What to say to a soldier?

Even saying "thank you" to a soldier carries a political message, since you wouldn't say: "thank you for the fact that our nation has abused you by sending you to fight a worthless and unjust war."

It's not as overt a political message as many of our other national fetishes, but it is an interesting conversational implicature.

Unfortunately, it's not clear what else one could say, and in the absence of an easy alternative, I see no reason why one couldn't just say "thank you." There is definitely a sense in which the troops deserve respect, even if you consider the majority of them to be victims, as I do. Sadly, our nation has again produced honest to god war criminals, but these are a minority, and though many of the rest support the war, that makes them no more culpable than our many friends and relatives who support it.

(This is prompted by a carolina support the troops organization which bills itself as non-partisan. My initial thought was "I have a bridge to sell these people," but their web presence and the articles about them really do make it appear that they are as non-partisan as a support the troops organization can be. Pointing out the presuppositions of saying "thank you" to the troops is the most loaded thing they do as far as I can tell).

Brass Balls

"When I came to Texas, my main two goals were to get started on earning my degree and to have the opportunity to play in the NBA," Aldridge said. "I've accomplished both of those and the opportunity is there for me right now to begin the next stage of my basketball career."

I tip my hat to Aldridge--the kid has got style, vaguely tipping his hat to the ideal of the scholar athelete while obviously not giving a shit.

In other news, how come most of my posts are about sports?

Roommate

Hey! I got a job! I need a roommate! If you yourself need a roommate in Chapel Hill or proximal parts of Durham or know someone who does (who's even remotely capable of living with me), please do tell me!

Update: this is for the summer, June-August ideally.

Missing links

I'm pretty excited by the discovery of Tiktaalik roseae skeletons, and not just because if the models are correct, this fish looked awesome. From the times article:

In the fishes' forward fins, the scientists found evidence of limbs in the making. There are the beginnings of digits, proto-wrists, elbows and shoulders. The fish also had a flat skull resembling a crocodile's, a neck, ribs and other parts that were similar to four-legged land animals known as tetrapods.

So the fossils appear to be one of the best examples of a transitional form discovered to date. This should be bad news for creationists, and to a lesser extent, proponents of intelligent design.

The bad news for us is that the discovery won't really do that much. For a long time, the missing link argument has been a bad argument bolstered by a lie. The obvious points are that we have no strong a priori reason to expect a complete fossil record, and much less of a reason to expect a discovery of the complete fossil record. But while the anti-evolution argument requires that we have a complete fossil record, with missing links, claims about common ancestry can be established in spite of huge gaps in the fossil record. Given some large number of species with gaps present, we may be unsure of certain details of descent, we can identify evolved traits and get a course-grained image of the phylogentic tree sufficient to confirm the hypothesis of common descent. There's more wiggle-room for intelligent design here, as they don't question common descent, but even they would lack any strong argument from missing links.

The lie concerns the status of the missing links. While it is true that we don't have many transitional fossils similar to Tiktaalik roseae, creationists are fond of asserting missing links that are not missing. To take an example, some estimates show as many as 20 early hominid species, not all of whom are our ancestors, and quite a number of species who are not obviously either hominids or other apes (this isn't to say we could use a few more fossils). And yet creationists are fond of asserting that there is a problem of missing links between early apes and man. The argumentative strategy goes something like this: if you say there's a missing link between A and C, once a scientist finds B, you just proclaim one missing link between A and B and another missing link between B and C. That this rhetorical strategy has some force relies on neatly forgetting all previous claims about unbridgable missing links and completely ignoring the issue of what a problematic missing link would be, as in the last paragraph.

So I think it's safe to say that while this discovery might help convince some people who are sitting on the fence in this whole discussion, it won't have a serious effect on creationists and even less of one on the ID folks.

It had to be done

As usual, pundits are being stupid about how the final four has never consisted of all #1 seeds, and therefore you're stupid if you have them all in your bracket. A wee bit of probability. Most of the calculation is suppressed to prevent massive boredom.

If each #1 seed has a 40% chance of making the final four. Then the chances of all four making it are about 2.5%. Given that the tournament has had 32 teams for only 27 years, that leaves it a coin flip whether we would have had all four there by now. These numbers are also (roughly) compatible with another actual result, which is that all four have made the elite eight exactly four times.
Is 40% a reasonable number? Look at the distribution of results: 41.6% of the top seeds have in fact made it over the years.
Three top seeds: 3
Two top seeds: 13
One top seed: 10
No top seeds: 1

So duh, right? Well, no. There appear to be a lot of people who don't think it's just a matter of probability.

(If it didn't happen in '93, one of the greatest years ever for college basketball, it might never happen. The only No. 1 to miss the party was Indiana, which might have had the best team in the country until Alan Henderson hurt his knee late in the year. The Hoosiers were beaten in the regional final in St. Louis by No. 2 seed Kansas.)

So the odds are stacked heavily against Duke, Connecticut, Villanova and Memphis advancing en masse to Indy. Don't count on seeing it. Pat Forde.

That's true. With the four teams in the sweet sixteen, the chances that they'll all make the final four are still pretty bad. But unless one of the teams is mis-seeded (sup, Memphis?) the chances they'll make are as good as, or better than the teams that end up there.

In conclusion, this has been massively boring, but to the extent that you trust me you can be confident that it all works out and the guy lecturing you about why you shouldn't pick all #1 seeds is a hack.

Professors Ftw

Some people somewhere are peeved about sabbaticals. "Paying Teachers Not to Teach" and such.

The short rhetorical answer: Professors are exploited. These people are so smart and so well educated and you're paying them a pittance to teach when they really should be running the world.

The longer answer takes into account the quality of life issues, peculiar features of the market incentives concerning Ph.Ds and the substantial benefits that sabbaticals confer on the academic world, and admits that on the whole professors get a fair deal that isn't in need of substantial alteration in either direction. For a portion of that long answer, check the left2right post up there including the comments, and this bit from Keith Burgess Jackson in the rare moment when I'd agree with him.

Terrorism is not a success term

If you're a student of philosophy, you will eventually get yourself in trouble by saying "Oh, I'm a philosopher." Not only will your parents immediately feel a great sense of shame, no matter how far away from you they are, but also the person you are speaking to will think that you consider yourself the equal of Plato, Hume and Nietzsche. In the ordinary way of speaking, 'philosopher' and 'good philosopher' are nearly synonymous terms, in the way that 'Olympic athlete' and 'talented Olympic athlete' are. But really, 'philosopher' is more like 'plumber'. Not everyone is a plumber, and it takes a certain sort of skill that most people lack. But there's still such a thing a bad plumber.

Well, Mohammed Taheri-azar is just as much a terrorist as he is a philosopher. I just wouldn't want to hire him in either capacity.

The zeroth course in statistics

Given that we know that students give higher evaluations when they receive less work and get better grades, we know we should be somehow correcting evaluations based on the average grade in the course. There are a lot of technical details concerning the proper corrective, and fully removing the impact of grades seems like a bad strategy (after all, bad professors sometimes cause bad grades by teaching poorly), but doing nothing is just wrong. Figure out some way to offset harsh grading and low workloads, and then tell professors about it so that they'll have less of an incentive to be slack.

Wanna tell me I missed something obvious?

Libertarians are weird

From a comment on a crooked timber post concerning inequality:

Do you disagree with Dave’s contention that society is not a race, a but a cooperative productive endeavor?

I'm unsure what he could be asserting. Descriptively, there's a problem with Darwin. As an ideal, it sounds weird coming from a libertarian (I don't find his post particularly bothersome though).

Cartoons

I'm just going to repost something I wrote elsewhere about the cartoons issue. It's a bit less careful than I'd like it to be, but I'll put it up anyway.

What's amazing to me about this is that a lot of people who are nominally capable of serious thought about the state of the world who have just uncritically jumped on the bandwagon of defending the Danish journalists. What I wrote comes from the perspective that there are a lot of people who just want war between Christendom and Islam, regardless of the specific circumstances. They will say to invade Iraq because of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, but this is only the closest justification at hand. On the other side, Bin Laden represents the same tendency-whatever initial proximal causes led him to declare enmity towards the West, he has now reached a point at which provoking war between the Muslim world and the West is his goal. These people, who are thankfully fewer in number than the group of people who will support any given war, are our real enemies. Here's what I wrote elsewhere:

It's almost impossible to overstate how bad the reaction in the Muslim world is. It is seriously scary that such a large number of people in these various countries are capable of reacting in this way, and certainly when it comes down to it, it is necessary to defend ourselves against people whose actions follow this pattern.

But characterizing this as a simple case of free speech vs. ignorant heathens is missing the point by a long-shot. Muslims in the EU are subject to pretty vicious racism. These cartoons are just another episode in a dominant group doing everything it can to remind others that they are seen as inferior. There's an analogy with spoiled children who provoke an animal until it lashes out (usually in a more violent fashion than what the children were doing) and then the parents respond by putting the animal down, because it's hurt their poor innocent child.

