I think of this as "proper names" week. Each of the four posts this week will have a proper name in the title. Yesterday's, of course, is already "in the books". The proper name in the title of yesterday's post was, of course, Frank Sinatra. The proper name used in today's, and in the posts of the next couple days, will be violations of the Frank Sinatra rule. Today we discuss a recent book about analytic philosophy by Christoph Schuringa. As a Christopher who generally drops the "er" at the end of that given name when called upon to give my signature, I highly approve of his spelling. Schuringa wrote a book, published last year by Verso, entitled A SOCIAL HISTORY OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY. Its point is that most of what we think we know about analytic philosophy is wrong. The term "we' here can refer to anyone without an academic position who might nonetheless read a book with the phrase "analytic philosophy" in the title...
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Artificial intelligence, in the form that bothers people most these days, is a matter of the consumption of very large masses of text, and their re-packaging and re-use of that text to look and sound like something new and original. Should this worry us? Maybe not. It may be about to self-destruct. After all, as it happens more and more often, the AI algorithms are more and more busy digesting AI-generated texts. As a group of (admittedly human) researchers noted recently, “We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models." The models as they consume their own work will self-degrade and become useless over time. One of the members of the group of scholars involved is Ross Anderson, a Cambridge University professor. He has put the problem this way, in a blog post, “ Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with bla...
Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein were two of the giants of mid-century philosophy, especially of the Anglo-centric sort. They could each legitimately claim to the the true heir to Bertrand Russell as Russell receded from the central issues under debate in favor of a role as senior sage for antinuclear activists. There is an oft-today story of a ten minute argument between the two at a meeting hosted by the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club. Popper argued that there are substantive moral issues that philosophy can address, Wittgenstein replied that all Popper's examples of such questions were in fact linguistic confusions. Wittgenstein was standing next to a fireplace and started waving a poke around as the discussion, no pun intended, became heated. By way of winding up the discussion, Popper said that there was at least one moral certitude, that one should not "threaten visiting lecturers with pokers." I bring up this familiar story because a student of ...
At my birthday celebration last month, my sister gave me a book about the works of William Faulkner, FIGURES OF DIVISION (1986) by James A. Snead. This gift led me to google Snead's name, and discover a fascinating story. Snead was a promising scholar who died young -- at 35 years old (well, I'm old enough to consider that young). He died in 1989 -- apparently an AIDS related death. FIGURE OF DIVISION , an analysis of race in Faulkner's use of language, began its own life as Snead's doctoral dissertation. That earlier version got him his PhD in English from Cambridge, St John's College, under the direction of Colin McCabe. Here's a nice, I think representative, passage in the book: an appreciation of the character of Thomas Sutpen, "If one must read Sutpen as 'a version of the American dream,' a myth of rags-to-riches elevation, then clearly the American Dream of advancement deconstructs its own performance. Something is wrong if, even aft...
I recently had Cambridge University Press send me a reviewer's copy of THE COPYRIGHT/DESIGN INTERFACE, edited by Estelle Derclaye. Some background (I recently wrote an email to a friend outlining this, so I'm stealing from myself and saving some effort by re-using the material here): in the US the designer of an industrial product -- like a lamp -- does not create anything with copyright protection. It may be aesthetic (as in a certain Christmas movie, where the 'old man' wins a curvaceous lamp as a 'major award'), but insofar as the design feature is deemed inseparable from its utility as a lamp, it isn't a copyright matter. The designer (an Italian named Fragile?) would h ave to seek a design patent to have IP. This is unfortunate for our Italian because a patent application, which brings with it the necessity of a prior work search, is a difficult labor-intensive process, and because copyright generally lasts a lot longer than patents. So ...
Thanks to friend Henry for forwarding me a review of Cheryl Misak's recent book on pragmatism in England. I may never obtain the book, but I'll summarize here what the review says it says, and end with a quotation (from the book via review). The book recounts how, in 1908-09, Bertrand Russell, at Cambridge, developing his own logical atomistic views, took pragmatism to be an American re-working of a familiar foe, the coherence theory of truth distinctive to the Anglo-Hegelians. Russell was quite hostile to the coherence theory, and his view of this new variant of it from across the Atlantic was no more sunny. But, beginning with 1914, Russell was adopting pragmatic theses himself. By 1921 he had come around to the quite American understanding of belief itself as a "disposition to act." It was Ramsey, though, not Russell, who made the Cambridge warming to pragmatic winds more official or explicit. For Ramsey, Peirce was THE pragmatist, and a central influence...