Worth the wait

At the beginning of last September I enjoined us all to, as I put it then, anticipate the following April (= wait til next year). And here we are. What a difference (um, lessee ...) eight months makes! According to mlb.com, the Red Sox, who at 16-8 have the best record in baseball, will have their biggest lead in the standings at the end of April in team history. They've taken five of six from the Yankees; closer Jonathan Papelbon has yet to give up a single run in April in his career; starter Jon Lester (coming back from non-Hodgkins lymphoma) is doing well in rehab, about to return; and Manny has only just begun to hit. Not only that, their $100,000,000 man Dice-K, while performing perfectly acceptably so far, is only the second most exciting Japanese pitcher on the team (all hail Hideki Okajima!).

Of course I've just gone and jinxed it. If there's anything about this team it's the ability to put together a string of inexplicable losses sometime in July or August. But you wouldn't want them to just run away with it, would you?

Deep space

New Philosophers' Carnival, at The Space of Reasons. Thanks Avery!

They're at it again

... over at Leiter Reports, with the analytic/continental thing. The impetus this time was a statement on the U. of Michigan Philosophy Dept. webpage explaining to students that (as the statement puts it):

Philosophers disagree profoundly about what the best way to do philosophy is.

That's true enough, and philosophy students should indeed be aware of this if they're not already. The rest of the statement gives the UM department view of what this difference is. It's pretty much the same as the standard line we've heard before from Leiter et al (Leiter calls it "one of the more sensible things I've seen written about this topic"), and I was going to let it go, but in the comments to my last post Colin asks nicely what my view is, so let me try to say a few things.

First go read the statement if you haven't (it's reposted whole at the Leiter link, plus comments). As it points out, Michigan is an analytic department, so it's not surprising that the statement reads like a press release from the winner of an election, newly magnaminous in victory, and professing hope that winners and losers can heal the breach and work together in the future (on the winner's terms, naturally):

The much-discussed ‘analytic/continental’ divide was an artifact of the conviction, held by many English and American philosophers into the 60’s and 70’s, that analysis was the only way of doing philosophy. As this conviction becomes less widely held, and as analytic philosophers expand their areas of interest, the distinction is becoming less and less significant -- with the result that even predominantly analytic departments like Michigan generally offer courses covering all the major ‘continental’ figures.

See, we're overcoming our old closed-mindedness about that other stuff; we even teach it! But as we know if we've seen this before, when "analytic" philosophers give up the notion that "analysis [is] the only way of doing philosophy", what this means is that they no longer believe that what they do is characterized by a particular philosophical method of "analysis." Instead, what they do is characterized more generally as "valuing clarity and precision in formulating philosophical positions, and scrutinizing arguments carefully" -- or, as Leiter tends to put it, simply philosophy done well. The only thing preventing others from overcoming that artificial divide and doing philosophy well themselves, then, is their apparent preference for gnomic obscurity, or perhaps simple charlatanry (like ... well, you know, the usual suspects). And now that we know this, we can go ahead and teach "continental" philosophers ourselves (at least those, like all of those listed -- Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Foucault -- who are safely dead); but properly now, i.e. formulating their positions clearly and precisely, and scrutinizing them carefully (instead of, I don't know, "interpreting" them like a holy text or something).

So you have to read between the lines of this purposely bland statement to see what's going on. But "continental" philosophy is not the only kind of philosophy condescended to here. Pragmatism is certainly not "continental" philosophy; so it is either relegated to the history books, on the one hand, or folded in with analytic philosophy on the other (after all, officially anyway, the only good pragmatists are scientific realists). Or check out the threefold division of earlier analytic philosophers: some looked for "definitive resolutions" to philosophical problems, some merely for making them clear; but others -- well, "still others [believed] it would show these questions to be ill-formed ‘pseudo-problems.’" Ah yes, cousin Ludwig – rather a black sheep, I'm afraid; but nobody really reads him anymore, so not to worry. Anyway, that just shows what a big tent we "analytics" have; no rigid orthodoxies here!

As should surprise no one, then, the statement is predictably self-serving baloney. But as Colin mentioned in his comment, I myself come from an analytic background. What then should we "analytics" say about other methods/practices/traditions? Well, that's a hard question to answer. I'll have to put most of it off; but let me say a few things. First, for all my abuse of it, the statement is quite right that "analytic philosophy" no longer names a particular method, or even a bunch of people who all read each other's work. Instead it names a bunch of people who were trained by, or who were trained by people who were trained by, an earlier bunch of people who either shared a method or simply read each other's work. Some of these people have very different attitudes toward other kinds of philosophy than, say, Carnap did. So the "analytic/continental split" is indeed "becoming less and less significant" in that sense.

So while Rorty may have been right a quarter-century ago to complain that analytic departments were those in which the answer to the question of "who is going to teach Hegel and Nietzsche?" was "no one" or "the German department" (or "the English/comp lit department"), this is less so nowadays, even in smaller departments. And in non-pedagogical contexts we see much more interaction: McDowell reaches out to Hegel and Gadamer; Habermas is big on Putnam and Brandom (himself a big Hegel fan); Andrew Bowie aligns Davidson with Schelling and Schleiermacher; Jeff Malpas merges Davidson with Heidegger and Gadamer; the Cavellians are all over Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Emerson, and the Romantics; and of course the interest of cognitive scientists in phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty is old news.

All this is to the good (not like I agree with – or even understand – all of these people, of course). But I would have to agree with Leiter that the overwhelming majority, as well as the trend, in "analytic philosophy" (now understood, again, as the various heirs of a once much more unified "tradition"), continues to regard not only most continental figures, but also the collaborators I mentioned, as inimical or irrelevant to a naturalist program they regard as central to it (if perhaps not constitutive of it as a method would be) -- that is, unless they can be read as naturalists themselves (as Leiter does Nietzsche, as a sort of proto-Quine).

Indeed, one commenter on Leiter's post suggests that a more relevant "split" might be between realists and anti-realists, or between naturalists and their opponents. And while the former seems inadequate (leaving out as it does, well, the rest of us), the latter may indeed be as important as Leiter suggests; but it works better, I think, when we see it as a split within "analytic philosophy" (again broadly construed). On the one side, in the ascendant, we have not only overt naturalism like Leiter's, but any other sort of incorrigibly Cartesian or dualistic view, however manifested: residual metaphysical realism (whether in metaphysical, epistemological, or semantic contexts), resurgent a priori metaphysics, hard-core empiricism, whatever. This of course is most of "analytic philosophy," and I find myself more and more thinking about letting them have the term. On the other side, scattered and demoralized, we have (neo-)pragmatists, (certain) Wittgensteinians, (some) phenomenologists, and others, which I suggest can be grouped in an unfortunately but unavoidably loose and fractious coalition which some have called "post-analytic". The term invites misunderstanding and is somewhat pretentious, but it does at least have the virtue of reflecting both a shared "analytic" background (if such there be) and a somewhat tentative search for new directions, including, possibly, a move toward other, non-analytic areas.

