Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  As you may see from the news stories to which I linked you yesterday: the former President is open about the fact that he would not use US forces to protect Taiwan from an invasion from the Chinese mainland. He has allowed for the possibility that Taiwan could pay the US enough to change his mind: but I doubt that deal would ever get done.  The business of lending out an army for mercenary use didn't end well for  Yevgeny Prigozhin. [In case you have forgotten the name, you'll probably remember the face, here.]  One fascinating fact about this situation: Taiwan is the center of the world's semiconductor industry. Somewhere at the back of the Orange Guy's alleged mind is the thought, "If the PRC takes them over, the fighting will likely destroy their semiconductor industry, allowing the US to re-assert its dominance in that matter."  That is insane, but no more so that his babbling about sharks.  Anyway, there are lots of industries in the United States th...

  The US election is much watched in Taiwan, aka the Republic of China.  I'll just offer three quick links on the subject today, hoping to have something to say tomorrow. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-invites-china-to-invade-taiwan-if-he-returns-to-office.html  https://www.reuters.com/world/china/taiwan-must-protect-its-sovereignty-know-its-own-history-president-says-2024-07-21/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/sirens-sound-streets-deserted-taiwan-simulates-chinese-missile-strike-2024-07-23/

  Four books have especially shaped my thinking on the relations between the Eastern and the Western traditions in philosophy, broadly speaking.  I’ll just give you author, title, date for three of them, and a short explanation of the fourth. William Johnson, THE STILL POINT (1970) Thomas Tweed, THE AMERICAN ENCOUNTER WITH BUDDHISM (1982) Rick Fields, HOW THE SWANS CAME TO THE LAKE (1992). Now the fourth. Get a hold of Kitaro Nishida, AN INQUIRY INTO THE GOOD (1990). As the title suggests, this is NOT a work of history but a substantive philosophical work. Further, the 1990 edition, from Yale University Press, is a translation of a book by the named Japanese scholar that he wrote, in his native language, in 1911. Nishida was very well aware of western philosophy, and an admirer of the American pragmatists in particular. His “inquiry into the good” is very self-aware about his blending of traditions east and west. Nishida died near the end of the second world war. During his li...

  Just for nothin' I'm putting a famous image from Raphael's painting School of Athens, right here.  But I am thinking as the headline here indicates of the song that has become the new anthem of the Kamala Harris campaign.  As readers will probably recognize, I'm fully behind somebody-who-is-not-Trump for President. Harris is now that candidate and she is guaranteed my vote. In that spirit, here are the lyrics to the anthem, Beyonce's "Freedom".  Freedom! Freedom! I can't move Freedom, cut me loose! Singin', freedom! Freedom! Where are you? Cause I need freedom too! ---------------------------------------------------------------------  It sounds like an evocation of the police-brutality cases and arguments that clustered in the Trump years, often involving the phrase "I can't breathe!" from a dying man, and the taunt that if you couldn't breathe you couldn't say that. Yet people about to die apparently can say that.  And peop...

  I have mentioned Mayo and her book, STATISTICAL INFERENCE AND SEVERE TESTING before.  Here I come back to it to provide you with some fruits of my readings therein. Duhem's problem.   Pierre Duhem said that experimental falsification doesn't get us very far in physics because the error that explains the surprising experimental result could invariably have come from any of a number of related postulates. The surprising result only tells us that ONE of them is wrong.  "The only thing the experiment teaches us is ... there is at least one error; but, where this error lies is just what it does not tell us." [a 1954 book.] Quine said much the same, though he didn't think the idea restricted to physics.   Popper replied, in CONJECTURES AND REFUTATIONS (1962). "We can be reasonably successful in attributing our refutations to definite portions of the theoretical maze. (For we are reasonably successful in this -- a fact which remains inexplicable for one who...

  Since the Olympics is upon us again, I might as well admit my long fascination with the song "One Moment of Time," memorably sung by Whitney Houston in 1988, and often used as a sort of background music for highlight reels.  I want one moment in time When I'm more than I thought I could be When all of my dreams are a heartbeat away And the answers are all up to me Give me one moment in time When I'm racing with destiny Then in that one moment in time I will feel I will feel eternity. ------------------------------------------------------------------- My mind follows a well-worn chain of association from these words.  Think of an older athlete, say 70 years old thinking and perhaps talking about his marvelous 'moment in time' fifty years before. Like one of the two characters in the Springsteen song "Glory Days," but let's stick to the Olympics.  "Ah, yes, in the fifteen hundred meters in the Olympics of that year -- I was just hitting my s...