Put this in a context where thousands of muslims (many of whom we have found out were innocent) are being abused in detainment camps, with religious humiliation being one of the primary tools used. Then consider that the same paper refused to publish cartoons of christ a few years ago on the grounds that they would offend people, and this looks less like an issue of free speech, and more about people who are interested in furthering a war between Christianity and Islam. Note that Andrew Sullivan is using a commentator who advocates deporting Muslims from Europe as an encouraging sign about the hard thought that people on the left are engaging in. The people who wrote these cartoons are in the business of ensuring that we spend the next 50 years at War with the Muslim world. They're no better than any other political leader who uses war as a convenient tool. If they get that war, yes, we better hope that our nations win, but for those of us who are atheists, apatheists, or just uninterested in having our politics governed by religion, there's more than one reason to be scared of what's going on here.

The other thing to add is that taking the long view, the retribution which will be enacted against the Islamic world for this incident will dwarf the damage that the rioting has done.

Basketball

While watching the game, it occured to me that most everyone complains about overpaid juvenile athletes, whereas no one complains about the announcers except for the occasional intelligent fan. This is in spite of the fact that announcers obviously are much less skilled and do much less work than the athletes(*). Announcers do three things:

1. Recite statistics
2. Make inane non-mathematical statements about the players
(2a. Make homoerotic comments about Sean May's "big soft hands")
3. Reminisce about when they played basketball

They do a pretty good job of two(three) of those things. But would it really kill us to require our sportscasters to have some notion that the law of small numbers doesn't exist? I'm not asking that they be doing 2-way-anovas before every statement they make, and I'm fine if the vast majority of the things they say have little to no statistical significance, but can we please not try to make predictions based on the free throw percentage of a kid who has taken 12 free-throws during the entire season?

Absolute statistical genius: "Wes Miller is 10 for 15 from the line this year, so he's not very good, but that's probably because he's been to the line so rarely."

Within a single comment, the announcer asserts that these 15 shots are enough to verify a stable level of free throw shooting ability, which is also so ephemeral that another 20 trips to the line or so could've erased it. Rarely have "p" and "not-p" been so rapidly asserted by the same person.

(*) Yes, the athletes eventually become sportscasters, but they're good at their first job and horrible at the second.

Projects

It's everyone's favorite game wherein I talk about things I want to get done in the medium to long term instead of actually contributing to the academic work which I need to get done today or this week.

1. I need to get a general familiarity with the major issues in metaphysics. The things I'm familiar with, I tend to know quite well, but I have huge holes. I think I'll read

Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction by Michael Loux. This should mostly provoke the response that I've seen this before, and I'm just jogging my memory.
Metaphysics: Contemporary Readings by Michael Loux. This should be a bit more novel.
The Bible by David Lewis.

After those, I'll probably hit up Jason for suggestions, and possibly look at the syllabus for his summer course.

2. Talking to one of the best prospective students this weekend in WashU, I realized that I'll probably have to shelve my thoughts about the Special Composition Question for a while (see Quotidiens). He didn't have any devastating objections, but spending a little bit of time fleshing the idea out with him led me to think that there are too many things I don't know to make a serious attempt at articulating my proposal at this point. Taking it as a conjecture that I'm aiming to prove might be a good way to focus my studies.

3. Study some logic. I realized on the plane ride home from St. Louis that I didn't remember the rules of passage (and correlatively the process of prenexing quantified statements). I also never really got anywhere in studying modal logic. If I don't want to take logic during my first semester in grad school, I might could need to do something about all this.

From Wikipedia:

Kripke delivered the John Locke Lectures in philosophy at Oxford in 1973. Titled Reference and Existence, they are in many respects a continuation of Naming and Necessity, and deal with the subjects of fictional names and perceptual error. They have never been published and the transcript is officially available only in a reading copy in the university library, which cannot be copied or cited without Kripke's permission. In fact many copies are informally circulated among philosophers. Its influence, though considerable, is thus difficult to trace.

I find it slightly odd that a philosopher can deliver a seven part series of public lectures and then control the transcript so that others are technically (if not actually) prohibited from even mentioning it in print. There's such a thing as speaking off the record, but surely this isn't it (for contrast, most of the John Locke lectures for the past decade and at least a large number of those before then have been published as books).

Fish in a barrel pt 4

I ran across some confirmation of the obvious fact that the media is paying much less attention to the NSA spying leak than it paid the Lewinski scandal. Not a surprise, but it's useful to see some quantitative measures, on which the difference is striking.

The charitable interpretation is that the Clinton administration had so many fewer scandals that the media was forced to spend time on unimportant or completely imaginary wrongdoing. (Media Matters)

Interesting tidbits

From Bill Lycan's preliminary description of his seminar on Dualism:

"First we shall examine the standard objections and consider some Dualist replies.
(I have come to think that the standard objections are actually pretty
feeble.)" Unless something has drastically changed, Bill is a staunch materialist in spite of this, so it's interesting that he'd trash the standard objections.

"April 4: Intentionality! (I think plain old intentionality is a much
worse problem for materialism than is anything in the area of subjectivity,
qualia, phenomenal character,....)"

I fairly well agree with that. In the fall of 2004, I wrote a paper for Bill on the Knowledge Argument. The argument runs as follows: you can know anything you want about the physical structure of the world, as well as neurology and psychology, the dynamics of color perception, etc, but if you have never seen red, then none of that information will tell you what it is like to see red. Therefore, there is some fact you do not know if you merely possess all the physical information. This is a problem for materialism (when you try to make this sentence precise, there be dragons in that forest...). The standard response is to say that you do gain information when you experience red which is not a consequence of physics, etc. This is just because you have a particular "introspective perspective" that is, your brain monitors the activities going on inside of your brain more or less directly, so that particular types of activity in your brain appear to you as seeing red.

My paper argued(*) that this response didn't get you squat, because the notion of a perspective was every bit as problematic for materialism as the explanatory gap between physics and color sensations. The problem is closely linked to how original intentionality arises: how is it that this particular lump of matter comes to have a viewpoint on the world, which is roughly similar to having any intentionality at all, since presumably any creature with intentionality has some sort of perspective.

(*) Actually, my paper did not argue anything. It flailed at various targets.

I am a ridiculous creature

One good way to improve your Go is to review games you've played, noticing what worked and what didn't, finding slack moves, whether or not the opponent noticed them, etc. It's best if you do it with someone substantially stronger than you, or at least your opponent, but it's still worthwhile if it's just you.

In that spirit, I present you with a commented game I played. No, really..I took a game which was on my computer, wrote down comments, showed some alternate sequences, etc. It's in a .sgf file.

There's something wrong with me.

Commented game

Fish in a barrel pt 3

Duke is really freakin good. They have played five ranked opponents and won by an average of 16.8 points. The fact that they are the obvious choice to win the national championship this year makes me very sad.

Go

I played the best game of Go today. Only made one obvious mistake at the beginning of the game when I thought I could push through a one point jump and cut when I couldn't. I ended up starting a decent sized fight which I was pretty sure I could win. Then I came up with a several move sequence which exploited a throw-in and shortage of liberties to catch six stones. That then led to a one sided ko which netted me ten points or so.

I was about to post a couple of mundane updates earlier this week, one of which would've included a complaint that my Go was stagnating and every game I played was bad. Good timing.

A minor quibble with Chomsky

From his newsweek interview:

Well, it's extremely difficult to talk about this because of a very rigid doctrine that prevails in the United States and Britain which prevents us from looking at the situation realistically. The doctrine, to oversimplify, is that we have to believe the United States would have so-called liberated Iraq even if its main products were lettuce and pickles and [the] main energy resource of the world were in central Africa. Anyone who doesn't accept that is dismissed as a conspiracy theorist or a lunatic or something. But anyone with a functioning brain knows that that's not true—as all Iraqis do, for example. The United States invaded Iraq because its major resource is oil. And it gives the United States, to quote [Zbigniew] Brzezinski, "critical leverage" over its competitors, Europe and Japan. That's a policy that goes way back to the second world war. That's the fundamental reason for invading Iraq, not anything else.

I think Chomsky is slightly off on his analysis of the 'rigid doctrine': I think you were perfectly able to admit in civilized discourse that part of the reason we invaded Iraq was its oil reserves, you just can't do that while maintaining that this fact has any moral relevance. This isn't really based on any detailed thought about the situation, I just feel like I heard a lot of people (even within the media) talk about how we were involved in part because of the oil, but I agree with Chomsky that you never heard anyone prominent act as if that made any difference to the justification of the invasion.

On the subject of bad excuses

It appears that the supreme court nominee was part of a Princeton organization which was opposed to large numbers of women and minorities attending the university (it's hard to determine exactly what the group's stance was, but it seems clearly reactionary). The best excuses that the various people were able to offer when interviewed by the Daily Princetonian were that he might not have been in the organization despite having listed it on a resume, or if he was in it, that was merely to get jobs and wouldn't have mentioned it on his resume unless he was exploiting a connection to someone in the organization. So either he's a liar or completely unprincipled. Good traits for a justice, I hear.

