Rorty and his critics (warning: this is a long 'un)

[X-posted to The Valve; I imagine more and better comments will be over there (once everyone's had time to plough through it), so if you got here from somewhere else, be sure to check over there too.]

John [Holbo, head Valvester] has invited me to say a bit more about the (R. Brandom, ed.) Rorty and his Critics collection we both like, for those interested (the rest of you can go back to arguing about whether Nabokov was a perv, or a robot, or whatever). I was going to say "dragooned," but I must admit I'm always up for talking about Rorty and his critics (seeing as the latter group includes me, me, me). And I see that I have written a bit more than "a bit." Oh well.

The Brandom volume came out in 2000. There are of course a number of previous books collecting critical responses to Rorty, including this one from 1990, and this one, from 1995. These critics, however, tend to be unsympathetic ones, and unsympathetic critics are not only less interesting to begin with, but bring out the worst in Rorty, who replies (in the second collection) in kind, i.e., less with careful engagement than with more of the same and then some. There are two basic kinds of unsympathetic critic. First we have realists who want to remind us that "yes, Virginia, there is a real world" (an actual title, as I recall, although this particular essay is not included in either of these books), and that relativism is self-refuting (an essay in the former collection is called "Auto-da-Fe"). The second group of critics is made up of scrupulous scholars of American pragmatism, outraged at Rorty's "creative misreadings" of their guys (esp. Dewey; Peirce is not so much "creatively misread" in Rorty as he is dissed and abandoned), and in service of (what they see as) a facile postmodern relativism to boot (as opposed to Dewey's, and Peirce's, explicitly scientific and experimental approach; Peirce was a working scientist, you know). And of course we also have critics on Rorty's political left, frustrated with the "piecemeal nudging" of reform and downright conventionalist quietism they see in his self-attributed "postmodern bourgeois liberalism" (compare criticism of Gadamer, as well as Wittgenstein, on similar or at least analogous grounds).

Now of course none of these groups is entirely wrong (I will not discuss the third). In my view as well, Rorty has never given a completely satisfactory answer to the charge that his views are, if this is how we want to put the point, insufficiently realistic; and of course 1990 is ten years earlier than 2000. I also agree with the second group that when we are concerned with what Dewey was actually up to, we should turn to Ralph Sleeper or Thomas Alexander rather than Rorty; but that doesn't mean that Rorty's use of Dewey doesn't help illuminate his own views, which should be evaluated on their own merits, and not with a set of Deweyan or Peircean doctrines already in place, which would allow us to elide failure to get Dewey or Peirce right with failure to get the world right.

I should also mention two other books. The single best response to Rorty's early views (that is, his early pragmatist views, not his even earlier materialism) is the essay on Rorty in Thomas McCarthy's book (his being a Habermas scholar notwithstanding); and if you are interested in these matters but think the Brandom volume might be too advanced for you (it is indeed difficult; but so is philosophy), I recommend this recent collection, which shares some of the same virtues, but is intended as an introductory book. In fact I think I'll read it again after I finish this.

But our topic today is the Brandom book. I won't discuss every essay, but zoom in on a few important topics addressed by a few of them, and say why I think this book is more than just a good book on Rorty.


Everybody knows that Descartes believed that mind and matter were two different substances. That meant that our beliefs, qua mental states, were "in here" while the world they purport to represent is "out there," such that the former are true if they "correspond" to the latter. Substance dualism is a tough sell for various reasons, but even when materialism became the dominant view, the Cartesian conception of
mind remained (although now thought of as a state of the physical world). The dualism changed from one of different substances (subject and object) to one of different points of view (subjective and objective). Belief remained a subjective representation of objective reality; and so the metaphysical dualism remained, even if not in "substance" form.

Descartes did not invent the philosophical problem of skepticism, but simply put it in a new and pressing form (the ancient skeptics agreed that objective knowledge was impossible, but basically told us to chill out about it – just accept the appearances and get on with your life). The Cartesian conception of mind presents an intolerable paradox: either we have no knowledge at all of the "external" world, not even that it exists, or we must show that we can bridge the epistemic gap between incorrigible subjective states (sense data and the a priori) and the objective world beyond. But no such bridge seems possible. Yet it is impossible simply to give up our beliefs as unjustified and unjustifiable, even in the face of this problem.

The most common responses to this paradox are 1) dogmatism, i.e., continuing to argue (or just assume) that the gap is crossable, and trying to shift the burden of proof back onto the skeptic; and 2) relativism, i.e., admitting the gap is uncrossable, even inconceivable, leaving each subject with his or her own "truth" faute de mieux, as that's all there is. The first leaves us with a possibly hopeless and maybe even incoherent aspiration to ground our beliefs; but the latter leaves our beliefs ungrounded and even themselves incoherent qua belief about a world beyond the subject.

Rorty tries another tack. As he sees it, the problem lies in the idea that our beliefs need "grounding," if that means seeing them as achieving "objectivity," which he agrees is either impossible or incoherent (he goes back and forth as to which). Yet he agrees that relativism is incoherent as well. So how are we to know what to believe, if we can't just believe whatever we want? Sounding a bit like the ancient skeptics here, Rorty suggests that the only "grounding" our beliefs need is in our practices as they stand. That is, if it is inherent in the very concept of belief that it points beyond the subjective realm – which is what makes relativism incoherent (how can a relativist really be said to "believe" anything?) – and we cannot see it as grounded in an inconceivable "correspondence" to an "objective" world (as we cannot jump out of our skins, as if to attain a "view from nowhere"), then let us turn to a third, intermediate realm: the intersubjective.

I won't rehearse Rorty's arguments and slogans here (see his collection of mid-1980's papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, for his most concerted effort to defend them properly), but we should take a look at his often-misconstrued "ethnocentrism" (a word I'm surprised he uses for his view; but see his response to Clifford Geertz, who himself uses the word quite differently, in the above collection). The idea is that we avoid relativism by recognizing normative constraints on our beliefs (we can't believe just anything if we are to be rational), but also avoid realism by recognizing that these norms come not from "the world itself" but from our fellows. The norms of justification vary from culture to culture, so whose norms should we use? If we are not to derive them a priori, nor to abandon them entirely, we can only answer: ours. These norms are revisable, not dogmatic; and that process of revision is itself subject to an ideal of free and unforced agreement, indeed open-ended conversation, appropriately enough if one considers one's own "ethnos" to be that of post-Deweyan "wet liberals" committed primarily to democracy and the avoidance of cruelty (rather than the accumulation of ideally accurate representations of objective reality, or of fealty to the One True Faith, or whatever).

We should thus reject "representationalism," and see our inscriptions and utterances as just one more set of tools for coping with the world, as it is the subject-object dualism lingering in that picture which causes the endless cycles of realism and anti-realism which have characterized the philosophy of the last century (I almost wrote "this century," which is of course what Rorty called it at the time). In other words, again, we should turn away from the world (i.e., so considered, as the object of our subjective representations) and toward our fellow inquirers, as it is to them and not to it that we are obliged. We thus abandon "capital-P Philosophy" as manifested in the traditional problems, and turn instead to our practices themselves, without worrying about grounding them transcendentally.

This is what provokes Rorty's turn to Deweyan conceptions of democracy as the political arm of philosophical pragmatism ("The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," in ORT), and his favoring of Gadamerian Horizontverschmelzung over the Habermasian obsession with somehow locating the key to an "ideal speech situation" in Critical (i.e., philosophical) Theory rather than implicit in practice itself. There is a back-and-forth-and-back between Rorty and Habermas in Rorty and his Critics, but that's not what I'm going to discuss here. (For some specifically Deweyan criticism of Rorty's treatment of Dewey, see Rorty and Pragmatism, the 1995 collection I linked above, esp. James Gouinlock's contribution.)

