Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I'm pasting in here material I first posted in this blog years ago, when I was thinking (with ironic seriousness) about the philosophy of humor,  Now, less serious, I simply post it as appropriate to this time of year. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Simpsons  a few years back did a Halloween episode set in the 1930s. The town of Springfield was ripped apart by panicked mobs after a radio program put together by a young Orson Welles that presented fake news reports of a Martian invasion. The next morning, Orson Welles is on his way out of town. He is met by the police chief who has just been surveying the damage done by the riots. This dialog ensures: Chief Wiggum: Why shouldn't I punch you in the nose, bud?! Orson Wells: (muttering to himself), Nose bud? Hmmmm. Is that funny?

Book note.    An important but neglected work by John Dewey, published by DC Heath, Boston, 1910, and one in the public domain, is known as How we think . Here is a link.  https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/37423/pg37423-images.html  How we think opens in striking fashion, "No words are oftener on our lips than thinking and thought. So profuse and varied, indeed, is our use of these words that it is not easy to define just what we mean by them." That phrasing could have led to a Wittgensteinian view of such definitions as games, where usage drives meaning rather than the reverse.   It doesn't go there. Rather: the first chapter comes to the conclusion that thinking is "that operation in which present facts suggest other facts (or truths) in such a way as to induce belief in the latter upon the ground or warrant of the former."  He suggests a man out for a walk who notices a cold breeze.  This may induce him to look toward the sky, which may in turn appear cloudi

  I mentioned Fuller the week before last, even posting a portrait of her above a list of key philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Let us say a bit more.... She did not have a long life (1810 - 1850), dying in a shipwreck on a sandbar near Fire Island, attempting to return to the US after a trip to Italy.  Fuller was associated with the Transcendentalist movement of the day, and with its organ The Dial, which she edited 1840 - 44. She brought a distinctive tone to that periodical, described sometimes as "noisy, histrionic and sincere," in contrast to the more cerebral and somewhat ironic distanced tone one finds in Emerson's essays.  Philosophically, she was an unabashed Platonist. This meant that there was a Reason that surpassed understanding -- understanding is something we can get WITHIN the cave,  “Reason” is the faculty through which a wise person conducts the Platonic Quest to go beyond the material in search of the ideal.  Emerson, to continue the contrast

 Meanwhile, in a distant land, Country Garden struggles to get out of its hole. One year and two days ago I posted here about the huge Chinese realty developer and its default on its bonds.  The broader issue, worth noting from the other side of the world, is: the PRC allows huge companies to continue in operation after they have ceased to be economically viable yet without restructuring or liquidation.  It is known as the "zombie companies" issue and the zombies are a drain on the productivity of the economy as a whole (though, no, we cannot even metaphorically say that they eat its brains).  https://jamesian58.blogspot.com/2023/10/news-from-china-country-garden-story.html The question after the default was: would Country Garden become such a zombie?  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-09/country-garden-misses-target-date-for-restructuring-backing Nothing new to report, one might say: but that fact IS the news worth reporting. Bloomberg is now reporting that the

Descartes is not ordinarily understood as an ethical philosopher. He is notorious for various epistemological and metaphysical positions, and with the a prior cosmology to which they led him. But ethics? ... his views on the subject barely rate a mention in the textbooks.   This may change, and a new book may be a harbinger of that change, Descartes' Moral Perfectionism by Frans Svenson seeks to tease a full ethical theory out of Descartes scattered remarks on the subject, some in letters rather than in his books. Svenson, who works at the University of Gothenburg, says that for Descartes the central ethical question is: why ought we be virtuous? The answer is: because by doing so we promote our degree of perfection.  What does it mean to be virtuous? that is, to be morally more perfect? It means to attend to certain facts about one's self and the world in which one lives and, in that context, to be generous. Generosity is THE key virtue, the key human bridge to perfection,

  My random reading in matters mathematical has brought me to Simpson's Paradox, the idea that a clear trend in a group of data can disappear, or even reverse, when different groups of data that taken severally exhibit the same trend are aggregated.  It is named for Edward Simpson, who described the effect in "The Interpretation of Interaction in Contingency Tables" in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society in 1951. Colin Blyth rediscovered this paper and gave the phenomenon the name Simpson's Paradox in a 1972 paper. It was once referenced in an episode of the prime-time cartoon The Simpsons because ... well, the name. Wikipedia has a good discussion. This is not really a "paradox" at all, though the name will probably stick.  It wouldn't impress Zeno, or whoever started the thing about the lying Cretan. But the phrase "Simpson's odd-seeming phenomenon" doesn't seem very resonant.  Good brief discussion in pp. 70 - 72 of Titel

Random comeback that should have happened.  Trump: "I am the father of IVF" Interviewer: So are you grandpa to all the children of IVF? I bet you plan to send out a LOT of Christmas cards! ------------------------ Now it's in YOUR head. 

