Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Those who would read the following should really have first read the first part, posted here on March 28th.  I'm going to dive into the middle of material today without reviewing that.  Ready? Let's go. How have defenders of a middle choice (between true and false, EVEN for some well-formed propositions) defended that possibility against C.I. Lewis' critique? Well, to begin, they note that any effort to prove something involves premises.  To the extent that the law itself (we will call it LEM for short) is supposed -- as it is supposed by many -- to be a foundational premise in logic, it of course cannot be proven.  If Lewis has actually proven LEM, it must have been by discovering other deeper premises, and turning LEM into a lemma, so to speak, a steppingstone on the path from some important truths to others. In fact, the Lewis "explosion argument" takes it as a premise that every sentence entails the disjunction of itself and any other sentence. This is kno...

Mary Shepherd is 'having a moment' and I am out of sympathy. Yes, I agree that many women have been written out of the history of philosophy because the history is written by men.  I agree that it is worth our while to reverse this trend and recover the contributions of neglected women where we can.  But Mary Shepherd, an early 19th century British thinker best known for an essay on the relation between cause and effect, doesn't really fill the bill here. In response to Hume, Shepherd wrote thus: "We cannot imagine a beginning of existence to be wholly unconnected with any thing that went before it; and this is sufficient to refute the notion, that causes and effects are only conjunctions, or sequences observed by the experience of mankind." She thus infers the necessity of causal relations from our inability to imagine the contrary.  This sort of thing reminds me of the scenes in The Princess Bride, where the bad guy Vizzini keeps assuring his confederates that ...

Softbank, the great Japan based holding company (not a bank), has agreed to buy Ampere Computing, an important chipmaker based in California.  According to a report from Reuters, this is an all-cash transaction, for $6.5 billion on the barrelhead. Now: I would not have you draw the conclusion, "the smart money is getting into chips, maybe I too ought to be getting into chips!" Softbank hasn't always been all that 'smart' in its use of money, I'm afraid.    Softbank was, for example, a big investor in WeWork, the company that gave some excitement and Silicon Valley gloss to the idea of shared working spaces.  The business plan was simple: enter into long-term leases for a lot of office space, and rent it at for shorter terms and higher rent.  WeWork looked good in the period 2010-2019. It was a private company and could keep most of its cards close to its vest.  Then it decided that there was money to be made in an IPO. But a public offering requires complia...

 "The plan required a masterful combination of precision and adaptability." Or maybe (if like certain friends of the Dude you're not into the whole concision thing), "The plan, like all good plans, required a masterful combination of precision and adaptability: precision, because there is a future to control; adaptability, because there is a past to contain."   I woke one morning recently with that sentence, in those and other variants, in my mind pressing for escape. I either had to write something down or consign it all to the waters of Lethe as my day commenced. 

This is the first in a projected three-part series about the law of the excluded middle, a (disputed) logical principle according to which, for any well-defined  proposition, either the proposition is true or it is false.  Today I will explain the law in question and offer a classical argument for its validity. On another day (not tomorrow, I assure you): I will explain why I do not believe that argument is a strong one and why we might want to allow for violations of this LEM. When I get around to Part III, I will discuss how the dispute feeds into political philosophy and certain questions about the legitimate regulation of markets. So ... let us proceed.  When it seems that a proposition IS both true and false, or is neither, and in either case is in violation of this law, various remedies are available: the proposition in question might just be nonsense (as for example the claim that the Jabberwocky has a frumious Bandersnatch), it might embed a false premise (as for ...

 One great historic Swiss bank is in the process of phasing out another. Because of a complicated series of crisis through in the early  2010s, Credit Suisse faced failure by October 2012, when an Australian journalist tweeted about a "credible source" that had told him "a major international bank is on the brink."  That tweet was the last straw. People quickly figured out that Credit Suisse was the unnamed major bank, and  a classic 'run' ensued until the Swiss government forced CS to accept takeover by the other huge Swiss bank of equivalent stature, UBS. As I write, Credit Suisse is still a semi-autonomous branded entity under the UBS umbrella. But that is just a matter of time -- we are told the process of 'full integration' is underway and even the separate branding shall disappear in time. It is a fascinating story, aspects of which I covered for the AllAboutAlpha blog in the aforesaid early 2010s. I mention it now only because I'd like to...