As the reference to Gadamer vs. Habermas might suggest, most critics see Rorty's "ethnocentrism" as just another kind of conventionalism, the left lamenting the loss of critical leverage against tyrannical consensus, and the right bewailing the loss of transcendent objectivity. In either case, they often suggest that Rorty's views sound suspiciously like Orwell's O'Brien, who as I recall actually cops to (metaphysical) "idealism," seeing "realists" like Winston as naive. Rorty has addressed the Orwell issue in "The last intellectual in Europe: Orwell on cruelty" (in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity), and in the Brandom collection James Conant has a typically lengthy and footnote-ridden article in response, which makes some excellent points, and is worth reading until you just can't get any farther, which should be about halfway through. Rorty defends himself surprisingly ably in response.


While Conant is the most detailed in his case for the view that, even in attempting to navigate a middle path, Rorty falls off to the relativist side (that is, he fails even by his own lights, a common charge among the commentators here), other commentators are more effective, even provoking unprecedented concessions which will, or should, or so I claim, be the focus of all subsequent Rorty scholarship, as I think Rorty would agree.

Bjørn Ramberg is the author of a fine book, Donald Davidson's Philosophy of Language: short, introductory, and yet substantive, although as a 1988 release it misses important developments in Davidson's philosophy since then. He also wrote the entry on hermeneutics at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; and while we're over there we might as well check out Jeff Malpas's article on Davidson.

"Post-ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson," Ramberg's article in Rorty and his Critics, is itself well worth reading, but it is Rorty's response that is the most compelling reading in the book. (Portions of this response, Rorty tells us, come from "Davidson between Wittgenstein and Tarski" (Critica 1998; Davidson's reply is available online here (scroll down) and on paper here; unfortunately, at the moment at least, the online archives at Critica go back only to this very issue, not the one in which the articles appear to which he is responding.)

Get this. "Ramberg," Rorty says in his response (p. 375), "has persuaded me to abandon two doctrines which I have been preaching for years: that the notion of 'getting things right' must be abandoned, and that 'true of' and 'refers to' are not word-world relations." More specifically, "it was a mistake on my part to go from criticism of attempts to define truth as accurate representation of the intrinsic nature of reality to a denial that true statements get things right" [374]. He explains this realization in the Davidsonian terms Ramberg had used – in particular, the later-Davidsonian picture of interpretation/inquiry (my slash) as a triangle with vertices of speaker, interpreter, and world. This is the key to Davidson, and for that reason I won't make a big deal out of my quibbles with the details of Rorty's long overdue mea culpa.

But let's at least look at them, and finish up by considering, in the context of three more articles in Rorty and his Critics, the effect of this doctrinal shift on one more key issue: the value of truth in inquiry. Consider Rorty's answer, immediately following the above concession to Ramberg [p. 375] to the following question he naturally asks himself: "How many of my previous positions – positions criticized by McDowell, Dennett, and others in this volume – am I now forced to give up?" That answer? "Not many. Here are some doctrines which remain unaffected:

"1. No area of culture, and no period of history, gets Reality more right than any other [as there is] no such thing as Reality."

Okay, but you won't like the subsequent exegesis, which still sounds antirealist.

"2. Pace McDowell, there is no second norm given us by the facts, in addition to the norms given us by our peers."

Here the brief explanation looks fine – except one thing: in the sense in which it is correct, there's no reason to take McDowell as disagreeing with it. I'll talk a bit about McDowell's article below.

"3. To say that we get snow mostly right [i.e., for Davidsonian reasons] is not to say that we represent snow with reasonable accuracy ... The holism of intentional ascription forbids any such talk."

Poppycock. Representation, like correspondence and objectivity, can be perfectly well domesticated. If you don't think we get snow right, then say so, and give us a better account. Perhaps naturally, after making such a big concession, Rorty is still concerned with minimizing what he is forced to say rather than with deciding what he still wants to say (or avoid saying).

"4. I [...] still maintain that there is no such thing as the search for truth, as distinct from the search for happiness [ = "getting more of the things we keep developing new descriptive vocabularies to get"]. There is no authority called Reality before whom we need bow down."

Yes, yes, realism is false. We get it. Note the dualistic form here, which is really what we should be jettisoning: our goal, he says, is not truth – that would be Realism! – but instead happiness (as if embracing the one still involved abandoning the other). Yet to be entitled to the Davidsonian picture, I would argue that we must reinstate truth – given its role there – as a goal. After all, if we want to know whether snow is white, doesn't that mean, given its meaning, we are ipso facto concerned with the truth of "snow is white"? Answer: sure we are. I'll say this again in a second.

So this is a big step for Rorty, but it seems he has not yet internalized this shift in doctrine (which, given all the rest of his views, may take some time to do). It is with this in mind that the other papers and responses should be read (some of which were written before 1998, but if Rorty wanted to change his responses he would have said so, either there or in the response to Ramberg).


In "Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald Davidson vs. Crispin Wright" (1995, so pre-Ramberg; but this part seems to be something Rorty has not retracted (see #4 above); reprinted in Truth and Progress), Rorty elaborates his view in the following way (T & P, p. 39).

Some Davidsonians might see no reason why they too [i.e., as Wright does] should not say, ringingly, robustly, and commonsensically, that the goal of inquiry is truth. But they cannot say this without misleading the public. For when they go on to add that they are, of course, not saying that the goal of inquiry is correspondence to the intrinsic nature of things [i.e., metaphysical realism], the common sense of the vulgar will feel betrayed [footnote: for an example see such-and-such typical realist griping from Searle and Rorty's reply]. For "truth" sounds like the name of a goal only if it is thought to name a fixed goal – that is, if progress toward truth is explicated by reference to a metaphysical picture, that of getting closer to what Bernard Williams calls [in his book on Descartes, I believe] "what is there anyway." Without that picture, to say that truth is our goal is merely to say something like: we hope to justify our belief to as many and as large audiences as possible. But to say that is to offer only an ever-retreating goal, one that fades forever and forever when we move. It is not what common sense would call a goal. For it is neither something we might realize we had reached, nor something to which we might get closer.

So instead of saying truth is our goal, because we can't tell when we have reached it, Rorty would have us say instead that justification is our goal, not truth. Now as you may know Rorty has been trying to get Davidson to go pragmatist in one way or another for many years. So prepare yourselves for another landmark in RahC. Davidson has resisted (as well he might) any "pragmatist theory of truth" In which truth just is "the good in the way of belief" (James) or something "good to steer by" (Dewey); but in "Truth Rehabilitated" (RahC pp. 65-73), he finally joins Rorty in this "somewhat tamer, but clearly recognizable, version" (p. 67):

What is clearly right is a point made long ago by Plato in the Theaetetus: truths do not come with a "mark," like the date in the corner of some photographs, which distinguishes them from falsehoods. The best we can do is test, experiment, compare, and keep an open mind. [...] We know many things, and will learn more; what we will never know for certain is which of the things we believe are true. Since it is neither visible as a target, nor recognizable when achieved, there is no point in calling truth a goal. Truth is not a value, so the "pursuit of truth" is an empty enterprise unless it means only that it is often worthwhile to increase our confidence in our beliefs, by collecting further evidence or checking our calculations.
From the fact that we will never be able to tell which of our beliefs are true, pragmatists [i.e., those committed to the "pragmatist theory of truth"] conclude that we may as well identify our best researched, most successful, beliefs with the true ones, and give up the idea of objectivity. (Truth is objective if the truth of a belief or sentence is independent of whether it is justified by all our evidence, believed by our neighbors, or is good to steer by.) But here we have a choice. Instead of giving up the traditional view that truth is objective, we can give up the equally traditional view (to which the pragmatists adhere) that truth is a norm, something for which to strive. I agree with the pragmatists that we can't consistently take truth to be both objective and something to be pursued. But I think they would have done better to cleave to a view that counts truth as objective, but pointless as a goal.

