All these 'school shooting' stories are starting to look the same. Except perhaps for this one. Because with this one we get a controversy over the use of the word "bro." There was an active shooter in the halls of Oxford High. One particular classroom followed the protocol they had learned on 'shooter drills.' They sheltered in place -- locking the door, taping the windows. So far as I can tell, there was no teacher in the room at the time. One of the students seems to have been 'in charge.' Then came a knock on the door. The voice that presumably belonged to the knocker said that he was from the sheriff's office and "it's safe to come out." In-charge guy, "We're not willing to take that risk right now." Voice from outside, "Come to the door and look at my badge, bro." I'm impressed that the students in that class had the operational common sense to understand that sheriff's deputies don't cal...
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The cephalopods are: the squid, the cuttlefish, and the Octopus. Do they have intelligence? We normally think of our companions in intelligence as other mammals. This is a very different branch of the tree of life. Still, as a start, we might ask ourselves: do they have a language? Nothing so auditory as the human voice, or the wonderful whale songs either. The best candidate for a cephalopod language is the constant change of the color of their skin. As Peter Godfrey-Smith writes, these colors change "second by second," Blues and greens, for example, can seep back and forth, unveiling "gray and silver veins." There are at least three evolutionary purposes for the display of colors. They are used for camouflage. If camouflage fails and it is necessary to flee a predator, the colors can also be used for "deimatic displays," i.e. for patterns that may surprise or confuse the predator giving chase. A predator that pauses or loses its own bearings can...
I suspect I've mentioned Steven Pinker in this blog before, although I'm too lazy to look it up right now. I've got a Big Thought about Pinker, but I have to get to it in stages. First: who is he? Second: what is the Context of the Big Thought. Third: the Big Thought. Who Is He? The lengthy wikipedia article attached to his name will tell you. But in case you're lazy: Pinker teaches psychology at Harvard. He got his Ph.D. in the field with a thesis on "The Representation of 3D Space in Mental Images," which suggests that cognitive psychology is his especial concern. Aside from his scholarly works -- to which I will return in a bit -- he is the author of several books aimed at broad audiences, including THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE (2011) and ENLIGHTENMENT NOW (2018). He is generally considered a conservative intellectual, but since "conservative" still often means counter-Enlightenment, and Pinker is an Enlightenment enthusiast, that may...
What would I mean by saying "John is sober now"? On one level, I mean "at the moment at which I am now speaking, an acquaintance of mine name 'John' is functioning unimpeded by alcohol." But that is almost certainly NOT all I mean when I use the phrase idiomatically. I might mean: 1) John, who is quite often drunk, is at a rare sober moment now. [So now may be a good time to talk to him about X.] or maybe, 2) John, a recovering drunk, is working on, and for some recent period has been successful at, maintaining sobriety. [Thank God for that 12 step program.] If neither (1) nor (2) is the case, then saying "John is sober now" of some random individual John who is usually sober, would generally be seen as defamatory, would it not? It would suggest to a third party that one or the other of those two idiomatic meanings is the case, and an acceptance of either of them as the truth can do harm.
In recent weeks, I've given my reactions to Fiona Cowie's 1999 book, What's Within. Today I'll conclude that line of posts. Cowie only briefly discusses Chomsky's famous reply to Skinner, and so far as I can tell her discussion accepts the idea that Skinner got outside of the range of his competence by writing VERBAL BEHAVIOR, and that Chomsky was right to rebuke him. Her view on language development, then, is not "forget all this subsequent nonsense, go back to Skinnerian 'positive conditioning' as a model, and try again." Her view, rather is that if there is to be a tenable empiricism with regard to language it will have to be an "enlightened empiricism," a post-Skinnerian sort. And she seems to hope such an enlightened empiricism will develop as a school of thought, though she does not explicitly align herself with it. If I understand her, she is saying that a minimalist nativism as to language ability may be necessary to expla...