One of the facts that lies in the background of constitutional history, and usually stays there, without being highlighted, is this: most of the founders of the United States shared a disdain for the institution of a "standing army" --that is, of a permanent professional military force maintained through peacetime and composed of full-time soldiers.  Their idealization of the "militia," and the reference thereto in the second amendment, arguably the second amendment itself, constitute the flipside of their anti-standing-army persuasion.  If you ask about the background and history of this conviction, you are generally referred to the build-up to the revolution, as the mother country built up its military presence (the "regulars") in the troublesome colonies. But a newly published paper makes the point that the vocabulary in which our founders expressed their conviction on point has a specific history within that Mother Country.  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol...

  Suppose I say to you, dear reader: "I have a hot tip.  Onion futures! If you invest a modest sum of money with me, I will invest it in futures. "You'll really like dem onions.  I have a solid inside source at the exchange."  If I ever say this to you, then 'I' have gone over to the dark side.  RUN.  There is no such thing as an onion future on ANY exchange in the US or in Europe or, so far as I know, anywhere on the globe.  The US has the distinction of having an act of Congress on the books saying that onions are not to be subject to futures trades. The Onion Futures Act was created at the insistence, back on the 1950s,  of one Representative Gerald Ford of Michigan.  His district was the epicenter of US onion growing, and he decided early on in his career that futures speculation in the crop was inherently crooked.    Ford had standard mid-20th-century laissez-faire opinions on a lot of subjects, but futures trading in onions: N...

 As everyone likely now knows, the US President has a plan to make the Gaza strip into a sort of French Riviera, a high-value vacation destination.  There will surely be lots of Trump properties there in this imagined future. There won't be a lot of Palestinians, though. The displaced people of Gaza will get some other nice place to live, but won't get to go back to Gaza.   They've been displaced before.  They must be used to it by now.  Amirite?  Donald Trump says the United States will "own" Gaza. I put quote marks around that word because he is not thereby saying Gaza will come under US sovereignty.  He is saying the US will own it -- ownership and sovereignty are two distinct facts. It is possible he has in mind Israeli sovereignty, and US ownership within Israeli law. If the hotels make money, Israel will have to be cut in with "a piece of the action," as grifters like to say.  Anyway: this imagined future is as likely to be the actual ...

 Haven't read it yet but ... it does appear Kane was determined to get in a final word about the free-will controversy: https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-complex-tapestry-of-free-will-a-free-will-odyssey/  For years I've cited his 1990s work as a fine expression of the view with which I associate myself. Kane works from generally secular premises, and reaches a free-willist position that is indeterminist and incompatibilist, the old in-in combo, thereby establishing that certain Jamesian contentions remain in the running.  Daniel Dennett (a determinist and compatibilist) replied to Kane and Kane was said to be working on a reply to THAT. Now Dennett and Kane have both shuffled off this mortal coil and this posthumous publication may be the last word in THAT exchange -- if it does contain  the response to Dennett I had heard about -- although surely the broader philosophical argument will continue.  I'm going to have to get this book. 

  Near the southern border of the western Massachusetts town of Longmeadow, near where it borders Connecticut, one finds a very fine and not-at-all expensive Greek restaurant named Grapevine.  Now, suppose you are in downtown Chicopee, somewhere in the neighborhood of John's Pizzeria [nowhere near as classy a place, to be honest] and you want to get to the Grapevine. What is the easiest way to do that?  You'll be starting off near 391. Get onto that highway and continue (westbound) for about 2 miles until you can get onto I-91 (southbound).   You'll then take 91 for about 7 minutes, if the traffic allows, and then get off exit 1, the last exit before you find yourself in (gasp) Connecticut. This exit will dump you onto route 5, and you stay on there, still southbound, until you find Maple Street.  This entails going past a lot of places familiar to anyone who loves Hollywood movies that involve small towns -- a small library with that Carnegie-ish look, a t...

