More banditry

The local library (next town over actually) had its semiannual book sale again (see my last haul here), and yesterday I went over and checked it out. Good news: the following cost around five bucks total. Bad news: this means I will continue to put off my promised account of that one last book (*** **** *****) from the other time. Starting off, we have:

1. Steven Pinker – The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (1994)

As I think I mentioned last time, when I picked up his Words and Rules, I'm not a big fan of the rosy one, but he's a least worth keeping an eye on. This book is more substantive, though, so it may be more likely than the other to be thrown across the room. (Non-philosophers talking about language, esp. scientists getting all chomsky, as Dennett would say, can provoke this response in me.) I better be careful, as it is a hefty hardcover and could really do some damage if propelled in the wrong direction. For example, I see a chapter called "Mentalese" – better go down into the basement to read that one.

2. C. E. M. Joad – Philosophical Aspects of Modern Science (1964; orig. ed. 1932)
3. H. Feigl and G. Maxwell – Current Issues in the Philosophy of Science (1959)

I bet these two came from the same source, but there's no name in either, so who knows. Professor Joad is worried that "modern physics" (he means quantum mechanics), as interpreted by such as A. S. Eddington and James Jeans, will seduce the young into Idealism or worse. These views, the back cover tells us, "are ... subjected to criticism on the ground that they rest on a faulty theory of knowledge, which ignores the Realist movement which is the distinctive feature of twentieth century philosophy." Russell's "Neutral-Monism" will not do either. This book seems not to have been cracked. Perhaps I shall be the first. Or not.

The Feigl & Maxwell is the Proceedings of Section L of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Chicago on December 27-30, 1959. Lots of big names (of the time): "Is there a Logic of Discovery?" by Hanson, comments by Feyerabend, reply by Hanson; "The Language of Theories" by Sellars, comments by Hanson, Feyerabend and Richard Rudner; "Law and Convention in Physical Theory" by Grünbaum, comments by Feyerabend, reply by Grünbaum. Also appearing: Rescher, Salmon, Michael Polanyi. Hanson and Feyerabend are in every other session, it seems. Time capsule city!

4. Mortimer Adler – Ten Philosophical Mistakes (1985)

Finally, truth in advertising? But no, he means mistakes made by people other than himself. (Anyway, it would be tough limiting the mistakes in here to ten, unless you consolidated them into general groups.) Here's a taste:

This [an unholy conglomeration of Hobbes, Russell, and Frege – don't ask] has led to the fatuous injunction "Don't look for the meaning; look for the use," as if it were possible to discover the use of a word without first ascertaining its meaning as used, a meaning that it must have had before it was used in order to be used in one certain way rather than another. Language does not control thought, as contemporary linguistic philosophers appear to believe. It is the other way around.

This is worse than useless. If it were simply false, then it would at least be something to argue against. But it's just a muddle of Colbertan truthiness (avant la lettre, I suppose). Adler doesn't mention Wittgenstein, the apparent target here, but it's just as well, considering the hash he makes of it. If you've never heard of him, Adler was the 50's equivalent of William Bennett, pushing upper-middlebrow quasi-Aristotelian pop moralizing as a tonic for midcentury modernistic ennui. (10 P. M. is subtitled "Basic Errors in Modern Thought - How They Came About [neglect of Aquinas], Their Consequences [Communism and hedonism], and How to Avoid Them [Take a Guess].") In the bio-blurb, the publisher (MacMillan) blithely refers to the author as "America's foremost philosopher." I think that's because he's the one who's been on TV (he had a PBS series on the Great Books or something).

5. Allan Bloom – The Closing of the American Mind (1987)

Hmmm, a mini-trend; more right-wing snark from a Chicago fossil. Actually, Bloom was a real philosopher, if an odd bird, and this has some interesting material about Plato and Rousseau. (Doesn't get Nietzsche though.) This book was a huge best seller but it is universally suspected that no-one read it. Lefties mocked it at the time (he does make a fool of himself in spots), but compared to contemporary Kulturkampf stuff (*cough* Dinesh D'Souza *cough*) this is Isaiah Berlin. Incidentally, the index contains precisely one reference to Leo Strauss.

6. Culture Wars (1999)

This book, the back cover informs us, is part of the "highly acclaimed Opposing Viewpoints series" of what seem to be high-school civics readers (tagline: "Those who do not know their opponent's arguments do not completely understand their own." Too true.) It consists of brief snippets of pro vs. con about this and that ("Belief in God is Necessary for a Moral Society" followed by, you guessed it, "Belief in God is Not Necessary for a Moral Society"). They're all like that. Now, I understand the appeal of the agonistic approach, but as a moderate I would prefer a little, well, moderation. The way it is, all you get is fair-to-good negative arguments (often against straw opponents) and bad positive arguments. Just for fun, here's a snippet from "Belief in God is Necessary ...":

Moral values are rather strange. We cannot see them, hear them, or feel them, but we cannot doubt they exist. A witness to a crime sees the criminal and the victim, but what is perhaps most important remains invisible—the moral evil of the act.
Yet evil is unquestionably there [....] Good and bad are unseen but real, much as God is said to be. Does that suggest a close tie between two mysteries, moral values and God?

Much predictable whining about naturalism and relativism later (okay, only a few paragraphs – these things are short), we get:

More important, we should consider the very nature of moral obligation. [Okay, fair enough: what is it?] We cannot be obligated to atoms, or gravity, or evolution, or time, or chance; we can be obligated only to persons. [So far, so good, I suppose; but it can't last ...] Indeed, we typically learn morality from our parents, and we stick to our standards at least partly out of loyalty to those we love. An absolute standard, one without exceptions, one that binds everybody, must be based on loyalty to a person great enough to deserve such respect. Only God meets that description.

Ow, my head. But the other guy – a philosopher, even – isn't much better. It's right, as far as it goes (he gives Leibniz's arguments against "Divine Command Theory"), but then he goes right to the conclusion:

Fundamentalists correctly perceive that universal moral standards are required for the proper functioning of society. But they erroneously believe that God is the only possible source of such standards. Philosophers as diverse as Plato, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, George Edward Moore [!], and John Rawls have demonstrated [!] that it is possible to have a universal morality without God.

Phew. Maybe this will be good blogfodder though.

7. Jonathan Rée – i see a voice: deafness, language, and the senses – a philosophical history (1999)

This seems to be a book for the general reader, but the author is a philosopher (I think I've heard of him, even, though I may be mixing him up with Paul Ree, the "English psychologist" whom Nietzsche mentions in the Genealogy). Think Oliver Sacks's Seeing Voices, only less neurology and more history (and less rah-rah Deaf Culture). The last part looks more philosophical; chapter 28 is entitled "Space, Time, and the aesthetic theory of art," and discusses Kant, Baumgarten, etc. Maybe I'll just jump to the end.

8. W. G. Muelder, C. K. Sears, and A. V. Schlabach – The Development of American Philosophy (1960; orig. ed. 1940)

I think I got a similar volume last time, but this one looks a bit more diverse: eight sections, including a long one called "The Idealist Tradition," with a whole slew of names. Interestingly, the sections the previous owner (a Miss M. W. of Mt. Holyoke College) has most marked up, in addition to Peirce and James, are the selections by Josiah Royce and the succeeding selection, "The Limits of Evolution" (1895), by one George H. Howison. And what a piece of purple prose is this latter essay! We'll have to get back to that one sometime. But now, forward!

9. Stephen Jones, ed. – The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (2002)

Actually, the title page says it's the MBoBNH 13 (so they've been doing this for a while, then). 600 pp. of thrills and chills. One story ("Most of My Friends are Two-Thirds Water") is by one of my fave new discoveries, Kelly Link; but it seems also to be in her first collection (so get that instead, if you're torn between that and this). I haven't read this one, but she's great. Lots of unfamiliar names, but I'm not really into horror, so I can't tell what that means – they could all be stars for all I know.

In a similar vein, more or less, we have:

10. Goethe's Faust: The Prologue and Part One (1963; orig. 1831, or at least the whole thing)

Last time I got a German-only version of part two [actually, checking later, I see that it also was part one; no matter, I have that little yellow edition of part two somewhere]. This is a bilingual edition, and thank goodness for that, because the English part is dreadful – metered, rhymed, archaic, and absurdly literal. Check this out. First the German:

Faust: O selig der! dem er in Siegesglanze
die blut'gen Lorbeern um die Schläfe windet,
den er, nach rasch durchrastem Tanze,
in eines Mädchens Armen findet.
O wär' ich vor des hohen Geistes Kraft
entzückt, entseelt dahin gesunken!
Meph: Und doch hat jemand einen braunen Saft,
in jener Nacht, nicht ausgetrunken.
Faust: Das Spionieren, scheint's, is deine Lust.
Meph: Allwissend bin ich nicht; doch viel ist mir bewusst.

Romantic poetry, sure, but not ridiculous by any means. Here's the English:

Faust: O fortunate, for whom, when victory glances,
the bloody laurels on the brow he bindeth!
whom, after rapid, maddening dances,
in clasping maiden-arms he findeth!——
O would that I, before that Spirit's might,
ecstatic, reft of life, had sunken.
Meph: And yet, by someone, in that Easter night,
a certain liquid was not drunken.
Faust: Eavesdropping, ha! thy pleasure seems to be.
Meph: Omniscient am I not; yet much is known to me.

Glug. Well, at least it's got the German, and I've got a dictionary ready to hand (or is it present at hand?). By the way, there was a foreign-language section at the book sale, and most of it indeed seemed to be original language material. But there were some translations too, and it was pretty weird to see things like Racine: Werke and Isaac Asimov's Preludio alla Fondazione.

11. Jeff Danziger – Wreckage Begins with "W" (2004)

Finally, on the lighter side, we have a book of editorial cartoons. I always liked Danziger (especially his short-lived (I think) strip, McGonigle or something) – the drawings are good, and there are often several gags in one frame – but he seems to have gotten bitter over the years, and much of this collection is crudely partisan (and worse, unfunny). Here's one: little George, in cowboy hat with "W" on it, idly shaking the tail of a big mean dog (labeled WAR), who has turned around with slavering jaws to eye the lad threateningly. Oh, I get it: wag the dog, with blowback imminent. Heh. Or this one. The book explains that Bush had asked Henry Kissinger "to head a panel looking into the causes of terrorism." In the picture, a grotesquely cadaverous Kissinger looks on as Bush, at an absurdly small desk (with an absurdly small chair) says to Rove or whoever, "Henry says he'll do it as long as he can bomb a few villages afterwards...." See, Kissinger is bad: he likes bombing things for fun. Other cartoons are better, but overall this is already a disappointment.