Let's not get fuddled by Davidson's use of "pragmatist" here. He thinks of Rorty as a "pragmatist" in the sense he uses it on the basis of Rorty's endorsement someplace or other of the "pragmatist" reduction of truth to utility. But as we have just seen, Rorty endorses both of the last two sentences of this quotation (and is thus not a "pragmatist" in this sense, at least not by 1995). Even without the (later) concession to Ramberg that true statements "get things right," it would surely be pointless for Rorty to say both 1) that truth is not objective, but instead to be identified with utility, and 2) truth is pointless as a goal; for that would mean that utility is pointless as a goal, which is nuts. So in agreeing to (2), we lose any motivation to deny that truth is objective. After all, as Davidson tells it, the whole point of (2) was to improve on (1). But we still have a version of pragmatism here. Compare e.g. Davidson's invocation of the Theaetetus with Peirce's dictum that "the final opinion [his criterion of truth] does not glow in the dark." And of course realists won't want to save the objectivity of truth by giving it up as a goal.

But here's where it gets sticky. For neither do I. (Ironic, isn't it, that after all this time, Davidson and Rorty finally agree on a version of pragmatism ... and it's wrong. Ironic, anyway, for those of us who hoped it would go the other way.) And neither do Akeel Bilgrami [full disclosure: my dissertation adviser at Columbia, not like he necessarily agrees with me on anything besides this] and John McDowell, whose articles here are essential (but not essentialist; that's something else).


Here's my paraphrase of Bilgrami's argument (but don't hold him responsible; read it yourself). For both Rorty and Davidson, the key point that requires that truth not be a goal (almost wrote "gaol"; who's that, Foucault?) is that (as Davidson puts it) "we can never tell which of our beliefs are true" (because, again, they don't come with a "mark" distinguishing them from the false ones). But wait a second. There is indeed a truth in there somewhere; but that's not it. Let's be more careful. We are fallible; our methods of justification do not guarantee that the resulting belief is true. So every believer (that's everybody) has some false beliefs (he thinks they're true, but they're not; because truth is objective and doesn't depend on what we think). Each of us may be required to revise our beliefs in the future, as new evidence comes in.

So far so good. But you have to watch that first-person plural (the very aspect of "ethnocentrism" that was supposed to help us). I can say "we all have some false beliefs" because a) everybody else does, and b) I'm fallible too. But I can't say "I have some false beliefs just like everybody else," for Moorean reasons (Moorean paradox: both "it's raining" and "I believe that it is not raining" may both be true, but to say "It's raining, but I don't believe that it is" makes no sense on any remotely straightforward interpretation). Similarly, you can't say "I can't tell which of my beliefs is true." Try it.
-- How about this one? Is this one true?
-- Of course it is. Everyone knows that.
-- So you can tell. How about that one?
-- Maybe not.
-- Maybe not? It might be false?
-- Maybe.
-- So you're in doubt about it; it's not a "belief" at all. If you believe something, what can that mean but "I have checked this every way I know how (or at least every way I care to) and it is true true true"?

Moral: only on a third-person view of inquiry can we disavow the transparency (in this sense) of belief. From the first-person point of view, an inquirer's beliefs must be true. But that's what each of us is – a first-person inquirer. (Akeel says a lot more, but that's the gist.)

Let's just solve the skeptical problem while we're here. Here comes a skeptic now.
-- Okay, okay, you believe it (he says). But maybe you're wrong about what you believe; you're fallible, aren't you?
-- Yes, I am; I've made mistakes before.
-- So maybe you're wrong this time too.
-- We'll see, won't we. Did you have any of my beliefs in mind?
-- Well, how about this one? Is this one true?
-- Why yes. Yes it is.
-- But it might be false, say if this (admittedly unlikely) situation were the case.
-- It would be then; but we're not in that situation.
-- So you say.
-- Yes I do. Let me ask you: do you believe it?
-- Me?
-- Yes, you. Do you believe that belief of mine?
-- Of course I do. I'm a philosopher, not a moron.
-- So you agree it's true.
-- Yes, but it might not be.
-- It's true, but it might not be true?
-- Okay, wait. No, I don't believe it.
-- You don't? What are you, a moron?
-- No, I just, uh, it might be false.
-- So you say. But if I am to credit you with actually believing that it might be false – that is, that you don't believe it (i.e., in order to be a consistent skeptic) – then you have to act that way, or you're just flapping your mouth. So go ahead, act that way. Go on.
-- Um...
-- See, you can't – they'd lock you up. Congratulations, you're not a moron after all. But you have to give up your skepticism. Either you believe something or you don't; and if you do, you can't be a skeptic; but if you don't, then we're not talking about the truth of our beliefs; we're talking about what to believe. And that's just first-order inquiry, not philosophical reflection. Only Cartesians confuse the two, i.e., those who see philosophy as laying down requirements for our practices, not (as Wittgensteinians say) elucidating them or (as pragmatists say, with Peirce) making them clear (of course that's just what "elucidating" means, isn't it).

Now, where were we? Oh yes – we can too tell when our beliefs are true. To say otherwise is to give them up. But doesn't this require absolute certainty? And wouldn't that be dogmatic? Yes, it would; but all we need do is distinguish between degrees of certainty and types of certainty. Certainty is just the absence of doubt; but the absence of doubt is just belief. So when I believe something, I'm completely or entirely certain; but I'm not "absolutely" certain, if that means something like incorrigibly certain. And all I need to do to avoid that is to pledge to revise my views if new and persuasive evidence comes in; but I was going to do that anyway. So since we can indeed tell when our beliefs are true, there's no reason that truth can't be a goal after all. QED.

Almost done (for today). My favorite article here is McDowell's "Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity" (pp. 109-23). (By the way, that may seem short, but the pages are big, with close print. You would have gotten your money's worth with this book, if the price hadn't gone up to $35.99 in paperback.) Covering some of the same territory as Bilgrami, McDowell hits Rorty on the same points, but from a metaphysical rather than an epistemological angle. (This makes sense given McDowell's turn to Kant and Hegel.) As I've already mentioned, there's no point in denying that truth is objective, once we make the necessary pragmatic connection to our practices of inquiry and interpretation (although that connection cannot take the form either of reducing truth to utility or of giving it up as a goal). McDowell elaborates this point, in the context of showing Rorty's "pragmatism" to fail by its own anti-Cartesian lights (that's gotta hurt).

I won't go into the whole McDowellian picture, which would require a detour into Mind and World and a dozen or so of his most important articles (ooh, and the one in here), but let me just give you a taste (pp. 114-5):

Rorty's picture is on these lines. If we use an expression like "accurate representation" in the innocent internal [i.e., to our practices, as in Putnam] way, it can function only as a means of paying "empty compliments" to claims that pass muster within our current practice of claim-making. Now "the representationalist" finds a restriction to this sort of assessment unacceptably parochial. Recoiling from that, "the representationalist" tries to make expressions like "true" or "accurate representation" signify a mode of normative relatedness – conformity – to something more independent of us than the world as it figures in our world view [i.e., as an objective world – one, that is, that does not depend our our thoughts about it – so that what the Cartesian demands is fealty to a world more independent of us even than that; this distinction is McDowell's metaphysical analogue to Bilgrami's "first-person" epistemology, of which McDowell has his own variant]. This aspiration is well captured by Thomas Nagel's image of "trying to climb outside of our own minds" [The View From Nowhere; but of course Nagel – a sap, but a good philosopher nonetheless – thinks that this task, which we should all deplore as irretrievably Cartesian, is "philosophically fundamental"]. The image fits a conception, or supposed conception [there's the Wittgensteinian in McDowell speaking], of reality that threatens to put it outside our reach, since the norms according to which we conduct our investigations cannot of course be anything but our current norms. [...]
This conception is naturally reflected in just the sorts of philosophical wonderment at, for instance, the meaningfulness of language, or the fact that we so much as have an "overall view of the world," that Rorty tellingly deplores. In this conception, being genuinely in touch with reality would in a radical way transcend whatever we can do within our practices of arriving at answers to our questions. Thus a familiar gulf seems to open between us and what we should like to think of ourselves as able to get to know about. And the only alternative, as Rorty sees things, is to take our inquiry not to be subject to anything but the norms of current practice [i.e., as we have seen above]. This picture of the options makes it look as if the very idea of inquiry as normatively beholden not just to current practice but to its subject matter [that is, the idea that we want to "get things right," which Rorty is now willing to equate with "believing true sentences" – but only to abandon both as goals] is inextricably connected with the "Augustinian" picture [i.e. as so described in the opening sections of Philosophical Investigations] and the impulse to climb outside of our own minds. But a piece of mere sanity goes missing here.

