Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Outgoing President Biden has made more appointments to the federal judiciary than incoming President Trump did in Trump's first term. Specifically, Biden has put 184 district court judges where they are today as of this writing. Trump appointed 174.   This is important, because most cases do NOT go up the appellate ladder at all.  The Supreme Court (where of course Trump got a pivotal three appointments) ends up taking a very small percentage of the petitions for review it receives. A little under 1 percent, so less than 80 out of about 8000. That is a matter of necessity. This is a big country, there is a heck of a lot of litigation. There is only one Supreme Court.  The upshot, then, is that although he only got to make one SCOTUS pick, Biden's other judicial appointments are an important legacy.  There are 673 active federal court judges across the country.  So (my quick arithmetic at work) Biden has appointed somewhat more than one quarter of them....

  Adams, one of our founding fathers, a president and the father of a president, a mammoth figure in US history, owned dogs while he was in the (newly constructed) White House.  That isn't surprising.  It is kind of an all-American kind of fact.  We might at some level be disappointed if he had NOT had at least one dog. But did you he name one of them "Satan"?  Perhaps for the perverse pleasure of training this pioneer White House pet? Instead of saying "heel" I guess Adams would say "get thee behind me."  [Matthew 16:23].  No, the above is not a picture of Adam's dog. ;-) It obviously has some features in common with our President-elect, though.

 So: as I indicated yesterday, Nishida says  that the will is free because it is not bound by natural law in choosing the good. [No, that isn't him in the attached photo.] So: what is the good?  I understand Nishida to be saying that the good is the actualization of potential.  So long as we are becoming who we really are, we are in the right.   How does this play itself out in particulars where we might really want to know what the good is?  Where telling us "it is what your real self would want" is no help?  Consider an example Jean-Paul Sartre would later evoke.  A young Frenchman has to decide whether to stay home and take care of his frail mother or leave her to her own devices and go join the resistance to the German occupation.  Telling him that he should actualize potential seems likely to be of little help.  But Nishida does seem to avail himself of the (very Jamesian) notion that human history is the working out of such co...

  At chapter 15 of Kitaro Nishida's book we finally pass into the discussion of ethics and "the good" within human conduct, the long-deferred but titular subject of it all. Nishida's definition of freedom of the will seems to steer directly into Kantian territory. End of chapter 17, "[The] unifying activity [of consciousness] is not a product of nature; rather, it is because of this unity that nature comes to exist. This unity is the infinite power at the base of reality, and it cannot be limited quantitatively. It exists independently of the necessary laws of nature. Because our will is an expression of that power, it is free and goes beyond the control of such natural laws."  A few chapters later, after a classification of all other ethical positions and his view of their errors, he gets to his own: goodness is the perfection of this will-beyond-natural law, and so the fullest expression of the underlying unity of consciousness. So at the end of chapter ...

  A few years ago now, somebody at Quora asked the broad and fascinating question, "How has Greek philosophy influenced Christianity?" I gave a brief answer, and one that I think is pertinent to this time of year.  Let's begin with Hanukkah, which actually begins at sundown on Christmas Day this year.  Hanukkah -- this is a quick and rough statement -- celebrates an uprising against Greek influence, as it manifested itself in the "abomination of Desolation" (pagan sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem).  So my answer brings in the Jews of the Second Temple period, the early Christians, and of course as requested ... the Greeks. In one mix. I hope I have stirred your curiosity.  Here is the answer:       Very deeply. And from the beginning. After all, the two cultures (of Judea and Greece) were merging           already in the time of the Seleucid Empire. In the second century BCE the Hellenizers pressed too hard ...

This comes under nice-to-know and -absurd-that-it-is-worth-saying.  My sympathy for organized religion, including that in which I grew up, grows lesser and lesser.  https://theconversation.com/ai-jesus-might-listen-to-your-confession-but-it-cant-absolve-your-sins-a-scholar-of-catholicism-explains-244468  

The murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare, has been a compelling news story.  On the one hand, there was the excitement of a who-dunnit and a will-he-get-caught. On the second hand, there was and is the opportunity to pontificate about the health care and health insurance industries in the United States and their rage-producing dysfunction. UHC is the largest health insurance company in the United States. On the third hand, there is the opportunity to go "meta," to react to how other people, especially through these new-fangled social media lenses, are talking about the murder of Brian Thompson.  THAT has become a big deal, because it turns out the head of a private health insurance company -- especially one whose rates of coverage denial seem to have risen strikingly under his command -- is not a sympathetic victim. Who'd a thought? Thompson's company has actually pioneered the use of artificial intelligence to find reasons to deny claims. Hence the soci...