The sale continues tomorrow, and I'm tempted to go back and pick up a few of those math textbooks, which I need as I do a lacuna in my skull. But they're cheeeap!

Anyone up for a little carpal tunnel syndrome?

Jason at Evolutionblog linked to this game, and I've tried it a few times. You move your knight around the board, trying to land on all the designated squares before time runs out. Unfortunately, you're not allowed to land on any undesignated squares. So sometimes you have to stop and figure out how to get where you're supposed to go. It's kind of fun, but I think I would need a mouse to build up any real speed (it's a bit harder on a trackpad). One feature I liked: when you finish a level on time, you get bonus points (no surprise there); but you also get a rousing cheer from the crowd. I think I'd almost rather hear the cheer than get the points. Is that sad or what?

It's that time of the, uh, three-week period

New Philosophers' Carnival here.

Mission accomplished

We now return to the status quo ante ALDS, in which only the original Tigers are Tigers. Good work everyone! Carry on.

Get yer philosophy dissertations here!

Or, if you've written one yourself, you can make it available to others. (I'm thinking about it...). Here's the link.

HT: Leiter

We are all Tigers now

I owe this observation to Michael Berube (hmmm, can't make acute accents for some reason). Anyway, see here for more playoff ruminations.

What is it like to be a Philosophers' Carnival?

Find out here.

I've got children? How about that

Another one of those damn quizzes. I don't have time for this, dammit! Now where did I put my glasses?

[HT: Siris]

You scored as Commander William Adama. You have risen to your position by being damn good at what you do. Not only that, you have the deepest respect for the people under your command. You may be a little grumpy and unapproachable, but every commander needs to distance himself. Shame that you apply that to your children too.

Commander William Adama		63%
President Laura Roslin		50%
Capt. Lee Adama (Apollo)		50%
Dr Gaius Baltar		44%
CPO Galen Tyrol		44%
Tom Zarek		38%
Col. Saul Tigh		31%
Number 6		25%
Lt. Sharon Valerii (Boomer)		25%
Lt. Kara Thrace (Starbuck)		13%

What New Battlestar Galactica character are you?
created with QuizFarm.

And now ...

... the graphic-novel edition of the latest work by the ever-dangerous Michael Bérubé. Strike a socialist-realist pose, and check it out!

HT: Crooked Timber, Pharyngula, etc.

I can't win

According to this test, I am "definitely a nerd but low on the totem pole of nerds." Story of my life.

HT: Ed B, who is apparently not a nerd at all. To see the Sciencebloggers ranked by nerdiness, see here.

Cinematic travails [some spoilers; but come on, these aren't whodunits]

On Monday, which was Labor Day, I watched a DVD of Laurent Cantet's 1999 film Human Resources, which I had not selected specially, but which turned out to be very appropriate to the day. Young Jalil Lespert is hired as a management trainee at the factory where his father has worked for 30 years. (You can just see it coming, but trust me: there's nothing you can do.) Eager to please, he suggests (not a union-busting but more like) a union-outmaneuvering tactic to his superiors -- but alas, he has overestimated their moral scruples, and they use it to justify layoffs. (I didn't exactly understand this part -- something to do with the 35-hour work week, which was apparently a big deal in France at the time.) Naturally Papa is one of those laid off. This leads to some soul-searching and ultimately drastic measures. Toward the end there is an emotional confrontation during which some long-buried feelings are unearthed. Not an amusing scene, but I couldn't help noticing the characteristically Gallic subtlety of the emotions in question -- not just pride or shame, but the same at second- and third-order (possibly even fourth). For the pinnacle of work-related anxiety, check out Cantet's follow-up Time Out, loosely based on the book which was more faithfully rendered here (haven't seen this but the book is great).

Laborwise, I also saw (though not on the Day itself) the recent Criterion Collection release of Harlan County USA (1976), a documentary about striking coal miners in Kentucky. It's all very Which Side Are You On -- and in fact we hear that stirring number performed several times. The music is very much part of the film -- lots of Hazel Dickens, for example. Emotional confrontations abound here too, not surprising given the circumstances. No higher-order angst here though, just good old American stubbornness. Interesting also to see traces of the 1970's seeping into more traditional, isolated areas.

For comparison we have yet another look at industrial management, this one from Denmark. Arven (a.k.a. The Inheritance) stars Ulrich Thomsen (whom you may know from Festen a.k.a. The Celebration) as a refugee from the family steel business who is browbeaten by his domineering mother into returning and taking it over after his father kills himself according to time-honored Scandinavian custom. This leads to resentment on all sides, and downhill we go from there. A bit melodramatic at times, but Thomsen is excellent. Can his stoic resignation survive the long-simmering resentment and heartbreak? Yes and no, obviously, or there wouldn't be a movie; but this battle, as played out on Thomsen's furrowed brow, maintains our interest throughout. Nice score in a Biosphere + orchestra vein (not actual Biosphere though; for that see the original Insomnia).

Back to school

Appropriately enough, the Back to School edition of the Philosophers' Carnival takes place in the Playground.

Anticipate the following April

There was no real reason for anyone to notice this after that memorable five-pack of games two weeks ago against the hated Yankees (a debacle some locals referred to as the Big Dig 2), but the other day the Boston Red Sox took the diamond without their leadoff hitter Coco Crisp, a man who seems to have it backwards (you're supposed to let them name the breakfast cereal after you, not the other way around). They were also missing their #3 hitter (MVP candidate David Ortiz, out with heart problems), their cleanup hitter (future Hall-of-Famer Manny Ramirez), their #5 hitter (catcher Jason Varitek), their #6 hitter (RF Trot Nixon), and their starting shortstop (Alex Gonzalez, whose nickname must surely be A-Gon). Wily Mo Pena (that's right, one L; what's his nickname, Wile E. Coyote?), who had been spelling Nixon, was also out. This left the team with three starters: 2B Mark Loretta (at DH), 1B Kevin Youkilis (in left), and the sole starter at his original position, 3B Mike Lowell, the usual #8 hitter, batting cleanup. They lost the game, one of 21 they lost in August.

The starting pitcher in that game, David Wells, had been doing well since returning from the DL, but he has since been dealt to the Padres for the proverbial player-to-be-indicated-later (presumably he already has a name; we just don't know what it is yet). Two other starters, Matt Clement and knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, have yet to return, and it seems that closer Jonathan Papelbon (he of the microscopic 0.92 ERA) has joined them, not to mention Curt Schilling, who will miss a start due to a strained muscle. Not only that, rookie starter Jon Lester has been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Also, Josh Beckett was hexed by a practitioner of the dark arts, such that he would not be able to locate home plate even if it were to be painted bright red, with a spotlight directly above it. Okay, I made that last one up, but you have to wonder what made him walk NINE batters in that Yankee game (that is, that part of it that he pitched before they FINALLY took his ass out of it).

Of course, the Yankees themselves have had a number of injuries this year, but all they do is just go to the bench for another all-star – or, if absolutely necessary, pick one up from another team, with a decent starting pitcher to boot, for a handful of rookie leaguers. (How do they DO that??)

The trolley problem

No, not the moral philosophy chestnut. We speak here of what we would call "shopping carts", and the problem of what to do with them when they end up in the river. Here's an attractive solution.

HT: 3 Quarks Daily

Le rouge et le noir

Last night I saw Samuel Fuller's 1953 noir Pickup on South Street on a fine-looking Criterion Collection DVD (although this library copy was scratched, making me miss the part from 33:03 to 33:25; anybody know what happens just before she leaves the shack?). Richard Widmark is in fine form as a pickpocket (or "cannon") who picks the wrong purse (in the opinion of some), obtaining for himself some curious microfilm. What was funny about it was the infusion of Red Scare attitudes into the noir form; our characters may be hardscrabble denizens of the demimonde, but they ain't no filthy commies, see? (On the other hand, our man would be willing to shake said commies down for $25K rather than, say, turning them over to the police.) See it on a double bill with Bresson's Pickpocket.

Iconic moment: Widmark offers Jean Peters a smoke; he lights it with his own half-smoked one; then he jams that one in her mouth and starts smoking the new one himself. Also Thelma Ritter and her neckties.

Another pairing for PoSS would be Kiss of Death, Widmark's 1947 debut, in which he plays the psycho killer Tommy Udo (love that insane grin). We also see an impossibly young Karl Malden in a bit part. This film was remade in 1995 with Nicholas Cage in the Widmark role and starring David Caruso, who had just quit NYPD Blue after one season in order to be a big movie star. This movie bombed, prompting much humor about the aptness of its title re: Mr. Caruso's career ... and then he went on to make Jade, a movie for which the phrase "godawful crap" is particularly apt. He seems to have found his place though, back on TV as the unflappable Lt. Horatio Caine on CSI: Miami, so we shall not weep for him.

Below average

90% True has a hot tip on forthcoming titles in the Politically Incorrect Guide to ... series. (I think this one registers something less than 90% on the old aletheiometer though.)

HT: Panda's Thumb

Free popcorn shrimp!

Figuratively speaking, that is. Philosophical Review has made part of their archive available free online, for, as the saying goes, a limited time only, so don't delay! And those book reviews sure are addictive - betcha can't download just one!

HT: Thoughts, Arguments, and Rants

Icon war

What happens on the desktop when icons get bored? Check it out here.

HT: Crooked Timber, where the first two commenters simultaneously point us as well to this equally clever (and violent) episode [itself from boing boing].

How to use a technologically enabled indexical expression

New Philosophers' Carnival. Here.

There's hamburger all over the highway in Mystic, Connecticut

Lindsay gives us an inside look at the Connecticut senate primary here. (See surrounding posts.)

In related news, look out for penguins in Texas.

HT: Pharyngula (again)

Tome of horrible, yet cuddly, secrets

Available here. More such material, including campaign logos, here.

HT: Pharyngula

Moussellini? No, Kitler!

Some of these guys are scary (but others are cute).