A tepid defense of conceptual analysis

Over break, I read Frank Jackson’s book “From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defense of Conceptual Analysis, along with a review of it by Steve Stich and Jonathan Weinberg. S&W pose two questions to Jackson concerning the empirical assumptions that he makes: first, Jackson seems to rely on a dubious notion of concepts as embodying a folk theory, and second, he seems to assume interpersonal consistency of intuitions about hypothetical cases without any basis. What I have to say mostly bears on the first question.

S&W note that in the contemporary cognitive science literature most researchers have adopted theories upon which our concepts do not resemble any sort of “folk theory.” For reasons of space, they only examine one alternative, exemplar theories of concepts.

On such a theory, a given concept is constituted by a set of exemplars, which can be seen as detailed ‘descriptions’ of particular members of the category. When called upon to answer whether some new object is a member of the category, we determine how similar it is to several of the exemplars, and render a verdict on that basis (much of the processing will be unconscious). One important fact about the theory is that a person’s recent emotional and cognitive history “primes” or activates a subset of the exemplars, as well as altering the level of similarity which must be achieved for a positive judgment. So there is a substantial degree of intrapersonal variance in people’s intuitions, as well as interpersonal variance in the exemplars various people have.

Neither of the points which S&W make are very definitive attacks on Jackson’s account as they stand (in all fairness, S&W present them as questions). There is a doctrine, typical of the rationalists, but also present in Aristotle, that only a certain sort of person is capable of properly doing philosophy. For instance, Plato believed that you had to spend years studying a variety of subjects in order to develop your “rational intuition” (not the Platonic term) before you could properly do philosophy.

I don't know whether exemplars are supposed to be the sort of thing you can intentionally influence but it seems possible given that Stich points towards “the importance of myths and parables in moral pedagody, since these stories can serve as the basis for building stored up exemplars” (639). This fits with the fact that you can inculcate reluctant undergraduates with the traditional philosophical intuitions (Gettier and Twin Earth cases, for example). Since one’s recent cognitive and emotional history prime the exemplars that are used in a particular case, perhaps one of the abilities that characterizes a good philosopher is the ability to prime the proper exemplars in herself. If that was true, then there could be an account of how both interpersonal and intrapersonal variation in conceptual intuitions can be compatible with the possibility of conceptual analysis.

There are still problems for this sort of account. Jackson meant to defend an account of conceptual analysis on which the philosopher is elucidating folk concepts—if this is the case, that places a limit on the divergence between the exemplars used by the philosopher and those used by the folk. Still, even this account does not require perfect agreement in judgments-you possess the same concepts at different times in your life, even though you activate different exemplars and make different judgments at different times.

Pointing out that this account is available obviously falls quite short of defending it. In particular, what reason do we have to suppose that anything about the philosophical training we undergo in the Anglo-American tradition has any of the effects on our intuitions that are mentioned above? I think even if everything I've said so far is correc, that question might prove impossible to answer.

A steaming pile of shit

A little bit of philosophy of science can be a very bad thing. Albert Aschuler on the Dover court decision:

The court argues that ID does not follow the ground rules of science because it is not “testable” or “falsifiable.” Like most writers on the subject, the court invokes the image of science associated with Karl Popper – a view still endorsed by many scientists but rejected for good reason by most philosophers of science. W. V. Quine (and before him Pierre Duhem) showed that paradigm-preserving explanations are always available. New data never require the abandonment of a particular belief when we are willing to sacrifice other beliefs. In that sense, no scientific proposition is ever falsifiable.

This summary of 20th century philosophy of science would be poor by the standards of an undergraduate paper, while the apparent inference to rejecting any demand for falsifiability is simply appalling.

Resolutions

Eat, sleep, relax. Keep up the good work. Eat all of the candy and drink all the booze I received this christmas (I've failed at this one for some of the recent holidays).

An Uncertainty of Mine, Expressed as a Proposition

Proposition: In the scene in American Beauty in which the plastic bag is featured, we are supposed to largely agree with the boy about the beauty of the plastic bag, or at least sympathize insofar as we feel him to have a certain depth.

"we are meant" can be either cashed out in terms of authorial intent or any other theoretical apparatus you find appropriate.

Thoughts?

Brutal Composition Again

I've posted updated versions of the Brutal Composition paper. It's in a pdf this time, so it's nice and shiny and cool and friendly to the .doc-challenged. There's some significant revisions, but that'll only be of interest to nascent Blank scholars and those who missed it the first time around.

(Ignore the "writing sample, department of philosophy" junk at the top of the file. That just indicates that I am now finished with 3! grad school applications. Also, I blatantly stole the reference to "Blank scholars" from Neil Sinhababu, but I'm connected to him by a reasonably tight two degrees of separation, so it's cool).

Bob Jones? Not so much...

There's a small debate in the Times Higher Education Supplement over intelligent design being taught in schools. First exhibit: can anyone figure out what the ID defender is saying? Does he have an argument? Second exhibit: the critic of ID is arguing for the beneficial effects of faith schools. Unbeknownst to me, there are a large number of religious state schools in the UK. The author argues that the faith schools can be used as a tool to integrate Muslims, and that a number of distortions in the U.S. educational system are the result of the fact that religious education is run almost entirely by the private sector.

Aside from the constitutional problems with anything similar to the British system, I think it would be a horrible idea. My picture of how primary and secondary education should work is even funding for all schools at the national level, with the states given the option to increase funding for education, again subject to maintaining an equitable distribution of resources between school districts. You'd have to couple this with high taxes imposed on private schools to prevent the middle and upper classes from fleeing the public schools and manoeuvring to slash funding for public education. The salutary side effect of this would be to, in an entirely constitutional fashion, push a lot of religious education out of existence. There would still be private religious schools for the fanatics who were able to pay, as well as some extremely prestigious schools, but the net effect would be to improve the quality of public education while making it more egalitarian.

Quotidiens

1. Went to Go club today after a two week hiatus. Played three reasonable games, which ended my pattern of playing rushed and disastrous games. Still, I haven't made any noteworthy improvement in at least a month.

2. I go home Friday, which means I'll probably not post until the New Year, though a reasonable internet connection should appear at the familial estate on the 28th.

3. It's getting harder for me to talk about politics. I'm just getting more stupid and ill-informed and apathetic. Apathetic in the sense that I know my general stance on a lot of different areas, but can't be bothered to examine the nuances that distinguish particular positions, and can't be bothered to try and defend my viewpoint. In particular, I no longer know or care enough to argue with people who are misinformed or lie (whether it's real or a hypothetical discussion with some nutcase in the blogosphere). I feel that this is a bad thing.

4. I think I'm going to start trying to write my second paper on composition, a defense of the intuitive conception of when composition occurs as a moderate, non-brutal answer to the Special Composition Question. Don't know what that means? Read the first paper! It's in an old post "Consistency Again." The view that I'm going to defend will be that

some objects, the xs compose another object y iff y is epistemically salient.

The trick is to define the notion of epistemically salient in the proper manner: the result I want is for the SCQ to reduce to a question about reduction and/or elimination in the special sciences. The question "do the molecules that make up my body really compose something?" reduces to the question "is the category 'human being' a scientifically significant category?"

In that case, our intuitions about composition end up being intuitions about reduction, except 'composition' is referentially opaque (that could be a misuse of the term 'referentially opaque'). Nihilism and Universalism turn out to be limiting and equivalent cases. Everything either gets reduced to physics, or is eliminated in favor of physics so either 1) nothing exists except fundamental particles, or 2) every fusion is real, because physics doesn't distinguish between them (in some sense of the word).

In a natural enough sense, this paper is a followup to Brutal Composition and Our Intuitions because that paper argued that we need a theoretical account of what composition is, or when it occurs that explains how our intuitions could have evidential force, and I think this account does the trick.

(I know the title of this post isn't quite a word, but I like it).

Whoring Myself

I'm spent an amusing 5 minutes pondering putting ads on this blog. Thanks to the Google AdSense program, it's easier than ever!

There's something ridiculous or unethical about the thought of putting ads on my blog when I use firefox with adblock and would recommend that the rest of you do the same. Silly questions about ethics aside, the real point is that I don't quite get enough traffic to justify the practice. Most ads give you money for every thousand views/viewers, and it takes a little while for this blog to get a thousand views...

I just realized today that I screwed up something in my writing sample. I took Michael Lynch's minimal conception of intuitions as my working 'definition' of intuitions, and then did some analysis of Ernest Sosa's reliabilist theory concerning intuitions, without noting that Sosa is using a more restrictive conception of what an intuition is than Lynch is. Bad news. I think my commentary on Sosa is obviously still relevant despite the disconnect (and will add a sentence saying so) so I don't think anyone will think this hurts my argument. I'm more worried that it'll just make me look unobservant and stupid.

Good thing Rutgers was the only place I sent that copy of the writing sample to, because it's obviously an unappealing safety school for me.