Today is my 66th birthday.  I continue to work steadily, receiving no social security money.  (You are welcome, younger taxpaying workers.) I will celebrate by asking myself an arbitrary question.   "Who are the most influential philosophers of the 18th and 19th century?"  And I will answer it with some context-free listing of philosophers, attributing the choice of names to what unnamed authorities "consider" to be the case. Let's go.  On the continent of Europe? Christian Wolff, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche all come to mind. The British isles? George Berkeley, David Hume, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Carlyle fit the bill. North America? Ah, there’s Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, R.W. Emerson, Margaret Fuller, C.S. Peirce, and William James. Anywhere else? You pays your money and you takes your choice.  Fuller is the only name among those 18 that might seem a non-canonical intrusion. So I ha

 Let's just try to think of things anew. I'll work in dialog form.  The following is a discussion between guy-in-quote-marks and guy-without-quote-marks. Old friends. What is the most plausible path to peace? "What are we talking about now,  Ukraine?" Not today. I'm thinking of Israel, or Palestine, or whatever neutral name we might want to give to the territory between Lebanon and Egypt on one axis, between the Jordan River and the Sea on the other. "Let's call it X, as in algebra." Okay. What is the most plausible path to peace for X? "A two-state solution."  Really?  Won't two states in that enclosed space be constantly at war -- or at war until one conquered the other, whereafter the warfare could be reclassified as civil unrest, but would continue unabated? "Very likely." So: the problem I take it is the violence, not the classification.   "The point, though, is that peace for X cannot really be considered in isolati

Superconductivity is one of those things, like fusion energy or quantum computing, that are always JUST ABOUT TO make a big splash in the world, change everything ... and ten years ago this was just on the verge of happening too, and in another ten it will still be right on the knife's edge of realization. And so on. The notion that superconductivity will be the next big thing comes from experience of materials at very low temperature, Properly cooled materials (most often metals such as lead, tin or aluminum) conduct direct current (DC) electricity without energy loss: resistance vanishes.  If you've watched cheesy old sci-fi movies in which aliens tell humans "resistance is futile" you will probably be at work on your puns already. Still ... the absence of current resistance is enticing. It is a prospect with no end of possible practical applications. But, of course, the process of cooling the proposed superconducting material below the threshold temperature and ke

  Samantha Barbas’s  Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in  N.Y. Times v. Sullivan : Publication date, August 2024. UC Press.  A fascinating case: Times v. Sullivan  (1964) constitutionalized the law of libel.  I'll review facts that will be familiar to the former law students among you: the Montgomery, Alabama police commissioner filed a lawsuit against the Times over an advertisement the Times had published that, the lawsuit claimed, harmed his reputation. The US Supreme Court said that criticism of public officials, even harsh criticism, and even that which may sometimes be erroneous, is integral to our system of ordered liberty. Such criticism is protected by the first amendment unless it is "published with knowing falsity or reckless disregard for the truth."  Samantha Barbas has now written a new book about the case. Apparently, her chief slant is that implied by the subtitle: that the Sullivan case is generally perceived as a first-amendment case

 I know someone who knows someone who just won a Nobel Prize! Just two degrees of separation! I won't name the intermediary link.  But she is an old college friend of mine who married into the Ambros family. She thus became the in-law of a biologist named Victor Ambros [with no "e"], a professor at UMass Medical School.  And Professor Ambros just won the Nobel Prize in medicine for work on microRNA.  Allow me to bask in reflected glory. And here is a link should you want to know more about his work.  U.S. Scientists Win Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of mRNA (usnews.com) And a word to the ghost of Alfred Nobel.  You're forgiven for that high-explosives thing. 

 In a television commercial for an insurance company, a child (9 ish?) causes some consternation. After the adults around him start bemoaning "the economy," the child asks, "what's the economy?"  They can't answer, and he ends up deciding to 'Google it.'  Let's try to answer. It is a question from a child [actor], but not a childish question.  Even a 9 year old is probably familiar with the catch-all term "society".  How about telling him that "the economy" and "society" are the same fact, looked at from two different points of view. Or, if he doesn't know either word so this doesn't help, speak to him in single-syllable bits, and tell him they are "two names for the fact that folks all have to find ways to work and live with folks."  When we refer to society as "the economy," we're thinking about this living-together thing in terms of limits, and choices made in awareness of limits. 