(HT: Evolutionblog)

R.I.P. D.Z.P.

Via Leiter, I hear that D.Z. Phillips has died. Professor Phillips was a major figure in Wittgenstein and the philosophy of religion. His book Philosophy's Cool Place is essential reading for those interested in the particular sense in which Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy was "quietist." Perhaps he is now in a cool place of his own. If so, cool!

Vielen Dank!

Apparently this installment of the Philosophers' Carnival takes place in Berlin. How about that.

Kerblog

Blogging from Beirut, featuring some intense drawings. (HT: Microsound list)

Wheee!

New Philosophers' Carnival here. Thanks Dr. F-R!

Tell us what you really think

More reading than writing going on at the moment here at DRHQ, I'm afraid. For now here are someone else's thoughts (Ed B. at Dispatches, on the recent brouhaha about the Times's disclosure of government anti-terror activities):

Every single side of the story is represented by people who are, frankly, completely full of shit. The New York Times is full of shit, their critics are full of shit, and the right wingers calling for treason charges are completely full of shit. Every single facet of this thing just screams hypocrisy on the part of every single person involved.

Plenty more here.

My language, right or wrong

As is well known, grammarians (and other non-philosophers) fall into two types: prescriptivists and descriptivists. The former feel free to tell everyone else how to talk, and the latter tell the former to lighten up and go with the flow. (The novelist David Foster Wallace has an amusing, characteristically footnote-ridden piece about his own membership in the prescriptivist marching society, for which body he has an equally amusing but alas unmemorable neologistic acronym - "floot"? "froot"? "snoot?")

This is a non-issue, or should be anyway, for philosophers. Language changes, at a speed and in a manner to be determined by its users on a case by case basis. In the face of perceived linguistic anarchy, prescriptivists are right that there are indeed objective "linguistic facts" -- that word X means "y" and not "z", or that string W is not well-formed -- but any imperatives (prescriptions) we may derive from same are what you might call "hypothetical" rather than "categorical." That is, while it is (as they say) a true fact that "dog" means "one of those [indicating Fido]" and not "one of those [indicating Garfield]", the only sense we can ultimately make of this sort of "semantic normativity" is that IF you wish to speak in the way that English speakers (as a matter of empirical fact) typically do, THEN (and now comes the normativity) you must say "dog" when speaking of Fido and his canine kin, and "assassinated U. S. President" when speaking of Garfield, Lincoln, et al. (A related point is that IF you wish to be understood by English speakers (or perhaps to keep from annoying them), THEN you must speak in the way that they typically do, or at least refrain from improvising freely.)

Or so we Davidsonians say (locus classicus: "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs," now available in Truth, Language, and History). This means that in particular cases the issue is not whether there are linguistic facts, but whether our purposes are best served in this case by speaking this way or that. In general, useful distinctions are retained while useless ones fade away. The problem arises when some people let distinctions become obscured while others are still using them (and hoping to do so in the same way they had been doing up to now, by saying this and not that). The proper philosophical attitude to take here is again that it'll all come out in the wash (which is often, I find, the proper philosophical attitude to take).

So we should be neither hard-line prescriptivists nor hard-line descriptivists (as neither position is coherent). The sympathy I have for either is limited to the empirical fact that proponents of the other can be annoyingly dense. If language currently allows a useful distinction, then let's not just let it go out of sheer carelessness. Common courtesy suggests that if someone is using something, you don't just throw it out just because you can't be bothered not to (and maybe you'd like to use it too - try it and see). We all have our favorites, but I appreciate the semantic distinction between "jealous" and "envious", and of course I have a professional interest in keeping "imply" and "infer" straight. And some things are just eyesores (quotation marks for emphasis, possessive "it's"; again, we all have our favorites).

On the other hand, there's nothing quite like doctrinaire prescriptivists for cluelessness. They make me appreciate the existentialist notion of "bad faith": I don't have to use my judgment, there's a rule I can follow (and berate others sanctimoniously for not following)! It's like (and indeed I imagine in some cases this really is it) they want to be able to feel justified in inferring social class (and thus ultimate worth) directly and reliably from forms of speech - how can we distinguish Us from Them if you insist on talking in a way in which (even if there is no other reason not to do so) They do and We do not?

What's particularly galling is the (not at all unusual) cases in which prescriptivists are (ironically enough) just wrong. Again we all have favorite examples (mine is the ridiculous kneejerk rejection of singular "they," which is just fine, thank you). I ran across another today, which I don't think I'd ever seen before. Baldo is perhaps the most annoying and reliably unfunny comic strip I've ever seen, but I can't help sparing the 2 seconds it takes every day to read it. Today's jape features the pretentious Anglo (naturally) English teacher upbraiding car-parts shop employee Baldo:

Baldo: Can I help you?
PAET (snarkily): I don't know – can you?

... the point being, of course, that what B. "should" have said was "May I help you?" Now of course this latter is a traditional greeting and perfectly idiomatic, employing a locution that people do in fact abuse in the form our man no doubt usually hears it (his response here is, verbatim, that my 4th-grade math teacher regularly gave to "Can I go to the bathroom?"). But Baldo's actual question makes perfect sense on its own terms. For if he were to return snark for snark, we might hear:

Baldo: I don't know either – tell me what you want, and I'll see if ... (wait for it) ... I can help you.

At least that's better than "Whom should I say is calling?"

UK agrees to jail Charles Taylor

It's childish, I know, but my philosophy-nerd sense of humor is tickled by such headlines (see here). I know Taylor's phenomenology-based criticism of McDowell's conceptualism is a little harsh, but the same could be said of Dreyfus, and nobody's throwing him in jail. (Cue Emily Litella.)

Hot off the presses

As of 10:20 P.M. EDT, when I clicked on it, this edition of the Philosophers' Carnival had been up for all of ten minutes. Watch it, it's still hot! (Thanks Kenny!)

Gimme some truth

Many people nowadays, including or even especially philosophers, seem to think it important that we acknowledge the value of truth. I was reminded of this by the recent release of Ophelia Benson's and Jeremy Stangroom's Why Truth Matters, but this is a familiar theme not only in the works of the usual pomo-phobic culture warriors, but also those of philosophers such as Michael Lynch and Simon Blackburn. In his 2004 book, itself called True to Life: Why Truth Matters, Lynch compares philosophic indifference or hostility to truth with complacent acceptance of the Bush administration's alleged blithe rationalization of insufficiently justified claims of Iraqi WMD as instrumentally valuable (e.g. for fostering consensus). As George Will would say (and it is not often that I quote the man, so listen up):

Well.

Should we indeed make a point of valuing truth? Not surprisingly, that depends on what we mean. Sometimes "truth" is used (usually – but not only, alas – by non-philosophers) as a name for a kind of commodity or stuff, like knowledge is, rather than for a property that a proposition has, or not, in virtue of the relation between its content (meaning) and the way the world is. Although this usage can be innocent (as in the pragmatist motto "seek truth, avoid error"), it can also blur the very real conceptual difference between truth and knowledge, thus making the following points more controversial than they should be. (It can also lead to confusing talk about "kinds of truth," which would be better thought of as domains of inquiry or discourse.)

First, perhaps it is too obvious to mention, but it can't be that what is to be valued is that there is such a thing as truth, i.e., that there are truths. All that would mean is that we are speaking a language; but while I suppose I'm glad we're discursive creatures, that can't be what truth-valuers value. What use is it to me, for example, that "Eto ne moy plotok" correctly denotes a certain state of affairs if I don't know which state of affairs that is? In order for truths to be valuable, or for truth to be a goal, I need to have access to them somehow, and it is that that must be the locus of value, not the truths themselves; so maybe it is the value of knowledge that we are meant to affirm.

However, this doesn't seem right either. The value of knowledge, while more easily debated, is a fairly straightforward matter, philosophically speaking. Naturally we can think of plenty of things we are better off knowing than not knowing (or being deceived about). But clearly not every particular thing is worth knowing; indeed, the vast majority of truths are entirely worthless as knowledge. It is presumably either true or false (pace verificationists) that the word "marble" was used at least once on October 12, 1977 within a six-meter radius centered at a particular spot in the Fulton Fish Market. But who cares? (Of course we could make up a story in which we might need to know this. But so what.) Some knowledge is even downright dangerous. On the other hand, we can hardly make sense of a choice between knowledge and ignorance in general. Believing only falsehoods – having no knowledge at all – isn't even conceptually possible. Even Thomas Anderson (Neo pre-red pill in The Matrix) has plenty of true beliefs (but let's not go there today).

If the value of knowledge in this (uninteresting) sense is the value of belief (that P) given the truth of P, maybe we can do better switching it around: what is the value of the truth of P given belief that P? This keeps the focus on the value of truth, while preserving the connection to belief without which, as we saw up top, the question makes no sense.

So, do we really want our beliefs to be true? This too is ambiguous. In one sense, it's not an issue about truth at all, but about our desires. Given that you believe the world to be a certain way, do you really prefer (what you see as) the actual state of affairs to, say, this other one? I believe that the hurricane was devastating, but I would be happy to be wrong about that; I would prefer that my belief be false (but it isn't, alas). In another sense, this reverts to the question about knowledge – the value of true belief. If my beliefs are true, then, just as when truths are believed, the epistemic connection to the world is made; but we've already seen that this may or may not be valuable.

A third sense must be what is intended. As the aletheiaphiles present the matter, the issue is one of the threat of instrumentalism, or skepticism, or nihilism, or all at once. Richard Rorty famously denies that justification-transcendent truth is a goal of inquiry, or even that there is any such thing in the first place; and this will never do. The question is this: given that you believe something (i.e., because it pays to do so, and has established its value already, say in terms of prediction and control), do you place an additional value on its being true as well as useful? Rorty claims that he cannot see what point there could possibly be to this. But if you do not go beyond valuing utility, we are encouraged to complain, you are (if I may borrow a phrase from elsewhere) an epistemic "free rider": belief without ontological commitment, that is, has all the advantages of doxastic theft over honest ontological toil. But does this accusation, and the accompanying apotheosis of truth, get at our real interest here?