I found the above browsing about Mastodon (my favorite social media site given Musk's destruction of the old Twitter).  I've been too lazy to look for confirmation. Maybe this calls for some philosophical exegesis BEFORE confirmation!  The above is a screenshot of a post on a social media site that says that in 2022 medical researchers tried to make a machine-learning tool for identifying skin cancer. The idea, as always, was that the Algo would learn from large quantities of online photos of skin lesions that turned out to be cancerous and other skin lesions that did not, until the algorithm would teach itself how to tell the difference maybe better than humans would ever be able to.  Didn't work out. The Algo ended up focusing on the presence or absence of a ruler. (Doctors routinely use a ruler to measure a potential tumor for scale.) The social media post ends, "Basically they tried to build a cancer finding machine and instead built a ruler finding machine." ...

 From Soliloquies in England (1922): Santayana was part of a world that was rubbing its eyes after the end of what they called the Great War, wondering what it all meant and where civilization can go from here. The moment produced some fine (one might even say 'stellar') intellectual work. Hold that metaphor. Santayana, in Soliloquies , gave us this aphorism. "It would seem that when a heavenly body ceases to shine by its own light, it becomes capable of breeding eyes with which to profit by the light other bodies are shedding: whereas, so long as it was itself on fire, no part of it could see." What does that mean? I think I know, at least vaguely. And it is a better piece of work than some other famous Santayana quotes, including the condemned-to-repeat-it thing. On one level, Santayana means here what he says. When earth (and possibly other analogous planets) cooled a bit it became a host for life, and some of the lives made possible by this contain eyes capable ...

                                              Throughout school, I took what I have come to think of as a guess-and-test approach to math word problems. This was never the 'official' approach, so I eventually had to learn to dress my answers up to seem more official.  But they were derived from guess-and-test. Simple example.  There are two school buses, A and B.  A has 18 more seats in it than B does.  Together, they have 96 seats.  Find the number of seats in each.  Guess-and-test.  Hmmm. Sixty is a nice round number lower than 96.  Let us see if the big bus could have 60 seats. That would mean the small bus has 18 fewer seats than that. Hmmmm.  60 + 42 = 102 NOT 96. Okay, each bus has to have fewer seats than that.  Let us guess that the big one has 55. Does that work? 55 + 37 = 92 NOT  96. Oops.  But we do...

  Last week's posts were hard work.  I struggled to get through a reasonable discussion of that nuclear explosion of a SCOTUS term using no more than four blog posts and without making any of them unduly long. Today. and maybe this whole week, I will take things easier.   The orange and the gray.  Look! up there! a cute kitten!  And another one below! See you tomorrow. 

.  It is appropriate that we ended our last post with Jarkesy .  For without much effort, that can be seen as part of a push by the majority of this court to put the whole regulatory apparatus on a defensive jurisprudential footing. There is some combination here of social darwinism and a fear of the hidden rulers behind the superficial state consisting of well-known politicians.  MAGA as a political movement is an effort to weaponize the superficial against the deep.   Beyond Jarkesy there is the CFPB case, and there is Loper Bright , the case that has finally overturned Chevron.   I would like to focus especially now on :  Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association of America,  aka the CFPB case, published in mid May. CFPB was a loss for the cause of dismantling administrative agencies. A win for the deep state, if you will.  It is not always clear what the word "consumer" means in the financial worl...

To pick up on the thought with which I ended yesterday's entry: as I write these words, Richard Glossip is still alive. And that has to be considered good.  Glossip is alive because the US Supreme Court, in January of this year, agreed to hear his case. I mentioned that fact in this blog in February, but I'll say a bit more now.  In January 1997 (yes, more than a quarter of a century ago, and days before the second inaugural of President Clinton) and man called Barry Van Treese beat Justin Sneed to death with a baseball bat. In order to avoid the death penalty, Sneed testified that Glossip instructed him to do this.  Van Treese's sayso is virtually the whole of the prosecution case. Just about everybody who has looked into the matter believes that Van Treed was lying. Sneed's family members, and the Attorney General of the State of Oklahoma, are among the many who have drawn that conclusion. So ... why is Glossip still on death row?  The short answer is bureaucratic ...

