to be the truth has a lot to do with direct (intuitive) perception of things. I do not belive it is arrived through reasoning; reasoning perhaps follows retroactively, perhaps to add intellectual respectability, and only in simple, straightforward and uninteresting cases.
What does that say about epistemology? It makes nonsense of the idea of "justified true belief", where reasons need to be articulated. Mostly what we believe is what we are already inclined to believe. A believer is inclined to prefer the intellectual proofs of the existence of God. None of the proofs are in of themselves conclusive. Actually the proofs themselves do not have any meaning, only readers impute some value and meaning to them, depending on the time, their background, and their inclination...i.e. whether they are interested in intellectual proofs. We know many pious people in our own history weren't very interested nor impressed with theology, on the other hand the believer's face has always been the "best argument". Aesthetics (perhaps same as sincerity/ikhlas/sidq) takes the front seat. What is in the Prophet's (saw) face that would lead one to draw conclusions and he is truthful (perhaps conclusions aren't drawn, its a direct perception of truth). No axiomatic inferences here.
The state of one's knolwedge/skepticism is mostly dependent not on formal conditions of proof, but rather on the state the heart is in: Its seeing and witnessing. I am not implying that rationality, as a calculater, as something which compares and produces analogies is useless. It has its uses in problem sovling, when the premises are given. But has no power to produce premises.
Even fiqh judgements are intuitive and their justifications retroactive. I can't imagine anyone axiomatically reasoning to a conclusion in fiqh, except only as an after thought, or to justify his view when writing down a fatwa. Furthermore, Feyerabend claims that the highest form of intellecutal exchange is story-telling. And that is again the way God speaks to man in the Quran. And sunnah is like a story too. Stories contextualize knowledge fully.
Hence, knowledge, rather than being something absolute and Platonic, is a living tradition, and understandings which are in the hearts and minds. Knowledge can be taken from books only because those symbols already mean something to the reader, and the text is able to suggest linkages and relations which perhaps the reader was unaware of, and thus, knowledge is ‘gained’ from books, and also because the reader can contextualize the statements. On the other hand if one cannot contextualize it properly, as in the case of a misreading (say a wahhabi reading of the Quran) one is just imputing meanings not intended by the author of the text. Thus meanings are thus the reader’s commentary on the text; in fact, the reader is the commentary (Shaykh Nuh). Even if one is to grant, in fact quite rightly, that the intended meanings are in the knowledge of God, those meanings aren’t accessible. Logicists and semanticists believe meanings are given, static, and unchanging. But given the above considerations, there is no such static thing which is accessible to human beings. Rather each human being approaches the text with his/her own background, reading meaning into the symbols, sometimes with interpretations close to what was intended, and sometimes not. Either way looking up a dictionary has limited benefit, because matters are not settled this way. Meanings are conventional uses of words, and dictionaries are posterior to the conventional use of words, and therefore not more authoritative than the speaker of that language or a member of the relevant culture.

On Philosophy of Science: The Unconventional Views of Noam Chomsky and Paul Feyerabend

Below are some rather unique conclusions that follow from reading Chomsky's "New Horizons in the study of language and Mind" his article "Language and Nature' and Wittgenstein's "Philosphical Investigations" and of course Feyerabend's “Three dialogues”, “Killing Time”, and “Science in a Free Society”, and his commentary "Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations" ).
Some of the unique consequences of these views are:
(1) Everything is conceptualized by the mind before we can see it. This is how we perceive. So, there is no such thing as sense data theory of meaning. We do not have anything prior to it being conceptualized. So, there is no apple outside of a concept apple which gets invoked in our minds. Just like there are no colours before the prism which creates the spectrum, just as there are no meanings prior to the conceptualization of the mind. The existence is there, just as the light is, but there is no differenciation, and no colours.
Corollary: Ibn Arabi said that God is not known through a concept. My reading of some of his easier works, though it may sound immodest, seems to suggest that he held the same Kantian/Chomskyan view that everything we see is conceptualized by the mind/language. And thus he says God is not known through a concept, rather directly through the soul. And he says those who worship Him through a concept ("All-foriving, All-merciful, All-compassionate...) will never really know Him, but only through a concept, even in the akhira. And hence, Ibn Arabi delineates the limitaitons of rationality. And thus the emphasis on the direct experience of the Divine, for this is the only real way to know Allah.