But I'm not wedded to it (the term). I just think that we need something like that to capture my sense that someone like Kit Fine (or James Pryor, or Jason Stanley, etc., etc.) and I, while both "philosophers," aren't even practitioners of the same discipline, let alone members of the same "school"; yet at the same time our differences might very well be traceable back to a wrong turn (or a failure to turn) that one or the other of us (or his main influences) made in the past, such that we can each see ourselves as having the same (ultimate) forebears -- or even to specific doctrines on which we disagree.

So "continental" philosophy need not even enter into it, in this sense. For all I've just said, I still find it much easier to read Pryor and Williamson than, say, Badiou or Zizek. In other words, there's a difference between reading texts such as the latter, which, due to their alien provenance, are painfully opaque, and reading texts which are painfully wrong-headed (even if thereby equally confusing). This means that even while seeing most analytic philosophy as stuck in the mud, "post-analytics" (that still looks funny) should be seen not as crossing over a DMZ to the other side, as much as looking wistfully out the window of a house divided.

So that's my rant. Beat that, Colin ... if you can.

Truly random nine (power failure edition)

I have two reasons for not posting recently: first, I've been wading through (and occasionally contributing to) a monumental thread at the Valve about Derrida and idealism, which was interesting but (surprise!) inconclusive. Secondly, thanks to the recent nor'easter, we had a) a flooded basement, which had to be dealt with, and b) a power failure. But from these lemons we (eventually) make the bloggy lemonade, yes?

One night after considerable basement-to-lawn water-relocation activity, I fired up the computer, only to be greeted soon after by the sudden onset of near-total darkness (thank you, PSE & G). I say near-total, because my laptop was still on, having switched to battery power. But my aged titanium PowerBook (which must be all of three or four years old) no longer charges very well, and only ever says it has a half-hour of power left (which actually means it's on the verge of shutting down). Besides, the modem went out too.

So I turned it off and instead of fumbling around for some lights, I went to bed. But I was wide awake, so I located my battery-powered discman and headphones, the plan being to listen to something to lull me to sleep. But of course there was no light, so I couldn't just pop in, say, Trances & Drones or anything by Alio Die. So I picked something at random from the many piles of discs within arm's reach. Here is the result of that search for your amusement. The first disc I selected turned out to be:

1. Kettel – Through Friendly Waters (Sending Orbs)

Kettel is a Dutch person/ensemble (I think person), and this is Sending Orbs 001, from a couple of years ago. I've only listened to it a couple of times, but after a few minutes I identified it correctly, which was harder than you might think, as quite a bit of contemporary ambient sounds somewhat like this. There was something about the sequencers though which sounded familiar. After a couple of tracks I found it too busy for my present purposes, so I moved on, to

2. Sogar – Basal (12k)

This too I recognized pretty quickly (although I did get a hint from the slimline case). Here also we have a common style (minimal/pointillist DSP stuff, like virtually everything else on that label), so it wasn't obvious. I like this disc, but I didn't want to hear it just then. Next:

3. Sandoz – Digital Lifeforms (Touch)

Some people swear by the amazingly prolific Richard H. Kirk (ex-Cabaret Voltaire, if you remember them), and I have a number of his discs under various monikers, but I don't. Swear by him, that is. This one is from 1993, and it has some good tracks on it, but like his other discs it's very beaty and not what I was looking for. I failed to identify it, by the way. I listened to most of track 1, not liking its plodding drumbeats at all and wondering what mistake I had made, that this disc takes up space in my collection (but as I said, some later tracks are good). I forget the exact order of the next few discs I chose. One of them was

4. Daniel Menche – Beautiful Blood (Alien8)

Menche is one of the premier American noise artists, and I have several of his discs. This one is billed as being a bit more ambient/listenable than the others, which I suppose it is, compared to, say, legions in the walls, but after several portentous low piano notes at the beginning of track 1, a tremendous burst of static reveals what sort of disc this is. Track two is indeed more drony, and might have worked, but I had not pegged this as either Menche or this particular disc, so I didn't try it.

5. Alp – at home with alp

This one begins with several minutes of rumbling, and I impatiently took it to be one of those avant-garde discs that sounds better on the page than in the ear; and indeed it turns out to have a semi-trendy conceptual-art-ish component, in that all the sounds are derived (as the disc's title suggests) from objects found in the home (track 1: disk drive, kettle, washing machine). I ejected it quickly; but like the Menche disc, if on a smaller scale, this is a fine semi-noisy effort. In fact I think I'll listen to it all later. This is the first Alp disc; his second, out and about with alp, uses found recordings from outside, and has some lovely ambient tracks.

6. Greg Davis – somnia (Kranky)

Here we have a promising title (but of course I couldn't see it). And in fact for heavily DSPed computer music it's very drifty and ambient (as we might expect given the label, home of Stars of the Lid and suchlike). On the other hand, for drifty ambient it has more of a harsh digital edge than one would really want if one is indeed hoping to drift off to sleep. Maybe I'll listen to this one too.

7. Shostakovich – String Quartets 3, 8, & 13 (Fitzwilliam String Quartet)

This was not what I wanted either. Of course I could have gotten a light and located something non-random (looking now, I see several candidates at or near the top of the various piles: not only Alio Die, but Jeff Greinke, Oöphoi, Thomas Köner, Synthetika, shuttle358, etc.). But I was determined to stick it out. Of course this is a great disc too. I recognized it immediately, although I knew it was #3 not because I know it that well, but because it's the only opening work on any single-disc Shostakovich quartet collection I own (I've got two cycles) -- oh wait, I might have a 7, 13, 14 somewhere. You might think #3 was an early work, but DSch didn't start writing quartets right away (good move), and #3 turns out to be a middle-period work from 1946, about the same time as the Ninth Symphony, and totally rocks. Which is not what I wanted to do.

8. Robert Wyatt – shleep (thirsty ear)

Okay, now I know someone's mocking me. The front painting (by Alfreda Benge, Robert's wife) even shows Robert asleep on the back of a gigantic bird. But the music, great as it is (all-star cast, including Evan Parker, Phil Manzanera, Brian Eno, Paul Weller, and Philip Catherine), is not sleepy at all. The opening track, "Heaps of Sheeps," about trying to get to sleep, has been running through my head ever since. Here's a lyrical excerpt:

Still not sleeping,
I tried counting sheep.
One by one,
they leapt across the fence
constructed for them.
Right to left,
across the fence I had constructed.
Having jumped,
they refused further direction.

Each sheep, where it landed,
refusing to exit, remained.
(Creating a vast writhing heap
growing fast on the left).
Try as I might,
I could not stop them entering
once again.
Try as they might,
not one could leave the stage.

As it says on the back of the disc (tweaking Hamlet, no doubt): "fat chance to dream".