Four Joys

From earlier today:

1. Valentina hot sauce has reignited my passion for cosmic, which had waned over the past month or two.
2. I pulled an all-nighter of the good kind.
3. I turned in my application to Rutgers.
4. I had my last day of class today.

One down, Ten to go

I turned in my Rutgers application. That leaves

Brown
MIT
NYU
Pittsburgh
Princeton
UC-Berkeley
UCLA
UMass-Amherst
USC
Wash-U

to go. Luckily, the vast majority of work has been done.

An Utterly Trivial Terminological Point

The title gets you going, huh?

I'm revising my writing sample, and I'm confronted with the question of how to name the view that "For any xs, the xs compose an object y if and only if the xs are fastened together." Fn 34 of Brutal Composition reads as follows

See Van Inwagen, Material Beings, p.56. Van Inwagen calls the view "fastening." But Mark Aronszajin and Fred Feldman have convinced me, in conversation, that this is a misnomer, since 'fastening' is a form of the verb that denotes the act of causing some things to be fastened together, rather than a word that denotes the relation being fastened together. And 'fastenedness', which does denote that relation, is too hard to pronounce.

Nevertheless, every reader of my paper who was not completely immersed in the composition literature has responded to seeing 'fastenation' with complete and utter incomprehension. So I think I'm going to use 'fastening' since at least one canonical figure in the literature uses it, and I'd rather not annoy the heck out of non-specialist readers. But I'm really unsure of this decision. Most importantly, this is obviously the best way to be using my time at the moment.

Chapter the Third, In Which I Come to Accept Capitalism

Achewood and Fafblog are going up against the Dilbert Blog and The Hate Mongers Quarterly on The Weblog Awards for Best Humor/Comics Weblog. I was going to write about how this is a clear example of market failure, since Girls are Pretty just isn't included and the Dilbert Blog isn't really that funny. Also, the Hatemonger's Quarterly is some of the shittiest shit ever shat onto the net. Believe me on this one. You don't want to spend the time confirming my opinion.

I know I'm biased, so let's factor that into the equation, by moving my opinions of both Fafblog and the Hatemonger's Quarterly towards the center. The result is that Fafblog is still one of the top 250 things to happen to humanity, while the Hatemonger's Quarterly has become a despicable mediocrity. Even when they take on targets where I can roughly sympathize with an old conservative curmudgeon, such as the "Student Environmental Action Coalition’s Activist Training Camp," they just sort of muddle around being unfunny. One of their favorite posts for the year involves making fun of an English professor for ending a sentence with a preposition.

On second thought, this isn't really a market failure, since Achewood and Fafblog are both solidly in the middle of the pack, Dilbert isn't in first, and the Hatemonger's Quarterly is dead last.

Purpose and Religiosity

Ed linked to an old article by Mark Oppenheimer which laments a trend in which college campuses discourage single-minded purpose. Oppenheimer's idea of single-minded purpose is a bit eccentric, as he cites some odd reminiscences

They say it would take a lifetime simply to copy out the works of Bach or Telemann. Much the same is true of Wodehouse. I know: at school I hammered out all of his novel Fringe Assets on an electric Remington in an effort to teach myself to touch-type, an effort that took me a term and a half.

This particularly eccentric pass time aside, Oppenheimer mentions physicists and poets, so his concerns are broader than the welfare of the almost OCD. I'm less interested in Oppenheimer's article itself, which I am often in agreement with, so much as the influence of his religiosity.

Oppenheimer is not concerned with our lack of ability to sustain attention per se--the sort of concern which can be articulated from the viewpoint of soulless careerism. Instead, Oppenheimer is concerned with what the lack of devotion present on college campuses shows about our view of the good life. Fry's patient transcription of Wodehouse has touch-typing as its product, but this is hardly what gives the image of Fry its gravity. We are told to "reflect for a moment on the elegant asceticism of Fry's project" and this project exemplifies "something provided by college life at its best, something all too rare afterwards, to be cherished while one can: the uninterrupted moment."

Respose can be a commodity. The dominant careerist aesthetic includes yoga, meditation or gardening as ways to take a little bit of time for yourself, which enhances your concentration and keeps your mind healthy. But Oppenheimer's vision of what validates repose is different. His description of the values which are the opposites of repose is curt and dismissive: "well-rounded and liberal is a perfectly nice way to be — I hope it describes me — but it connotes no particular meaning or calling or purpose. It's a way to be, not a reason to be." Going by that description alone, many people would by surprised to realize that they're devaluing peacefulness and rest. I'm belaboring this point, but I want to stress that there's something peculiar about Oppenheimer's point which invites you to identify with it, without necessarily understanding what motivates him.

You most often hear calls for leading a purposeful life from religiously minded commentators. If, as a secular atheist, you start to reflect on not just the concrete complaints Oppenheimer lodges but also his reasons for doing so, you might feel a substantial disconnect. The language of purpose and "a reason to be" are familiar and natural to a theist, whereas for us they leave the sense that we don't really know what either thing would be, or they reflect nothing more than a shallow dressing up of careerism. I don't think this difference is intrinsic. Certainly, given Oppenheimer's examples: Campus Crusade for Christ, and Big Ten football players, one might suspect that he has a poor grasp on what activities exhibit purpose in any important sense. The inclusion of Big Ten football almost has the force to rewrite the entire article as a parody.

In any case, a religious outlook fosters a comfort with the notion of a purposeful life, whereas a reflective atheistic perspective tends to discomfit us by stripping away a layer of illusion about the purposes that our life might serve. I don't mean to say something idiotic to the effect that atheism makes life meaningless, as I've heard a theist or two assert, rather, I'm saying that the task of explaining the nature of a purposeful life becomes much more difficult because we're not allowed to cheat. In particular, despite my intrinsic sympathy for Fry and for the notion of single-mindedness of purpose and for the uninterrupted moment, I feel as if I have nothing more than a hunch that these things have anything to do with a purposeful life.

What is Dad Rock?

Dad rock is ususally from the period referred to by historians as "back in the day," but it's not classic rock. None of

The Beatles
Jimi Hendrix
The Doors
Simon and Garfunkel or
Credence Clearwater Revival

are Dad Rock, even though there's a reasonable chance that any given Dad listens to several, if not all of them. If you want examples of Dad rock, look at Paul Simon on his own (I don't know if he was always Dad rock, but he's put out an album or two in the genre) or the 800 lb gorilla: Steely Dan.

But what makes those last two Dad rock? I'd really like someone to answer that for me.

I was probably going to apply to CUNY...

and then I found out that the application fee is $125. In comparison, Princeton is a complete ripoff at $65 for applications before December 1 and $80 afterwards.

I'm still applying to Princeton, since if I got in I'd spend $80 of my pocket money on the party without hesitation. Wouldn't do $125 for CUNY (seriously, with my likely guest list, how the hell could I throw a $125 party? Grey Goose screwdrivers? Drinking contest employing 10 year Laphroaig?)

Bush Guarantees All Suspicious Arabs Will Get Good Grades

One official said about three dozen names fall in that category; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said. Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake (Washington Post)

Objectivity Again

An interesting example of what the current journalistic mode of writing demands. The Pentagon has been planting articles in the Iraqi press, and paying friendly journalists. The New York Times comes down with the following unusually angry denunciation.

Even as the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development pay contractors millions of dollars to help train journalists and promote a professional and independent Iraqi media, the Pentagon is paying millions more to the Lincoln Group for work that appears to violate fundamental principles of Western journalism.

All in the third person, but also non-factive: the phrasing "principles of western journalism" leaves the crucial ambiguity between accepted principles and binding normative principles. I'd love to learn to be able to write like that.

Harry Potter and the Curmudgeon's Capitulation

Usually when I go back to my parents' house, I read fantasy novels and relax. I tried to work over Thanksgiving break but was completely scatterbrained, so instead I read Harry Potter vols 2 through 6, and uh..

Well, I enjoyed them. I'd always admitted to enjoying the first one, but I shamelessly enjoy a lot of bad fantasy. Anyway, they're pretty freaking funny, moreso as the series goes on, and a lot of the obnoxious things from the first book make more sense as time goes on. They're well above par for the genre, though I still don't quite what the huge fuss is about.

You happy, Megan? I won't be getting any less half-hearted, so don't hold out.

Semantic Paradoxes In Natural Language

There hasn't been a lot of philosophy here recently.

In "Truth and Meaning" Davidson attempts to extend the Tarski style definition of truth in a formal language to natural language, and use this as a theory of meaning. In the case of the formal language, you have an object language "L" and a metalanguage, which is capable of expressing everything expressible in L, and which also contains a predicate "true-in-L." You give a recursive algorithm for translating sentences in L into the metalanguage. If s is a sentence in L and p is it's formulation in the metalanguage, you get a sentence of the form

"s is true iff p"

The reason that you have to do this in a metalanguage is to avoid the liar paradox, in which you have a sentence of the form

"This sentence is false."