(2) Science is merely model making based on the conceptualizations in the mind which our faculties can carry out (Kant). There is no Bunge's "realism" about science. Physical objects are conceptualized in the mind. Electron is a concept, atom is a concept, at par with acceleration and force. We make mathematical connections which we test. There are no entities outside the mind as such. Because we have no access to them outside of what our mind can conceptualize. So, we have no direct apprehension of the so called mind-independent reality through by-passing the inevitable conceptualizations of the mind. Hence our perseptions are all personal. Science has little to do with mind-independent reality, because we don’t have direct access to it, and the moment we apply language to it, it means we are assigning meanings to things we can identify (after conceptualizing them), either through our intuitive appratus, or through some scientific apparatus which translates input into something we understand intuitively (like a black spot on the screen), so either way we are only dealing with conceptualizations. Thus, Being/being, whatever it is, we only know it through our own, perhaps reductive, conceptualizations. Any comment remark on the acutality of the Being/being is unjustified, because that would mean by-passing our own language, and conceptualization, and once we do that, we aren’t being coherent, we can’t make sense. So, perhaps Sufis can experience Being/beings (God, realities) directly, and not mediated through the senses and the mind. Hence the intellecutal limits to access the Being/being are severe.
I believe the works cited above would relieve one from a lot of technical hair-splitting which results from an exceptional and mistaken use of language by so-called intellectuals (realists). The mideavel talk of substance is a typical example. One has to match the use of the word 'substance' to something we can conceptualize in order to make sense of what is going on in the mideavel texts; the closest concept being a point in space dressed up with properties, or as Russell suggested, a bundle of properties without any essence. As chomsky says, there is no clear sense of the word ‘matter’ (because matter is an intuitive concept: something solid we run into). He also suggests that contrary to widely held scientific opinion, water is not H2O. Rather water is that which is usually and conventionaly referred to as water, and which is never pure H2O. Things are not equal to their chemical compositions. Chemical compositions is a certain way of looking at things, i.e. through a set of conceptualizations called the periodic table (i.e. divide the physical being as it reacts to our prodding, or experimentation, into this scheme rather than the intuitive scheme of chairs and tables), and with certain ends in mind such as on how to get different elements to react with each other to produce something useful. But none of these schemes have any claims to ultimate realities; rather these are ways in which we interact with Reality or Being.


Thus it is immodest to project our own conceptualizations to the point of claiming them to be realities in the absolute sense.