But then:

9. various artists – Infraction Sampler 1: Fall/Winter 2005-2006

A short but glorious bath of frayed string chords greets my ear. Here, finally, we have some seriously ambient material, from a fine microlabel dedicated to same. (Check website here.) I did have some trouble IDing this disc though. A CDR was generously included with one of my orders as compensation for having waited so long for a pre-order, and as I have most of the tracks on the discs themselves, I hadn't listened to this one that much. I should have gotten the Ultra Milkmaids/Aidan Baker track (track 3), but it just hadn't occurred to me that this disc might be an anthology, and I was still puzzled about track 2 (an unreleased track by Mifune), which was a very nice guitar/echo piece in a sort of muted Günter Schickert mode. At one point I did indeed start thinking Andrew Liles-y thoughts (track 5), but I knew the whole disc couldn't be him, and I still hadn't put two and two together. If I had stuck it out through track 10 (a track from a forthcoming reissue of Tetsu Inoue's classic World Receiver, which everyone should snap up immediately when it arrives), I would have understood; but I was indeed starting to fall asleep by track 7 or so, so I quit.

But I have learned my lesson: I have placed the Matthias Grassow/Klaus Wiese disc mercurius (Arya) where I can locate it even in the dark.

UPDATE: The World Receiver reissue, I see, has been out for some time. Go get it!

))<>((

If you know what this delightful icon denotes, then you will want to check out this amusing site – not that the site concerns what the icon denotes, mind you! (If not, go here, not like that's a complete explanation or anything.)

HT: Mormon Metaphysics

Fair's fair

At Mixing Memory, Chris ameliorates his own lack of postage by sending us to two separate discussions, each between Sam Harris and Some Religious Guy. RG #1 is Andrew Sullivan, and this one's been going on for a while. Last time I checked, they had reached an impasse, but it seems they've been plugging away nonetheless. Good luck, fellas!

RG #2 is celebrity pastor Rick Warren, whose encounter with Harris was documented in this last week's Newsweek magazine. Man, is it ever painful to read (thanks Chris!). Here's where I gave up, about a third of the way through:

WARREN: Where do you get your morality? If there is no God, if I am simply complicated ooze, then the truth is, your life doesn't matter, my life doesn't matter.

HARRIS: That is a total caricature of—

WARREN: No, let me finish. I let you caricature Christianity.

Well, that's okay then.

No joke

They're not fooling around at the latest Philosophers' Carnival. Check it out!

Wheels within wheels

Today is April 1, which (for the benefit of those from distant locales, spambots or no) we in the U. S. of A. celebrate by playing practical jokes on each other. (I believe that in France they have "poisson d'avril" or some such.) So today I was interested to read of an elaborate stunt that some wiseacres have played on us.

I need to back up a bit. I haven't commented on it, but one extended skirmish in the evolution wars over the past few weeks has been between one Dr. Michael Egnor, a purported neurosurgeon, on the ID side, and various interblogutors on the other, many from scienceblogs (see here and here, for example).

But today it was revealed that the whole thing was a joke:

Over the past month I [i.e., "Egnor"] have engaged in what my friend Bill Dembski ludicly refers to as "street theatre". My posts here [i.e., on the Discovery Institute blog] have been an outlandish parody of the bona fide Intelligent Design position, liberally injected with many of the more simplistic errors of the Young Earth Creationists. My purpose was to see how far we could go before the gullible Darwinists realized they were being taken for a ride. The Discovery Institute has graciously aided (and abetted!) by allowing me a voice on this weblog and by giving me valuable feedback on my comedic output. Together, we have succeeded in duping the Darwinists (like the foul-mouthed duncecaps at the Panda's Thumb and Scienceblogs).

At The Panda's Thumb we find a sporting tip of the cap to the prankster(s), and PZ at Pharyngula is equally red-faced.

So, ha ha? Not so fast. If this is a joke by the Discovery Institute, it's hard to see the point of it. As Mark CC's post (first scienceblogs link above, at Good Math, Bad Math) shows, "Egnor's" misunderstandings of the relevant concept of information are sadly typical and not at all susceptible to the "you actually thought I believed that? Whatta maroon!" treatment. In fact they pretty much hew to the standard ID line on the matter; as does a lot of the rest of what "Egnor" says. And as commenters at PT/PZ point out, if it's hard to tell deliberate balderdash from arguments in earnest, that could just as easily say something about those arguments in earnest as it was supposed to say about those too dense to tell them apart.

Other commenters at these pages – more suspicious, more sharp-eyed, or at least more awake than the rest of us – tell us to take a closer look at the page on which the hoax is revealed. It sure looks like the DI blog ... but instead of "Discovery Institute" it says "Discover"; the trackback URL is to "www.disocvery.org"; the page is called "Evolution Views & News" instead of "News & Views"; and, at bottom below the trackback, the blurb says "Evolution Views & News presents analysis of that coverage, as well as original reporting that accurately delivers misinformation [!] about the current state of the debate over Darwinian evolution" ... although the subsequent link is indeed to the real DI blog (evolutionnews.org, that is, rather than evolutionnews.net). Lastly (or is it?), the figure in the logo seems to be wearing an eyepatch (and may thus, if I am up to date on these matters, be a closet Pastafarian).

So, what we have here is in fact (as Maxwell Smart would say), the old fake hoax trick. Unless it itself is a hoax too (the old ersatz fake hoax trick?). In any case, the real entry for Evolution News & Views is here, credited, as it happens, to Dr. Michael Egnor. So is he spoofing us too? Let's take a look.

The post begins with a swipe at materialism. Not surprisingly, Dr. Egnor is not an advocate of this position (i.e., physicalism). Amazingly enough, we agree on this point. Physicalism is a form of metaphysical substance monism: everything that exists is composed of a single substance type -- matter. Its natural opponent is substance dualism, most famously in Descartes. But as I've said before, substance dualism is only the most superficial manifestation of Cartesian subject/object dualism. Once we resolve to stop plucking the dandelion and go for the roots (whether or not we go on to trade them for a rhizome), physicalism is no longer well-motivated. In fact it preserves the dualistic opposition in its negative form (as, similarly, do most forms of several other doctrines: skepticism, empiricism, anti-realism, and a bit further away, consequentialism). The actual dualistic error is the urge to ground the manifest qualitative difference between normative and causal explanations of everyday facts in a corresponding metaphysical difference between types of substance. In resisting this error in the way they do – by affirming a single substance-type and grounding the appearances in it and its various manifestations, it seems to me that physicalists themselves succumb to the pernicious urge.

What this post needs now, I feel, is (hold onto your hats) a lengthy quotation from John McDowell. As he puts it in his awesome paper "Functionalism and Anomalous Monism" (originally from Actions and Events, the second volume of papers from a marathon Davidson conference in 1985, which is out of print, but the paper is now available here as well):

It is quite intelligible [he says in response to an argument of Brian Loar] that [substance dualism] should seem to be [the] basic flaw [of the Cartesian picture], and consequently that a "physicalist" conception of the inner should seem to be exactly what we need instead. But [...] I think this account of the Cartesian picture does not go deep enough; and if we go deeper, this apparent recommendation for "physicalism" disappears.