Since the metalanguage only defines truth in L, rather than truth generally and L has no truth predicate, there is no possibility of having a liar sentence in either language. Davidson's extension of Tarski's proposal gives you sentences of the form

" 'Snow is white' is true iff snow is white."

The account looks completely vacuous in English, but there are at least some more interesting sentences in the vicinity

" 'Der schnee ist weiss' is true iff snow is white"
" 'Snow is white' est vrai si et seulement si la neige est blanche"

Moreover, the theory of meaning itself is given not by these sentences, which are theorems of that theory, but rather the meaning postulates attaching to individual words and composition rules which tell you how to give the truth conditions of any sentence in terms of its constituent parts.

Now, most logicians had thought that Tarski's idea was inapplicable to natural languages, in part because natural languages seem to have a universality that makes the proposal untenabile. That is, English is it's own metalanguage, "true-in-English" seeming to be an English predicate. Davidson's answer is decidedly odd. Without claiming to have a decisive answer, he puts forth the following suggestion.

The semantic paradoxes arise when the range of the quantifiers in the object language is too generous in certain ways. But it is not really clear how unfair to Urdu or to Wendish it would be to view the range of their quantifiers as insufficient to yield an explicit definition of 'true-in-Urdu' or 'true-in-Wendish.' Or to put the matter in another, if not more serious way, there may in the nature of the case always be something we grasp in understanding the language of another (the concept of truth) that we cannot communicate to him."

Your ability to translate Urdu into English implies that the resources to define 'true-in-Urdu' in English are available (and they can define the same thing about English in Urdu). But that seems to create an obvious problem. An Urdu speaker can just say "['snow is white' is whatever those British people mean by]'true-in-Urdu'[iff snow is white]" putting everything in brackets into Urdu, and they have seemingly just reintroduced the possibility of generating semantic paradoxes. It is therefore quite unclear to my how Davidson's project is supposed to avoid the semantic paradoxes (he does say he feels justified in proceeding without having definitively shown that there are no semantic paradoxes in natural language).

Fish in a barrel pt 2

The torture ban passed 90-9, and the Bush administration has been threatening to veto. 90 votes isn't even close to the cutoff for overruling a veto, so the administration has to have known for a long time that they didn't stand a chance. So why did they veto it? "We'd just like to make a symbolic gesture that we approve of torture, and also exacerbate divisions within our own party by forcing Republicans to help overrule the President." This could not make less sense.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

I'm in the middle of deciding where to apply to graduate school. Roughly, the three stages are
Beginning: Ask professors where to apply, generate large list based on all of their recommendations.
Middle: Stare at the websites of relevant institutions, hoping for insight.
End: Buy a dart-board.

What currently irks me is the way some departments are less than forthcoming about who is exactly on their faculty. Stanford, in particular, lists everyone you could possibly associate with the department on the website, and you have to click on individual links to find out that they are emeritus or better yet, "former faculty," having moved on to a job at another institution.

Update: Does Stanford read my blog? Either that, or I'm illiterate (this is a very real possibility). I returned to their website today, and saw that they're now listing the former faculty so that you needn't look at the personal websites. Also, philosophy placement records are depressing.

How Not to Interview One of the World's Greatest Minds

There's something over a controversy over a Chomsky interview with the Guardian. Chomsky claims he's been misquoted, which wouldn't surprise me, but I can't really tell from here. Leiter has the basic set of links. What I did notice in the interview was the astonishingly stupid and petty attempts of the interviewer to discredit Chomsky. Here's a gem:

So I am surprised when he says he only goes online if he is "hunting for documents, or historical data. It's a hideous time-waster. One of the good things about the internet is you can put up anything you like, but that also means you can put up any kind of nonsense. If the intelligence agencies knew what they were doing, they would stimulate conspiracy theories just to drive people out of political life, to keep them from asking more serious questions ... There's a kind of an assumption that if somebody wrote it on the internet, it's true."

Is there? It's clear, suddenly, that Chomsky's opinion can be as flaky as the next person's; he just states it more forcefully. I tell him that most people I know don't believe anything they read on the internet and he says, seemlessly, "you see, that's dangerous, too."

Far be it from me to prove that people are more credulous while on the internet than when dealing with other media, but they certainly are more credulous than they should be. Probably most people say they don't believe much of what they read on the internet, but they generally don't have the metacognitive skills to identify reliable sources. Extra points to the interviewer for not realizing that Chomsky's glib response was just to avoid getting in a petty fight with her.

Update: I regret not reading to the end of the article. It was intellectually dishonest of me not to get a complete picture of the interview before commenting. Forget everything written above. What you really need to know is that Chomsky is a hypocrite for having a stock portfolio.

Police State, Yes?

According to the Times, New York City is investigating the possibility of imposing congestion tolls. The idea is that whenever you drive into the the most heavily trafficked areas of the city during the day, you pay $7 for the privilege, with exemptions for residents and individuals with disabilities. It's a good idea, but it's not worth it. London is typically mentioned as the model for this policy. To sell the public on the idea, the mayor of London made all sorts of promises that the camera system involved would not be used by general law-enforcement. By the first day the system was on line, he was on the radio trumpeting the fact that law enforcement could use the system to nab potential terrorists. I don't think the promises will even be made in the United States. The Times article didn't even mention civil liberties concerns.

That's all, folks

I sent my thesis to the committee via email at 6:00 AM on wednesday and dropped off a pair of photocopied figures today. I'm not very confident in it, so don't count on seeing it unless you're writing a philosophy thesis which I've had a look at. Strict quid pro quo concerning embarassment and all.

The rest of the semester will be largely devoted to relaxing. Remaining tasks include:
1) Play more Go. Sadly, I've got my priorities enough in order that my devotion to the game was suffering as a result of the thesis.
a) On which note, look what I ordered!
2) Fill out a ton of applications.
a) read a lot of justifications of the use of intuitions in philosophy, and incorporate this into my paper/writing sample on Brutal Composition.

20 hours left

David got home and we had a huge team rant about health insurance and also a level headed discussion about the flu killing us all. Oddly, this was just what was needed to get me in the mood to finish my thesis. Let's do this.

What objectivity entails

From an article on the American Museum of Natural History's exhibit on Darwin:

An ongoing federal trial in Harrisburg, Pa., may determine whether a local school board can compel teachers to inform students about the theory of intelligent design - the idea that life on earth is too complex to have arisen through evolution alone. And though there is no credible scientific support for this position, President Bush, when asked in August about evolution and intelligent design, said that "both sides ought to be properly taught." (Nytimes, my emphasis)

I guess I'd been too hard on the Times. I'd previously said that they were just following the standard "he said, she said" model that is the typical journalist's mangling of the concept of 'objectivity.' That's not the case in this article.

Limits of non-discrimination

The story that Target allows its pharmacists to refuse to dispense emergency contraception on religious grounds checks out. It's not surprising, given that several states may well pass legislation to extend this supposed right to all pharmacists. This seems worthy of no longer shopping at Target, or rather contacting Target to tell them they will not be receiving my business, while neglecting to mention that they didn't in the first place. You might consider doing the same.

It's clear to me that pharmacists do not, and should not, have the right to refuse to fill prescriptions on religious grounds. The reason religious anti-discrimination has nothing to do with it is that the pharmacists aren't being discriminated on the basis of their religion, rather, they're not being allowed to hold a job while acting on beliefs that prevent them from meeting the requirements of the job. So far, so good.

Here's a test case that shows things to be a little more complicated. The job description of a doctor(1) is to provide patients with medical care necessary to alleviate or prevent illness and improve the quality of life, while also making the patients feel comfortable and inspiring confidence. Now transition to the south in 1960 or 1950, and imagine the following line of argument "Refusing to hire Black doctors is not discrimination on the basis of their race, it's just refusing to hire people who are not capable of discharging the function of their job. If we hire Black doctors, patients will be uncomfortable, and won't trust that their doctors can help them." I take it this argument is wrong, whereas the first was correct. But it's also obvious that the premise about how patients would react was correct.

What this shows is that we ought to think very carefully about the reasons underlying what constitutes discrimination (and the limits of state and corporate power in general). As liberals, broadly defined, we've usually got the right intuitions, but we don't know exactly why we have them. Belle did a good job of exhibiting this by posting one of the best arguments against same sex marriage (at least outside of queer theory, if you give those arguments any credence) and then quickly taking it back, but leaving a skeleton of it behind. Though I'm not sure Belle draws this moral, what her exercise shows is that it's worth thinking about whether you aren't just another "handwaving Burkean conservative" who just happens to believe in gay marriage and reproductive rights.

It's times like these when I want to do ethics and political philosophy. *sigh*

(1) Was going to say waiter, focusing on the comfort of the diners, but then I realized that most southerners were probably perfectly comfortable being waited on by Blacks.

Schedule

[Updated and reposted]

I'm afraid the upcoming weeks are certainly going to suck.