The Continuum of Knowledge: Philosophy and the Sciences

There are many ways in which phillsophy is connected to the sciences.
(1) There is no line separating philosophy and any of these disciplines: sociology, literature, political science, economics, mathematics and computer science. For example: Take computer science. In the undergrad program eventually the courses get quite theoretical and difficult and there is no way to manage then execpt through the realization that most of the founders of the field were philosopher-mathematicians, and it was through studying their works that one could really understand what computer science was all about. For example you have to understand the work of Godel. Now Godel is taught in mathematics department, in computer science department and of course in the philosophy department. But Godel's proof is so crucial that even sociologists and anthropologists use the ideas (but without understanding the full-blown proof).
(2) It is evident from the history of philosophy, that many of the other subjects which have become independent fields at university were first studied and written about by philosophers, and because of the practical success of those writings that subject became independent, and took a life of its own. But the core principles of these sciences continue to be studied in philosophy department. For example take economics. The only way to understand the core of economics is to understand the history of economics, and that cannot be done without reading through those who are counted among the philosophers. (For example a recent work, a very good one, on economists was called "Worldly Philosophers").
(3) There is no line (not even a vague one) that separates philosophy and science. There were physicists who wrote philosophy, and vice versa. In fact the development of Relativity Theory was motivated by Ernst Mach, a philosopher whose writings inspired Einstein on the lines of his Relativity Theory. And those at the core such as Dirac and Bohr continued to contribute to the philosophical understanding of Relativity Theory and Special Relativity, and they quite naturally wrote in both philosophy and science journals.
(4) Any scholar of any of the western sciences has to study philosophy. For that matter any conscientious student has to do the same. My friends who did their undergraduate studies from McGill were forced to study philosophy and logic, because that was the only way they could really understand their field because most of the leading writers in any field are eventually philosophers (or are versed in philosophy and inevitably their writing assumes that background).
(5) My view is that only mathematics (applied mathematics leads to most of the ideas in the hard sciences) and philosophy are two pure fields, in the sense, that all other fields are derived from these two (mostly a combination of the two). For example: computer Science is a branch of number theory, and the theory turns on Godel's Proof and other results that were arrived at in 1936. The theory has remained the same, and the founders of this field were for example Alonzo Church, Alan Turing, Kurt Godel, all of them philosopher-mathematicians and wrote in philosophy journals.
These are among the many arguments that lead to the position that philosophy is not a well-defined core of ideas. In fact, it straddles every field and the only way to understand any field is to go to its philosophical and historical roots. Newton was called a natural philosopher, because there was no physics at his time. Just because physics is an independent field taught outside the philosophy department does not imply it does not have philosophical ideologies hiding beneath it.

Bibliography on Rationality and Relativism

Paul Feyerabend. “Realism and the Historicity of Knowledge.”

Noam Chomsky. Language and Nature.

Noam Chomsky. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind.

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations.

Paul Feyerabend. Science in a Free Society.

Paul Feyerabend. Farewell to Reason.

 

 

 

On Rationality and Realism: The unconventional views of Chomsky and Feyerabend

A couple of books by Paul Feyerabend have radically changed my perspective about knowledge and rationality. I highly recommend his "Three dialogues on Knowledge" and "Science in a Free Soceity". Especially if one's rationality prevents one from appreciating something, say for example, the dance of the whirling dervishes, I think the Three dialogues is a very good antedote for it. I have never read a book which changed/freed my perspectives more than this one. It basically shows that there is nothing pure about reason except perhaps some bit of logic; that mostly what matters is aesthetics and taste (bias/intuition/insight/baseera). Thus our beliefs are based on our prior proclivities, rather than the purported deductions from axioms of rationality to logically justified conclusions.

In my reading this is consistent with what Ghazali(ra) has to say about faith based on reason:
‘Whoever supposes that faith is realized through speculative theology, abstract proofs, or academic divisions is an innovator. On the contrary, faith is a light that God, the Sublime and Exalted, casts in to the hearts of His servants with bounty and grace from His presence. Sometimes faith is evidenced internally and is impossible to express; sometimes, through a vision while asleep; other times, by witnessing the state of a pious man and receiving the emanation of his light as a result of his companionship and presence; and there are times when faith comes by the concurrence of circumstance. Indeed, a Bedouin came to the Prophet denying and disavowing him. But when his eyes fell upon his radiant aspect—may God increase its dignity and nobility—he saw in it the light of prophethood and exclaimed, “By God! This is not the face of a liar!” He then implored the Prophet to explain Islam to him and immediately embraced it.’
Realizing what one thinks to be the truth has a lot to do with direct (intuitive) perception of things. I do not belive it is arrived through reasoning; reasoning perhaps follows retroactively, perhaps to add intellectual respectability, and only in simple, straightforward and uninteresting cases.

What does that say about epistemology? It makes nonsense of the idea of "justified true belief", where reasons need to be articulated. Mostly what we believe is what we are already inclined to believe. A believer is inclined to prefer the intellectual proofs of the existence of God. None of the proofs are in of themselves conclusive. Actually the proofs themselves do not have any meaning, only readers impute some value and meaning to them, depending on the time, their background, and their inclination...i.e. whether they are interested in intellectual proofs. We know many pious people in our own history weren't very interested nor impressed with theology, on the other hand the believer's face has always been the "best argument". Aesthetics (perhaps same as sincerity/ikhlas/sidq) takes the front seat. What is in the Prophet's (saw) face that would lead one to draw conclusions and he is truthful (perhaps conclusions aren't drawn, its a direct perception of truth). No axiomatic inferences here.

