Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  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.  Then

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: a Potemkin Vi

  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 job with this common task of