  Some context-free business history here.  The Adani Group is a conglomerate based in India and founded in  1988 by Gautam Adani.  It began as a commodities trading concern, with an especial interest in trading in the metals. But that didn't really stick as a core corporate identity.  Nowadays more than 60 percent of its income comes from coal related lines of business. This includes the mining of coal as well as the production of electricity in coal-fired plants.  It has engaged in aggressive expansion of late. So much so that in August 2022, CreditSights (a unit of Fitch, the big ratings company) warned that all the rapid expansion threatened the group's cash flow and credit metrics.  Since soon thereafter, the Indian securities regulator, SEBI, has been investigating Adani on suspicions that it is pumping up the value of its stock with accounting shenanigans. In May 2023, the country's Supreme Court effectively ordered Adani to wrap up its investig...

  Are we close to it?  What can be done about it?  The term comes from the name of a retired NASA scientist, Donald J. Kessler, known for a paper he wrote in the 1970s, "Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt." It hypothesized that the amount of artificial debris in low earth orbit would in time reach a tipping point, creating a cascade effect where collisions cause smaller debris to float around, causing further collisions, ending with a sort of hollow and impassable sphere around the earth rendering further space usage and exploration impossible for generations.  NASA was impressed by his exposition of this threat, and Kessler had written himself into a promotion: he became the head of the Orbital Debris Program Office.   The term "Kessler syndrome" for this effect was  first employed a short time later by a NORAD employee. John Gabbard. The work of Kessler and Gabbard was popularized in 1982 by Jim Shefter, ...

Disney World in Florida acquired political resonance late in 2023 and early 2024 when many people (some sensible folks among them) thought the host state's governor, Ron DeSantis a plausible candidate for President of the United States. DeSantis was against Disney in a very loud and litigious way. This is odd because a state's governor usually takes a rather positive view of that state's largest employer. But DeSantis needed an example of what he called the "woke corporations" of the United States. Ideally one that he could kick around a bit as Governor of Florida. Disney served as such.  Perhaps because it gives generous health insurance benefits to its employees and their domestic partners, whether or not the partners are lawful spouses, and whether or not they are of the same sex as the employees. Gasp.  Horrors.  Contemplating this recently, I became curious about Disney World's energy consumption and carbon footprint. Does the power involved merely come f...

Just suppose that, from some distant foreign country closely allied with the United States, we were all to learn one day -- suddenly and as an intrusion on our own domestic concerns -- that the country's (elected) President had ordered into existence a system of martial law, and pursuant to that order that he had prohibited meetings of his country's elected legislature until further notice.    Suppose his happens not now, but sometime soon after Jan. 20, 2025. It might easily spiral into a serious matter affecting the interests of the US.  Consider, for example, that there might be US military bases there -- there might continuously have been military bases there since a war in the early '50s.  Perhaps the situation becomes violent, and the violence spreads out beyond the capital city.  A couple of nearby foreign countries, which had been enemies of this country, and of the US, in this earlier war, are watching closely to see how far this disruption goes. The Pr...

I am reading a book by Kitaro Nishida, a Zen-tinged Japanese philosopher who was prominent a century ago.  An Inquiry into the Good.   That title reminds me a bit of Spinoza calling his masterwork Ethics. Spinoza had ethical points to make, but wanted to ground that in comprehensive premises about the world and our place in it. Nishida likewise has a (quite Zen) conception of the good to convey, but wants to start at the beginning.  The beginning is a very Jamesian place, as Nishida acknowledged. His beginning is the fuzzy boundary between cognitive psychology and epistemology.  "As psychologists say, we can will a movement simply by recollecting a past memory; if we direct our attention to the memory, the movement will follow naturally.  From the standpoint of pure experience the movement itself is but a continuation of the sensation of movement in recollection....We tend to think of the will as some special power, but in fact it is nothing more than the experi...