Now I agree with the truth-lovers in a certain limited sense: we should indeed reject instrumentalism, skepticism, and nihilism. This may not seem to be a limited sense, but as we shall see, it amounts to somewhat less than they suggest. Again, our claim cannot be that there is no such thing as a useful fiction (or even a pious fraud); clearly there is. Rather, it must be that we should not elevate this fact into a general attitude toward truth, like that what matters in inquiry is the consequences of believing P, rather than that P is true. But this – rightly claimed as a "truism" by Lynch, but brandished as if it were a substantive result – is simply a condition of having beliefs at all. (In fact, Lynch's "truism" is that "truth is a worthy goal of inquiry," which is confused – it's like saying that "arriving at the solution is a worthy goal of doing a puzzle." If you're not trying to get the solution, you're not "doing the puzzle" at all.) It makes no sense to deny the "value of truth" in inquiry; but by the same token it makes no sense to affirm it either (i.e., as something that transcends what is normally available to us as the result of inquiry). One inquires, and forms beliefs, or one does not; and one cannot not believe.

The anti-skeptical point, as shown for example by Myles Burnyeat some time ago re: ancient skepticism, is that it is incoherent to take a third-person point of view on your own beliefs (although Burnyeat himself did not press the matter any farther). If you believe something, inquiry is over: the issue is settled. This doesn't mean you're stuck with your beliefs, as you may always reopen the matter. But to do so is to remove the proposition in question from your beliefs and put it into doubt; and doubt is only intelligible against a background of settled belief. So (at least on the pragmatist cum Davidsonian view I recommend) we never say: this belief of mine might be false; for to say of something that it might be false is to regard the issue of its truth as no longer settled – and thus no longer a belief at all.

Making a similar (but not identical) point (and ironically providing Rorty, who is otherwise not a big fan, with pragmatist cover), Peirce claimed that the goal of inquiry is not truth but belief: you may think you want truth, but once you believe, you find that that is sufficient (I can look up the quote if you want). The thought is right, but the conclusion is not – because once you believe, you thereby ipso facto believe that you know the truth; so of course fixation of belief is sufficient. What would be superfluous would be a purported philosophical demonstration that our beliefs are true, either individually or collectively. If you really do believe, you feel no need for such a "demonstration"; and if you don't believe, then such a demonstration wouldn't apply (as it applies only to beliefs).

As may be evident by now, an important confusion (or systematic conflation) that can cause trouble here is between "belief" as a) a proposition qua believed (never mind by whom), and b) a proposition actually believed by the agent in question. These must be kept distinct. Again: take a belief of mine, any belief. If I cease to believe it, now I see it as possibly false. So the belief is possibly false? No, the proposition is possibly false as far as I'm concerned: I'm in doubt. Once I give it up, it's not a "belief" at all. Maybe someone else believes it; then it's a belief of theirs.

Once the anti-skeptical point is in place, the anti-instrumental and anti-nihilist points follow quickly (or are superfluous; on the other hand, this is not to say that related metaphysical and methodological unconfusing – of realist and anti-realist alike – isn't necessary to keep the anti-skeptical point in place, as skepticism naturally reactivates in the presence of dogmatism). So, to sum up: the value of truth has to mean the value of true belief, lest it mean the value of there being truths at all; but it turns out to be impossible to isolate the truth component of true belief as the object of value – the value of true belief ends up being either 1) the value of the world's being a certain way, or 2) of our knowing that the world is the way it is (either for the informative value of true belief or for the instrumental value of lacking false belief), or 3) of our believing what we believe given that we believe it (or something). The first two aren't what we were after, and the third doesn't make any sense. Our concern is really with belief and inquiry properly construed; but that noble goal is remarkably poorly advanced with such slogans as "truth matters."

I was going to run through Lynch's WMD example, but there are so many conflations and confusions in there that we better save it. Next time.

New (home for) science blogs

Totally awesome science blogs The Loom, Mixing Memory, and Evolving Thoughts are moving to (how about that) scienceblogs.com. There are other new additions as well: check out the home page here. Must ... update ... blogroll ...

Spanish castle magic

Here's another optical illusion - a nice variation on an oldie but goodie. (Make sure your mouse is off to the side.) Bonus: this one's free! (HT: Unfogged.)

That's four hears

At Dispatches, Ed gives us a long excerpt from a recent speech by Judge Jones (yes, that Judge Jones), explaining the concept of judicial independence. Ed's comment: "hear, hear." To which I add: hear, hear. The entire speech is here. (Ooh, almost had five.)

For the time, being

If you have too much of the one and/or not enough of the other: beware. See you there! (Maybe.)

(HT: Mormon Metaphysics)

Choons

I'm not sure I've mentioned this fine site yet. Now I have.

It's a streaming web radio show (one per week, *no archives*), featuring (as our host puts it) "Experimental / Ambient / Electronic / Ethereal" music, all from netlabels. I listen even now, to a very tasty track from an artist (Gyges, as in "ring of") previously unknown to me (as they usually are). Check it out!

You are getting sleepy, too

Check out this optical illusion. You won't believe your eyes! (Obviously.) Then, you will send me a check for a great deal of money. (HT: Mixing Memory).

Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible (redux)

Remember that one? Ah, corporate disingenuousness; is there anything more heartwarming than that hardy perennial? Today, however, is a different day, so here is more of the same, uh, material. Our source, Truth Tables, is a new blog which displays a taxonomist's love for the logical fallacy. Check it out!

Ah, I see they got it from Wonkette, so it's already out there, making this post somewhat redundant. But I wanted to plug the new blog.

Friday semi-random ten (recently retrieved edition)

Okay, it's Saturday now, but I won't tell if you won't.

1. Eleni Kairandrou – Ulysses' Gaze (ECM New Series)
2. Bill Laswell/Terre Thaemlitz – Web (Subharmonic)
3. Jeff Pearce – Vestiges (Hypnos)
4. Francis Bacon in conversation with Melvyn Bragg (Sooj)
5. Hal Willner et al – Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus (Columbia)
6. Sheila Chandra – ABoneCroneDrone (Realworld)
7. The Hafler Trio – Walk Gently Through the Gates of Joy (Touch)
8. Astor Piazzolla – Tango: Zero Hour (IRS reissue (!))
9. Maeror Tri – emotional engramm (i-Light)
10. Hiroki Okano – Heaven in the Koo (Brain-Food-Music)

Canon or cannon?

The painters have been here for the last couple of days, and for much of this time their besplattered boombox has been tuned to a "classic rock" station. Listening involuntarily with half an ear, I have identified (in rough order of descending frequency): Pink Floyd, Who, Led Zeppelin, Dylan (birthday tribute), Beatles, Eagles, Tull, Clapton, Springsteen, Stones, Queen, Clash, Red Hot Chili Peppers, U2, Bowie, Ramones, Yes, Billy Joel, Jackson Browne, Elton John, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Steely Dan, AC/DC, Styx, Creedence, Green Day, the Dead, Blondie, the Doobie Brothers, and Janis Joplin, plus a few (otherwise unremarkable) things I didn't recognize.

At one time that would have looked like a relatively diverse list, and that a popular radio station would play all of them might have seemed a triumph of pluralism (if not quality exactly) over narrowcasting. Yet now it takes an act of imagination not to see it as exactly the opposite. It doesn't help that in each case the tracks selected were utterly predictable. I understand the motivation, and even the appeal, behind the "canonical" approach (thus the name, "classic rock"), but Aqualung is not the only Tull album (nor the best one, but that's another story), and I don't think we really need to hear The Wall twice daily (double album though it be, and much as I liked it in 1979). If I had to hear this every day I would surely go mad.

Yet sometimes I'm glad there are such stations. One chilly day we were out at the storage locker moving some furniture around, and a car with radio cranked came by long enough for us to hear two things -- "New Year's Day" and "Rock 'n' Roll" -- and it was just the thing for energizing weary limbs (mine anyway). Small doses at opportune moments: that's the key.

So while part of me thinks it would be great to have, say, an Atom Heart-only radio station (not least for its potentially infinite playlist), I really would not appreciate the sinking feeling I might come to have on hearing even the glorious opening digital stutters of "Supertropical" for the umpteenth time.

This is so illegal

But it won't last. Behold the glory here -- until you can't. (HT: Unfogged)

OPC IV plus PC XXX = my brain hurts

The Online Philosophy Conference continues here, while the latest Philosophers' Carnival convenes here (and note considerable cat-blogging at the latter site, featuring multiple kitties).

DVC smackdown x 2

On Thursday film critic A. O. Scott of the local broadsheet took aim at, as he put it, "Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence," and he gets off a few good ones, which I reproduce here for your amusement. Since director Howard is merely a hack and not an outright disgrace, Mr. Scott's best lines concern neither him nor Tom Hanks's hair ("long, and so is the movie"), but the source material. The screenwriters, he says,

have streamlined Mr. Brown's story and refrained from trying to capture his, um, prose style. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino with long white hair." Such language — note the exquisite "almost" and the fastidious tucking of the "which" after the preposition — can live only on the page.

Later he notes that said albino – neither enormous nor long-haired on the screen – "may be the first character in the history of motion pictures to speak Latin into a cellphone" (I wouldn't be so sure about that, actually ...). The best line does concern our cast, however:

Through it all Mr. Hanks and Ms. Tautou stand around looking puzzled, leaving their reservoirs of charm scrupulously untapped.

Also weighing in on this celluloid marvel is the American public, as canvassed by The Onion. Here's Matt Medsker, Dramaturge:

I've been waiting my whole life to hear, 'Oh, no, Jesus ditn't!' shouted in a movie theater. Perhaps now that dream may come true.

So say we all.

P.S. For more about DB's inimitable (Deo volente, he said into his cellphone) prose stylings, check out the posts collected here (scroll down).

O come, o come, Immanuel

I recently ran across two new blogs (HT: Transcendental Philosophy and Naturalism, itself an excellent blog) dedicated to the philosophy of Kant.

At Kant Blog, Andrew asks how many of us support "two-world" rather than "one-world" readings of Kant's transcendental idealism. One problem with "two-worlds" readings has always been that they make Kant look like a skeptic, when it seems clear that skepticism (or, as Kant puts it, "skeptical idealism," i.e. Descartes) is one of his targets. Or they just make him look flatly inconsistent – as Andrew says, the charge is that "transcendental idealism is “inconsistent Berkeleyanism,” since it seems like Berkeleyan idealism + un-Berkeleyan things in themselves". These mysterious noumena supposedly somehow cause us to create phenomena affect us, the result being that our minds create phenomena, which we are thus in a position to know (seeing as they are not radically independent of us, as noumena are would be if we could say even that much about them). But now it seems that whatever reality there is in the objects of our knowledge (i.e. phenomena) actually resides in their ultimate cause, um, source. And then the question arises, how come we can't know the real world, instead of this merely phenomenal knockoff? Instead of an answer to skepticism, Kant's story looks like a restatement of it.