 Last week I posted about Wilhelm Wundt, and said that he was a structuralist, as distinct from a functionalist, in psychology. What does this mean?  It means that his goal was to break down consciousness into elements, and then to suggest how the elements combine, or could have combined, to create the whole structure that we know through introspection.  For Wundt the structure begins with sensation. At first blush a sensation is a physical fact -- light striking an eye, for example, The physical facts are much the same for us as they are for other creatures. But we are humans, with minds. So (WW's line of thought here)... we have apperception, a process that turns sensations into something different. Apperception turns sensation into intuition.   Wundt saw his laboratory's experiments were an effort at learning something about this transformation.  One issue that troubled him was: how does the human mind acquire its intuition of space? These three dimensions of extension into

I believe several Mayors of the city of Waterbury, Connecticut, have been indicted. Some have served time.  There are protocols for this in Waterbury. Regular training for what to do when the federal marshalls show up and want to speak to the Mayor.  Nobody who grew up in Connecticut is all that impressed with the indictment of Mayor Adams in the city to our southwest.  One neat thing about the indictment though, is that they don't play the cutesy games other indictments do when they are made public. The bill of indictment is readily available.  In fact, I'll just give you the link in case you haven't come across it elsewhere. https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/u.s._v._adams_indictment_1.pdf But what do I mean by "cutesy games"? The anonymization of terms with pretty obvious referents. Some US Attorneys would have referred to "Country Number 1" yet made it obvious what country was referenced. Maybe with a reference to a waterway that rhymes with the word

 I don't know whether I can run polls within this simple blogpost format.  If I knew how, I would run one now.  Which one of the following, dear reader, best reflects your view about the recent sentencing of Caroline Ellison? 1) I have no idea who she is 2) I know but don't care 3) The sentence was too harsh 4) The sentence was too lenient 5) The sentence was about right. 

A few words today about psychology before James, or Freud, or Pavlov. Before any of them there was Wilhelm Wundt, who may have been the first scholar writing about the human mind to call HIMSELF a "psychologist".  A few words about the timeline. Herbert Spencer wrote his PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY in two volumes, which appeared a decade apart, in 1870 and 1880. Wundt's most important works in the field were published in 1873-74 and 1881. James published his brilliant two volume Principles in 1890. Freud's breakthrough began with Studies in Hysteria and Three Essays, in the 1890s and after the turn of the century, respectively.  Pavlov published his lectures on the nervous system, which included his famous observations of salivating dogs,  in 1897.   One gets the impression, then, of Wundt (and perhaps Herbert Spencer in his psychological writings) as constituting the Old Guard in psychology, in the days just before the field was about to explode in a variety of dif

A much anticipated trial, the second US-versus-Google this year, unfolded over recent weeks before Judge Brinkema of the US district court for the eastern district of Virginia.  Leonie Brinkema, by the way, is a New Jersey native with an undergraduate degree from Rutgers and a law degree from Cornell. She is also a Clinton appointee.  Trial began on September 9. In opening arguments, the Department of Justice's lead attorney, Julia Tarver Wood, spoke of Google huge share of the market for the sale of online ads (87%). It is the almost-indispensable middle-man between someone who wants to advertise and the ad pages on which the ad will eventually be seen. It is selling to you (if "you" are an ad manager for a company with something to sell) the value of its algorithms, which help your ads find your products demographic niche.  Wood spoke about how Google has aggressively bought up ad software companies like DoubleClick and AdMeld. She spoke, too, of how Google locks you in

Marcellus Williams is dead. He has been executed by a state of the United States, (Missouri) and likely for no offense more grievous than that of having been a convenient scapegoat.   https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/24/marcellus-williams-execution-missouri-faq/   Three DNA experts have concluded that the DNA on the murder weapon was not Marcellus'. There is no battle-of-the-experts here. No DNA expert disagrees with this. The evidence was contaminated. The DNA was that of a investigator and an assistant prosecuting attorney who handled the murder weapon, a knife, improperly. Williams' death was an injustice that the former Governor, Eric Greitens, seems to have been interested in correcting. Greitens in 2017 convened a board to review the evidence, including material that jurors had never heard at trial.  Unfortunately, for justice and for Williams, Greiten resigned from office in the midst of a charges that he had sexually assaulted a former hairdresser. That b