Oct 25th Philosophy of Language Paper
Oct 25th Algebra Homework
Oct 27th GRE
Oct 31st Paper on Benjamin
Nov 1st Bastard gave us Algebra Homework for the day before the test
Nov 2nd Algebra Test
Nov 4th Writing Degree Zero
Nov 7th Mythologies
Nov 8th Algebra Homework (maybe)
Nov 9th Draft of my thesis
Nov 16th Thesis Defense

Pretty much everything takes a backseat to the Thesis.

Armchair Psychology

I retook a web version of the Jung personality test today, and was rather stunned by the following question:

17) I tend to pay more attention to my thoughts than my feelings.

Perhaps I'm just in some strange mood, but I don't get the distinction. I don't think I categorize mental states of mine into thoughts and feelings. I take it that both are supposed to be occurent mental states, roughly dateable events in an individual's conscious experience, and I'm not sure I find two such things "when I introspect."

That isn't to say I don't use feeling as either a verb or a noun, it just seems that the usages to which I put it don't correspond to what the test-takers have in mind. First, I often refer to sensations as feelings: "I feel hot." Second, I use feelings to refer to moods: "I feel elated" or "I feel down." But, as Ryle did a good job of showing, moods are more or less patterns of dispositions to think certain thoughts and feel certain ways. Third, if I have a strong opinion which I cannot find good reasons for, yet which I can't give up, I might say "well, I don't know why, but I just feel like he's bad news." This seems like it's the closest to what the test-makers had in mind, but I'm still not getting it. After all, it doesn't seem like anyone could pay more attention to their feelings than they pay attention to their thoughts, if this is what a feeling is. This thing is just a thought "he's bad news" that you've discovered that you don't have a reason for. But you had to go through a logical process of reasoning, checking over the various possible rationales you might have to discover that you don't have a good one. So it seems like this isn't precisely an occurent mental state either.

I'm an extremely analytical and logical person, but I certainly haven't gone through a process of reasoning for most of the things that I think. Most of my beliefs go unexamined until something comes up to call them into question, and most of my thoughts occur to me and I move on without ever thinking of a reason for them. In that, I'm in the same boat as everyone who has ever lived. What distinguishes the analytically minded person is her dogged persuit of a sound rationale for the thought once it has been called into question.

Most people don't react this way when they take the Jung personality test (or its cousin the myers-briggs). They find that sort of question easy to answer. So, tell me what the utterly obvious thing I'm missing is. Really, I mean it. I demand that you comment and explain what a feeling is.

Also, in case you didn't catch it:

INTP - "Architect". Greatest precision in thought and language. Can readily discern contradictions and inconsistencies. The world exists primarily to be understood. 3.3% of total population.

Free Jung Personality Test (similar to Myers-Briggs/MBTI)

Shot Down

"Thank you for bearing with us while your paper was considered for publication in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. I am sorry to have to tell you that your paper has been judged unsuitable for publication in the AJP. I attach a copy of the referee's report on which our decision about your paper has been based; perhaps this information will be useful to you in revising your paper for submission to some other journal. Please bear in mind that the AJP accepts less than 10% of the papers submitted to it. Thanks again for considering the AJP. (From internal evidence or other sources, you may feel that you have identified one or more of the individuals involved in the assessment of your paper. We ask, nevertheless, that you direct any communications to assessors through me at the above address.)"

The reviewers complaints were that 1) I did seem to substantially engage with the literature on intuitions in my discussion (true-though I'm familiar with the volume he cites, and I didn't find it especially helpful. Still, this is worth fixing). 2) The author picked up on some important slip-ups on my part, 3) The author claims a disconnect between what I assert I prove and what I prove (I'm mulling over this one), and 4) I think the reviewer may have missed the thrust of my argument at the end of the paper (I'm mulling over this one as well). (2) can be easily rectified, (3) is troubling, (4) is a problem if the author didn't make the mistake I'm attributing. (1) Will probably take time to fix that I don't have until after Nov 9th.

Still, very helpful comments, and the review time was literally less than a month. The kids at the AJP do a very nice job.

Can anyone guess what I'm doing?

I think one of the major differences between a real philosopher and an undergraduate is that the real philosopher doesn't look at

Explain Frege's puzzle about identity. What is Frege's distinction between sense and reference, and how is (sic) this distinction supposed to account for the informativeness of some identity claims? Is Frege's account of the informativeness of identity claims adequate?

and think to themselves "how the heck do I get 5 pages out of that?" At moments like these, I join the non-philosopher in thinking that philosophy just teaches you how to complicate the obvious.

The letter of the law

prohibits me from linking to the blogs that I link to over there to the right, unless I have my own contribution (of dubious value) to tack onto it, as in the Frege post. I'm going to circumvent my hitherto unannounced and self-imposed rule. Here's the trick: I'll link to someone who is doing the exact same thing as Kieran Healey is doing at crooked timber. When you're going apeshit over Leon Kass's most recent attempt to have what is colloquially known as a "thought," there's sort of a standard model for the post. Just let him hang himself:

For the first time in human history, mature women by the tens of thousands live the entire decade of their twenties — their most fertile years — neither in the homes of their fathers nor in the homes of their husbands; unprotected, lonely, and out of sync with their inborn nature. Some women positively welcome this state of affairs, but most do not; resenting the personal price they pay for their worldly independence, they nevertheless try to put a good face on things and take refuge in work or feminist ideology.

Speaking of my rule about not linking to those blogs, the rationale is that you, being a good person, are already reading them religiously. Seriously, if you're not reading crooked timber on an almost daily basis there's probably something wrong with you. If you're checking it seven times a day, hypothetically speaking, there's probably nothing wrong with that either.

Did I mention that Leon Kass is Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and The College at the University of Chicago, and Chairman of the President’s Commission on Bioethics. This man is in charge of deciding that we can use embryonic stem cells for scientific research prior to the date of the proclamation concerning whether or not we can use them. Today he's taking a break from that sort of thing to tell us about the downfall of civilization. Priorities, you know?

Political uses of philosophy of language

Juan Cole trots out Frege's distinction between sense and reference in order to explain why Cheney's decision to reveal Valerie Plame's identity was illegal. Cheney et al seem to have thought that by using the phrase "Joe Wilson's wife" they could avoid the law which forbids revealing a covert agent's name. I think Frege's sense-reference distinction is actually in line with Cheney's position. Picture Cheney claiming that they didn't reveal the name of a covert agent, merely that name's referent.

Still, Cole is clearly invoking Frege in a spirit of "you've got to be kidding me." Anytime "19th century german logicians" enter a political discussion someone is probably getting condescended to, and lord knows that's justified. I wonder if any of the philosophy bloggers will mention this one, since I'm not sure that Cole's invocation of Frege is mistaken.

Update: I probably should be sure about that, since I started my philosophy of language paper on Frege's sense-reference distinction today.

I very nearly failed to get in to grad school today...

You see, it turns out that while you can sign up for the GRE as little as two days in advance and there are GRE tests offered almost constantly throughout the fall, as time goes on the tests fill up. Of the test centers in Durham, Raleigh and Greensboro there was only one open test-date in October. Neither the Raleigh nor the Durham center had any November tests either.

It takes 4-6 weeks for scores to make it to your schools and the Rutgers application is due December 15th. Time for someone to learn me some words.

Fish in a barrel pt 1

Perfect, but a problem. Had the ringtone been a common telephone ring, the scene could have dropped into the final edit without a hitch, the moment providing a quick bit of emotional texture to the film. But EMI Music Publishing, which owns the rights to "Gonna Fly Now," was asking the first-time producer for $10,000 to use those six seconds. (Times)

I don't know how to state the distinction, but it's obvious: the documentarian was not using this song to enhance their documentary, they were recording an event in which the song incidentally appeared. Recording this event should be no more a copyright violation than the woman playing the song in the first place is one.

Perversity

Anomalous behavior on the part of GNU Go: I've been playing with a 4 stone handicap, and winning by perhaps 20 points so long as I concentrated. 3-stone games, I'd lose by 30 points. On Sergio's advice, I've tried some even games, and lost both by 30 points...I know not what to think. Anyway, time to learn fuseki.

Drugs Drugs Drugs

I think I'm being inconsistent. I'd be inclined to agree with both of the following statements:

(1) Most recreational drugs should be made legal. Not just relatively safe drugs like marijuana but also some of the nastier stuff. I'm not sure how far I take this: the relative ease of addiction and debilitating nature of withdrawal symptoms might make a drug like heroin bad enough to warrant legal proscription, though not with the severity of current laws.

(2) The distinction between prescription and non-prescription medications serves an important purpose and should be maintained (without saying that everything is on the side of the line where it should be).

The inconsistency isn't as wide-spread or obvious as it might seem. Many legal prescription drugs are much more dangerous than illicit drugs. To take an obvious example, someone using barbituates under a doctor's supervision is putting themselves in a lot more danger than someone smoking weed.

A second point is that there's more need to regulate something that people think is good for them than something people think is dangerous. People are prone to thinking of drugs in a very Manichean fashion even if they are moderately aware of the facts about how the drugs function. Thinking of a drug as "useful but dangerous" and acting in accord with that thought requires a bit of cognitive sophistication and will power that most people lack. For that reason, allowing people to self-prescribe medication would probably end up having extremely negative effects.