The "one-world, two-aspect" reading (e.g. Allison, Bird) is supposed to help us avoid this problem. If there is just the one world, which can be considered either as it appears to us or "as it is in itself," then this lessens our sense that when it turns out we can know only the former (that is, know the one world only under the former aspect), there is something else still out there behind the scenes that remains unknown. Instead, we know things in the only way in which it makes sense to think of us as knowing them – that's all.

I am sympathetic with this line of thought, but I think it's somewhat hasty to think that it solves our problems just like that. And I agree with Bader, the proprietor of our second Kant blog, Transcendental Idealism, that the two-worlds/one-world distinction shouldn't be thought of as one between "ontological" and "epistemological or methodological" readings of Kant. Whatever the noumena/phenomena distinction amounts to, Kant clearly has ontological fish to fry here (he'd better, or we're still stuck with the Cartesian "transcendental-realist" conception of the objective world). Bader agrees with James Van Cleve that "the distinction between appearances and things in themselves is a distinction between two separate universes of discourse - not between two ways of discoursing about the same class of objects." (Problems from Kant, p. 150). I would agree with this as well if all it means is that (as we just said) it's not true that Kant is concerned simply with knowledge and language and not with ontology. However, I take his (Kant's) point to be that the three cannot be so cleanly separated (as they are on the Cartesian picture – in fact that's what gets the skeptical problem going: the idea that we can have perfectly contentful beliefs about what might not actually be out there at all). Still, I think we have to say that there's only one world, or we run straight into the problem we started with. So in some sense we are indeed concerned with "two ways of discoursing" about the same thing (if not "the same class of objects" exactly). Again, a key Kantian point is that part of what it is to be an object at all is for it to be the object of our thought, as we conceptualize it.

Here's how I like to explain why simply pointing to the one-world reading as an answer to skepticism (i.e. so that there's no transcendent world to be worried about not being able to know) cannot work. The original question was: "why can't I know the real world instead of (just) the world of appearance?". On the one-world reading, the question does not just go away, but instead becomes: "why can't I know the world the way it really is, instead of (just) how it appears?". The virtue of the two-aspect reading is that it allows a better answer to that question (but you still have to give it, not just say "but there's only the one world, so there's no problem"!).

What we should say is this. When we know the world as it appears (say by observing the cup on the table, and inferring that the cup is on the table), we do know the world the way it really is. If you don't think that that's how things really are, then you have no business saying that you believe it; and if you don't believe it, then you need to take another look. If you still don't believe it, then you are letting Cartesian theoretical requirements dictate your beliefs (or lack thereof, qua skeptic). In particular, it is the Cartesian identification of "how things are in themselves" with "how things really are" that is causing the problem – or in other words, the Cartesian conception of objectivity as radically independent of subjectivity. That's the target of Kant's argument.

Again, objectivity is an ontological matter, not one (simply) of semantics or epistemology. But it is indeed (as the original crude identification of one-world/two-aspect readings with "epistemological or methodological" ones was meant to bring out) in explaining the role of the concept of objectivity in semantics and epistemology (that is, in speaking and knowing) that we see what objectivity is (and thus what sort of thing we should think of as "objective").

I will make these points in my own pragmatist-cum-Davidsonian language, rather than Kant's own tangled idiom, but the anti-Cartesian point is essentially the same. See for example the "Refutation of Idealism" section of the first Critique (B 274-79), where Kant speaks in terms not of language but of experience, i.e. self-consciousness. But (in this context at least) being a self-conscious agent and being a language user are the same thing, for the very Kantian reasons we are discussing: each, contra Descartes, commits you to dependence on an independent world for the content of your thoughts.

The central concept of epistemology is that of belief. The truth of your belief that p depends not on anything having to do with you, but instead on whether p is really (objectively) the case. My belief that the cup is on the table is true iff the cup really is on the table, independently of my believing it. The concept of belief marks the conceptual difference between actual knowledge of the objective world and possibly false subjective impressions of it. Belief, we say, doesn't make it so; yet if things are indeed as you believe them to be, then your knowledge is perfectly objective. This is why relativism is false: the truth of our beliefs depends on how the world is.

Analogously, the central concept of semantics is that of meaning. My statement "the cup is on the table" means what it does in virtue of its being true when things really are as it says they are when it is so construed (here, as meaning that the cup is on the table). Or, in a non-homonymous case (and omitting a few complications), taking "the slod is on the kovep" as being true in virtue of the cup's being on the table (and not otherwise, whether I said so or not), would be to take it as meaning "the cup is on the table" (and, presumably, that "slod" means "cup" and "kovep" means "table"). This is why idealism is false: the content of our thoughts depends on how things are when our beliefs (that they are that way) are true.

That's all there is to the concept of objectivity (i.e. things being really one way and not another, independently of what we say or believe). It is a Cartesian distortion to identify "objectivity" with the world as seen from no particular point of view (itself a distortion of the idea of the world as seen through mathematical eyes, as the new science demands). This is the point of the Kantian rejection of noumena (i.e. as "nothing to us"). For Kant, the phenomenal world is the (one and only) objective world; and when we speak truly, we see things as they really are. (There are different kinds of "noumena," and Kant sometimes backslides, but I think it undeniable that this is generally Kant's view: that noumena are to be rejected as a Cartesian fantasy.)

Seen from a Cartesian point of view, this looks like idealism – that what is objectively the case depends essentially on our practices of speaking and thinking, rather than being so "anyway" (as Bernard Williams puts it). But of course that's one of the things wrong with the Cartesian view: that seen from it, the correct view looks unacceptably idealistic. (But it isn't.)

We can indeed put the Cartesian fantasy in terms of there being an "independent world" (i.e. "beyond appearances," metaphysically speaking), as in the two-worlds version of Kant's philosophy. That's why it's hard to see that reading as helping: it seems to leave the Cartesian thought in place. Then it looks like the mystery of the noumenal world is Kant's doing, not Descartes's. (For example of this sort of reading, see Barry Stroud's uncharitable reading of Kant in The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism).

I have thus interpreted Kant's "transcendental idealism" as not being idealism at all (as I would Hegel's "absolute idealism" too, for that matter). It's as "realist" as we should want, once we give up the Cartesian fantasy of "absolute" objectivity. Some philosophers embrace Kant's "empirical realism" as allowing us to put metaphysics behind us (and become "scientific realists"). However, I tend to reserve the term "realism" for the "transcendental realist" position Kant enables us to reject (or, in contemporary terms, "metaphysical realism"). So we should embrace neither realism nor idealism, which should be rejected together as jointly committed to an untenably dualist picture. ("Scientific realism" has its own problems.)

This doesn't mean that I think we can accept Kant's position as it stands. From our present position on the far side of the "linguistic turn," we can see Kant as a key predecessor, but only once we know what to look for. To be "Kantian" nowadays is to apply Kantian insight to our contemporary situation, not to drag Kantian doctrines whole into the present (or to join them in the past). For various reasons (including his obsession with the problem of freedom (agency, rationality, morality, etc.) and his somewhat less successful solution to it, not to mention his equally obsessive systematicity), Kant seems to have left a certain amount of residual Cartesianism in place (or even, in some places, reinforced it), and it is natural for us to turn to subsequent critics (Hegel, various Romantics, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche) for help. Still, the "critical turn" remains an essential part of the glorious Nietzschean story (even if Nietzsche himself understates Kant's role in it, relegating him to an earlier phase than I would) of How the True World Became a Fable.

We are devo

When I was at Penn, I remember sitting one day with a friend in the Allegro Pizza on 40th and Spruce (I actually used to call it Andante Pizza; you know, not quite allegro, if you know what I mean), and I related to him the following dire statistic (NB: I'm not sure where I heard this, so I might not have it right). They took a poll, and asked: "Should it be illegal to criticize the government?" Answer: 75% said yes. Now, my point is not that that number is remarkably high (although it certainly is that). For this poll was conducted in tandem with another poll (they can't possibly have asked the same people), in which they asked: "Should people be allowed to criticize the government?" Again (gulp), 75% said yes. So at least 50% of respondents had no idea what they were even saying. (Yes, I know it's not a strict contradiction, but even so!) So help me, that was the story as it was told to me. I certainly hope it's apocryphal. By the way, as we were marveling over this folly, there in Andante Pizza, a middle-aged lady came over to us and said she was happy there were some people our age who weren't just talking nonsense all the time. Faculty maybe? Who knows.

I thought of that today when I saw this. Over at EvolutionBlog (check out the new digs!), Jason tells us about a new Harris poll about evolution, creation, and all that. Check the Harris link for all the numbers, but here are three results that Jason cites.

We find that 65% of conservatives vs. 37% of liberals reject the idea that humans developed from earlier species. 56% of conservatives vs. 31% of liberals reject the idea that man and apes share common ancestry. And 58% of conservatives vs. 35% of liberals reject the idea that the fossil record confirms evolution.

Okay, we've seen these numbers before. But check this out (and it seems they did ask all these questions of the same people): at least 9% of conservatives and 6% of liberals (that's about 70 people, 7% of the sample) rejected the idea that humans developed from earlier species, but did not reject the idea that man and apes share common ancestry. So humans were created in their present form, but (maybe) they share an ancestor with apes. If so, that ancestor can only be human. So humans didn't descend from an ape-like ancestor (that'd be crazy!): apes descended from humans. (Maybe.) So do people really believe this, or was this poll conducted in the morning hours, before people have had their coffee?

UPDATE [mere hours later]: This morning's Times tells us that humans and chimps may have interbred, and that contemporary humans may be descended from that hybrid. Interesting – but that still doesn't mean apes descended from humans.

OPC III

Oh, and the Online Philosophy Conference continues. There's a paper this week called "The Concept of Valuing." At first I thought it said "the concept of vaulting," which would have been interesting. Also interesting, I should say.