Ooh, the Devil don't like that kind of preachin' (as Jimmy Swaggart would say, in rather a different context)!

Okay, that's enough for now. Putnam and Dennett have short bits here, and there are also articles from Jacques Bouveresse, Michael Williams, Barry Allen, and the editor himself, all worth reading (but with less gold, by my lights). Check it out!

Thanks to all for reading this far, if you did, and thanks to John for the invite. I'll take questions if you got 'em.

Blackburn on Bernard Williams

Simon Blackburn has a piece on Bernard Williams here. I might comment later – I haven't even read it yet – but I wanted to post the link right away, as it is not behind a sub wall and I don't know how long that will remain the case. Check it out!

Uwe!

Three hours of gloriously glitchy wonderfulness from Uwe Schmidt (aka Atom Heart, aka Señor Coconut, etc., etc., etc.,). Some decidedly collectible trax appear on the playlist, so now's your chance. Either that or hang out on eBay.

HT: motherlist

The "Wittgenstein fallacy"

There is an interesting discussion taking place at Leiter Reports and the boundaries of language, regarding "the Wittgenstein Fallacy," i.e., the idea that the profession is in such dire straits nowadays – e.g., in demanding mountains of publications for tenure and even tenure-track positions – that even Wittgenstein would not succeed if he were alive today.

There are two issues here: whether early and/or frequent publication is necessary for professional success, and whether having an attitude toward philosophy similar to Wittgenstein's hurts one's chances for same. These two coalesce into one only if one equates a Wittgensteinian attitude with low rates of publication in particular. (A further issue is whether we should equate philosophical success with professional success in the first place.) In his discussion at Leiter Reports, Jason Stanley paints a picture in which (with the crucial qualifier that this applies at the elite departments but maybe not at others) the best students can succeed in getting good jobs even without publications, based on their budding reputations (the grapevine, I suppose, more than letters of reference). It seems we have no way of disputing this, as he would know this from the inside, so I will not do so.

Moreover, I certainly agree with Professor Stanley that "it's a mistake to rush into print," and that "pressure on graduate students to publish is unhealthy and detrimental to the profession, because [...] it takes years to produce a good piece of philosophy [...])." As Wittgenstein himself put it: "This is how philosophers should greet each other: 'Take your time!'" (This is from Culture and Value, which also has: "In philosophy the winner of the race is the one who can run most slowly. Or: the one who gets there last").

But so far the only thing this has to do with Wittgenstein is that (as James Klagge elaborates in a comment to that post) he only published one book (the Tractatus, his unrevised dissertation) and an early article ("Remarks on Logical Form") during his lifetime. Indeed, the view Professor Stanley says that he is specifically concerned to reject is "that philosophy is so extraordinarily hard to do that virtually any publishing whatsoever is a sign of failure to recognize its profundity," a view he attributes to "the followers of Wittgenstein, and most specifically the students of Burton Dreben," Dreben being another notorious non-publisher and purported Wittgensteinian (I cannot confirm this, as I was not one of his students).

I don't say this is a straw man (though Professor Stanley also notes that it is "less and less common nowadays"), but it does seem to me to be comically overstated. Rejecting it – as we should – leaves open the possibility that philosophy is so extraordinarily hard to do that most of what is actually published nowadays fails to recognize its difficulty.

But even this fails to answer the latter question (i.e, whether it is detrimental to one's career to have a Wittgensteinian attitude in and toward philosophy). So let us ask: who are these elite students, who succeed merely on their aura of promise? Why are they so highly regarded? It certainly isn't because of any Wittgensteinian attitude they may have (i.e., other than refraining from publication, which you don't have to be a Wittgensteinian to do). Instead, they are students of the most highly regarded scholars in the profession: the stars of the mainstream-analytic firmament. Indeed, Professor Stanley's own suggestion for a contemporary Wittgenstein-analogue, in refuting the "Wittgenstein fallacy," was not someone with contemporary-Wittgensteinian views, but rather the exact opposite, i.e., "a graduate student at Princeton in the 1980s under David Lewis and Saul Kripke." (Any suggestions that Kripke counts as someone tolerant of, or even aware of, Wittgensteinian views, on the basis of his having written a famous book on the Investigations, will be mocked, or perhaps ignored, as I determine appropriate.)

As Professor Leiter has presented it on his blog and elsewhere (I can dig up links on request), the contemporary consensus on Wittgensteinian views in philosophy is that, while there had been until recently a few remaining such holdouts against the naturalistic tide (to wit: Chicago, Harvard, Pittsburgh, and Berkeley), it seems that even these are returning to the fold (what with Dreben's death and the emeritus status of Cavell and Putnam at Harvard, and their replacement by fresh-faced youngsters with more respectable views). Indeed, even counting Putnam here, or seeing Pittsburgh and Berkeley as Wittgensteinian redoubts in the first place (i.e., on the basis of their housing McDowell and Sluga respectively), is stretching it; and Chicago is just as much, if not more, a haven for classical German philosophy as it is for Wittgenstein.

So while it may indeed be the case that Cavell's and McDowell's actual students may get jobs – I can think of at least one of each – despite their views (and of course even these students may not have Wittgensteinian views at all), it surely remains undeniable that Wittgensteinian attitudes are dangerous to one's career. After all – to make just one point in this regard – just as all but the elite departments demand scholarly publication, they equally demand scholarly specialization; and unless such candidates are willing to present themselves as "historians of analytic philosophy" (i.e., qualified to teach the Frege/Russell/Tractatus course, along with intro logic and maybe analytic philosophy of language), they may very well fall between the stools in this sense. Once more from Culture and Value: "I find it important in philosophizing to keep changing my posture, not to stand for too long on one leg, so as not to get stiff." So while, with Nietzsche, I "admire scholars even for their hunched backs," it's hard, from this seemingly vanishing minority perspective, not to see the profession as one full of stiffs – and it is quite clear that the feeling is mutual (mutatis mutandis).

New year, new carnival

Now that all that celebrating has been taken care of, let's have a carnival! Philosophers' Carnival, that is.

Apocalypse

Michael Bérubé, Exalted Leader of the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party, has resolved to give up blogging, retiring undefeated as Best Educational Blog. This is disappointing, as that was a great blog (the regular commenters are insane, in the good sense of that term). He gives his offical goodbye here. However, before he left, he did give a gracious if brief reply to my comments on his book (scroll down past his more lengthy comments on some other guy -- kidding!) I have promised, unbidden, to reply at length in this space. (As he tactfully puts it, he "just [doesn’t] quite understand what [I am] driving at".)

So let me get my notes together [shuffle shuffle]. Indeed, one might have thought that I too had quit fooling around abandoned the bloggy life. But fear not! (Although one resolution is to spend less time on the web this year, I do hope to continue to post, if only at the same leisurely pace.)

[Update: great minds think alike - here is the final final post.]

Think me a river

Philosophers' Carnival #40 at The Brooks blog.

Whaddya mean, "six"?!