What is fundamentally at issue is the pull of the idea that reality is objective, in the sense of being fully describable from no particular point of view. [footnote: Nagel's article "Subjective and objective"] This idea is in tension with a natural intuition to the effect that the mental is both real and essentially subjective [in the relevant sense]. Cartesian [substance] dualism results from trying to put these forces in equilibrium: the subjectivity of the mental is (supposedly) accommodated by the idea of privileged access, while the object of that access is conceived, in conformity with the supposed requirement of objectivity, as there independently – there in a reality describable from no particular point of view – rather than as being constituted by the subject's special access to it. [footnote: B. Williams's book on Descartes] Since there is no plausibility in the idea that one could have the appropriate kind of special access to something "physical," the upshot is the notion of a non-"physical" substance.

This account of what generates the Cartesian picture of the inner suggests that to recoil from Cartesian dualism into "physicalism" may be to avoid only a superficial defect; it may be that the fundamental flaw is the attempt to force the mental into an objective mould, something still plainly operative in the supposedly healthy position in which this recoil leaves one. (pp. 394-5 in original; [fetches other volume] 335-6 in the McDowell collection, from which see also "Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World," another corker)

But as you might imagine that's not Dr. Egnor's route (remember him?) to the rejection of physicalism. Here's sentence four of his post:

[M]aterialism is nonsense, because if matter and energy are all that exist, then truth doesn't exist (it's neither matter nor energy). If truth doesn't exist, then materialism can't be true.

Wow. Now let this be a lesson to you (should you need same): a true conclusion does not a non-ridiculous argument make.

But wait! Perhaps he too is joking. Sadly, I believe that he is not. Once again, this is too close to the actual ID line on the matter for the joke to have much point. I think Alvin Plantinga (a philosopher, even, to the shame of our guild) says something like this in his review of Dawkins's book. I'll stop now, but maybe we can pick this up again some time, like when there is no question of spoiling the joke.

UPDATE [4/6]: I missed this accompanying post at the Panda's Thumb, which either does or does not confirm my verdict about Egnor's post.

Humanists behaving badly

Not so much postage recently (busy!), but I've got a few things in the works. Here's another link to tide us over.

I don't want to make a big deal about not (really) very much, but I did find this to be a depressing little episode. Jeremy, Julian (in comments), and Ophelia administer the tough love here, here, and here.

Awesome random quote

As you know, some blogs have all kinds of stuff in the sidebar (we're sort of minimal that way here at DR), including random quotations. I think Clark had one from Strawson that I commented on some time ago. Anyway, I just got a great one at Pharyngula:

The politics of failure has failed! And I say we must move forward, not backward! Upward, not forward! And always twirling, twirling, TWIRLING toward freedom!

Kodos, (disguised as Bob Dole), THE SIMPSONS

That episode has some great bits. ("Go ahead, throw your vote away!")

Lynx

1. Slow-motion train wreck here. I find these curiously fascinating, especially when I have some sympathy for both "sides" (not to imply that any actual engagement took place ...). HT: Butterflies and Wheels (see comments there too).

2. Flash guide to "electronic music" here. More like electronic dance music, I would say; and some of the examples are oddly chosen. Fun to look at though. HT: oscillate.it (some other good music links there too)

3. I clicked through to that site (relatively inactive before now) from A brood comb, who credits it with this link, which has video and audio of a lecture by Hilary Putnam (not sure if it's new material though). For more, see Abc's online-philvideo page, which is pretty impressive by now.

4. Leiter Reports reports that there will be another online philosophy conference in May; some big names will be posting (video too!). So click over here ... in May. I'll remind you. If I remember.

Decisions, decisions

Carlos Reygadas is a Mexican director whose first feature film, Japón, showed him a) to be a promising young (30 at the time) talent, who b) had seen about 15 too many Robert Bresson movies (which is not easy to do, believe me). I do approve of using non-professional actors, and I did like Japón, which was very Bresson/Tarkovsky/Kiarostami-in-rural-Mexico, but it was tough sledding in spots; I think I watched the DVD in three shifts. Some prominent Arvo Pärt on the soundtrack, if that tells you anything. Nice title, by the way ("Japan," a country in which, as I have already mentioned, the film is definitely not set). Some of you would like it a lot (you know who you are). On the other hand, if you're one of those people, you've probably already seen it twice.

Anywho, I recently saw a predictably uninformative trailer for his subsequent film, Batalla en el cielo, and I thought I'd go over to imdb to check it out before tracking down the DVD. Now there was some, um, unusual material in Japón; nothing to give you nightmares or anything, but enough to make one just a little wary. imdb has a relatively new feature on their recently redesigned page, which shows five (presumably) computer-generated recommendations: if you liked this film, you may also like these others.

So what does the imdb database recommend for those who enjoyed Batalla en el cielo, you ask?

1. Caligula
2. Ken Park
3. Intimacy
4. In the Realm of the Senses
5. Visitor Q

I've seen three of these films. I had heard that Caligula was really bad, but I love Malcolm McDowell, who is perfectly cast as Caligula: Alex the Droog as Roman Emperor, always up for a bit of the old ultra-violence. So I saw it. It was really bad. Oscar trivia: in 2007, one nominee for each of the Best Actress and Best Actor awards, including one winner, appeared in this film almost thirty years previously (Helen Mirren and Peter O'Toole). How about that?

I did like Intimacy (dir. Patrice Chéreau), which has some fine acting (Mark Rylance, Kerry Fox, the always great Timothy Spall) along with the apparently unsimulated (i.e., real) explicit sex. But you see where this is going (check out the Plot Keywords for this film at the imdb link: hel-lo!).

In the Realm of the Senses is Nagisa Oshima's legendary 1976 shocker of sexual obsession. Thumbs up on this one too (but you have to like that sort of thing – by which I mean that era of Japanese avant-garde cinema, you naughty boy).

I'd never heard of Ken Park, but it turns out to be a film by Larry Clark, director of Kids and other teen-sex-exposé-cum-exploitation numbers, of which I have seen zero to date. One imdb commenter on the film says: "Before watching 'Ken park' I was warned this was the uncensored version. If there really is a censored version, may be the one in theaters, it would probably miss around an hour out of the hour and a half the movie runs." Oooo-kay.

The last film is a film by Takashi Miike. I did not dislike Audition, but after reading reviews of Ichi the Killer I decided to pass on further visits to the twisted Miike psyche. Here's what another imdb commenter says about Visitor Q: "There are some truly disturbing things in Visitor Q that few people of sound mind and body will want to sit through. Fortunately, I am not of sound mind or body." Body? Yikes. Oh, and the page also lists (under Fun Stuff) a Continuity Goof: "At the start of the film when the girl is undressing to have sex with her Dad, she takes her socks off. However when we see her again a few seconds later, she still has them on. She then removes them (again)." Even though I thereby repeat myself, I say again: yikes.

So I guess I know something about Batalla en el cielo. Just not whether or not I want to see it.

Philosophers gone wild

Philosophers' Carnival, Spring Break edition, now up at Movement of Existence. Thanks Bryan!

Ooh, me too!