Another link to something exceedingly clever, while we wait for the next substantive post

A "cheat sheet" for those confused about Christianity. (Not offensive.) HT: Dispatches.

Oldie but goodie

If you've been in the biz for a while you've seen some version of "Philosophers' proofs that P" (HT for this version: Scottish Nous). But you don't really get them unless you know the philosopher. Now I've been reading Joseph Margolis lately, and I can confirm that this, Margolis's disproof that p, is very good:

The assumption that P -- indeed, the belief that P is so natural and obvious as to be beyond dispute -- is so deeply woven into Western thought that any attempt to question it, much less to overthrow it, is likely to be met with disbelief, scorn, and ridicule. The denial of P is a deep thesis, a theme of courage, a profound insight into the fundamental nature of things. (Or at any rate it would be if there were a fundamental nature of things, which there isn't.) Anyone unfamiliar with the hidden brutalities of professional philosophy cannot imagine all the nasty things that will be said about someone who dares to mount an assault on P. (Just look at how neglected Protagoras is now -- they even cut his writings up into tiny little bits!)

It has repeatedly been alleged that the denial of P is self-refuting. Extraordinary! As if one bold enough to deny P would feel bound by the conventions of dialethism on which alone any charge of self-refutation rests! Once we have seen through this delusion, we are free to dismiss as nonsense our current vision not only of philosophy and science but also that quaint notion of 'the good life.' We are also free to discard antiquated Hellenic prejudices as to what counts as proof and disproof, whilst retaining (of course) a proper sense of logical rigor. Hence, the foregoing constitutes a disproof of P.

Except for the last sentence of each paragraph, this could be cut and pasted from the man himself.

Some of them aren't so funny, but others are excellent (I like Kripke's). Check it out if you haven't.

Ribonucleic bourbaki, indeed

I love spam poetry, but this one seems a little, I don't know, unimaginative, compared to some I've seen:

dodecahedra delmarva andorra ahmadabad shelby electronic carey montreal bantus
calorimeter
casualty oratoric circumcise gaylord hump depositary govern archival canary
bustard lucius positron universe swanlike coxcomb allegate onrushing capstone
saline formate
inadvisable arginine elision ribonucleic bourbaki various analogy nasturtium
newsmen oilcloth cologne arabesque deed von logician grenoble
sane dissension dugan chaucer ecuador needful take sancho

After a blah beginning, it reaches for some lyricism with "swanlike coxcomb allegate onrushing capstone/ saline formate"; but that clunky "ecuador needful take sancho" ending just ruins it. And no, I am not interested in your product.

OPC II

The Online Philosophy Conference continues here. Gird your rational loins, for there is rigor there!

You want results? I got results

As a slimy mollusc (actually, I seem to have been evolving and devolving wildly over the past few weeks – today it seems I am a flippery fish, but I doubt that'll last), I tend not to bother linking to interesting or amusing things, assuming that readers are much more likely to see the thing where I saw it than to need me to point it out to them. But what's the harm, right? If you've seen it already then don't bother.

Here is manifested a standard of candor in student papers (physics division) that we all wish were more common (or at least occasional). HT's: Evolving Thoughts, Pharyngula.

Friday semi-random ten (Monday edition: the other room)

1. Dots (Rather Interesting)
2. Vir Unis – Aeonian Glow (GreenHouse)
3. Marco Cerletti – Random and Providence (soundways)
4. Natacha Atlas – Diaspora (Beggars Banquet)
5. Björk – Homogenic (Elektra)
6. Philip Jeck – Stoke (Touch)
7. va – label compilation (Vertical Forms)
8. Xenakis – Electronic Music (EMF/INA-GRM)
9. Arcana – Arc of the Testimony (Axiom)
10. Burnt Friedman & Jaki Liebezeit – Secret Rhythms (Nonplace)

That Vertical Forms compilation has some tremendous material on it: Delay, Bola, Múm, Monolake, Isan, etc. I think I'll have to listen to it now.

An embarrassment of riches

Not only has the new Philosophers' Carnival begun, so has the first On-line Philosophy Conference, with real papers and responses and everything. Rigorous arguments abound here. Each round lasts only a week, so don't delay!

A bandit, I

The library in the next town had its semiannual book sale today, and I made off with a double armload of goodies. My eyes are surely bigger than my head – there's no way I'll ever get to all of these – but these babies were priced to move: the whole lot cost about six bucks total.

1. Goethe – Faust, pt. 1, Penguin Classic edition (1949; orig. 1801). Never read this. I did read The Elective Affinities a few years ago, which wasn't exactly what I expected (good though). You've heard the opera(s), now read the book!

2. Ferdinand de Saussure – Course in General Linguistics (1959; orig. 1915). I'm always amused by criticisms of "post-structuralism" which point out triumphantly that Saussure was wrong about this or that. Q: What part of "post-structuralism" don't you understand? (A: the "post-" part.) Not like I'll be reading this one soon, but it may prove useful for reference at some point (he said, engaging in furious rationalization for his cupidity).

3. Paul Ramsey – Nine Modern Moralists (1962). To wit: Tillich, Marx, Niebuhr (x 2), Dostoevski [sic; not like that's wrong, of course], Maritain, Sartre, Brunner, and one Edmond Cahn. Blurb on the back: "A single thread runs through these essays, that divine charity, by transforming human justice and elevating legal morality, created the Western conception of the good community." Never heard of this guy, but it says he was the chair of the Religion dept. at Princeton. Looks interesting. Onto the shelf with the other unread theology!

4. Steven Vogel – Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People (1998). Not sure about this one, on second look. It's a pop science book about the mechanical principles explaining various natural forms. It does mention cats though. I'll keep it around for a while.

5. Robert Coles – The Moral Life of Children (1986). Out of the mouths of babes. I keep hearing about this one – but he has a number of simarly titled books, so maybe I'm just confused.

6. Philip Kerr – A Philosophical Investigation (1992). This could be stupid, but I couldn't resist. It's a serial-killer tale, and yes, the title is indeed alluding to a somewhat more famous work by someone else. From the blurb on the inside dust cover: "Inspector 'Jake' Jacowicz must use all her powers of reason and intuition to track this extraordinary sociopath, code-named 'Wittgenstein,' who draws her into a diabolical cat-and-mouse game and engages her in a chilling 'philosophical' dialogue about the nature of life itself." Set in 2013, by the way.

7. Wm. Buckler, ed. – Prose of the Victorian Period (1958). 570 pp. of Macaulay, Carlyle, Newman, Mill, Ruskin, Arnold, T. H. Huxley, and Pater. I don't currently suffer from insomnia, but it's nice to know that if I ever do, Sartor Resartus will be within easy reach. I kid – actually this does look good.

8. Steven Pinker – Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999). Not a big Pinker fan, but here he has limited himself to a very narrow topic: irregular verbs. The author attempts to entertain as well as instruct. Here's a taste, from p. 85, a quoted excerpt from one of the H*y*m*a*n K*a*p*l*a*n books:

"I tought de pest time 'bite' should be—'bote.'"
Miss Mitnick gave a little gasp.
"'Bote'?" Mr. Parkhill asked in amazement. "'Bote'?"
"'Bote'!" said Mr. Kaplan.
Mr. Parkhill shook his head. "I don't see your point."
"Vell," sighed Mr. Kaplan, with a modest shrug, "if is 'write, wrote, written' so vy isn't 'bite, bote, bitten'?"
Psychic cymbals crashed in Mr. Parkhill's ears.
"There is not such a word 'bote,'" protested Miss Mitnick, who took this all as a personal affront. Her voice was small, but desperate.
"Not-soch-a-void!" Mr. Kaplan repeated ironically. "Mine dear Mitnick, don' I know is not soch a void? Did I say is soch a void? All I'm eskink is, isn't logical should be soch a void?"

And naturally there's a lot of stuff about kids. Put it on the shelf next to the Coles book.

9. An Anthology of English Drama Before Shakespeare (1952, orig., well, before Shakespeare). Everyman and other such. Not all dour mystery plays; there's also something called "A Right Pithy, Pleasant, and Merry Comedy Entitled Gammer Gurton's Needle."

10. Leonard Peikoff – The Ayn Rand Library, Vol. VI: Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991). Not all dour mystery plays (oh wait, that was the last book). This, the publisher feels it is important that the reader know, was endorsed by Miss Rand as "the only authorized presentation of the entire theoretical structure of Objectivism. P.S.: Kant sucks." (okay, I added that last part). Accept no substitutes!

11. Kazuo Ishiguro – When We Were Orphans (2000). I have not yet managed to read any Ishiguro, though The Unconsoled has been parked on my shelf for some time (thanks Jay!). That book was recommended to me heartily, as being one that I in particular would like, by someone who had not 30 seconds earlier described his experience with it as including many instances of wanting to hurl the book across the room. Not sure how to take that. Also, I have had the recent Never Let Me Go out of the library proper for a month now (haven't started it yet). I did see the movie of The Remains of the Day though – partial credit? This one has been described to me as being a cross between Remains and The Unconsoled. Let me try Never Let Me Go; then we'll see about the others.

12. Strunk and White. They always have a few copies of this, and I always get one, so I can hand them out to those who especially need it. But I never do (seems presumptuous somehow), so they're accumulating. Oh well, there's fifteen cents wasted.

13. José Ortega y Gasset – The Dehumanization of Art (1948) Includes 4 other essays, including "In Search of Goethe from Within," which goes well with #1 above, don't you think? I may actually have this one somewhere already, but I don't see it.

14. Howard Kahane – Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric: The Use of Reason in Everyday Life (1992). This is your typical Critical Reasoning textbook. Looks okay. Lots of cartoons and quotations, making it reasonably entertaining. Continuing our theme for the day, here's one from our man Goethe:

When an idea is wanting, a word can always be found to take its place.

Ouch. That's harsh.

15. Actually, this one deserves its own post. Stay tuned. Really, you are not going to believe this one.

Friday semi-random ten (on Friday this time)

1. Monolake – interstate (monolake/imbalance)
2. Yasume – where we're from the birds sing a pretty song (citycentreoffices)
3. Tetsu Inoue – Yolo (DiN)
4. Four Tet – Rounds (Domino)
5. Roberto Musci – Debris of a Loa (Lowlands)
6. Daniel Menche – the face of vehemence (Ground Fault)
7. Beethoven – Piano Trios, Vol. 3 (Op. 70, 1 & 2), Stuttgart Piano Trio (Naxos)
8. Christoph Heemann – Days of the eclipse (Barooni)
9. Iron & Wine – Our Endless Numbered Days (Sub Pop)
10. Andrew Chalk – East of the Sun (Hic Sunt Leones)

Let's get this straight, ding bing it!