Continuing yesterday's thought. Imagine somebody DID make an argument for an innate culinary faculty that enables our learning what is or isn't curry. This somebody would likely be making four mistakes: he'd probably be underestimating the amount of "negative evidence" around for an empirical inquiry into what is and isn't curry; and might be idealizing culinary learning as if it were instantaneous, whereas actual culinary learning is gradual and piecemeal; and is probabilistic, not a realm of certainties; and, finally, he may be assuming that there is an endpoint where we all agree about what is curry, whereas in fact there will always be room for disagreements. The second of these sounds odd, and those not familiar with these debates might not know to what she is making reference. But Chomsky has said, in his KNOWLEDGE OF LANGUAGE (1986), that in understanding language we can presume that the "order of presentation of data is irrelevant s...
Let's return to the Fiona Cowie book, we've been working through bit by bit. Today we move to the portion of the book that speaks specifically of Noam Chomsky, and of his influential arguments to the effect that, (a) all languages conform to the same structural principles, a 'universal grammar,' but that (b) growing children as they acquire their grasp of these languages, do not receive sufficient data from the outside world to allow us to see this universal grammar as learned, thus (c) we ought to see it as innate -- hardwired into our brains. Further, the pertinent hard-wiring is specific to the linguistic domain. Cow thinks this is misguided, and to show why, she invokes a culinary example of learning. She writes about curry, that dense use of spices and herbs associated with the Indian subcontinent. See pp. 211 - 17 of the book. Many humans, perhaps most, eventually learn to recognize curry as a type of cuisine. How do we learn about curry? Chomsky oft...
I've written about the Voynich manuscript here only once, years ago. Here's a quick review: Wilfred Voynich was an early 20th century ms dealer, and the manuscript that bears his name was a mysterious book he bought from the Jesuits, a book that originated in the 15th century (something carbon dating has confirmed). In the century since Voynich made its existence known to the world, nobody has been able to make hide nor hair of it, except for the guess -- based on the illustrations -- that its a medical or pharmacological text. The usual guess has been that the author performed some sort of cryptographical trickery upon Hebrew, although even that still isn't a matter of consensus. And, even if it were, that wouldn't get the job done. What trickery? Now some new information. A team of Canadian scientists think their algorithm has worked it out. Or at least parts of it. They derive this as the first sentence of the text, translated and decoded, " She made...
"We are all conformists of some conformism or other, always man-in-the-mass or collective man." I believe the point he is trying to make here is akin to Ludwig WIttgenstein against the possibility of a private language. But Antonio Gramsci (1891 - 1937), being Gramsci, phrased the point so as to make it more political. Amartya Sen suggests that Gramsci may have influenced Wittgenstein's move away from the picture theory of knowledge.
From a David Foster Wallace story: "Firm Doctors Telephone Poles." If you get it, you can stop reading here. If not, I'll help. --------------------------------- When I first read that sentence, I saw "telephone" as the verb. Obviously doctors -- apparently those with a certain unwavering deliberativeness in their manner -- were calling Polish people on the phone. It took awhile for the other way of reading it to occur to me. But "telephone poles" together could be the object of the sentence. Presumably, there are business entities somewhere that repair and maintain old and broken telephone poles. They "doctor" such poles. Just thought it worth recording here.
Bordewich is the author of AMERICA'S GREAT DEBATE, a book Simon & Schuster brought out last year on the legislative compromise of 1850 that kept the United States together for a final decade. I enjoyed the following observation, from the preface: "Something else intrigued me, too, the more I read through the records of the debate itself: never did American politicians speak to the nation more honestly, more persuasively, more provocatively, and more passionately, in language that was often so splendid that it nearly reached the level of poetry. The poll-tested, spin-doctored, shoddily argued, and grammatically challenged 'messaging' that today passes for political communication is pathetic and often incoherent by comparison. It can be no surprise that many Americans have lost interest in politicians who have forgotten how much can be accomplished by the persuasive power of well-crafted English."