The Scienceblogs crew is discussing important matters for once (e.g., here, here, here, here), and I commented at Pharyngula, but I find I have more to say. It concerns someone's list (no Scienceblogger, but someone else, here; click the link for an amusing editorial comment on one writer) of

The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002

Note the dates, which I shall ignore in my comments below. Like everyone else, I shall embolden the titles of those I have read.

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

Only read this three or four times (not like some people). That may hold me, in fact.

The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov

I loved this as a teen. I grant his stylistic deficiencies though.

Dune, Frank Herbert

Some find this overrated, which I certainly do not. But there's no reason to read past the first one. (Although if you do, #5 (Heretics of Dune) is kind of fun.)

Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein

Not what I expected when I finally read it. I can see why hippies liked it.

A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

I assume they mean the series. This is well worth reading as a good example of the wizards & dragons (as opposed to sword & sorcery, which is a bit different) school of fantasy. And unlike some, I have no problem with putting fantasy in with SF. The first three books are the best, but I liked the fourth one too (Tehanu, written much later). I think there are one or two others. As I expected, she went ballistic when the miniseries had Ged as a blond-haired blue-eyed white guy.

Neuromancer, William Gibson

Again unlike some, I think cyberpunk at its best was a breath of fresh air. In any case this is certainly a "significant" book (I like the second one (Count Zero) best though).

Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke

I do think Clarke is a bit overrated, but this is a fine effort.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick

Interesting disagreements on this one too. Like most people, I prefer the film on the one hand, and other Dick on the other (Three Stigmata, A Scanner Darkly, Ubik)

The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley

Good idea – King Arthur from the Celtic angle – but toooo looong.

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

When I think of Bradbury I always think of that Simpsons episode in which übergeek Martin Prince is running for class president, and makes a campaign pledge that he will establish a science fiction library featuring "the ABC's of the genre: Asimov, Bester, and Arthur C. Clarke!" To the question "What about Ray Bradbury?" his dismissive reply is "I'm aware of his work." I like Bradbury myself, but my favorite by far is The Martian Chronicles, which is a thing of beauty. This is okay though.

The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe

As I mentioned at Pharyngula, I hated this, and I can't believe I went on to read all four, especially after suffering through the godawful third one. (Bit of a rebound in the finale though, as I recall.) It really is insufferable (look at me, my main character's a torturer!). Forget this and try Robin Hobb's Assassin trilogy.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.

I liked this, but it's been a while and I don't remember it that well.

The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov

Another teen fave, and all respect for our progenitors, but I think Foundation is all we really need.

Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison

Not sure I read all of these stories. I do approve of the edgy turn SF took around that time, but sometimes a little goes a long way.

Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany

I did read Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, which was okay, but I think I'll skip this one, which sounds like more of the same and then some.

Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card

I did like this, but I have no intention of reading any of his other books. I bet the original short story is much better; this seems padded, and it's that stuff that I hear predominates in the later books. It's true of Delany and it's true here: Nobody wants to hear your stupid politics, big guy.

The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl

Interesting premise; lame payoff. Worth reading though.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling

I guess this one is the most "significant" in that it was a surprise smash hit, but I think each successive one is slightly better than the preceding one (haven't read Half-blood Prince yet).

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

Best as the original radio series; on the page the timing is off. But yes, essential. Like other series, though, it tails off in quality after three.

I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin

This is perhaps a tad overrated, but I admire the ambition.

Little, Big, John Crowley

I'll get to this one, really I will. I have a copy and everything. Right there on the shelf. (*sigh*)

Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny

Only Zelazny I've read. Very nice.

The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick

Again, not my favorite, but respectable (his Hugo winner, I believe).

Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke

Now this is overrated. Where's the punch line, after all that? And there are sequels too (glug).

Ringworld, Larry Niven

Not believable, but entertaining.

Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien

I own it, but I just can't see reading it.

Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut

I went through a Vonnegut phase once. This is a good one, as is the movie, but Cat's Cradle is my favorite. The Sirens of Titan is also great.

Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

Another polarizing figure. My own view is a common one: good stuff, but learn how to write an ending! I like Diamond Age too (same caveat), but I have spurned the subsequent doorstops.

Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner

Another ambitious tome, which (although a bit dated by now) I liked a lot. Check out his eco-dystopia The Sheep Look Up.

The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock

Haven't read this one, but Behold the Man was a kick in the head. Remember all the fuss about The Last Temptation of Christ? If Pat Robertson read Behold the Man his head would explode.

The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks

Never read it, and after all the abuse I've seen piled on it, I never will.

Timescape, Gregory Benford

Okay. He's a physicist, and the premise is interesting, but I don't remember it that well.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

This is Riverworld vol. 1, I think. One was enough for me.

So that's 28 out of 50: respectably geeky, although not geektastic. I think we've seen that result around here before. Of the ones I haven't read I think I'll try Bester next – people seemed to like him a lot (even if one of them was Martin Prince).

Of course everyone had favorites that were missing. At Pharygula I mentioned off the top of my head:

Patricia McKillip. I don't understand why she isn't better known. Maybe it's the covers of her books, which no guy would dare carry around with him lest he be beaten up. But she totally rocks. Riddle-Master is the early epic every fantasy writer has in them (and I loved it), but I actually prefer The Book of Atrix Wolfe and the more recent Alphabet of Thorn. Lyrical and haunting.

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Jane Austen (or some Victorian, say Dickens) writes fairy stories. Slow start, but gets better and better. Definitely groundbreaking. Not at all like McKillip, but the same point applies: people look down on "fairy tales," but when they're good they're %$#&in' creepy. I want to read it again.

Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep. Just read this one after multiple recommendations (e.g. the last time we did this). Galactic-scale SF, great concept, cool aliens.

David Brin, Startide Rising. Like the previous entry: uppity humans vs. ancient galactic powers. Great aliens (must learn dolphin trinary someday). This is book two of a trilogy, of which I liked the other two less (you can skip the first one, as the plots are not that closely related; whatever you need to know is filled in for you; similarly, the plot gets tied up nicely at the end, so you can skip #3 as well, though I did like parts of that one too).

More (upon reflection):

Stanislaw Lem. At one point I had read everything available in English. More literary than most; typical 20th-C. Eastern Europe sensibility, written in a wide range of styles. My favorites: The Chain of Chance, His Master's Voice, Fiasco, Solaris (and yes, I liked both movie versions), Imaginary Magnitude, A Perfect Vacuum (the last two are rather experimental ...).

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Mars Trilogy. Maybe I was a sucker for this, liking The Martian Chronicles like I do, but (with that book) this is the definitive story of Mars colonization. I also liked The Years of Rice and Salt (alternative history w/reincarnation).

Robert Charles Wilson, Spin. A recent favorite. Very nice hard SF with a galactic time-scale, although not an epic (yes, such a thing is possible). His heroes do tend to be dour, damaged souls, but I did also like Blind Lake and The Chronoliths. Ooh, I see he has a sequel (Axis) scheduled for July release. Maybe we'll find out [redacted].

Robert Morgan, Altered Carbon. Another recent fave, very entertaining if not deep. Tightly plotted cyber-noir, where the two genres really do mesh nicely. Violent though.