Interesting post on honor here. Not having anything substantial to contribute to the discussion there, I will limit myself to the following empty but diverting pedantry.

Verdi's opera Falstaff takes its plot pretty much from The Merry Wives of Windsor, but there's also some stuff from Henry IV, Part 1, in which the rotund one also appears. This latter includes the famous rant about honor (cut and pasted from here):

PRINCE HENRY
Why, thou owest God a death.

Exit PRINCE HENRY

FALSTAFF
'Tis not due yet; I would be loath to pay him before
his day. What need I be so forward with him that
calls not on me? Well, 'tis no matter; honour pricks
me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I
come on? how then? Can honour set to a leg? no: or
an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no.
Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is
honour? a word. What is in that word honour? what
is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it?
he that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no.
Doth he hear it? no. 'Tis insensible, then. Yea,
to the dead. But will it not live with the living?
no. Why? detraction will not suffer it. Therefore
I'll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon: and so
ends my catechism.

What's interesting is that in the original context this is a soliloquy, delivered on the morn of battle, as our doughty doughy knight ponders his fate -- and how possibly to cheat it. Indeed, later on he escapes death by feigning mortal injury, explaining (when once again alone; this is scene 4):

'Sblood,'twas time to counterfeit, or
that hot termagant Scot had paid me scot and lot too.
Counterfeit? I lie, I am no counterfeit: to die,
is to be a counterfeit; for he is but the
counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man:
but to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby
liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and
perfect image of life indeed. The better part of
valour is discretion; in the which better part I
have saved my life.

Actually, he's not alone, if you count Hotspur's lifeless body (killed by Hal) lying beside him:

'Zounds, I am afraid of this
gunpowder Percy, though he be dead: how, if he
should counterfeit too and rise? by my faith, I am
afraid he would prove the better counterfeit.
Therefore I'll make him sure; yea, and I'll swear I
killed him. Why may not he rise as well as I?
Nothing confutes me but eyes, and nobody sees me.
Therefore, sirrah, [stabbing him]
with a new wound in your thigh, come you along with me.

So indeed, no honor here. Anyway, what I was going to say was that when Verdi's librettist Arrigo Boïto lifts the honor soliloquy, he sticks it into an entirely different context. Here's Wikipedia's summary of the scene (Act I, Scene 1):

A room at the Garter Inn. Falstaff is surrounded by his servants Bardolph, Pistol and the innkeeper, when Dr. Caius arrives and accuses him of robbery, but the excited doctor is soon ejected. Falstaff hands letters to his servants for delivery to Mistress Ford and to Mistress Page. The letters, which purport of Falstaff's love for the respectable women, are intended to seduce them (although he is really seducing them for the money). Bardolph and Pistol refuse, however, claiming that 'honor' prevents them from obeying his orders. Sending the letters by a page instead, Falstaff confronts his servants ('Che dunque l'onore? Una parola!' -- 'What, then, is honor? A word!') and chases them out of his sight.

That's not quite right (and no, I didn't correct it at Wikipedia); here's how it really goes (the last part anyway):

Il vostro Onor! Che onore?! che onor? che onor! che ciancia!
Che baia! - Può l'onore riempirvi la pancia?
No. Può l'onor rimettervi uno stinco? Non può.
Né un piede? No. Né un dito? Né un capello? No.
L'onor non è chirurgo. Che è dunque? Una parola.
Che c'è in questa parola? C'è dell'aria che vola.
Bel costrutto! L'onore lo può sentire chi è morto?
No. Vive sol coi vivi?... Neppure: perché a torto
Lo gonfian le lusinghe, lo corrompe l'orgoglio,
L'ammorban le calunnie; e per me non ne voglio!

... ending, as I recall, on a triumphantly rebellious high G. So the tone is quite different: while there he was the morally dubious coward and braggart, here he's the jowly rogue looking to fill his purse and/or warm his bed, scolding his pathetic servants and giving them a cynical lesson in real roguery. I note also that Boïto might have been inspired by this "catechism" in his previous collab with Verdi, i.e., Otello, in which, in a soul-baring "Credo" which has no analogue in Othello that I know of, Iago declares, among other things:

Credo che il guisto è un istrion beffardo,
e nel viso e nel cuor,
che tutto è in lui bugiardo:
lagrima, bacio, sguardo,
sacrificio ed onor.

Although he hasn't picked out honor for specific abuse, as Falstaff does (interestingly, after acknowledging that it "pricks him on"), Iago does echo, a few lines earlier, Falstaff's reference to "catechism": "Si, questa è la mia fè." Anywho, the thing that set me off today was having the line from the aria run through my head ("Che è dunque? Una parola. Che c'è in questa parola? C'è dell'aria che vola"), followed closely by the memory of looking at a score which included an English translation in a near-enough meter to the original that it could be sung (as I indeed saw it so performed in Santa Fe, a performance memorable for, among other things, the size of Thomas Stewart's feet as he soaked them in a tub of hot water after his character's midadventure in the preceding scene). But this metrical constraint often means you can't translate literally, and here is a fine example. "Una parola" is five syllables long; but "a word" is only two. So the translator did the best he could, rendering it "a word of six letters," which has an extra syllable at the beginning (harmless given the melody). Now of course Santa Fe is in New Mexico, in the United States of America, where "honor" has five letters, and the point of singing in English is to sing in the local language, which is American English; but Sir John is a Brit, and he's mentioning the word as well as using it, and that's how he spells it, so the translation is appropriate after all. Aren't you glad we figured this out?

Pop Potus quiz

Today's Week in Review section of the New York Times has an article, which I did not read, about how there have only been white male presidents up to now, and how this affects the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns (should there be such). Making this point with characteristic subtlety, the article features a "facebook" of the 43 white males in question, each labeled "White Male" (but no name). So it's a quiz, with pictorial hints: who are these guys? We did pretty well, forgetting only one name and fudging some dates/elections (some lucky guessing though). And here I thought, after having suffered through this, that I would never forget that guy (Nigel Hawthorne, that is, not Anthony Hopkins). Well, never again.

I cannot tell a lie

On the other hand, I don't believe it:


How evil are you?
HT: Pharyngula (who is eeevil, surprise, surprise)

Systrum Sistum

I don't think I've mentioned this before, but if I have, then I repeat myself. If you need regular infusions of bleeding-edge IDM (i.e. arty techno) then check out this site, which streams the stuff virtually 24/7. Some cool features (beyond the fab trax): most tracks are open source, and the playlist links to the relevant netlabels, so if you hear something you like, you can gratify your urge for more virtually instantaneously, or just download the track for later. Also, there's a meter indicating the number of listeners currently plugged in: there's a limit of 36 (up from 24, or was it 12?), and down below, they're listed, in order of time connected, with little flags indicating country of origin. It's weirdly gratifying to see your little flag advance up the list as people tune out, plus the sense of global community is heartening. Check it out!

Bingo!

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Northeast Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The Midland
The South
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

[Update: not sure why it's not working, at least for me right now, but there are supposed to be red bars of varying lengths in the above chart. Just FYI, they should apparently be of lengths 87%, 85%, 60%, 54%, 44%, 18%, and 2% respectively.)

I am indeed from north NEW Jersey, and I was indeed born in Philadelphia (or Fluffya, as natives call it). However (due most likely to my social class, which is solidly bourgeois), I do not have the classic Fluffyan accent, of which my favorite orthographic representation is the following. At breakfast, Fluffyans drink either cwuffy or wurringe juice, and they complain about how wuffle things are (usually someone's bad attytood, or perhaps the fate of their beloved Iggles). Okay, now I'm homesick.

HT: Majikthise

PhilCarn 39

New Philosophers' Carnival at A Brood Comb (which means what, exactly?).

