Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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Logic and a flower bed

My quote from Brandom about inferentialism earlier this week has me thinking. Consider the following inference. If a flower bed contains only geraniums and violas then it contains no roses. This flower bed contains only geraniums and violas. Thus, this flower bed contains no roses. That seems straightforward although it is more Stoic than Aristotelean, and to some minds the "if ... then" of Stoi logic sounds question begging. Could we put it in more categorical syllogistic form if we wanted to? I suppose so. We would want to make explicit the premise that the different types of flowers are mutually exclusive: that is, a geranium is reliably not a rose. Couldn't there be a hybrid? I have no idea, but I'm presuming any hybrid gera-rose would be neither geranium nor rose. Even with a gera-rose, every flower in this flower bed has been identified as to type, and in each case the type is non-rose. Reasoning as process of elimination. Just think...

Jobs numbers off a cliff

I turned on CNN on the morning of August 7th. Yes, I do sometimes get news from the television, rather than the net. Boomers endure! Anyway: I turned it on and was immediately hit with the release of the July jobs numbers. Dismal. Of course the administration keeps telling us the economy is great, best ever, and that anything negative anyone might say about the US economy is fake news. Even when their own flunkies provide the numbers. This is from their Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment Situation Summary - 2026 M07 Results There is, admittedly, something Orwellian in the wording of the report itself. It says, "Both nonfarm payroll employment (-23,000) and the unemployment rate (4.1 percent) changed little in July." The number, 23,000 nonfarm jobs lost in one month, is startling. But it is covered by a soothing word. That change is "little". Betweem a bureaucrat's startling numbers and his soothing words -- be...

The Fermi Paradox

As a graduate of Enrico Fermi High School, I see myself as only one degree of separation away from all things Fermi. Accordingly.... Consider the Fermi paradox. If there are intelligent life forms in this galaxy, aside from those of Earth ... where is everyone? Why haven't we unequivocally heard from them? This is NOT a paradox in the traditional sense of the term. It is simply a question and, given the premises, a good one. One answer: the universe is actually hostile to the development of intelligent and tech capable life. There is one and only one contrary example because ... miracle. A God who performs miracles. If you believe that, you have a lot of questions to answer, and I will leave you there. Supernatural miracles notwithstanding, it seems much more likely there is someone out there. And this leaves us with the unanswered question. Of course, one answer is that techie civilizations come into existence, yet don't last very ...

A quote from Brandom

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...

Does Zeno of Elea still matter?

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...

On the word "sprocket," and the Jetsons

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...