I was surprised to see no Robert Silverberg, who was a big name at one time. Not a genius, I suppose, but deserves mention. I liked Dying Inside.

China Mieville is a new name I hear a lot. I haven't read any of his big books, but I did like Looking for Jake, his collection of stories.

Kelly Link! Yes, this promising new writer gets an exclamation point. No novels yet, but two collections of bizarrely compelling stories.

Also, I'm sure I read something by Kate Wilhelm that was really great, but I can't remember the title. It was the one where ... (okay, never mind).

Not really appropriate for the list, but relevant while we're on the subject: I also enjoy the more out-there material by (*cough*) "literary" writers. Lem is often compared to these guys, but for some reason only he counts as a real SF writer. I refer to Borges, Italo Calvino, Haruki Murakami (my first one was A Wild Sheep Chase, which is great), even (stretching the point a bit) Pynchon, Hesse, Kafka, and this guy no-one else seems to have heard of, Robert Pinget (try Someone). I also hear good things about the latest Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go).

Okay, I'm sure I've forgotten some wonderful things, but forgetting wonderful things is what life is all about.

More of the same (no intuitionism this time!)

First my standard disclaimer: this started out as a reply to Aidan's reply, in comments, to my last post (for which I thank him). But again, my rule is that anything of this length goes out front. I'll start out in the third person, but subsequent occurrences of "you" may refer to Aidan, in his post or reply.

In his comment, Aidan quotes Scanlon as finding the trivial answer unsatisfying because "it simply takes the reason-giving force of moral considerations for granted." This seems to me to conflate two different things. Consider the ambiguity of "simply" here (just as an example, to see what I'm getting at). I agree that the trivial answer does this, and that it is unsatisfactory. But its unsatisfactory nature is not due (simply!) to its doing this at all, but instead that that is all that it does – it "simply" points to it. This is trivial; we wanted more.

Reading "simply" the other way, it says that it does this (i.e., takes the r-g f. of m. c. for granted) undeniably: it does indeed do it; it simply does; there's no way around it. It does indeed do this undeniably. But that, as I've said, is not what's wrong with it. A better answer will do that too. It is not that it does it at all which renders it trivial, but the unhelpful way in which it does it. There's no explanation there, just affirmation (however correct).

So it's not that "merely asking 'why does an action's wrongness give me reason not to perform it?' shows some kind of scary conceptual deficiency." That may indeed be what one finds puzzling, and it is not at this point, nor to the very idea of moral philosophy, that I object. My problem is with the implied requirements on acceptable answers. As you say, questions of the form "why is this a reason for that?" need not imply skepticism about whether this is indeed a reason for that. But that's my line. For certain requirements on the form of acceptable answers seem to me to amount in practice to skepticism. One is required to act, in generating and evaluating such answers, as if one did not (yet) believe the conclusion – as if one were a moral ignoramus. That's what makes it seem as if there is a "scary conceptual deficiency" – not that one asks the question at all. Puzzlement does indicate "conceptual deficiency" of a more everyday kind, not necessarily scary, and we treat it with a better account of how the concepts in question function – even if this does entail telling you what you already know, albeit now in a more perspicuous form which makes (the proper use of) the relevant concepts clear.

So the disagreement, it seems to me, concerns the purpose and nature of philosophical explanation. If you demand an "explanation" for something (here, the reason-giving force of moral wrongness), and you also specify that it not appeal to the truth of that which is being explained (whether or not you claim to believe it already), then this "explanation" can only take the form of an argument from the one (thus narrowly construed) to the other. This is effectively a skeptical requirement. This is why it looks like there's a dilemma: the non-trivial horn consists of such arguments, the unacceptability of which is that in scrupulously refraining from taking the conclusion for granted (in order to meet the requirement), these arguments, however effective they may be in showing that the conclusion holds, fail to explain. We are still in the dark about what puzzles us. That much is true: neither horn of the dilemma is acceptable.

I originally put this by saying I didn't think the dilemma bit: there are other, better, explanations which, in spurning that questionable requirement, are impaled on neither horn. But I could say instead that I do think the dilemma bites those committed to the questionable (I'd probably say "Cartesian," but that's my universal term of abuse) conception of philosophical explanation, but I'm not one of those people. It is indeed a puzzle how an acceptable explanation of that form could be enlightening. Compare the skeptical paradox: it does bite those with Cartesian conceptions of knowledge – an important fact, which should indeed be rubbed into the relevant complacent faces – but the rest of us (however few we may be) may shrug it off. (On the other hand, it's not "Prichard's paradox" but his "dilemma.")

Another way to see my worry is to compare it to McDowell's rejection (e.g. in "In Defense of Modesty") of Dummett's analogous demand in the theory of meaning, i.e., that we explain the phenomenon of meaning without appealing to it at all, taking up, as McDowell puts it (either there or in "Anti-realism and the epistemology of understanding"), the perspective of a "cosmic exile." For McDowell and me, "modest" explanations (from a "participant perspective," although I'm not sure McDowell uses this term) are perfectly good, and "explanations" to cosmic exiles inconceivable. I think this is Anscombe's Aristotelian point too ("Modern Moral Philosophy").

As for your second point. (Boy, careful explanation takes time, doesn't it?) My point is that speaking of "p" allows elision of a key distinction: between propositions I believe and those I don't. Any specific example falls into one but not the other of these, and in such cases I will know which. If I have no idea whether it is true (Andromeda example), I fail to see how its bare obtaining can constitute a reason to believe it. Any reason to believe something must itself be something I am aware of. Or at least that's the "internalist" way to put it. "Externalists" would complain not of my failure to be aware of it, but of the lack of any reliable process that caused the belief. After all, I don't believe it. You were the one referring (ie in the example) to its truth: so why do you believe it? Again, "because it's true" does nothing here (just as you naturally must have demanded more than that when you came to believe it yourself, as you claim to, in the example, by referring to its "truth"). Reasons for believing p, internal or external, concern not p (by) itself but our cognitive access to it.

Now (as with the other case) this is not to say that you may not appeal to the truth of p in giving your extended explanation of how we can know this (the reasons, in either sense, for our belief). But this is (typically) in cases in which I do (already) believe the truth of p. And here again, "because it's true" does nothing by itself.

We have reason to believe that electrons are running through the wire not simply because electrons are indeed running through the wire, although they are, but also because this caused the ammeter to spike, and ammeters are built in such-and-such a way, and every alternative explanation for why such things act that way in such circumstances has been ruled out (for such and such reasons), etc. (After all, this is why I believe it.) You may appeal to the existence of electrons; but you don't have to – you can tell the story however you like. Here a scrupulously non-question-begging argument for the truth of p would be fine as well – it would, if it worked, constitute a reason to believe p. But so might a "question-begging argument," even if it (thereby) fell short of convincing us of the truth of p, as even in such cases I might still see what you were getting at, enough to see it as a (non-conclusive) reason for belief.