Robert Altman RIP

From the Film Society of Lincoln Center website:

On the night of November 20th, the cinema lost one of its finest, a fiercely independent spirit who made movies that lived, breathed and inspired a unique devotion in movie lovers all around the world. Robert Altman’s camera eye was a remarkably delicate and sensitive instrument, seeking out and illuminating the most fleeting beauties and mysteries of being human. Altman gave us images and sounds and sensations we’d never experienced before – think of the sustained euphoria of California Split, the glorious interchanges between Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall in 3 Women, or the heartbreaking snowbound ending of McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Altman’s greatest films are uplifting in the best possible way: they open our eyes and ears to the wonders of everyday life.

Those in the NYC area can attend a tribute here (not sure what it involves except a showing of his last film, A Prairie Home Companion).

Notes on Bérubé

Over at the Valve, there has been a continuing month-long pile-up on Michael Bérubé's latest opus on literature and politics. Most of the commenters there are literature and politics types, so their comments are more germane to his ultimate ends than will be the following ill-mannered philosophical gripes; but hey, he's a big boy, and besides, he brought it up. In a nutshell: in one sense, Bérubé is too postmodern, while in another he isn't postmodern enough. It is only fair to note that this post will feature an irresponsibly large ratio of flat assertion to careful argument. You have been warned.

Ahem. Michael Bérubé devotes chapter 6 of his recent book What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? to a discussion of an undergraduate honors seminar he teaches called "Postmodernism and American Fiction." He's a literature professor, not a philosopher, but the course naturally includes a discussion of some properly philosophical topics. At a couple of spots in What's Liberal, Bérubé (hereinafter MB, so I don't have to keep making those accent marks) tells us what "many philosophy professors" do, to wit: "They complain that we literary types like to 'reduce' everything to texts and discourses, and we don't understand that they are searching for the immutable, nondiscursive truths of the universe." That is, most philosophy professors are what we call "metaphysical realists," who think that "literary types" are relativists and skeptics. It is true that philosophy harbors many such; but there are actual relativists and skeptics in English departments too, so, so there. I'm no realist, but that doesn't mean I agree 100% with MB's account of the matter, which MB rightly associates with that of Richard Rorty. Let me elaborate; first his views, then mine.

As an example of a realist, MB could have cited any number of people, from Roger Kimball to Jerry Fodor, but he actually turns to "philosopher Sam Harris" (he of the anti-religion polemic The End of Faith). Harris is actually a grad student in neuroscience, not a philosopher, but he apparently took a few courses with Rorty at Stanford, and feels he knows enough to set Rorty straight in his book, from which (specifically, a section entitled The Demon of Relativism) MB quotes (pp. 180-81): "In philosophical terms, [MB's text has "then," here] pragmatism can be directly opposed to realism," which Harris then goes on to defend in a predictably obtuse and table-thumping manner. We may put all that, such as it is, to one side for now, and turn to MB's response. Actually, I need Harris's punch line to set it up: "To be an ethical realist is to believe that in ethics, as in physics, there are truths waiting to be discovered—and thus we can be right or wrong in our beliefs about them."

So now MB responds.

The reason I disagree with Harris, the reason I am not what he calls an "ethical realist," is that I believe that gravity and slavery are different kinds of things, and that objective, observer-independent knowledge about gravity is possible but should not be taken as a model for knowledge about human affairs. I believe that there are mind-independent entities, and that you can check this for yourself by kicking a stone; but I do not understand how people like Harris, who are so stringently skeptical about religious belief [this – the supposed incongruity of Harris's objection given his other views – is MB's reason for citing Harris rather than, as he does immediately below, a realist philosopher like Thomas Nagel], can insist on the existence of mind-independent concepts. And this, as my students gradually come to understand, is an incommensurability. It is not an incommensurability about slavery itself; both the ethical realists and I are against it. It is an incommensurability with regard to how one justifies one's being against it (pp. 263-4).

Far be it from me to dispute the difference in kind between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften. And that difference may even be enough to license MB's actual practices re: liberalism. So I don't want to hit him too hard here, lest I be rightly accused of academic pedantry and/or turf-warring. On the other hand it did indeed seem as if the properly philosophical issues MB and Harris both bungle disagree with me about are indeed where the action is (as MB suspected when he brought them up in the first place).

In fact, MB has already received some heat on this point. At his blog he elaborates (comment #10):

Seriously, when I object to the idea of mind-independent concepts, I’m objecting to the notion that “in ethics, as in physics, there are truths waiting to be discovered” (as Harris puts it): concepts that exist independently of any mind [as opposed to: ind. of my mind]. I think it’s a kinda quasireligious belief, which is why I find it so strange that Harris professes so strong a faith in it.

This helps, a bit. As it was, the notion of "mind-independence" was hopelessly ambiguous, and now it is somewhat less so (but only somewhat). And the idea of "truths waiting to be discovered" does indeed go down more smoothly w/r/t inquiry into facts (i.e. not just science) than to value determination, which it seems we hammer out among ourselves in a way unlike that of physics (that is, the hammering-out seems more constitutive of the content of the result, where in physics it concerns the epistemic justification for believing what we take to have been "already true"); and again, maybe that will be enough to licence MB's actual practice (or theoretical practice). But once the philosophical idea of metaphysical realism has been brought up, we absolutely cannot leave it at that. This is especially true in MB's explicitly Rortyan context. To his credit, he realizes this (and I support 100% his pedagogical decision to turn to literature at this point in the course, given its aims):

I wrapped up this part of the course by telling my students that if they wanted to pursue this further, with real philosophers, they should consult Richard Rorty for (most of) my end of the discussion, and Thomas Nagel—in The View From Nowhere, for a start—for one of the most salient responses to Rorty (p. 264)

As it happens I am very much like MB in one respect: my most profound philosophical influence has been Rorty, a fact which my many serious and fundamental differences with him sometimes make me forget. But it's true. Before Rorty, no-one was talking about bringing together Quine, Sellars, and Davidson, on the one hand, with Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and phenomenological hermeneutics on the other, let alone in the context of a revival of Deweyan pragmatism. Unfortunately, Rorty messes up the execution of this project; however, it is in an instructive and helpful way that he does so. So I totally get where MB is coming from w/r/t anti-foundationalism and all that. These remarks are this "real philosopher's" suggestions about where to go from here. If they are phrased in terms of criticism of what MB has actually written, let that not be taken to imply that he has misled his students unnecessarily, or that his postmodernism course, as described in the book, is anything less than terrific.

Enough! Here, then, are my worries:

My first gripe concerns the cutting of philosophical corners. It's understandable that people, especially non-philosophers, try to deal with the issue of realism and relativism in the moral/political context without first deciding what to say about scientific or commonsense facts. After all, that's what MB is interested in, ultimately: moral disagreement (e.g. about the rights of the disabled). This, plus, again, the acknowledged difference in kind between the Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften, makes it tempting to split the difference, defending anti-realism about morality by conceding realism about commonsense facts (e.g. Searle's version). But on my view resistance to realism must be global. If we don't see how a proper account of belief and meaning and truth and whatnot requires the rejection of realism in the *latter* case, then we can't see how it does so in the former case either, once the pernicious metaphysics has gotten a foothold. It takes more work (*much* more work) to do it the long way, but it's worth it. Maybe this will come out as I continue. But that's my most general worry – cutting corners in this sense.

Let's turn to Rorty, who does not cut corners in this way, but is admirably consistent in his rejection of realism. Unfortunately, this single-mindedness can result in some carelessness on his part. Rorty rightly pegs realism as a Cartesian position, committed to a metaphysical dualism of subject and object. And he is right again to reject the (rather silly, but remarkably persistent) idea that one avoids this dualism simply by rejecting its substance-dualistic manifestation and embracing materialism instead (a mistake Rorty himself seemed to be making even as late as chapter 2 of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature). And he does some other things right, which we'll get to. But he fails to understand how a conceptual dualism works -- and thus how easy it is to throw it out the window only to let it in through the back door (as materialists do). So in a sense he cuts corners as well, but in a different way.