"As a fact, the mystical tendency in religion is not the last, the mature, result, not yet the last refuge of piety. Mysticism is the always young, it is the childlike, it is the essentially immature aspect of the deeper religious life. Its ardor, its pathos, its illusions, and its genuine illuminations have all the characters of youth about them, characters beautiful but capricious." -- Josiah Royce, THE PROBLEM OF CHRISTIANITY (1913), from chapter viii, "The modern mind and the Christian ideas".  The brief passage, something of an aside in context, reminds me of another work from my postulated golden age, PETER AND WENDY (1911) by J.M. Barrie.  In both instances, our author was reacting against the earlier romantic idealization of childhood. At one point, Barrie wanted to call his novel The boy who couldn't grow up. Not "wouldn't".  Couldn't.  Pan's magical condition is not a choice of his and is at least as much a curse as a blessing.  ...

  Writing in the mid-20s about the Great War, Winston Churchill wrote that the grotesque casualties of the Battle of the Somme and others might have been avoided " if   only the Generals had not been content to fight machine-gun bullets with the breasts of gallant men, and think that that was waging war.” I'm just writing to say I like that line.  General Douglas Haig, who would have been understood by even casual readers of that line on its first publication as among its targets, if not indeed the chief of its targets. is said to have been (understandably) furious over it.  What is more interesting for me is the role that this conviction might have played in certain strategic arguments between Churchill and Roosevelt during the following war.  Roosevelt wanted a US/UK front in northwestern Europe as soon as possible. Stalin understandably agreed -- a new front would at the least tie up German resources and take some pressure off the eastern front on which the R...

  Are black holes philosophically interesting?  And, if so, why?  I submit that they are. They seem to be central to the development of cosmology, the branch of physics that asks the Big Questions: where did the universe come from?  why does it have the laws that it has?  (for example, why does gravity have the force that it has)?  Do the laws of nature themselves have a history? However much impressive and, for many of us, impenetrable the mathematics that may be thrown at such problems, they retain their philosophy-adjacent pull.  Why are black holes central to cosmology? In part because the natural way to understand black holes involves the notion of a singularity -- a place (perhaps a mathematical point) where laws cease to apply.   Take a simple point from some of the math I just mentioned.  Whenever there is a value defied as 1/x= V, then the value goes to infinity as X goes to zero. You can think x as the distance between an objec...

  Since Musk has destroyed twitter, I have been getting most of my social-media fix at Mastodon.  I haven't tried BlueSky yet, though I know some people laud it as the revival of the old pre-Musk twitter. The good thing about Mastodon is that it is NOT the revival of the pre-Musk Twitter.  It is a federated system, the co-operation of distinct servers in such a way that it would be difficult for a billionaire with a huge ego to buy it and ruin it.  One neat development there is a tradition, if you will, called #3GoodThings. Posters regularly exercise this random listing of positivity. Here is an example of a #3GoodThings post. One of several that appeared Sunday. ------------------------------------ 1. I beat #TacticalMystery 2. I spoke to a friend of mine who I do sometimes see on my social feeds, just haven't chatted with them proper in months 3. There is no work today.  ------------------------------------- Now, if you have no idea what #TacticalMystery is, t...

   There has been a new discovery of gold in the Indus River valley. Not a huge story, but I will use it to make a point about numbers and ambiguity.  The Indus River originates in Tibet, flows northwest through Kashmir, and eventually takes a sharp left turn before it would have reached Afghanistan in order to flow instead through Pakistan and enter the sea near Karachi.   The main current of the Indus never, then, travels within the present boundaries of the Republic of India -- it almost neatly parallels India's own northern border, to its north. That  delta  near Karachi, though, does include some Indian territory.  Initial reports estimated the deposit as worth 80,000 crore. How much is that? Pakistan and India both call their currency the rupee, and in both countries a group of 10 MILLION rupees is called a crore. So if I'm getting this arithmetic right 80 thousand crore is 800 billion rupees.   But ... WHOSE rupees?  Here I t...

Neil Armstrong of course is the first human being ever to have set foot on a celestial body other than earth. It is oddly appropriate, then, that the heteropalindrome (the semordnilap) of his name is: "Gnorts, Mr Alien." A palindrome is a word or phrase spelled the same way backwards and forwards.  Like the reputed book about Theodore Roosevelt: "A man, a plan, a canal -- Panama".  The word "semordnilap" is "palindromes" spelled backwards. It is sometimes used for a different but related concept -- a word or phrase that spells one thing in another direction and another backwards. Like tang/gnat. Heteropalindromes means the same thing.  An example: Gnorts, Mr Alien.  I have to go now. 