In either case the bare truth of p constitutes no reason to believe it (so "because it's true" is false, not trivial). There are plenty of truths we have no reason to believe; we just can't pick any of them out, because if we could that would mean we knew they were true – and thus had reason to believe them. (Again, speaking of "p", while perfectly understandable, makes this harder to see.)

I am no blind acolyte of McDowell, but here again let me compare our views to remove a potential confusion. McDowell is famous for insisting, contra Davidson and Rorty, that our relations to the world are normative, not "merely causal," and that we do indeed aim, in inquiry, to "get the world right." (It is strange that he should have to do this as, as McDowell himself points out, it was the whole point of Davidson's action theory that "reasons can be causes.") So in this sense the "world itself" (not the Cartesian objective world/Kantian noumenon, but the world qua object of our beliefs, as opposed to our beliefs themselves) can constitute a "reason" for belief. This may seem to contradict what I said above. But this only means, I take it, that, as I said, we may refer to the fact that p in explaining not only how we come to know that p but even why we should believe that p. (It is Cartesians who rule such things out; I think this is the source of the externalist animus toward "evidentialism," but I'm not sure, as externalism itself seems Cartesian as well, albeit in other ways.)

Gee whiz, that didn't take long

Gotta put the spam filter back up! Unless y'all really want to hear about how to get credit reports. Off to delete them now...

Intuitionistic logic makes my head hurt

At the boundaries of language, Aidan has a post about (Duncan) "Pritchard's Dilemma," which was a new one on me. Aidan relates Scanlon's version thus:

Scanlon presents the original version as a dilemma facing any account of what makes an action wrong. We want to know why the fact (assuming for now that it is one) that an act is wrong gives us reason not to do it. The worry is that we'll either end up giving an uninformative answer like 'Because it's wrong!', or we'll end up citing some feature of the act which supposedly substantively explains why we have reason not to perform it which intuitively has no connection to its wrongness (that performing the act would lead to social ostracism, for example); as Scanlon notes, it is not such features of the act which we'd expect 'a moral person first and foremost to be moved by'.

But Aidan is concerned not with this version, but with the "theoretical analogue," where the analogous question is: "why does the fact that p is false give us reason not to believe that p?" Aidan is "inclined to think Prichard's dilemma bites in both cases," and airs some ideas for us about how to argue for this conclusion. I would have commented over there, but as I think I have mentioned before, I am reluctant to drop voluminous comments on other people's property (I've done it before and it looks funny). So let me do it here where I can stretch out. (Back to Wittgenstein some other day.)

Since I reject some of the premises in Aidan's discussion, I get more confused as the post continues, so I can't address it all; but there's plenty to talk about.

1. The two cases of the dilemma seem quite different. Let me address the moral case first.

Let's say you pose me this dilemma (i.e. ask me this question). If you really don't believe that the moral wrongness of an act gives us reason (conclusive or not) not to do it, you don't understand what I mean by these things. Your question ["why the fact that an act is wrong gives us reason not to do it"] concerns the conceptual relation between moral wrongness and rationality.

So if I reply "because it's wrong!", this is indeed "uninformative" in one sense; but that makes it not a failed argument, but instead a rejection of the need for same (and an annoyed refusal to supply the requested explanation). It has the sense of "what part of 'it's wrong' (or 'there's a reason') don't you understand?" Rather than an answer, it's a demand for a better question.

But let's say I do explain. My explanation will concern both concepts (relating them to other concepts still, like agency, belief, truth, normativity, and, I don't know, human being), and is not an argument taking us from one settled location (in conceptual space) to the other. After all, if the one doesn't entail the other, I don't know what you're talking about when you say "moral" (or, again, "reason"); so I'm hardly going to accept your challenge. It'd be like agreeing to build a bridge between the two peaks of Kilimanjaro.

Note that this is not just a semantic claim of analyticity; after all, we may speak as we like, and you might very well come back with: "so morality entails reasons for/against action; if so, why believe there is any such thing?" Instead, it's that if you don't show at least a minimal level of moral understanding, I'm not sure what sort of person I'm talking to, and I might start edging out of the room (or at least keeping an eye on the spoons when you're over for dinner). Theoretical analysis is supposed to explain this phenomenon, not defend it (yet it does, I believe, remain corrigible; but if so, it is you who must explain, not me). I think Anscombe has something about this. You may simply be, as she puts it, "wicked." If so, it's hardly something I can expect to be able to argue you out of, although I suppose it does happen.

So yes, an instrumental "explanation" of my reason not to do something would hardly capture the moral aspects of the act. But that doesn't mean I've got nothing to say except trivialities (although if you continue to play dumb I may run out of things to say to you). The dilemma seems to have no bite here. (Exercise for the reader: contrast Euthyphro and divine command conceptions of morality)

2. How about the "theoretical analogue" of this dilemma? Our question here, again, is "why does the fact that p is false give us reason not to believe that p?" and whether "because p is false!" is too trivial, in the way that "because it's wrong!" is claimed to be in the moral case. This strikes me as a quite different matter.

In the moral case, the reason I come out with "because it's wrong!" is that it's so obvious that an act's moral wrongness supplies a reason for refraining from performing it that I can't even accept the question (i.e., the demand for an inference from one to the other). If I do, I say something unsatisfactory (the second horn of the dilemma); so I deflect the question (not answer it) with my triviality. (Again, this means the "dilemma" is not a dilemma: a third option is available = starting over with a long explanation of the relevant conceptual relations, this time in a larger context, as above. Or simply breaking off the conversation as hopeless.)

But in this second case the answer to our question is simply: it doesn't. Perhaps surprisingly, this is true on either an internalist/evidentialist or externalist/reliabilist account of justification. Internalist first (more obvious). Something's being true (false) hardly constitutes evidence for its truth (falsity). The Andromeda galaxy either contains intelligent life or it does not. We have no evidence either way; yet one or the other is true. Once we see this, externalism gives the same result. No reliable process has produced a belief either that p or that not-p (in me anyway; I'm in doubt on the matter). So no external reason either. (I don't get (epistemological) externalism though; maybe Clayton can help us out here.)

Why did we ever think otherwise? Well, let's take another look at the question. When you refer to "the fact that p is false," you pose a conversational dilemma. I can say "wait, how did we know that p is false? Maybe it's true." Given that you haven't said what p is, this would be a weird thing to say. What's going to convince me that "p" is true? I can hardly dispute it; nor can you give me evidence for it. Clearly your implied answer is "ex hypothesi, dummy."

So instead I let it go – I accept the implicit stipulation that p is false (i.e., that that p is false is a fact) – so that our conversation may continue and you may make your point. But now it looks weird to disclaim any reason to believe this "fact," or the relevance (to our belief) of its truth. I've just accepted it as true, without any argument, without even asking what it was. How can I then turn around and claim not to have any reason to believe it, since that it's a "fact" is all you told me? It is not making of the sense, to do this.

That's why it looks like "because p is false!" is trivially true, when in fact it's false (i.e, that p's falsity provides a reason for disbelieving p). It looks like the best reason there could possibly be, when it's no reason at all.

