Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  I only quite recently learned a new philosophical word, "inferentialism".  It is the view, especially associated with Robert Brandom, that a concept derives its meaning from its use in a network of inferences, and that accordingly a word or expression has its meaning only because and when users can employ it within such a network. This is a contention within the philosophy of language that has consequences in philosophy of mind and epistemology. That is Brandom above, with a parrot.  A creature that can use lots of words ad phases but has no real skill at inference. If you tell your parrot "it is raining today," he may or may not pick it up and say back to you "it is raining today." He will surely not say, "so you better be careful when you go for a drive tomorrow on those wet roads."    Importantly, this is a non-representational theory.  The phrase "it is raining" does not derive its meaning from the drops of hydrogen bonded with ox...

  To my mind, one of the most intriguing of the ancient Greek philosophers is the second of the great Eleatics, Zeno of Elea.  But ... does he still matter?  C ome, let us reason together.  If the fastest of warriors, Achilles, can not catch up with a tortoise, then something is of course very wrong with the way we understand our life in the world.  That is of course Zeno's point.  He was defending an Eleatic monism, a sort of Hellenic gaslighting that told the world nothing is as it seems, so he was committed to saying that since the apparent world is illusory, something crazy must be true.  Maybe this is irrelevant now, because we live in the thought world that Leibniz and Newton gave us with the development of calculus. The central idea is that of a converging series.   Consider continuously compounding interest.  You probably have bank accounts that earn it.  You do not regard this as a mystery.  But how can that be compute...

  The campy old television cartoon The Jetsons always portrayed George as working for Spacely Sprockets. His work consisted of occasionally pressing buttons that started or stopped sprocket manufacturing machinery.  For the record, a "sprocket" is a wheel-shaped object with teeth that mesh with a chain or belt. [If they mesh with each other directly, they are "gears".]  A sprocket sounds like a very old-fashioned 19th century sort of thing. But here in the early 21st century, there are large sprocket making corporations, such as JT Sprockets, which manufacture them for motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles. Indeed, in 2026 we are closer to the 2060s when the events of the cartoon are set then we are to the 1960s when it was created, and for all we know George's boss, Mr Spacely, may be a youngster now toiling, just out of high school, at a JT Sprockets facility. The importance of sprockets in the day-to-day life of that cartoon's world is a running gag. Geor...

  August 5th is a noteworthy moment in sports history.  It was 22 years ago today that women competed in a marathon for the first time in the history of the Olympics.  This was at the 1984 games in southern California. The winner was Joan Benoit, a US runner, pictured here. She crossed the finish line two hours, 24 minutes and 52 seconds after setting out.. The silver medal went to a Norwegian runner named Grete Waltz.  And the bronze? Portugal's Rosa Mota. What makes this something more than a generic glass-ceiling-breaking story is the physical comeback story attached to it.  Benoit had suffered an injury to her Achilles tendon earlier that year.  Her restoration to top -- Olympic winning -- fitness was extraordinarily quick.  She is still alive and so far as I know well.  God bless her. And us mortals might spare her a good thought on this day. 

  I didn't say much about the pandemic during the pandemic, even here in my hobby blog. I don't believe I've even commented on the much discussed question, for example, of whether Dr. Fauci was a national deliverer or a fraud.   Now I can and will say though: he might have been both. But for purposes of narrowing the field a bit, let's discuss the respect in which he might have been a fraud.  Fauci did a good deal during the pandemic to persuade Americans that Covid-19 had its origin in China's wet markets -- places where fresh (newly dead) animals are sold for food in open air settings.  But the diaries help make it clear that he did not believe this to be the origin.  He understood that the real origin of Covid-19 had a very likely tie to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab in Wuhan, China.  Comer and Jordan say, "Excerpts of emails we are making public today reveal that Dr. Fauci was warned of two things .... the potential that COVID-19 leaked fr...

In yesterday's post I quoted Jorge Ortega y Gasset summarizing a lecture he gave that itself displayed his equivocal attitude toward the phenomenological movement of the early 20th century, led by Husserl.  Husserl believed in the great bracketing -- precisely of the question of Being.  He thought the whole Cartesian question, about an evil demon creating a matrix for a Hollywood movie just to confuse me about which century I'm in -- Husserl thought all that could be just set aside.  We give ourselves plenty to think about if we simply focus on the world that does appear to us, and the selves that appear to our own introspection.  Ortega y Gasset admired Husserl's synthetic/intuitive thinking, as opposed to the sort of "conceptual-abstract thinking" that may be left homeless by such a bracketing, But he said that in order to get this right  " it is necessary to start out from a phenomenon which may be a system by and in itself ....human life." As a sema...