Like most people, I have a few particular gripes about other people's mistakes (my own mistakes I'm fine with). You know, like writing "it's" for "its", or misusing "begs the question" – that sort of thing. For some reason this very common one makes me crazy. We shouldn't be getting this wrong any more, people! (Actually, that's another one: "anymore" with an assertion rather than a negation, as in "I take the train all the time anymore." That one makes my skin crawl.) It's from an ad for The Economist, of all things.

When a butterfly flutters its wings in one part of the world, it can eventually cause a hurricane in another...

Argh. The reference is of course to the famed "butterfly effect," in which certain dynamical systems (like the weather) exhibit what is called "sensitive dependence on initial conditions." (There's a decent explanation of the effect, and some of the misconceptions surrounding it, here.) Sensitive dependence, no problem; but the clear implication of the ad, and that of the popular use of the idea, is that the slight puff of air caused by the butterfly's wings grew and grew until it became a raging hurricane.

Like the theoretical wings of the butterfly, events on the other side of the planet (not to mention right here in the U.S.) can ripple toward you at an alarming rate of speed and brew up quite a storm in your business .... and your life.

This is balderdash (not to mention flapdoodle). What grew and grew ("rippled toward you") is the difference between the states, at corresponding times, of the system sans butterfly and the one with it. There's nothing to suggest which one will end up with a hurricane, or that either will. If we picked a point in time halfway between then and now we wouldn't be able to tell which one had the butterfly and which didn't. The point is just that in such systems (and the Economist is correct to imply that the economy is one such system), a small difference in initial conditions will grow into a large difference later on: one which may even be manifested, at a particular place and time, between Katrina on one hand and complete calm on the other. It doesn't mean you should be on guard for those stormbringer butterflies across the globe. Or whatever the news-junkie analogue is. After all, even if butterflies became extinct we still wouldn't be able, in January, to predict the weather for Game 2 of the World Series (even if we did know where it was going to be).

Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry on the Ray Bradbury story "A Sound of Thunder," which refers to this effect (although before the work on chaos theory which led to the name) doesn't indicate why the story's ending is implausible; and even in the entry on the effect itself, which also mentions the story, it is not criticized in the obvious way (i.e. that the effect as described is not chaotic enough).

Not necessarily experienced, but ... beautiful

While our local libraries do reasonably well with cinema (I just got Kings and Queen, the new Arnaud Desplechin movie, which I'm looking forward to very much), the CD collections are virtually worthless, except for the classical discs. I did find one recently though, a 1993 disc called Stone Free: A Tribute to Jimi Hendrix.

Here's the lineup:

The Cure - Purple Haze
Eric Clapton - Stone Free
Spin Doctors - Spanish Castle Magic
Buddy Guy - Red House
Body Count - Hey Joe
Seal and Jeff Beck - Manic Depression
Nigel Kennedy - Fire
Pretenders - Bold as Love
P. M. Dawn - You Got Me Floatin'
Slash and Paul Rodgers with the Band of Gypsys - I Don't Live Today
Belly - Are You Experienced?
Living Colour - Crosstown Traffic
Pat Metheny - Third Stone From The Sun
M. A. C. C. - Hey Baby (Land of the New Rising Sun)

Some okay material there – perhaps not surprisingly, the less faithful renderings tend to be more successful, the P. M. Dawn track for example. Some are just embarrassing, like Nigel Kennedy (yes, the violinist), and most are pointless at best.

I don't mean to dump on this project – it's more dull than actively offensive. But it did get me thinking what a better tribute (and yes, one more faithful by my lights to the actual significance of the man's music) might look like. Here's my (wish)list, beginning as one indeed must with "Purple Haze":

Disc 1:

Heldon – Purple Haze (8:51)
Robert Wyatt/Terje Rypdal/Carla Bley/Steve Swallow/Jack DeJohnette – If 6 Was 9 (6:44)
Oren Ambarchi/Noël Akchote (produced by François Tétaz) – Machine Gun (12:11)
James Blood Ulmer – Voodoo Child (Slight Return) (7:08)
Fripp & Eno – Castles Made of Sand (9:23)
Robert Rich/jhno – Burning of the Midnight Lamp (15:00)

Disc 2:

Lassigue Bendthaus – Fire (4:21)
Naked City – Foxy Lady (5:50)
Supersilent w/Tore Elgarøy – House Burning Down (12:53)
Sun Ra Arkestra w/Vernon Reid – Little Wing (9:15)
Marcus Schmickler/C-Schulz/Manuel Göttsching – Rainy Day, Dream Away (8:33)
Jon Hassell/Michael Brook – 1983 (15:02)
Rafael Toral – Moon Turn the Tides ... gently gently away (13:06)

Disc 3:

Mark Nauseef/Miroslav Tadic (w/David Torn and Jack Bruce) – The Wind Cries Mary (5:44)
Windy & Carl – One Rainy Wish (30:05)
Francisco López/Joe Colley/John Duncan – ... and the gods made love (13:55)
Steve Tibbetts/Marc Anderson – Third Stone from the Sun (9:32)
Massacre w/Bob Ostertag – Are You Experienced? (8:19)

Okay, that's more than 14 (so sue me). And there's one point of overlap, but I never said there couldn't be. By the way, the Nauseef/Tadic track actually exists, on The Snake Music (CMP, 1994). As for the others – well, we can dream, can't we?

Names of names

My friend Justin has an article at 3 Quarks Daily in which he makes the following point:

The Neanderthals, I should not have to point out, were illiterate, and the presence or absence of an "h" in the word for "valley" in a language that would not exist until several thousand years after their extinction was a matter of utter indifference to them.

Quite right. Now read the rest.

10 things

Speaking of the PhilCarn, our überringleader Richard had a provocative post at his own place the other day about 10 things people should know about philosophy, and Clark followed suit soon after (evoking a comment from me there; but it seems I have more to say). I liked Clark's better – Richard's included several things which were philosophical opinions, rather than things about philosophy itself (not like the latter don't involve the former, of course), and some of them weren't even correct (!). Here's my own list.

1. Basketball coaches don't have "philosophies" (except possibly Phil Jackson). Philosophy is an intellectual discipline.

2. As such, it isn't identical with the profession of teaching philosophy courses to students in universities, or even with publishing articles about philosophy in professional journals. It's open to everyone to do, but you aren't doing it simply by saying you are (nor are you not doing it simply because you don't know that you are; on the other hand if you don't know that you're doing it you probably aren't doing it very well).

3. Philosophy is one of the humanities. It's not a science, but it's not an artform either. In this sense, it's like history, only less empirical. What matters is not simply whether what you say is true but what your point is and how your story goes. (Consider for example that a really lousy history could be made up of only true, perfectly well documented facts, while a really excellent history might be only marginally less so for its cavalier approach toward documentation. Philosophy's like that too – but of course in both cases solid arguments are generally better.)

4. That is, philosophers can make claims which are true or false (and failure in philosophy is at least, shall we say, well correlated with falsehood, although not straightforwardly so), but the goal of philosophers isn't knowledge, it's understanding. You can know without understanding (although your lack of understanding does put limits on what you can be said to know), and you can understand something without that understanding taking the form of a known proposition or formal theory (or, again, without the vehicle of that understanding being a rigorous argument for a specific philosophical doctrine).

5. In particular, our goal is self-understanding. ("Know thyself.") More particularly still, it's self-understanding as philosophers. That is, not only do philosophers want to understand themselves (everyone wants that), they want to understand what it is to take a philosophical view on something (including philosophy itself). This gives philosophical thought a characteristically reflexive cast. Which makes it the case that ...

6. Philosophy is really hard. I mean really hard. The reason that it isn't "rocket science" is that rocket science (qua garden-variety empirical discipline – *yawn*) is a snap compared to philosophy. What makes it characteristically difficult, again, is that its own aims, tools and methods are part of its domain. It's thinking about thinking (which of course includes thinking about thinking, etc.). This makes it something like performing surgery (using mirrors) on one's own motor cortex. What you do affects how you must think of what you are doing, which affects what you do, which ... you get the idea.

7. What this means is that while philosophy does indeed make progress (and not simply in rejecting previous absurdities, like that the world is made of water or some such), it takes much longer than science does (and of course there are other disanalogies, easily but fatally ignored). It can only be understood according to its own time-scale. Our present task, for example, is making sense of the transition into modernity (not out of it). This is proving quite a head-scratcher.

Corollary: while there are no "eternal" problems in philosophy, some of them are reliably stable, as we are reliably subject to certain fairly straightforward – although alas not thereby easily overcome – illusions. This allows us to see ourselves as in an important sense concerned with the "same problems" as, say, the ancients. The trick is to understand what sense that is, given that to understand exactly which confusion it is under which one labors, and how it compares to another, is hardly to be separated from overcoming that confusion itself.

8. "Analytic" philosophy isn't just a bunch of overly abstract, physics-envious logic-chopping, and "continental" philosophy isn't just a bunch of tenured-radical, jargon-ridden reality-free balderdash. Further, the (study of the) history of philosophy isn't just a bunch of fossilized Britons arguing over the placement of commas in the 20-volume edition of so-and-so's unpublished notebooks, where we now know that so-and-so was pretty much wrong about everything anyway, seeing as he lived back when they thought you could tell the future by consulting bird entrails.

Of course, here as everywhere else, one must remember Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. To be fair, for philosophy that figure is too high. Even a lot of the stuff which future historians will laugh at (even as they prepare their Gesamtausgaben) is worth doing (if only to dot the i's and cross the t's), and is being done reasonably well, by very bright people (even if they are misguided in not agreeing with me about everything).

9. "Logic" isn't the same thing as "reason" or "rationality." One way of being irrational is indeed by ignoring (or getting wrong) some logical rule, but that doesn't make one the same thing as the other. As a philosophical subdomain, logic is more concerned with structures as structures than with arguments or the "inferential glue" that holds them together. That is, logicians and philosophers of language never talk about logical fallacies or inferences or arguments (that is, any more than anyone else does).