Amid all the discussions of Trump's cabinet pick, that circling around his choice of a Treasury Secretary has fascinated me the most. This is, after all, Hamilton's heir.  What other cabinet post can you think of that is at the center of a Broadway show?  George Washington had only four members in the first cabinet: an Attorney General (Randolph), a Secretary of War (Knox), a Secretary of State (Jefferson) and of the Treasury (Hamilton). Those remain the four most critical of cabinet offices. Okay, Jefferson was also at the center of a Broadway show, 1776 -- but as the title suggests it wasn't about his work as a cabinet secretary.  Hamilton , very largely, is.  It delights me that Trump has chosen Scott Bessent.  I suppose that if the Trumpets meant the crap they've been saying for so long about George Soros, about how evil he is, how he reaches his monstrous tentacles into everything ... if they meant it they would now be venting their fury at Bessent, the o...

Somebody not long ago asked on Quora, "What is the meaning of Kant's statement, 'I have no need for that hypothesis' in his work Critique of Pure Reason?" Yes, the premise of the question is false.  But I had fun putting together a reply, and I'll re-use it here, with slight cosmetic changes.  Happy Thanksgiving.  -----------------------------------  That is not a Kantian statement. It is one generally attributed to Laplace. And it doesn't come from a book of Laplace’s, either. It comes from a later book by a biographer of Napoleon, discussing a confrontation Laplace, an early 19th century big-shot politician, supposedly had with the Emperor Napoleon. (Kant does come into this story in an indirect way — but put a pin in that for a bit). Pierre-Simon Laplace was an astronomer and mathematician as well as a politician. While Napoleon was busy in Russia, Laplace wrote a great work on CELESTIAL MECHANICS which was seen in some quarters as the most important th...

  Let's think some more about that James passage I quoted yesterday.  For James, a concept is something quite simple. It may form directly from perception without benefit of any intermediary thinking.  It, is accordingly, NOT an act of abstraction. Consider an intestinal polyp again. We are already supposing it can perceive. Suppose it perceives visually, and in color. It 'sees' a certain orangey-patch pass by. [Part of a carrot that its host is consuming, we say as outside observers.] The polyp may just call this patch of orange to itself the thingumbob. Later, in the absence of the thingumbob, the notion of the patch of orange, a quite specific shade of orange, may pass through its polypy noggin.  There doesn't have to be any abstractness here.  It can be as particular a notion as you please. The polyp is think of the same as the same, and so it is internally encountering the thingumbob again. It is conceptualizing.  In general, and speaking now again of ...

From Dewey to James: his authority in these matters.  In this and the next post, I'll talk about William James' view of concept formation.  Starting with Principles , Volume I, Chapter XII, Conception Some conceptions are of events, some of things, some of qualities.  Any fact, be it thing, event, or quality, may be conceived sufficiently for purposes of identification, if only it be singled out and marked so as to separate it from other things. Simply calling it 'this' or 'that' will suffice. To speak in technical language, a subject may be conceived by its denotation, with no connotation, or a very minimum of connotation, attached. The essential point is that it should be re-identified by us as that which the talk is about, and no full representation of it is necessary for this, even when it is a fully representational thing. In this sense, creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception.  All that is required is that they should recogni...

  There are many tech ideas that are always on the horizon, never actually here. Personal air travel (formerly known as "flying cars"), quantum computing, fusion energy, the commercial use of superconductivity. Another item for this list is surely "small nuclear reactors".  Even in the heyday of the nuke/anti-nuke debates, after Three Mile Island, there was a theory on the pro-nuke side that the real problem was the endless delay that comes with bigness. Smaller ("modular") reactors could mean less expensive projects, a quicker licensing cycle, more expeditious actual building, and the gradual popular acceptance that would come with familiarity.   "Okay, in my back yard, because it seems to be in just about everybody's back yard." That's the idea.  More recently, the growing concern over climate change as THE great environmental issue, and on the burning of hydrocarbons as the great controllable cause there of, the politics of nuclear pow...