This will be a somewhat shorter post than yesterday's: not because its material is any less important, but simply because somewhat less demands to be said about the two cases I feature today than about yesterday's unholy trinity.    Two decisions this year demanded that the high court take some role in shaping the post- Dobbs landscape of abortion jurisprudence. They may be considered opposite ends of a spectrum. One of these involved FDA approvals of early-term abortion medications: the second questioned whether the federal government has mandated life-saving abortions in hospital emergency rooms in a manner that can pre-empt state law.  First then, last month the Supreme Court dismissed FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine , a lawsuit in which the named Alliance sought to restrict access to the pill mifepristone.   Non-surgical abortions are typically conducted with a two-pill regimen: mifepristone followed by misoprostol. This seems to be the most effective (a...

A nuclear bomb of a court term. Regulars here are familiar with my practice of doing a four-part discussion of the just-ended term of the US Supreme Court here each year in early July. You may also have expectations as to how I divide up this four-part discussion: expectations I will have to foil somewhat this year. My usual pattern is this: the first installment contains some introductory material about the term just ended. It also usually contains a discussion of a "pet" case -- something that interests me for idiosyncratic, perhaps especially nerdy, reasons that would never get it to the front of anyone else's list.  Or even necessarily ON somebody else's list. Last year my pet case involved the issue of personal jurisdiction of state courts  over corporate defendant s of interstate reach... four years ago my pet was part of the aftermath of Governor Christie's political blockage of the George Washington Bridge.  Anyway: there will be no such idiosyncratic pet ...

  Have I written anything about quantum computing in this blog?  I wrote so much here about so many things it is difficult to keep track.  Ah, I just completed a survey of posts in the history of this blog that involve quantum mechanics  There is a fair number.  NONE of them address the question on my mind today -- whether humanity's understanding of quantum mechanics is about to set off a jump in our marketable computational power. So ... I will correct that lacuna.  This could yet be the biggest disruption in the high-tech world since transistors replaced vacuum tubes.  Existing computers, digi tal computers, work with a lot of on/off gates. Another way of saying this is that they calculate by “1” and “0.” Either number is called a “bit.” Quantum computers, first discussed theoretically by Richard Feynman and Yuri Manin in the early 1980s, have on/off/both gates. In numerical terms, a datum can still be a 1, or a 0, but can also be superposition of 1...

A 20th and 21st century Canadian philosopher who has not made as large a dent in the fields of philosophy of science and, more generally, of epistemology as he may reasonably have hoped: Ian Hacking died a little more than a year ago, in May 2023, when his heart failed him at the age of 87 at a retirement home in Toronto.  Hacking is best remembered as the foremost advocate in the philosophy of science of the view known as "entity realism".  This is related to our discussion of the Vienna Circle in recent posts. Consider that in the philosophy of science, in the heyday of the VC and in our own time as well, one central question is "do we need to explain the predictive success of the best scientific theories? and, if we do, is their approximate truth an accurate non-circular explanation?"  Scientific realism says "yes we do and yes it is." A theory about electrons may be right because electrons are real, and it may be successfully predictive because it is ...

Next week you will see my traditional four-panel piece reviewing the latest term of the Supreme Court.  But this last session is such a bore I'm not sure how I'm gonna be able to come up with any material! <jk>  A blogger's lot is not an easy one.  Happy fourth of July, everyone!  I'm reminded for no good reason for something John Adams says in the Broadway show 1776 .  History, he was afraid, would forget him. Posterity would believe that "Franklin smote the ground with his magic lightning rid, and up sprang a horse with General Washington astride it. Then the three of them -- Franklin, Washington, and the horse -- rode off to win a revolution."  It's a good line, and history does tend to become almost as simple in the re-tellings as the fictionalized Adams feared it would be.  ("Eisenhower conquered Germany, saw the Autobahn, and instantly wanted to order some of those for America.") But Adams does seem to have kept his part through multi...

  This is another comment on the Fifth Circuit decision I discussed briefly in my June 21st post on this blog.   You'll remember (I hope) that I said that the 5th circuit has (pending appeal) freed the private funds industry of a set of new SEC regulations, and that it did so on statutory grounds, not on the procedural theories that the fund associations' attorneys had also presented.  At this point I would like to say (on behalf of the industry, if I may), "Whew". They dodged a bullet that they had fired at themselves. It is lucky for the industry the court just ignored the procedural points.  Let's go back over this. A key procedural argument turns on the statutory requirements for notice-and-comment rulemaking, applicable in a vast number of agencies. They are:  (1) that a notice of proposed rulemaking be posed in the Federal Register, including a description of the issues involved or the text of the proposed rule; (2) that the public has an opportunity ...