Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Continuing yesterday's thought. Imagine somebody DID make an argument for an innate culinary faculty that enables our learning what is or isn't curry. This somebody would likely be making four mistakes: he'd probably be underestimating the amount of "negative evidence" around for an empirical inquiry into what is and isn't curry; and might be idealizing culinary learning as if it were instantaneous, whereas actual culinary learning is gradual and piecemeal; and is probabilistic, not a realm of certainties; and, finally, he may be assuming that there is an endpoint where we all agree about what is curry, whereas in fact there will always be room for disagreements.  The second of these sounds odd, and those not familiar with these debates might not know to what she is making reference. But Chomsky has said, in his KNOWLEDGE OF LANGUAGE (1986), that in understanding language we can presume that the "order of presentation of data is irrelevant s...

Let's return to the Fiona Cowie book, we've been working through bit by bit. Today we move to the portion of the book that speaks specifically of Noam Chomsky, and of his influential arguments to the effect that, (a) all languages conform to the same structural principles, a 'universal grammar,' but that (b) growing children as they acquire their grasp of these languages, do not receive sufficient data from the outside world to allow us to see this universal grammar as learned, thus (c) we ought to see it as innate -- hardwired into our brains.  Further, the pertinent hard-wiring is specific to the linguistic domain.  Cow thinks this is misguided, and to show why, she invokes a culinary example of learning. She writes about curry, that dense use of spices and herbs associated with the Indian subcontinent. See pp. 211 - 17 of the book. Many humans, perhaps most, eventually learn to recognize curry as a type of cuisine. How do we learn about curry? Chomsky oft...

I've discovered a fascinating blog, SANDWALK , by Laurence A. Moran, a Toronto based biochemist. One of the matters under discussion there by Moran is the prevalence of "junk DNA," that is, the idea that only about 10% of a cell's DNA has a function expressed in the development of the rest of the cell. The other 90% is, so to speak, the junk. There are scientists who dispute the notion that it is all that junkie, but they are rare, and Moran emphasizes how mainstream/consensus it is that most of our DNA is superfluous. I find the whole idea odd in that it is so parallel to a common misconception about the human brain People (always who don't know neurology) have been saying do decades that we only use 10% of the brain. The implication usually is "like wow, man, if we could only use it all we'd be, like, really something." The idea has been debunked repeatedly by people who do know neurology, but it persists. Anyway Moran tells us that as ...

Mary Midgley passed away this month. I'm told she was a renowned ethicist, active in discussions of animal rights, I don't know any of her work in that field. I am familiar with her chiefly as a nemesis of Richard Dawkins. She forcefully criticized his use of the word "selfish" as an adjective that could coherently modify "gene." This is, as it happens, the headline of the Telegraph's obituary of her: "Mary Midgley, moral philosopher who took on Richard Dawkins."   Genes, she wrote, "cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological." [I agree on the atoms, though I'm not sure about the elephants. Was she saying elephants cannot think abstractly? or just that any given elephant we might meet is an individual creature, not the abstraction ELEPHANT?] That first review was part of a long feud, and Midgley eventually apologized (to readers, not to Dawkins) for wha...

A new take on Plato's politics, GLAUCON'S FATE, will be available from Paul Dry Books in about a month. A new take on Plato's politics? A novel take on a subject that has been under debate for two and a half millennia? This speaks to a good deal of confidence on the part of the author, Jacob Howland, in the possibility that he really has something new to say. And the newness consists in looking to the frame story. The Republic begins thus (Socrates is speaking): I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess (Bendis, the Thracian Artemis.); and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant Polemarchus the so...

The philosopher and blogger Brian Leiter recently wrote summarily, "Straussians are incapable of reading Nietzsche." For some of us in the peanut gallery, this raises the question: what the heck is a Straussian? The term arose in political philosophy and was in use back in the early 1970s, around the time Leo Strauss co-edited a textbook on the history of political philosophy with Joseph Cropsey. The term "Straussian" suggests several things. First, it is an approach to the classic texts of political philosophy that presumes that nearly every important philosopher in the canon was hiding something. Thus, texts must be read for their esoteric meaning. Second, related to this, the esoteric meaning was often irreligious. Political philosophy is full of thinkers who are in fact atheists but who have to hide the fact. Third, related to this in turn, Straussians suggest that these thinkers were right to hide the fact. Their own premise is that there is no God,...