  So ... continuing our line of thought into a third day: why is this idea of individually specific concept acquisition (about "dog" or "life-bearing planets" or whatever) important for the philosophy of education?  The answer is that it emphasizes that educators have to meet a child where he is -- where, conceptually, he lives.  The temptation, given the old Baconian view of concepts, might be to fill a child's mind with facts and then start showing him how to draw inferences from these facts, in effect drawing up a chart of similarities and differences.  Dewey gives an example from geography, "The first thing to do" on a Baconian view, may be to give a definition of geography itself.  Then to define "the various abstract terms ... pole, equator, ecliptic, zone -- from the simpler units to the more complex which are formed out of them; then the more concrete elements are taken in similar series: continent, island, coast, promontory, cape.......

  As we discussed yesterday: a child will begin working with a concept of dog with only one data point: Fido. Nobody waits, or should wait, for enough material to build up a table of similarities and contrasts. The building of assumptions and experimentation begins immediately.  Meeting the neighbors' dog is simply an early experiment in one's life. The neighbors' dog may be much larger than our own family dog: I may have to revise my view that dogs fit naturally on human laps, like Fido.   Ah, but what does that have to do with us? One might ask. "There are only adults in this room."  Still: there are matters on which we have only one datum. Consider life on Earth. We know as of yet of only one planet that hosts life.  We have hypotheses about others, and a huge body of fiction on the subject. But we have no reliable information about any other such planet.  This is NOT an example of Dewey's.  [He was writing How we think only a few years after ...

  I discussed in two earlier posts the broad argument of John Dewey's book, HOW WE THINK, introducing a philosophical foundation for a theory of education in which schools have the goal of teaching how to think critically.  This week I would like to focus three posts on a single important, though rather dry, issue within that book. What are concepts and how are THEY formed?  According to Dewey, a conception is simply "a definite meaning which is standardized." As Dewey would have known, William James once offered a two-word statement of the same point, "thingumbob again".  How do we acquire these standardized meanings? Most especially: how do we acquire concepts that may be considered somewhat abstract, where for example the standardized meaning allows for variation?  Dewey offers a nice run-down of the standard account here before offering his own. The standard account (one may call it Baconian) is that a child begins with a lot of different particular things. ...

Back in July, after President Biden's disastrous old-mannish debate performance, stocks in Taiwan took a tumble. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., a chipmaker critical to the world's computer industry, collapsed, losing 5.6% of its value on a single day. This was largely on fear that the debate foretold a coming Trump Presidency, and that Trump would be less interested than Biden or several earlier Presidents in preserving Taiwan's de facto independence from Beijing.    It might be natural to ask: if TSMC stock fell sharply on the danger that Trump would be elected, what has the reality of a Trump election done to it?   Kind of strange but ... the immediate effect has been to lift the price. Here is a six-month chart: TSMC stock chart - Google Search The TSMC stock price, as you can see, was rising more-or-less steadily for the first two months of the charted period, peaking on July 10. That is a little to the left of the central axis of the above screen shot...

Lichtman set aside: the election last week would seem to establish that the "neoconservative" movement is, politically, a spent force.  "Neocons" were the dominant public policy intellectuals of the Bush era in the history of the Republican Party.   The Harris campaign spent a lot of time and effort to reach out to Neocons, and to politicians associated with Neocons ideas, notably the Cheney family. It created a strikingly broad alliance with Neocons and Bernie Sanders under the same political roof.  It did Harris no good.  Indeed, I suspect the rightward stretch of it was a misdirection that did her cause harm.  Because the Cheneys speak only for themselves.  Heck even if "W" himself had come out with a rousing endorsement of the Vice President, (which never happened) the result would likely have been spot on the same.  Such Neocons as are still active are just a coterie of mutual praise.  It is possible they never really were anything more:...