Here's where my head begins to throb (see title of post). For it seems to me that, given this, the difference between realism and (Dummetian) anti-realism, which Aidan goes on to discuss, doesn't seem to come up. The problem with getting from p's truth-value to my having a reason to believe it is that I don't have any idea what that truth value is until you tell me. As the Andromeda example shows, it could be true or false with no evidence either way. But now the (Dummetian) anti-realist objects: with no evidence either way, the statement has no truth-value (or: its truth-value is "indeterminate," neither true nor false). The Andromeda example is out.

But this doesn't help. Again, it's not that I have no evidence that p is false (or true); it's that I have no evidence about p's truth value at all, including what evidence there is for it. The anti-realist move simply pushes the problem back. The Andromeda example may not work, but a different example will – one, say, where I have no idea what would count as evidence one way or another. For any specific claim, of course, the Dummettian may object that this can't be a proposition that I understand. True enough; but that's hardly relevant, given that all I have been given is "p". Unless my interlocutor is messing with me, he understands it (i.e., he picked an intelligible example), and that means I have no reason to doubt that there is evidence for (the existence of evidence for or against or for the indeterminate nature of) "p". Again, to demand same here would be (as I believe they are putting it these days) teh weird.

Nor does is anti-realism relevant if we accept ex hypothesi, as before, that p is false. For the anti-realist, it follows that there is a proof (or conclusive evidence; Aidan uses a mathematical example, so let's talk about proof) from our axioms to not-p. Now that I have a proof, do I have a reason to believe that p is false?

Not in the relevant sense I don't, as the earlier reasoning still applies. I have no idea what this proof is (how could I – I don't even know what p is.) I'm in the same relation to (the existence of) this proof as I was earlier to p's truth-value: I can either demand to see it (weirdly) or I can accept your implicit claim that there is one (i.e., in declaring it false on an anti-realist construal) and (again weirdly) deny the relevance of that fact to the question of whether or not I should believe p, given the existence of said proof. This makes triviality (now of the form "because p is false, and so there is a proof that p is false!") the only apparent option.

Aidan actually says "If one asks why some set-theoretical statement s being false gives one reason not to believe that s, can we do better than to simply point out that s is false? Surely we can; usually we will be able to prove that ~s follows from some mutually shared set of axioms." So here we know what s is and have proved its negation. Now I do know what to believe. If so, then that's my reason for believing s is false: we proved its negation. But what about s's falsity? Did s's falsity provide (not a proximal, but maybe an ultimate) reason for my belief? Well, I didn't use it as a premise, obviously; so, no. If a, b, c entail not-s then not-s provides inductive evidence for a, b, c; but ex hypothesi again, I don't have independent access to not-s, so that doesn't help not-s provide ultimate reason for believing it.

Aidan asks: "Is it the case [...] that that fact that a statement's negation is provable is only a reason to believe it derivatively because of that close connection to truth?" My answer: if I know that the statement's negation is provable, then it's either a) that proof itself, or b) whatever other evidence I have for the existence of same (e.g., you told me), that provides my reason to believe its conclusion – not that conclusion itself. If I don't know this, I may have no reason to believe anything at all about it, whether it happens to be true or not. And again, it seems not to affect matters if we move from s's falsity to the provability of not-s.

And even in intuitionistic logic, if not-s is true, then s is false (right? right??), so I don't see how that's relevant. But by this point in the post I'm as confused as Aidan himself claims to be.

I may yet see spots before my eyes

Up to now I have resisted putting up any sort of visit counter here. I don't want to be self-conscious if there are a lot of visitors, nor (more likely) be disappointed if there aren't. But those ClustrMap things are really cool. So I got one (it's really easy, as shown by the fact that, well, even I can do it). Now let's see some red dots!

Yes, that's a Q

I was looking at Shawn's posts on Wittgenstein at Words and Other Things (see previous post), and I ran across this one, which is short enough to reproduce here in its entirety:

I wonder what Wittgenstein would think about Calvin ball. Calvin ball is a game invented by Calvin of the Calvin and Hobbes comic. The only rule to Calvin ball is that there are no rules. What counts as a move in the game? Pretty much anything. But, is this a problem? If anything counts as a move, does nothing count? I'm inclined to say no. There are not conflicting rules or conflicting interpretations being appealed to. There aren't distinguishing rules being appealed to either. Wittgenstein would probably think that there is too little structure to the "game" for it to count as a game.

This gets Calvinball slightly but importantly wrong. It's not that there are no rules; it's that they make them up as they go along (and that they never play it the same way twice). But once a rule is made up, it's a rule (at least for now). When Calvin touches (what Hobbes, making the rule up on the spot, then reveals to be) the Pernicious Poem Place, Calvin still takes himself to be bound by the newly invented rule to recite, to his chagrin:

This is a poem! Please do as you're told!
And this is a bucket of water, ice-cold!
Please take this water, and dump it on me!
Don't hesitate! Do it A.S.A.P.!

After Susie complies, Calvin subsequently indicates, damply, that he takes Hobbes to be bound by this rule as well ("just you wait").

And anyway, even if there "were no rules," that doesn't mean it's not a game, even for Wittgenstein (and his point here, of which more later). They're still playing, after all; and they do distinguish playing from non-playing (games begin and end). They keep score, too (one game is Q to 7 at one point, I believe).

Too rich for my blood

My previous post (eventually) ended up talking about the review at Amazon's page of a particular book. It might interest you to know that at that page, one used copy of The Sokal Hoax lists for $399.98. The same seller has another listing for the same book, this one for a mere $99.98. Both (perhaps the same copy?) are described as Used – Good (so if it were Excellent, that would presumably cost more, yes?). The natural question (which someone has surely addressed somewhere) is of course: why would anyone bother trying to sell this book for four hundred dollars? The book is in print, and Amazon is selling it new for $15.60 ($4.40 off the $20 list price) plus shipping (FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25). So why bother asking, um, $384.38 more (plus $3.49 shipping, no less)? After all, if you clicked on the button that says "25 used & new from $5.58," it was because you didn't want to pay $15.60 for a new one. Even $99.98 seems a bit much for a twenty-dollar book. Maybe Sokal signed it in his own blood (eww).

That's not the highest price I've ever seen for a book, either. I saw one on Bookfinder for over $1000 (that one might actually have been out of print though). But even in normal cases – books in print with $20-$40 list prices – there are always used copies selling for much more, with no explanation. What, I demand in colloquial English, is up with that?

By the way, due to its long shaggy-dog excursus into Tractarian territory, my post has garnered comment from the proprietors of two Wittgenstein-oriented blogs which are new to me (and if anyone knows any more, then let that person speak forth), and which I have added to the blogroll: Methods of Projection and Tractatus Blogico-Philosophicus (heh). If (but not only if) you are looking for more heavily LW-saturated blogging than there is here (despite the name, I am just as much influenced by Davidson and McDowell as by LW), check 'em out! While you're at it check out The Space of Reasons, a new blog dedicated to McDowell's epistemology (about which I might eventually have something to say as well ...).

[Update (3/5): another blog new to me has linked up as well - Words and Other Things]