Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Yesterday I wrote about the lottery paradox, the epistemological crux of some of my recent reading. I refer you back to yesterday's post if you come to this not knowing what the term means. I will proceed today presuming that you know.  Now, clearly, part of what makes the paradox ... paradoxical is the rule of conjunction. This is the idea that if A is known and B is known then it follows that A + B is known. Or, in a weaker alternative statement: if A is rationally believable and B is rationally believable then A + B is rationally believable.  After all, why can we not simply say that "it is true that my ticket is a loser and I can know that this is true by considering the laws of probability"? One reason I can't say that with a clean logical conscience is that if I can say it of my own ticket I can say it of any one of the thousand (or however many) others that were sold. And if I can do THAT, then by the principle of conjunction I can say that all the tickets ar...

I wrote here recently about Omarosa. The tone of my comment was dismissive. You probably didn't believe, reading this, that I would return to the subject so soon. And I don't want to. But all the fuss about her -- her book, her tapes, her media tour -- even in the few days since I last wrote about her here, has exposed some important facts about the shaky coalition that now runs the country. Jonah Goldberg, portrayed here, writing for the old-line conservative journal National Review , catalogs the different worlds whence come this President’s appointees. His examples come both from those still at work within this administration and from those who have departed. Some of them are from the world of business or the military, like Wilbur Ross from the former or Jim Mattis from the latter ; others come from the Bannonite “counter-establishment,” (Bannon himself, and Gorka); others from the GOP hierarchy (Priebus, Spicer); others are movement conservatives, like Sessi...