Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe once wrote the following: F or years, I would spend time, in cafés, for example, staring at objects saying to myself: 'I see a packet. But what do I really see? How can I say that I see here anything more than a yellow expanse?' ... I always hated phenomanlism and felt trapped by it. I couldn't see my way out of it but I didn't believe it. It was no good pointing to difficulties about it, things which Russell found wrong with it, for example. The strength, the central nerve of it remained alive and raged achingly. It was only in Wittgenstein's classes in 1944 that I saw the nerve being extracted, the central thought "I have got this, and I define 'yellow' (say) as this" being effectively attacked. Phenominalism is in essence, George Berkeley without the God. The tree was not there in the Quad yesterday, except in some hypothetical sense -- if some perfceiving being HAD been there, he/she would have seen.... What e...

Today's random memory takes us back to October 1974, when I turned 16.  As was then the rite of passage, [maybe not so much now?], Mom and Dad instructed me in a period of weeks on the basics of driving a car.  My chief memory of this involves the signal lights, and how utterly unperceptive on the subject I had been in my 16 years of life.  Adding up my time in cars would surely have summed to a plural number of those sixteen years.  I might have paid a bit of attention. But I hadn't. I knew that drivers did something involving a lever that turned on a light telling other drivers where you were turning. I also was sort-of-aware going in that this lever did not have to be used a second time to turn the light back off. But I suspected there was a timer involved. Signal left, then turn left and after X seconds, the light will go off ... no?  Oh, wait, you mean there is no timer, the light goes off when and because I turn the wheel the other way?  Who knew?...

Whitney Houston's ballad, "The Greatest Love of All" has never received the parody it deserves.  I am not up to the job, but this first verse might suggest the parody-able to a greater artist than myself.  I believe cliches belong together -- String them up and let them lead the way Don’t force sense upon them like a ball and chaaaaain. Let your ears feel bromides to make it easier Empty words will lap up all our sense inside Everybody’s searching for their devo People need cha-os to revert to I never sunk quite so low as a raw cliche -- cannot depend on "darns" When I must hit the broad siiiide of barns.

In QUORA, I found this question,  What's the historical significance of Peter Abelard’s treatise "Sic et Non," and why is it often translated as "Yes and No"? It is an odd question, worth the expressive tilt of a yorkie's head, since there is nothing ambiguous or difficult about the translation.  "Yes and No" is simply what "Sic et Non" means. I wrote a brief reply while under the impression that the querant who has asked was a confused human being.  I there acknowledged another possible translation, "Thus and Not Thus," but said that was awkward as a matter of idiomatic English. I have since realized that this silly question was from an algorithm, not a confused person.  QUORA relies ever more on unintelligent algorithmically generated "questions" designed to spark controversy and hits.    I will note here, dear human readers, that I was influenced in this answer by the common use of "sic" as a way of ackno...

  There was a lot of speculation, not too long ago, that Justice Alito would be leaving after the end of the October 2025 session of the US Supreme Court. The idea was: (1) that Alito wanted to be replaced by Trump, so he would want to get out while Trump still controlled the Senate and could still secure a younger Alito clone as replacement for the retiring Alito, and (2) that Alito has a new book coming out, October 6th, and he would want to be free to do a book-selling tour at that time.  Of course if Alito is still a Justice as the new October 2026 session goes underway, book selling opportunities will be constrained. So went the speculation.  But when Justices do retire on the basis on such calculations, they generally do so right after the final gavel of the old session falls -- this year, that gavel fell on June 30th.  Yet Alito made no such announcement. Quite the contrary, early this month he told The Wall Street Journal that he is "here for another term." ...

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...

  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...

  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 ...

  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...