Someone tried to tell me once that spiritual things were "beyond logic." I suppose he was making the familiar point (not that I agree with it necessarily) that we can't prove or disprove such things by argument. But if they really were "beyond logic," then they quite literally wouldn't make any sense. That might be okay if you are a Zen master or something, but most defenders of religion, I imagine, want to say that sentences like "God exists" and "Jesus was resurrected" are not only not gibberish (as "Krotok maxo corculoth stusk" is) but in fact true (indeed, not simply true but "absolutely" true, whatever that may mean), if perhaps not rationally justifiable (but no worse off for that, epistemologically speaking). After all, we're supposed to use them with conditionals like "If God exists, then I will be punished for my sins" to allow us to infer the consequent, and we can hardly do that if they don't have a truth value. And if something has a truth value, it isn't "beyond logic."

Some theologians (Kierkegaard, and Brunner is it?) do push the paradoxical angle, but there the paradox is (I think) supposed to be practical, not semantic. Another way of making my point here, then, is to insist on the mutually interconstitutive nature of logic and semantics – which shouldn't really be controversial: logic is the formal framework of meaning, and meaningful sentences are the instantiation of logical structure.

10. "Metaphysical" doesn't mean "supernatural." Whether God exists is a metaphysical question, but so is whether essences exist – or numbers, or species, or objects; and even the straightforwardly scientific question of whether electrons or quarks exist has its metaphysical aspects. After all, ontology is metaphysics, and ontology concerns what there is – as well as what it is to say what there is, and what we commit ourselves to saying there is in saying what it is to say what there is. Say that three times fast – and what it would be to say that three times fast (oh, stop it). And see #5 again (and #6).

Corollary: scientists who say that they have no metaphysical commitments are ... (okay, let's be charitable, or at least polite) using the term in a sense other than its usual philosophical one. (See Clark's version of this one.)

Now aren't you glad you asked?

New Carnival

New Carnival. Lots of stuff this time. Check it out!

Non-Friday non-random ten (ambient edition)

The ambient mailing list at hyperreal.org had another go-round at polling its members for their fave discs (I did not participate this time), and the results are here. Numerous gripes ensued, as people complained that the list looked suspiciously similar to the previous edition. Hasn't anything good come out since, say, 2000? So a further call went out, for, well, fave discs since 2000. This time I responded. The upstate returns haven't come in yet, but here is my list (as of whenever I wrote it; it may be different today). No order – they're all good.

1. Robert Rich - Somnium [Hypnos]

This is an audio DVD (not DVD-Audio, mind) of sleep-concerty stuff, seven hours long. Put it on and drift away, only to wake up four hours later with something unobtrusively odd happening in the room, over there somewhere. Very minimal (or is it?).

2. Jeff Greinke - Soundtracks [FWD]

Jeff used to go by J. Greinke, and put out three or four industrial-ish records on the Dossier label in the 80's. This is more drony, including a nice long track. I saw him play live (a couple of years ago already?) – in fact that's where I got this disc. Unfortunately it doesn't include the wild solo trombone thing he did (actually, I think you might have had to be there ...).

3. Bass Communion - Ghosts on Magnetic Tape [headphone dust]

BC is Steven Wilson of the prog rock group Porcupine Tree. This is very spacy, with some nice use of vocal sounds.

4. Rick Cox - maria falling away [Cold Blue]

Like his labelmate Chas Smith, Cox is a guitarist who will never be mistaken for Christopher Parkening (too few notes, no attacks; you get the idea). This has one track with Jon Hassell, but the highlight is a glorious twenty-two minute guitar-heavy track (not like you'd notice though).

5. Kwook - Unidentified Feathered Object [DataObscura]

Kwook is an Aussie, and I think this is his only actual CD release (okay, it's a CD-R), which ranges from Rileyesque sequencer workouts to a tour of the outer planets (no lie). There's a lot of other fine material on this label – check it out!

6. Loscil - First Narrows [kranky]

I mentioned Loscil the other day, touting his recent netlabel release stases (free! free!). I wasn't kidding when I said I liked this record. A new one is due soon, I hear.

7. Shuttle358 - Understanding Wildlife [Mille Plateaux]

All of Dan Abrams's work is good (Frame is a little beatier than the others) but this one epitomizes his sense of proportion among space, melody, and glitch. But also check out optimal.lp (a CD, actually) and the recent Chessa.

8. Oöphoi - Mare Tranquillitatis [Deep Listenings]
9. Alio Die - Il Tempo Magico di Saturnia Pavonia [Hic Sunt Leones]

For some reason Italy is a hotbed of ambience. Oöphoi (Gianluigi Gasparetti) and Alio Die (Roberto Musso) lead the pack. Both of these discs – and I could have picked any of many others, as both artists are both prolific and consistently excellent – are rich, thick, drony, and lushly reverberant. By the way, I think Alio Die's classic Suspended Feathers has been reissued somewhere (of course I have mine already ...).

10. Marconi Union - (Distance) [All Saints]

This was a name unknown to me until recently. It's a very nice guitar-oriented disc (identifiably so this time) that wouldn't be out of place on the Kranky label – like Labradford, only, well, more ambient. They're from Manchester.

I'm sure there's a lot more out there, even in this very room. But I'm sure I'll mention them eventually.

X-post facto

Ed B. has a post about Newt Gingrich's new book, The Creator's Gifts: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, and since I was thinking of addressing this topic anyway, I'll crosspost my comment here, to wit:

Alan Keyes likes to say that what liberals forget is that our rights are "given to us by God," (as if he'll take them away, or as if we're being ungrateful, or something, if we don't let theocrats run things) and it's disappointing to see Gingrich, who is not a total jackass, buying into it too. The Declaration reads:

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

This sentence rejects the then prevalent idea that our having rights is contingent on their being bestowed by some agent external to us (like a king, say), rather than their being ours by nature (and thus necessarily). The point of referring to the Creator here is to endorse the latter idea: we have rights simply in being human beings at all. This being the 18th century, the chosen wording is about what we should expect. It's a good choice – forceful, poetic, and yet doctrinally non-committal (between deism and traditional theism). And of course that's why it says "endowed" (which means "provided with some quality," i.e., by nature) rather than "bestowed" (although another meaning for "endowed" is "bequeathed," as in a university endowment, which may be causing some of the confusion here).

But Keyes (and now Newt) misses the point entirely, as if the founders were accepting the original idea (rights bestowed by external agent) and simply changing the agent from king to deity. But that can't be right. For one thing, they would hardly hold such a metaphysically contentious idea to be "self-evident." Indeed, that idea is barely coherent, assuming as it does that making us human and bestowing rights upon us are conceptually distinct things, as if it were possible to be fully human, but without the right to liberty until it was subsequently bestowed upon us (by a wave of His mighty hand – which did what, exactly?). But this is just what the Declaration denies. To be human just is to have the rights in question. They depend on nothing external to us, natural or supernatural. That's what the part about it being "self-evident" is meant to emphasize: that having rights is (metaphysically) necessary for being human. It doesn't say that they couldn't give an argument for that claim, but indicates the kind of argument that it would be if they did give one (if the DoI were a philosophical treatise, which it is not). That argument would not be an appeal to Scripture (which is the very opposite of self-evident, concerned as most of it is with contingent matters of fact), but one concerned with (as Kant would say a few years later, in a different context) "necessity and universality," the marks of the a priori.

Not that I agree with that exactly (that sharp necessary/contingent dualism looks funny nowadays, for starters) but that's what the founders thought.

Also see SharonB's comment, a point which Ed makes in the post as well: "Nowhere [in the Bible] is a statement to the effect that the power of government derives from the consent of the governed" (her words). Quite right.

Non-Friday semi-random ten

1. Ravel - Complete music for solo piano (A. Simon, piano) [VoxBox]
2. Alio Die - Il Tempo Magico di Saturnia Pavonia [Hic Sunt Leones]
3. L'Usine - s/t [Isophlux]
4. Michael Vetter - Zen-Glocken [Wergo]
5. Jan Maier - Mountain Skyes [Jemsong]
6. Hazard - Wind [Touch]
7. Dan Abrams - Stream [Mille Plateaux]
8. Richard Pinhas - L'Ethique [Cuneiform]
9. Anouar Brahem - Khomsa [ECM]
10. Klimek - Milk & Honey [Kompakt]

Notes: Le Tombeau de Couperin is my favorite piece of classical music (I don't remember how this performance is). Jan is my cousin.

Eppur si muove

My goodness, I think we have a live one here. (HT: Dadahead)

As is well known, the creationist knock on evolution is that once the kids learn that biological evolution is non-teleological, they will infer from this that there is no objective morality and consequently try to have as many abortions and/or homosexual orgies as humanly possible. Or something.

For some, however, this common view is insufficiently hardcore (= deliriously perverse). To save the world from gay marriage and so forth, it is thus not Darwin whom we must reject, or even those pesky geologists with their absurdly old earth, but ... Galileo and Copernicus. Yes, at fixedearth.com there is displayed a full-blown case of geocentrism. Under a picture of a "levitating globe" (scroll down) we read:

"An electromagnet and computerized sensor hidden in its
display stand cause the Earth to levitate motionlessly in the air."
Could God have engineered something like that for the real Earth?
The Bible and all real evidence confirms that this is precisely what He did, and indeed:
The Earth is not rotating...nor is it going around the sun.
The universe is not one ten trillionth the size we are told.
Today’s cosmology fulfills an anti-Bible religious plan disguised as "science".
The whole scheme from Copernicanism to Big Bangism is a factless lie.
Those lies have planted the Truth-killing virus of evolutionism
in every aspect of man’s "knowledge" about the Universe, the
Earth, and Himself.

Take your time.
Check it all out.
Decide for yourself.

So without the divine electromagnet (or whatever) the Earth would ... fall down? Which direction is that, exactly? South? My stars, that's astoundingly stupid. Even a flat earth makes more sense than this - at least then there is a "down" (in some versions, anyway; in others there are people on the flip side too).

And is it a coincidence, or instead deliberate, that this list (you can't see it in my version, as I cannot figure out how to center-justify; go look) resembles a mushroom cloud?