I will continue here the trend of thought of my recent posts about Fiona Cowie's 1999 book, What's Within. It criticizes both Fodor and Chomsky in some detail and I've already paraphrased/summarized her take on Fodor.  But in a sense the continuation is a pause. Instead of going further, into the part of the book that discusses Chomsky's linguistics views, I'll look a bit further at the differences between Fodor and Cowie as they have played themselves out SINCE the publication of this book. Fodor himself replied at length to Cowie, in an essay called Doing Without What's Within. It is a lengthy essay and difficult to summarize. Here is a link to the whole thing, for this who want to pursue this jousting.  Fodor Strikes Back . Quite early on in this essay, Fodor suggests that the relationship between empiricism and rationalism, or innatism, as classically understood, was symmetrical -- and that Cowie wrongly re-imagined it as asymmetrical so that she ...

This is one of those BIG birthdays. Sixty. I won't have much to say about it, but I'll see if I can do some self-indulgent reflection before the cake. I went back and looked at what I wrote in this blog (actually the precursor of this blog) ten years ago, upon hitting the half-century mark. It was not a bad bit of reflecting. I'll confine myself here to comments on the intervening decade. On a personal level, of course, the last decade has seen the intertwine of my life and Diane's. That has been wonderful and, although I seldom mention her in this blog (a bit of compartmentalization one can diagnose as one wishes), I am grateful to the fates or my own karma for our connection. She is at present  working on preparations for the party and the above mentioned cake. There is birth family and chosen family. I am blessed with regard to both. Over the decade since I turned 50 both my younger brother and my mother have passed away. Mark, who had struggled with depr...

About five years ago archaeologists studying the remains of a 7th century church in Sinope, Turkey, on the southern coast of the Black Sea, found a small stone box. Inside the box was a splinter of wood. This type of splinter, inside such a box, was a venerated feature of many churches through the High Middle Ages where it was regarded as a "piece of the True Cross," the cross on which Jesus was crucified. The 7th century dating of THIS find puts it a good deal earlier than most analogous splinters, though. Legend holds that it was Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, who on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land discovered the True Cross, and all the splinters that eventually found themselves to churches around Europe (enough to have rebuilt the whole city of Jerusalem, according to cynics) were said to have come from this Cross. Sort of like the use of two fish to feed multitudes? The historic significance of the find doesn't turn on whether one believes th...

In 2010, Cambridge University Press published KANT'S THEORY OF VIRTUE, by Anne Margaret Baxley, of Washington University, St. Louis.  Kant of course is generally considered the foremost exponent in the western canon of deontological ethics, the view that good and bad are subordinate to right and wrong, and hat right/wrong are defined by duties, imperatives, things human beings as rational creatures must or cannot do, damning the consequences. Baxley says, though, that Kantian thinking goes beyond that. Kant has a worked-out view of human character, or virtue, logically separate from his well-known view of duty, We generally associate "virtue ethics" with Aristotle, just as we associate deontology with Kant and consequentialism with Bentham. If one were going to teach a very abbreviated ethics course, one might focus it on those three, and then if allowed time for a fourth, throw in John Stuart Mill and his differences with Bentham to show that consequentialisms ar...

So ... the story goes that one day a Mexican magician informed his audience that he was about to disappear, right in front of their eyes, on the count of three. He began counting, "Uno ...                                      "Dos ..." Then POOF! He vanished. Everybody was surprised. Not so much that it was a good magic trick but because [scroll down] [a little more] He disappeared without a Tres.

Of late several of my posts have described aspects of Fiona Cowie's arguments about and against innatism, both in the classical rationalists and in contemporary figures, especially Jerry Fodor. Let's return to that subject Fodor calls his view of concept acquisition "brute causal." There is nothing psychological to say about it, it simply is the case that when I see a dog it triggers in me the protoconcept  that then becomes the full-fledged concept DOG. Cowie contends that this is irrational. Any view of concept acquisition of any value must involve "doing psychology," using "intentional" rather than brute-causal mechanisms. A story that she tells about this involves the movement of the mind from a certain medium level of  abstraction both up and down, toward greater and toward lesser generality. A child typically grasps the idea of "dog" fairly early in life. The movement up in generality, toward "mammals" and "ve...

This year the Nobel Prize in Medicine went to the perpetrators of a revolution in the treatment of cancer. It went, specifically, to James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo "for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation." The photo above is of Allison. The idea has been in the air for more than a century that the deadliness of cancer is due to the fact that the normal human immune system does not regard cancer cells as "foreign matter." It recognizes those cells as "part of us." Friend, not foe. But that situation could be reversed. Early attempts at fighting cancer this way involved infecting a patient with bacteria to stimulate the immune system, with the idea that once stimulated it would not then go solely after the bacterial threat, but after cancer cells as well. It didn't work all that well, although a variant of that approach remains helpful against bladder cancer. More basic research had to pass as wate...