Third, limiting access to prescription drugs while allowing the standard set of recreational drugs would avoid many of the costs of our current program of criminalization. Part of the reason that drug laws are so widely ignored is that there really are no (or few) substitutes for the recreational drugs that people use. So they keep using them, and we have the high cost of enforcement most importantly the harm to those who are prosecuted, or the victims of drug war related crime. If today's recreational drugs were legalized, while keeping prescription drugs limited to those with prescriptions, the prescription drugs wouldn't have the same incidence of illicit recreational use because of the availability of substitutes.

That said, I don't think the tension is really resolved. I ought to think about this more if I want to get it right.

Triviality is my style

Best to break my hiatus gently.

StumbleUpon, the best thing to happen to random internet use since AIM, delivered me to a blog entirely devoted to attacking figurative uses of the word 'literally.' I am literally furious. I can understand the sentiment that the figurative use is becoming so prevalent that it is simultaneously losing its force and obfuscating the original meaning of the term. What annoys me is that a large portion of the people commenting on this website seem to think that it's plain wrong to say "I literally want to kill him" when you do not in fact intend to commit homicide.

The ironic thing about this is that the function of the word 'literally' is to distinguish between literal and figurative uses of a word, yet its defenders are telling us that the figurative use is wrong. So if we applied their advice across the board, we wouldn't even have the word in the first place.

Although it doesn't precisely match the definition, the usage in question is essentially nothing other than hyperbole, a well established rhetorical device. A word of advice, children: when your view has the consequence that Catullus doesn't know how to use language, you might want to jump ship.

An article linked to from said blog indicates that I occupy an odd position by both defending the figurative use and deploring its superabundance.

For the moral psychologists

A few years ago we were all horrified to hear about a first person shooter ethnic cleansing game. We were not horrified to hear about Grand Theft Auto, a game in which you shot random pedestrians and beat hookers. The difference in our reaction was based on the natural assumption that the people who played the first game believed in what they were doing. Or at least, even if they didn't believe in literally gunning down members of other ethnic groups, they thought something like the members of those ethnic groups were subhuman. We didn't assume that the people playing Grand Theft Auto believed in beating hookers or shooting random pedestrians. At least, a lot of us didn't. Hearing the media hysteria, it was clear that someone out there really did seem to think your average teenager believed in beating hookers and shooting pedestrians.

I'm pretty sure we were right. But what lead us to view the two cases differently in that way? I think that's a surprisingly sophisticated judgment at the intersection of ethics and psychology and one that most of us perform quite naturally.

Law of Unintended Consequences

Yesterday evening I left my computer with ITS and today I retrieved something that has a new hard drive. I'm not sure it's my computer because I was missing three arrow keys, and this thing has a new keyboard, so there's no tactile resemblance. When I left mine there was a burzum cd in it and this thing came with a burzum cd, but they could be just that devious.

In this time of new beginnings, I'm starting over with Firefox. I also suspect I won't be reading Salon anymore. I was already falling off of the bandwagon, but with adblock, I now have to go to salon, disable adblock, watch a stupid advertisement to get the site pass and then turn adblock on again before going about my reading. So goodbye dear Salon, you've been a faithful companion these 6 years, but we all must die. Even eclectic left of center webmags with steadily deteriorating content.

Nietzschean Moral Philosophy

Josh Knobe and Brian Leiter have a paper in progress which argues for a Nietzschean approach to moral psychology, in contrast to the dominant Aristotelian and Kantian approaches. The majority of their argument is actually based on a huge body of psychological research which, they argue, is congenial towards the Nietzschean view and mostly incompatible with the alternate views. Much of this work concerns self-deception and free will (first separately then followed by free will as self-deception).

A choice study: It was assumed, for example, that any program that decreased racist attitudes would thereby also decrease racist behavior. This initial assumption was called into question by the influential work of LaPiere (1934). LaPiere went on a long car trip with a Chinese couple. Along the way, he took careful notes about how his companions were treated at each of the hotels and restaurants they visited. Despite the widespread prejudice against Chinese people in America at the time, LaPiere found that he and his companions were generally treated quite well and that they were refused service on only one occasion. Later, he wrote to all 250 hotels and restaurants listed in his notes, asking the employees whether or not they would be willing to serve Chinese guests. Over 90% of respondents said that they would not serve Chinese, in spite of the fact that they had just done exactly that. This finding seemed to suggest that attitudes and behavior were not quite as closely linked as had previously been thought.

I have two recommendations.
1) You should read the paper (it's probably the antepenultimate draft)
2) I should familiarize myself with the majority of the work they cite.

My first recommendation will probably take you 30-90 minutes to comply with. Given the various other commitments I have, the second will take me the next 6 years.

I'd already arranged to meet with Josh this thursday before finding this paper. Now I'll have even more stuff to ask about. *grins*

GoBlogging

Been a while, eh? In the results category, I have played a lot of people and am continuing to improve. I even attended a tournament and conducted myself respectably. You don't want details.

I replayed some of Takemiya's games on the computer and found them utterly incomprehensible. Then I found out that "reviewing Takemiya's games is very instructive since they are full of unusual ideas. It is very difficult to follow his style but at the same time his plays opens horizons for others," so I didn't cry. Then I replayed the most famous game of Go ever, and it wasn't completely bewildering. I think if I keep improving quickly, I'll ask for this book of Shusaku's games for Christmas. Unless it's $47 and I'm not a moron, of course.

You heard it here first: the NRA is nuts

One question that really just now occured to me is how well various national political organizations represent the views of their members. For a while I've criticized the NRA not respecting the positions of a majority of its members on several issues. Part of what makes this so objectionable is that often the members are right at the NRA is wrong. Or sometimes the members are wrong, and the NRA is insane.

But thinking about it more, I suspect that the disconnect between members' opinions and official organizational positions is probably pretty common. And sometimes the organization is closer to being right than its members are. So (1) I'm curious how common the disconnect I mentioned is, (2) I'm unsure how worried about it I need be, and (3) pending the response to (1) and (2), the criticism that the NRA misrepresents its members positions seems pointless: the real problem is that the views involved are typically insane. You could criticize a political organization for failing to represent the views of its members, but I think you'd need a special sort of relationship to the organization to do that. Part of that special sort of relationship involves not wanting to abolish the organization. Since I don't really feel like the NRA needs to exist, I lack that special sort of relationship. So I should just stick to my guns and continue saying that the NRA's positions are freakin nuts.

Quotidiens

Today I had lunch at Peppers with Jason and two other grad students to talk about applying. The conversation ended up just wandering around, with a lot of metaphysics thrown in, since I didn't actually have a lot of specific questions. The net result is that sometime during the conversation, I realized that I've subconsciously decided to apply this year unless I just can't get the work done. So, let there be a conscious decision.

I am applying to grad school this year.

I also decided to ask Keith Simmons and Alan Nelson for recommendations. I'm told that it's no problem that Keith only knows me from a set theory reading group, and Alan has only taught me as a visiting professor. Apparently a recommendation from him would carry a lot of weight, even more than I realized. That'll be four recommendations if each of them ends up being willing (Bill Lycan and Ram Neta are the other two).

Oh yes, time to take the GREs.

John Roberts told me this morning that even though November 18th is the deadline for my thesis defense, it isn't when my final draft is due. More like penultimate, possibly antepenultimate. Still, Nov 18th is precisely 7 weeks from today. Even after making some progress this week, I'm way behind where I need to be. Time to cut back on Go and AIM--if I have the strength.

Oh Gasp! New Math!

A long train of links starting with Belle gets you to the assertion that children in L.A. schools are having trouble learning fractional division because they are being taught that fraction division is repeated subtraction (in the same way that division of natural numbers is repeated subtraction).

Too often, the math that teachers are taught at district training sessions is just plain wrong. For instance, middle school teachers are erroneously taught that fraction division is repeated subtraction. This makes sense only for special examples such as 3/4 divided by 1/4 . In this case, 3/4 may be decreased by 1/4 a total of three times, until nothing is left, and the quotient is indeed 3. Understanding division as repeated subtraction, however, is nonsensical for a problem like 1/4 divided by 2/3 because 2/3 cannot be subtracted from 1/4 even once. No wonder students have trouble with fractions in high school.

Leave aside the odd use of 'erroneously' to describe a working algorithm, but does anyone really think that it's easier to teach kids this complicated method of subtracting fractions instead of the normal "invert and multiply" method? The subtraction method is going to take more computation except in the rare cases where the two fractions have the form a/b and ca/b. I guess that's the point of all the hubub. But maybe I'm out of touch with exactly how the average kid learns math.

Classes

Whatever happened to my underload? I was supposed to take three courses my final semester.