In particular, Rorty has trouble keeping in mind that our primary target is not realism, but dualism, of which realism is but a symptom. The way he sees it, the problem with realism is its obsession with a "non-human authority" (i.e. a transcendent "real world"), which he sees (in Nietzschean fashion, or so he thinks) as a secular substitute for a transcendent deity. And now of course the pragmatist solution is to turn from metaphysical fantasy to practical reality. So while Rorty sometimes insists that he wants to reject the traditional philosophical oppositions (the "made" vs. the "found," etc.), what he actually ends up doing, a lot of the time, is rejecting them not by overcoming the dualism (which is hard), but instead by leaving it in place and simply erasing the transcendent disjunct (here, the "found"). Just as materialism does: in each case, the move is not from two distinct types of thing to one, as promised, but from two full boxes to ... two boxes, one full and one empty. This does not help.

Here's an example. Rorty has always insisted that the traditional problem of skepticism is of no interest once we see its roots in a pernicious conception of knowledge. And this is partly right: if we believe there is no transcendental gap between our internal states and what they "represent," then we are indeed not in the market for any philosophical bridges to cross that gap. However, that's only the beginning of that conversation, not the end. But I don't want to talk about the epistemological problem here. My point is this: since Rorty sees "skepticism" as essentially a problem for dogmatists (i.e., realists who hold we can bridge a transcendental gap between knower and known), we can avoid skepticism, on his view, by renouncing any desire to cross the gap in the first place. But this just is skepticism, of the Pyrrhonian variety. Again Rorty leaves the dualism in place.

It does not help here to push the skeptical attitude to the metalevel. MB applauds Rorty for not claiming that what he says (about truth and knowledge) is true, but saying instead merely that it's useful to act as if it were true. MB says this on his own behalf in other places, seeing this as a virtuous consistency, necessary to foil the traditional realist accusation of self-refutation. (Is Rorty's pragmatism "really true"? If we answer "yes," the familiar thought goes, then we affirm and renounce its truth in the same breath, a contradiction; but if we answer "no," then, Rorty feels, there's no problem.) Again, this is skepticism; and the problem with skepticism is that it makes hash of the notion of belief (and with it of meaning; of this more below). It is true that in particular cases we may intelligibly advocate acting, for instrumental reasons, as if something were true that we do not in fact believe to be the case. But this cannot be our general attitude. It makes no sense to argue passionately for a particular view, and then, when familiar muddles cause the conversation to grind to a halt, or spin its wheels uselessly, to cut the Gordian knot by saying, "oh well, I wasn't saying my view is true." Of course you were. If you weren't, then I was wrong to take you as believing it, and now I am more confused than ever. After all, if at the beginning I had said the things you say, wouldn't you have agreed? You wouldn't have said, no, I don't believe that -- but I do think we should act as if that were the case. That qualification only shows up when disagreement threatens. But then it means -- once belief is off the table -- that "disagreement" can't be the proper description of our problem. Again, this leads not only into the epistemological issues I have postponed, but also into my own highly unpopular take on them. I'll just claim here, as below, that I may consistently speak of truth without committing myself to the dreaded transcendental gap, nor reducing truth to consensus. Let's move on.

Wait, one more thing about this. MB mentions that Sartre quote about how if the fascists take over then fascism will be "the truth of man," and then so much the worse for us, and admires the "humility" he sees in Rorty's version of/attitude toward it. Here again, one person's "humility" is another's craven (and pointless!) skepticism. How can you refer to fascism being the "truth" -- even in that counterfactual situation -- if you don't believe it yourself? Feh. Belief is belief true, and vice versa; and abjuring belief is skepticism; and skepticism -- even the pre-Cartesian kind, in our context anyway -- is a dualistic position.

Now. Here's why that little dance -- pushing skepticism to the metalevel in order to justify (i.e. pragmatically) "belief" at the object level -- looks attractive to Rorty. He hasn't forgotten his rejection of dualism; it's just (on my account) that his anti-dualist strategy is fubar. Rorty believes (or whatever) that we can overcome the realism-antirealism dualism by seeing both positions as committed to an unacceptable "representationalism." Instead of trying to represent the "real world" outside us (an irretrievably Cartesian notion, in his view), we should abandon such fantasies and turn toward each other ("other inquirers huddled together against the dark," or something; you know, "solidarity" in his sense). If we allowed any normative connection to the world (i.e. "getting it right," as beliefs attempt to do), then that would screw up his anti-dualist strategy and force a choice between realism and anti-realism, which is what he is trying to avoid. Again, this is partly right, and indeed inspiring. Realism and anti-realism (including, ironically, Rorty's own) are indeed dualistically opposed, and can indeed be disposed of together once we see what they share; but what that is is not "representationalism" -- like "correspondence," a perfectly innocuous idea, properly construed -- but a conception of objectivity as dualistically opposed to subjectivity, metaphysically speaking. (Yet even that promising slogan is empty without a lot of unpacking.)

This leads to another of Rorty's favorite shibboleths, one which MB picks up as well. Following Dewey (and his similar rejection of the Cartesian "spectator theory of knowledge"), Rorty puts great stock in rejecting the "correspondence theory of truth" in favor of a "coherence" view. Again, the reason "coherence" looks to Rorty like an improvement over "correspondence" is that it allows him to say that our justificatory obligations are not to the world but instead, on the one hand, to the rest of our beliefs (with which the new belief must fit), and on the other, to our fellow inquirers (our relations with the world being "merely causal"). But this cannot eliminate the (normative) relation to the world. For something to be a belief at all -- and, not coincidentally, for the concepts that make it up to mean what they do in expressing the belief in question -- it must be held to be true of the world.

In his fight against "correspondence," Rorty has appealed to Davidson, who at first seems to agree -- though Davidson's commitment to "coherence" is half-hearted in spots (see "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," anthologized here) -- but it is Davidsonian considerations that thwart him (and eventually Davidson himself; but that's another story). For a belief to have the content it does -- for it to be a belief that P -- it must be appropriately sensitive to evidence that P is actually the case. That is, in order for you to convince me that X is indeed saying what you say X is saying -- that your interpretation of his words is correct -- you must show that the beliefs you ascribe to him in so doing are (that is, that he is) appropriately sensitive (whatever that may mean in the context) to evidence that the world is not that way. Which way? The way he believes it to be, on your account of what "P" means in his mouth when he asserts it. Naturally you will use your own terms, and refer to the world as you believe it to be, when telling me this. But that's okay; I'm in the same position w/r/t your utterances as you are to his, so that's been taken into account. And so on. All this is thoroughly Davidsonian (see "Three Varieties of Knowledge, in that same collection); which is one reason why we critics accuse Rorty's pragmatism -- here, in accepting "coherence" as a substitute for "correspondence" -- of being not pragmatist enough by his own lights (let alone ours).

I have similar gripes about Rorty's (and MB's) appeal to "anti-foundationalism," and their retreat to epistemological fallibilism. Fallibilism, qua skepticism, is fool's gold; and "anti-foundationalism," like "solidarity," moves the focus toward epistemology and away from the more general problem of how to overcome dualism(s), where it needs to be for several consecutive moves if we are to get anywhere. Onward.

Another brief aside. One of my least favorite terms (along with "mind-(in)dependent") is "incommensurability." The massive ambiguity of this term is another reason why you risk disaster by going directly to the moral case, before the semantic (and epistemological, and metaphysical, and metaphilosophical) cases are aligned properly. [I started to go into it here, but it got unwieldy, so let's come back to that one in another post. Let's just say you need to be really careful with this term.]