The state of one's knolwedge/skepticism is mostly dependent not on formal conditions of proof, but rather on the state the heart is in: Its seeing and witnessing. I am not implying that rationality, as a calculater, as something which compares and produces analogies is useless. It has its uses in problem sovling, when the premises are given. But has no power to produce premises. 
Even fiqh judgements are intuitive and their justifications retroactive. I can't imagine anyone axiomatically reasoning to a conclusion in fiqh, except only as an after thought, or to justify his view when writing down a fatwa. Furthermore, Feyerabend claims that the highest form of intellecutal exchange is story-telling. And that is again the way God speaks to man in the Quran. And sunnah is like a story too. Stories contextualize knowledge fully. 

Hence, knowledge, rather than being something absolute and Platonic, is a living tradition, and understandings which are in the hearts and minds. Knowledge can be taken from books only because those symbols already mean something to the reader, and the text is able to suggest linkages and relations which perhaps the reader was unaware of, and thus, knowledge is ‘gained’ from books, and also because the reader can contextualize the statements. On the other hand if one cannot contextualize it properly, as in the case of a misreading (say a wahhabi reading of the Quran) one is just imputing meanings not intended by the author of the text. Thus meanings are thus the reader’s commentary on the text; in fact, the reader is the commentary (Shaykh Nuh). Even if one is to grant, in fact quite rightly, that the intended meanings are in the knowledge of God, those meanings aren’t accessible. Logicists and semanticists believe meanings are given, static, and unchanging. But given the above considerations, there is no such static thing which is accessible to human beings. Rather each human being approaches the text with his/her own background, reading meaning into the symbols, sometimes with interpretations close to what was intended, and sometimes not. Either way looking up a dictionary has limited benefit, because matters are not settled this way. Meanings are conventional uses of words, and dictionaries are posterior to the conventional use of words, and therefore not more authoritative than the speaker of that language or a member of the relevant culture.

Regarding philosophy of science (which is pretty much the same subject as 'western rationality' or the 'history of western rationality'), I have come to a rather unusual view through reading Chomsky's "New Horizons in the study of language and Mind" his article "Language and Nature' and Wittgenstein's "Philosphical Investigations" and of course Feyerabend's “Three dialogues”,  “Killing Time”, and “Science in a Free Society”, and his commentary "Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations" ).
Some of the unique consequences of these views are:
(1) Everything is conceptualized by the mind before we can see it. This is how we perceive. So, there is no such thing as sense theory of meaning. We do not have anything prior to it being conceptualized. So, there is no apple outside of a concept apple which gets invoked in our minds. Just like there are no colours before the prism which creates the spectrum, just as there are no meanings prior to the conceptualization of the mind. The existence is there, just as the light is, but there is no differenciation, and no colours.
Corollary: Ibn Arabi said that God is not known through a concept. My reading of some of his easier works, though it may sound immodest, seems to suggest that he held the same Kantian/Chomskyan view that everything we see is conceptualized by the mind/language. And thus he says God is not known through a concept, rather directly through the soul. And he says those who worship Him through a concept ("All-foriving, All-merciful, All-compassionate...) will never really know Him, but only through a concept, even in the akhira. And hence, Ibn Arabi delineates the limitaitons of rationality. And thus the emphasis on the direct experience of the Divine, for this is the only real way to know Allah.  
(2) Words do not have determinate meanings. Dictionaries which list meanings only do so posterior to some use of that word. So, absolutely speaking, words are not associated to this or that meanings, rather the association only comes about once words are used. Thus meanings are fluid and open-ended, and outside of context there is no meanings associated with words. This does away with analytic associations of words and meanings. Meanings are taken from context and they are open ended, there are ways to produce meanings which are not given in dictionaries, but somehow the speakers have a creative ability to produce them, and hearers able to extract them from the context, but not from the dictionaries. So, one can't say that this word includes these items under its meaning, because meanings only arise in contexts, and there is nothing out of context. So, according to Feyreabend there is no essece of words. See Feyerabend's summary of Wittengesetin's Philosphical Investigations for a very easy synopsis of what Wittgenstein tried to put across in Philosphical Investigations.

