Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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...

Samsung has in recent days cancelled $2.11 billion of its shares. In its own native currency, that of the Republic of Korea (the won) that number of 3.05 trillion.  This follows up on earlier buy-backs of those shares of course.  You have to own them before you can cancel them.  Significance of this move?  Like the initial buy-back, the point of a share cancellation is to support the price. The price needs the support largely because of the Trump administration's tariff policy.  Samsung is a Korean company with indispensable business ties both in the US and in the PRC. A trade war between those two counties is a nightmare for its managers and shareholders.   Consider this post just a random bit of flotsam from the stream of recent news. 

  Even the ads did not live up to the hype this year.  One of the first was a Coca-Cola ad that began with a 2025 argument over artificial intelligence and how AI was going to take over the world. Two young hotheads were engaged in this dispute, and an older woman smiles benignly at them and says, "I think we're going to be just fine."  Then we see an event in 1975 -- a memory of hers. She was then as a young woman a participant in a similar argument, except that the key word was "computers" rather than "AI".  Someone or other ar that earlier moment had apparently said, "I think we're going to be just fine" in the same benign way. Only after all of this does one see the logo and realize that it was all a Coca-Cola commercial.  Meaning what?  That "it" has been "just fine" for fifty years despite worries about digital technology because we've had coke? And it will continue to be just fine because we still have it?  ...

I am thinking today of an expression my father used to use. The occasion for this expression could come about because my father had just told us a story about something that had happened years before, maybe during his time at an engineering school. One of the members of his brood would ask him, "where was I when this happened?"  He would reply, "You weren't even thought of yet."  It took me a looong time to realize that I hadn't fully understood this nice bit of paternal wordplay. It was a pun on the word that Dad did not use here, the word "conceived". He punned on that word by NOT using it. Conceived has two meanings, and Dad was explicitly invoking only one of them. Dad passed away in 2003. Twenty two years later I have to say, without any effort at word play, that he is thought of often and with gratitude. 

 Throughout this book the authors use the word "securitization" as the name of a process, or "securitize" as a verb. To securitize an issue X is to come to regard X as a security issue or threat. The process of securitization brings a nation-state's decision-making elite to this point: X is a threat.  Once in a while, too, a desecuritization takes place.  What had formerly been considered a threat ceases to be so, not because it disappears but because it fades into the status of a background fact.  Their use of these two words can be a little confusing for someone accustomed to the very different use of "securitization" in financial news: an asset or income stream is "securitized" by being used as the basis for the sale of securities. But over time I did become accustomed to their use.  Simply by using the word in this way, they have suggested that what is or is not a security issue is not a given -- that it is, to a great extent, a matter of...