  The last notes of the Theranos melody have sounded.  The symphony is over and the audience is heading home. That is what it feels like to see this headline: Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes loses fraud appeal.   (BBC). Theranos was a huge story in the business world in the period 2014-2018, in the rise and fall of its claims to revolutionize healthcare tech.  It was a big story in the world of crime and punishment in the period that followed its collapse, ending with the conviction of Theranos founder Holmes and her sentencing in the US district court for northern California in November 2022 for a little over 11 years.  In the two and a quarter years since, though, the world of constant short news cycles has passed her by. So it comes as a bit of a nostalgic trip to be reminded of the particulars by the circuit court's denial of her appeal in recent days.  The appeal contained the usual range of evidentiary issues -- some things were allowed in the evide...

The point, again, is to make the case that the period 1880 to 1920 was a golden age for western thought -- in philosophy and in the leavening by philosophy of related intellectual work.     I've changed several of the items from my earlier list.  I will include some commentary on this version of the list.  Again, a caution.  The use of UPPER CASE LETTERS for all the published items below does not discriminate among genre or by length.  Many of the pieces below are books. But some below are brief articles (such as Harris on education, right at the top). Some are plays, speeches, etc.  Roll with it.  1880:  Fyodor Dostoyevsky [pictured above], THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV                  William Torrey Harris, PSYCHOLOGY OF EDUCATION                           Commentary:  The Harris item was a contribution to the Journal of Sp...

  If there was any one subject about which Donald Trump has been pellucidly clear, it has been this:  Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are to remain sacrosanct. Indeed, I would argue this has been central to his takeover of the Republican Party -- he adopted not just elements of the New Deal but elements of the Great Society too, jettisoning the political baggage of having to oppose them.  When he did debate other Republicans in the spring of 2016 he was consistently 'to their left' on such matters.  And (a distinct but related point) when he was President the first time, he consistently told us that in another two weeks or so we would see a great new plan for health care coverage that would make Obamacare obsolete. Talk like a populist though you walk like a plutocrat.  The Republicans in the House of Representatives, it appears, did not get any of those memos.    One and only one Republican voted against the budget resolution, which uses Medic...

Claims have long been made that introspection is special. I have a peculiar sort of knowledge about what is happening inside my own head.  Descartes, Wundt, James all spoke to the issue of the epistemological status of introspection. They took three distinctly different views of it, but such august names indicate the importance of the idea.    In more recent years, one particular thread within this larger controversy has focused on the idea of immunity from error through misidentification (IEM).  Some authors, such as Sydney Shoemaker, [above] have stressed the notion that many propositions go wrong through misidentification. If I hear someone crying out in the next apartment I might say "My neighbor Joe is in pain." This might be wrong for several reasons (i.e. Joe might be practicing a part in a play, feigning pain.)  But one way that I might go wrong is misidentification -- Joe might have moved out -- it may be my new neighbor who is in pain.    Wit...

Not only is Richard Glossip still alive, but he will receive a new trial, a new opportunity to establish the reasonableness of doubt about his guilt.  A really ugly injustice has been done here already, by virtue of the very fact that such celebration is necessary.  But it is an ugliness that may avoid a final consummation now.  Glossip is alive because the US Supreme Court, more than a year ago now, agreed to hear his case. You can enter his name in the search engine to this blog if you want to find a fuller explanation. Or, go to other sources of news if you believe that there are other sources.   https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/02/supreme-court-grants-richard-glossip-new-trial-in-capital-case/     In January 1997 (yes, more than 28 years 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 ...

Gabby Petito was murdered by her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, as the two were travelling cross-country in the hopes that Gabby would develop a broad body of followers in the van life community.  The precise date is uncertain but Petito died in late August of 2021. Her body would be discovered in Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming on September 19th of that year.  The case was a mass media sensation in large part because she seemed to have martyred herself to the cause of social media influence. An 'influencer' is nowadays a sort of job title.  I know, I know, I tend to wince when I hear the word used that way, too.  But it is.  Anyway, if the "van life community" had taken to regular consumption of Petito's posts, she could have sold her services as a social media guru to advertisers, that is, selling her mention in the course of her YouTube videos of products useful for life in a confined and often moving space.  As a new Netflix docuseries stresses, Petit...