PHIL      109        PHIL PROB PSYCH            LEC     3.0                  
13821 001  T        12:30PM-03:00PM KNOBE, JOSHUA          

Josh Knobe is one of the big guys in experimental philosophy, and he's new here in the department, and he just came and visited phil club and he's totally awesome. Unless the course description ends up being something ridiculously weird, rabid wolves couldn't stop me from taking this course.

PHIL      305        SYSTEMATIC PHIL            LEC     3.0                   
09559 001  W        03:30PM-06:00PM REEVE, C D                

Ancient Philosophy is a requirement for graduation, but I'll sign up for an independent study and take this course on Plato as a substitute, assuming I've correctly identified what this is (I can't sign up for it directly because it's 300 level).

PHIL      240        PHILOSOPHY OF MIND         LEC     3.0                   
13968 001  T        03:30PM-06:00PM LYCAN, W G     

Philosophy of Mind with Bill Lycan?! Unless it's an entire semester on consciousness, the rabid wolves don't stand a chance. It's 200 level, so they won't let me sign up directly. Am I allowed to take two independent studies?

MATH      181        INTRO TOPOLOGY             LEC     3.0                    
07298 001  MWF      11:00AM-11:50AM BELKALE, PRAKAS 

MATH      187        GROUPS AND FIELDS          LEC     3.0                    
07299 001  TR       09:30AM-10:45AM EBERLEIN, P               

Did I ever mention that the math department schedules classes the way Satan would? I could take either or neither of these, depending on how I'm feeling next semester.

LING      137        SEMANTICS                  LEC     3.0                     
07051 001  TR       03:30PM-04:45PM TERRY, JULES, M   

If I've underestimated the rabid wolves, this looks pretty. I'm sure not having ever taken a linguistics course won't be a problem.

Then there's bowling. Oh, did I mention that I definitely have a natural sciences perspective left, and possibly, pending the results of a conversation with the study abroad advisor, a social sciences perspective to fulfill? *Hates*

Bed blogging

...less salacious than it sounds. I've been mildly sleep deprived for a long time now, but I don't have any major obligations until next tuesday, and I plan on spending most of the spare time in bed.

Consistency again

This morning, I mailed a paper to the Editor of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy in ever so distant New Zealand. Since this is an international journal which would be accessible through the internet as well as any university library worth its salt, I should have no hesitation showing the paper to my good friends who always accept me for who I am. Yeah right. But the hobgoblin of little minds is strong today, so here you are.

Witness the rather mundane title: Brutal Composition and Our Intutions.

Update: maybe I'll find out how to make it into a pdf for those of you running linux (does the linux running one still read this, actually?). Anyway, pdfs are nifty and professional looking.

It wasn't necessary

...but oh did I need that guilty self-congratulatory feeling.

Me: I need to send this to New Zealand
Girl behind the counter: "Is this just letters/papers?"
Me: "Yeah, it's just a manuscript."

Why we buy our own books

Davis Library

BD311 .V35 1990

DUE 08-15-06

That's the entry for Peter Van Inwagen's Material Beings, a book that I read a while back and now need a page number from. Given the nature of the book and the length due date, I'm fairly certain I can narrow it down to one of 5 people who has it out of the library. Still, it could easily take as long as a week to track him down and humiliatingly beg to have a look at the book.

Plan b: remove that thankfully inessential citation from the paper and continue.

But, I want the compliments...

The comment spam has ceased being interesting, so I've deleted what's coming in, and turned on word verification to stop more from appearing. Although I'll miss the compliments, I don't think they'll ever match the silver tongue of my first secret admirer.

One of the good guys is being a bad guy

I don't really have a theory of how Supreme Court nominees should be evaluated, but I'm pretty sure that it's not like this:

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, was much less satisfied with the nominee's responses to questions about whether there is a "right to die."

"Do you think the Constitution encompasses a fundamental right for my father to conclude that he does not want to continue - he does not want to continue - on a life-support system?" Mr. Biden asked.

"Well, Senator," the judge replied, "I cannot answer that question in the abstract because - "

"That's not abstract," Mr. Biden interjected. "It's real."

Mr. Biden found the long back-and-forth less than illuminating, referring at one point to "this Kabuki dance we have in these hearings here, as if the public doesn't have a right to know what you think about fundamental issues facing them."

Of particular interest is the bold ontological assertion that abstract objects are not real. While there are certain moods in which I agree, I find Professor Biden's excursion into metaphysics to be a bit of a non-sequitor. That said, John Roberts' confirmation could well be such a disaster that it doesn't matter how bad the stated reasons for opposing him are. Paraphrasing a bit, I'd sooner confirm Godzilla than John Roberts.

It only takes one drop

The Vatican would desperately like to purge American seminaries of gay men, and are preparing by conducting an investigation to find all the mutants.

Edwin O'Brien, archbishop for the United States military, told The National Catholic Register that the restriction should apply even to those who have not been sexually active for a decade or more.

I really hope that they don't think this one through too carefully.

It is unknown how many Catholic priests are gay. Estimates range widely, from 10 percent to 60 percent.

What I was going to write

I was writing a long post detailing my lack of faith in the entire project of giving a theory of reference during these past two days. Shortly before finishing, I made the mistake of expressing some of the same thoughts to Ed and thought "oh wait, I'm just doing a bad job of rehashing Stephen Stich's argument from The Fragmentation of Reason." So instead of the long post, I'll just give you the money shot:

I think that analytic philosophy went insane recently

There's two long posts waiting in the wings, one on Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller" and the other on Benjamin and fascism, but they might die equally horrible deaths.

I have a secret admirer!

Or some comment spam on that last post. You be the judge:

"You have a knack for
writing. I read about 20
blogs a day, and skim about
30 more, so I mean it! We
can all use improvement, but
you certainly are better than
most I've read."

But don't get your feelings hurt, international man of mystery!

"I'm going to be starting a blog
soon, about affordable seo [ed: link removed]
(I know, it sounds strange!) but
if you don't mind, I might drop
you a line just to get a little advice.
Ok?"

Oh how I anticipate that day.

In the meantime, read about how spammers are sort of like aliens.

Down with the king

How could a monarch stoop to dressing so much like a member of the petty-bourgeoisie? In the next generation we will have kings earning their MBAs and selling yard tools.

Judicial Activism please?

Rejoice! The california state legislature passed legislation rendering the marriage law gender neutral. It awaits the signature of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who may well still veto it, in which case there aren't enough votes to push it through (at least I think not).

What I really love is the governor's position, however: "Schwarzenegger's office has repeated that he believes the issue should be decided either by a vote of the people or a court decision" (emphasis added). All the more evidence that the judicial activism issue is a red herring.

Digging myself in deeper

Trying to write for my thesis is becoming a nightmare. Not only is the organization absolutely impossible, I'm really struggling to decide what demands to hold the theory to, so that I'm honestly unsure whether I'm defending Dennett or attacking him, half of the time.

I'm reasonably sure of a number of points, but I have no idea how to work them into a thesis. I'm also worried that everything I've written so far is a dead end that I won't be able to use once/if I clarify these problems.

Things I should've or actually did use as responses to dumb questions on my P.E. webassign

My first stab at the problem was good enough, but I ultimately decided not to submit it on grounds of unresponsiveness:

1. What is the Physical Education Activities Program at UNC trying to accomplish through formulating activity standards?

The physical education activites program at UNC attempts to foster a fascist youth movement centered around the cultivation of an aesthetic of bodily perfection, especially that of the virile young man.

3. Does elitism foster mass-participation in physical activity? Briefly explain your answer.

Elitism is naturally at the core of any fascist movement: the individual learns that he must submerge his private goals into the collective will of the fatherland as it is expressed by the leaders of the nation. Having made peace between individual and state via this submission, the individual then participates in the mass-physical activity dictated by the reich.

4. Physical activity has been shown to provide some protection against several chronic diseases. Name four of these diseases.

Democracy, Modernity, Enfeeblement, Faggotry.

More tactically sound were the following responses:

To 1) The physical education activities program at UNC attempts to promote a culturally relevant approach to fostering physical education that is congruent with the economic and moral necessity of healthy physical activity. PEAP attempts to combat the well documented decline in physical activity following puberty, a period of transition which many UNC students have previously experienced. Thus, these students are at risk for declining levels of physical activity, and PEAP attempts to shelter them from this possibility.

To 3) While some might see elitism as the cornerstone of any regimen of physical education, drawing upon the lengthy cultural history of the Olympian ideal and the correlatory focus on the virile young man, this conception of physical activity seems more likely to promote a spectator society that is detrimental to the possibility of mass-participation in physical activity. Elitism, however natural it may seem, is likely to cause many students to become alienated from physical activity, seeing their own physicality as a flawed cariacature of those privileged by the elitist doctrine, a result which can only be strengthened by the Judeo-Christian conception of the body as an impure and temporary resting place for the soul.

To 4) Physical activity is known to absolutely obliterate coronary heart disease, adult onset diabetes, hypertension and depression.

T-10 minutes

...until there's a legal battle over disciplinary action taken against high school students because of their facebook profiles. From a pragmatic perspective, I really can't imagine what they thought they were doing by launching this new service.