So, the conventional use of language is the highest form of language that there is, in the sense that it cannot be perfected by an intellecutal. If the intellecutal tries to spell out meanings which leave the speakers of that language dumb-founded, then it is the intellecutal who is making the mistake, because the use of language is not his province, rather it is as much the province of the non-intellecutal. Everyone can suggest, hint and tell stories, bend the words, play with meanings, and so on. Some fear that this leads to relativism, I think it just allows for the creativity which will otherwise become impossible.
 (3) Science is merely model making based on the conceptualizations in the mind which our faculties can carry out (Kant). There is no Bunge's "realism" about science. Physical objects are conceptualized in the mind. Electron is a concept, atom is a concept, at par with acceleration and force. We make mathematical connections which we test. There are no entities outside the mind as such. Because we have no access to them outside of what our mind can conceptualize. So, we have no direct apprehension of the so called mind-independent reality through by-passing the inevitable conceptualizations of the mind. Hence our perseptions are all personal. Science has little to do with mind-independent reality, because we don’t have direct access to it, and the moment we apply language to it, it means we are assigning meanings to things we can identify (after conceptualizing them), either through our intuitive appratus, or through some scientific apparatus which translates input into something we understand intuitively (like a black spot on the screen), so either way we are only dealing with conceptualizations. Thus, Being/being, whatever it is, we only know it through our own, perhaps reductive, conceptualizations. Any comment remark on the acutality of the Being/being is unjustified, because that would mean by-passing our own language, and conceptualization, and once we do that, we aren’t being coherent, we can’t make sense. So, perhaps Sufis can experience Being/beings (God, realities) directly, and not mediated through the senses and the mind. Hence the intellecutal limits to access the Being/being are severe.  
I think all of these are related issues. And somehow I believe the works cited above would relieve one from a lot of technical hair-splitting which results from an exceptional and mistaken use of language by so-called intellectuals (realists). The mideavel talk of substance is a typical example. One has to match the use of the word 'substance' to something we can conceptualize in order to make sense of what is going on in the mideavel texts; the closest concept being a point in space dressed up with properties, or as Russell suggested, a bundle of properties without any essence. As chomsky says, there is no clear sense of the word ‘matter’ (because matter is an intuitive concept: something solid we run into). He also suggests that contrary to widely held scientific opinion, water is not H2O. Rather water is that which is usually and conventionaly referred to as water, and which is never pure H2O. Things are not equal to their chemical compositions. Chemical compositions is a certain way of looking at things, i.e. through a set of conceptualizations called the periodic table (i.e. divide the physical being as it reacts to our prodding, or experimentation, into this scheme rather than the intuitive scheme of chairs and tables), and with certain ends in mind such as on how to get different elements to react with each other to produce something useful. But none of these schemes have any claims to ultimate realities; rather these are ways in which we interact with Reality or Being.

Thus it is immodest to project our own conceptualizations to the point of claiming them to be realities in the absolute sense. 

 

Problem with Frege's philosophy of language

Problem with Frege’s puzzle of identiy:

Frege believes that words have a public meaning. That signs are connected to objects of the world independently of the human cognition or intermediation of the individual’s psychology. That is Frege’s platonic world of language. But this view is incorrect.

The justification offered is that language cannot be a private enterprise because that will preclude communication. However our pronunciation of words is also private, each person has his own slightly different ways of pronouncing, and yet we are able to effectively communicate.

Hence our meanings are private even while allowing for communication (Chomsky). Each word is conceptualized in the mind and according to that conceptualization, if there is a reference to that word, it is determined accordingly.