Almost done. Here's a criticism which is no doubt unfair, but that, as I like to say, is how the bowling ball bounces. For a sixty-seven-page description of a course on postmodernism, one in the English department no less, there is surprisingly little in MB's chapter -- or the book as a whole -- about hermeneutics. In fact there's none at all: the index contains zero references to hermeneutics, zero to Gadamer, zero to Ricoeur, and one to Heidegger (an interesting point on p. 200, the chapter preceding that on postmodernism, about Gatsby's "new world" being uncanny in the Heideggerian sense, i.e. one in which he was "not at home" (unheimlich)). I suppose that's okay, given that it's not a philosophy course; but in my view, given what he ends up saying about it, the time MB spends on the Habermas-Lyotard debate might have been better spent on the Habermas-Gadamer debate.

Of course this may be because I suspect that Lyotard really is a relativist where Gadamer is not; but it's also because MB's final word on the subject in What's Liberal is, again, that maybe objects are "mind-independent" while concepts are not. But what are concepts, and what is it to say what their content is -- that is, what makes them the concepts they are? Answering this question, especially in an explicitly Rortyan context, puts us squarely in the territory Davidson (also zero refs in WL) shares with Gadamer. On the other hand, Habermas never really seems to get what Gadamer is doing, so as a debate maybe it's not as good as the one with Lyotard (with whom I am not that familiar). In any case, the best counter to Habermas's obsession with "universality" and the critical function of reason is to hold his feet to the Davidsonian (and Wittgensteinian) fire concerning the nature and practice of linguistic communication and interpretation; this, perhaps, could shake loose some of his more unacceptable realist/dogmatist commitments. More specifically, it is the Davidsonian focus on rejecting the scheme-content dualism that allows the right sort of connection to the world (which I would describe as "linguistically mediated" if the word "mediated" were not itself so fraught with theoretical peril). We might also note that at one point, in the context of trying to appropriate Davidson's work, MB's hero Rorty actually defines pragmatism as "something Davidson approves of: getting rid of the scheme-content distinction." (This allowed some hostile critic – possibly Susan Haack, I don't remember – to cite this quote, but just up to the colon, making Rorty look like a frivolous sycophant. Naughty, naughty!)

Also, the Gadamerian context provides a safe place to appropriate the healthy aspects of Heideggerian phenomenology -- the ones that insist that inquiry and reference and rationality are practices of engaged, embodied, situated individual agents -- without getting sucked, or geworfen, into the whole Heideggerian morass. Better yet is to emphasize the Davidson/Gadamer connection, which puts us onto drier land still. The downside of this, I must admit, is that most Davidson scholars (exceptions being Jeff Malpas and Bjorn Ramberg) take an incorrigibly analytic line, preferring to speak mostly of Tarskian truth-theories and anomalous monism (see this recent anthology, with articles by the usual analytic suspects such as Ernest Sosa and Jaegwon Kim; Gadamer doesn't make that index either, although there is an article by Samuel Wheeler which compares him to Derrida). Another downside is that phenomenologists tend to see Davidson as do most analytics, i.e., as just another analytic, committed, and I am not making this up, to metaphysical realism (see Charles Taylor, who explicitly contrasts Davidson with the "three H's", i.e. Hamann, Humboldt, and Herder -- although I must admit Taylor developed this attitude in the 70's, back when it was much more justified than it is 25 years later). Related to this, there is a continuing brouhaha, with much noise coming from that direction, over the issue of "non-conceptual content" and whatnot. So we'd have to deal with that (but we would eventually anyway).

One last thing. MB points his realist student "Stan" (or wishes he had so pointed him, in a pang of l'esprit de l'escalier) to Wittgenstein's "private language argument." But while (the later) Wittgenstein seems to be the very opposite of a systematic thinker, it is very difficult to pull specific arguments out of the context of his thought. Not to say that MB is wrong here -- a turn in that direction is what I also would recommend -- but we would need to say much more here, as I don't think the PLA can do that much on its own in this context. In my unpublished and still being worked out view, Wittgenstein provides the key piece to the puzzle; but we can't see this unless the other pieces are ready to go -- the catch being that this precondition can itself require that the Wittgensteinian vision has been already grasped. This catch (not catch-22, that's something else) is part of what accounts for Wittgenstein's unusual writing style -- why he feels he must "travel criss-cross" over the same territory over and over in different directions. But that is yet another story for yet another day.

Belle W on Mark S

Here's a classic putdown, courtesy of Crooked Timber:

It’s a refreshing frappe of ignorance, suspicion, and homophobia topped with whipped misogyny and dusted with grated stupid!

A delightful concoction indeed! As they say, go read the whole thing.

Wheee!

A new Philosophers' Carnival! Check out the neato rides here.

Boo!

Today is of course Halloween, and all the kiddies were out in force (still are, some of 'em). On my way to the library, I saw Batman, and Supergirl I guess that was, and some pirates, and Darth Vader, and Richard Dawkins (just kidding), and some angels, and A Person Who Seemed to Be Under the Impression that it was St. Patrick's Day (now that's scary!). Naturally the little ones were accompanied by a parent, and the custom around here now seems to be that the parents dress up too. One such parent was attempting to corral her youngster ("Michael! Get over here!"), and I felt like advising Michael to heed the woman with the purple hair and witch hat, lest she turn him into a newt.

On that note (the Halloween one), a commenter at Pharyngula today had a good zombie joke:

Q: What do vegan zombies eat?

A: Graaaains!

Heh heh.

Come on out

3QD points us to The Nation's appreciation of composer Steve Reich on his 70th birthday, which includes the following description of the early (1966) tape piece Come Out:

The voice of Daniel Hamm, a 19-year-old member of the Harlem Six--five of whom, including Hamm, were later acquitted--is first heard clearly saying, "I wanted to come out and show them." The phrase "Come out and show them" is then transformed through phasing to become an evolving series of rhythms, timbres and pitches. These early works remain fascinating, but their politics is troubling. They seem to spring directly from the civil rights struggle, and yet the phasing process calls attention away from the meaning of words to their sounds.

This provoked your hot-tempered blogger to fire off the following peevish missive in the general direction of the Nation website:

Re: David Schiff's description of Steve Reich's "Come Out" ("A Rebel in Defense of Tradition"):

For gosh sakes, it's "Come out TO show them," as anyone who's actually heard this piece can tell you. As Schiff mentions, what happens when the loops overlap is that you no longer hear repeating loops of text but instead the repeating sounds of one or two phonemes. So you hear "mm-mm-mm-mm-mm" at the same time as "o-o-o-o-o," as well as the more percussive "tsh-tsh-tsh-tsh-tsh" (from "To SHow them"). Hard to forget.

Not only that, it's not even "I wanted to come out (and/to) show them," as if Hamm were explaining why he was there in the first place. Here's Wikipedia on the matter:

"The voice Reich eventually used for the work was that of Daniel Hamm, then nineteen, one of the boys involved who was not guilty of the murder, saying: "I had to open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them." Hamm had punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police that he had been beaten; they had not previously wanted to treat Hamm's injuries, as he had not appeared sufficiently wounded."

So yes, "the phasing process calls attention away from the meaning of words to their sounds" - that's why the piece works at all, a point analogous to one Schiff explains very well w/r/t "Clapping Music": these pieces concern the relation between rhythm and sound ("the ordinary became magic"). But the idea that this makes the "politics" of these pieces "troubling" is just silly. It's actually the ham-handed didacticism of some of Reich's later works which is politically troubling, as if he were losing faith in his art - as if magic were somehow insufficient - and felt he needed to preach instead. Still, he is (was) a titan, and "Music for 18 Musicians", at least, will live forever.

Of course The Nation is a political magazine, not a music magazine, so it's not surprising that their writer frets about music that seems content to produce magic rather than advance the revolution. And I'm certainly not waving the flag for "aestheticism" or "formalism," whatever the commissars of political correctness may say. I just don't see how self-consciously "political" art, which is invariably crap, can even do what it's supposed to do, let alone what it should be doing.

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