  The remainder of this week's posts will consist of reactions to last week's election.  Rather low-key reactions, given the stakes: but you'll judge that for yourself.  First thought: Back to the drawing board for Lichtman? The political scientist Allan Lichtman has identified 13 "keys to the White House" through which, he has said, the outcome of any particular presidential election can be predicted with a degree of certainty that dominates the pre-vote poll results.   The underlying idea is that the election is always a referendum on the incumbent administration, whether it is an effort at re-election or not.  The distinction between an incumbent seeking re-election and an incumbent party seeking to manage a passing of the baton is accounted for in one of the keys. Each key is a binary statement to which one can respond "true" or "false," and the "true" response favors the incumbent party. If more than five of the keys draw a ...

Can "refute" simply mean "deny"? If so: isn't that unnecessarily confusing? Typically and historically, refutation means "to prove a claim to be false or a person to be in error."  Example: "The observation of noontime shadows at both Alexandria and Syene can refute the flat earth theory." [There is no noontime shadow at Syene, on the equator. There is a shadow at Alexandria, at a latitude of 31 degrees.]  Yet one irritatingly often encounters the word "refute" used where "deny" would suit the context better.  "At a news conference, the Senator refuted claims that he had embezzled campaign funds to finance an excursion to Alexandria with prostitutes."  I just made that one up. But the following less amusing example is authentic: "Sometime in 2023, blockchain firm Forte acquired game studios Phoenix Labs and Rumble Games. However, it would be a year before this came to light, because according to a report fr...

 I  wrote last week about a book by John Dewey, published 104 years ago now, "How we think".  I described then the conclusion of the first chapter, that thinking in its essence is the operation by which present facts suggest other facts in such a way as to induce belief in the latter on the basis of the former.  Let us take his line of thought (about thought) a little further.  For he moves quickly from thinking in a generic sense to reflective or critical thinking. And THAT is the key.  John Dewey is still probably better known as an educational theorist with a reputation for an aversion to tough grading or school discipline.  That reputation is overblown.  But ... HOW WE THINK was aimed at the philosophy of education, Its program is this: first let us figure out what thinking is attempting to do, and then let us infer how THAT can be done well. That in turn will lead us to an understanding of how older humans can teach younger ones to do a good ...

You have to get up at 7 AM.  You wake up in darkness and turn to face your clock. It says "2:35". There are, in my experience, two possible reactions.  The negative one: "DAMN! Why am I awake now???" The positive one, "Oooh, good. I don't have to get up for more than four hours." Then roll over and close eyes.  In principle, I think, there ought to be a mixed reaction.  Something like a groggy good-news/bad-news joke that would incorporate both of those.  I never HAVE the mixed reaction. I either luxuriate for a happy moment in how much time I have left or curse the negligence of the god Morpheus for my wakefulness. Is the third possible reaction anything but a theoretical possibility?  Hmmmm.       

From the Titelbaum book on Bayesian epistemology I have mentioned here before.  There is a nice explanation in a footnote near the end about "observation selection bias" as a ubiquitous problem in statistics and, really, in the understanding of probability. The explanation is illustrated with a World War II throwback. US War Department statisticians observed in 1943 that bombers returning to London from their flights over occupied Europe generally had more bullet holes in their fuselage than in their engine. Somebody drew the conclusion that the German fire tended to hit the fuselage, and that there should be extra plating there.   Such a reinforcement of the fuselage was not a decision to be taken lightly.  Reinforcement adds weight. Heavier aircraft are less maneuverable, have a lesser range, etc.  So Abraham Wald, a Hungarian Jew known before the war for econometrics research, who at this point was working at Columbia with the Statistical Research Group, cons...

  Diane and I were talking recently about how the incumbent President, Joseph Biden, has seemed to do relatively little campaigning for his Vice President, Kamala Harris.  We both agree on that observation, but we had different interpretations.  My initial thought was, "Maybe Joe is grumpy.  Yes, he has supported her and done everything he had to as a party guy, but he was dumped over and may be ticked off." Diane thought this must be wrong.  The reason is more likely not that he is grumpy about campaigning but that she and her team have decided he is more a liability than an asset on the trail.  Whatever.   Looking at this from a broader PoV. Harris is in a familiar position in US presidential history. She cannot seem to be disloyal to the incumbent president whose mantle she has inherited -- nor can she present herself as a mere acolyte. She has to be both her own woman and a loyal party gal.  It is easy to get this wrong. George H.W. Bush ...