Furthermore, we also have to grant the following: that everything is conceptualized. There is not such thing as a real world, independent of our conception of it. If there is we have no access to it, because everything we access is through the repertoire of our concepts given by our faculties and those we have put together artificially or given through language.

So, there is a concept Bertrand Russell in our head, which is instantiated when we come across Bertrand Russell. If we come across Russell in some guise that we are unfamiliar with then even though he is Russell, our concept of Bertrand Russell is not instantiated. We don’t see or think of that person as Russell.

So, if a concept is a name, then it is attached to a concept of that person that we have constructed and stored in our memory, and if that concept is invoked then we know who is being talked about. In this light, lets analyse the apparent puzzle between the morning star and the evening star. Morning star  corresponds to a concept in the head, through which it is mediated and through which is it individuated. So, if we in our conceptual knowledge know that the concept of morning star and the evening star actually talk about the same object individuated in our conceptual scheme then we say they are the same.

Sameness deserves an extended comment: In this case a particular sense of sameness is employed according to which two stars are same iff their physical bodies are same. We could have a notion of sameness, that if stars appear at different times of the day then they are not same. So we invoke a particular sense of sameness attached to the concept and our understanding of stars, and therefore, if we have knowledge that the physical bodies (another concept) of the morning star and the evening stars are same, then they are same. So, then we can say that evening star is the morning star (with a particular implied sense of sameness used in the word is). Alternatively, it won’t make sense to say that the ‘half moon’ is the ‘full moon’ in spite of the fact that both are talking about the same physical moon and yet the equation will not make sense, because the equation is not between the physical bodies, but between the conceptualization of the ‘half-moon’ and the conceptualization of the ‘full-moon’, and the criterion of sameness as it applies to these conceptualization is different from one which applies to the morning star and evening star. Furthermore, the criteria of sameness differs based on the interests of the parties involved. For example for a scientist studying the celestial bodies, the sun that rises each day is different from the previous day, because it has a different mass.

Therefore, Frege’s puzzle of identity only arises only because of his metaphysical assumptions about language in which terms have a reference, which is unmediated through our conceptual faculties. Such an object cannot be, because in order for objects to be, they have to be conceptualized first, and thus individuated.  

To further elucidate the points covered above:

a.      Just as Frege claims that numbers are not attached to objects but to concepts, according to which objects are individuated, and thus counted; likewise, what constitutes an object is a concept as well. Only when and once the object is individuated according to some concept is it considered an object. Nothing in of itself is an object, at least as far as human perception goes, unless it is brought under some concept.

b.     Individuation is according to the conceptual scheme—different schemes will lead to different individuations (compare the conceptual scheme at atomic level, with the level at which human beings regularly interact with objects such as chair, table etc.). What counts as one depends on which conceptual scheme is employed.

c.      A consequence of the above is that objects are not available outside of human cognition. Rather, they are posterior to perception. Only by the mediation of perception are things called objects i.e. individuals which are different from other individuals.

d.     Thus, Frege’s referents can’t be talked about in the kind of language we use. Referents presuppose individuation, and individuation presupposes concepts or sense. Hence, there is no simple concept-free way to talk about referents as objects.

Imam Ghazali (ra) on Reason

‘Whoever supposes that faith is realized through speculative theology, abstract proofs, or academic divisions is an innovator. On the contrary, faith is a light that God, the Sublime and Exalted, casts in to the hearts of His servants with bounty and grace from His presence. Sometimes faith is evidenced internally and is impossible to express; sometimes, through a vision while asleep; other times, by witnessing the state of a pious man and receiving the emanation of his light as a result of his companionship and presence; and there are times when faith comes by the concurrence of circumstance. Indeed, a Bedouin came to the Prophet denying and disavowing him. But when his eyes fell upon his radiant aspect—may God increase its dignity and nobility—he saw in it the light of prophethood and exclaimed, “By God! This is not the face of a liar!” He then implored the Prophet to explain Islam to him and immediately embraced it.’ (trans. Hamza Yusuf in “Creed of Tahavi”)