A few words from Chauncey Wright, famously of the "Metaphysical Club" that gave rise to the pragmaticism of Peirce and the pragmatism of James. "The derivation of this power [self-consciousness], supposing it to have been observed by a finite angelic (not animal) intelligence, could not have been foreseen to be involved in the mental causes, on the conjunction of which it might, nevertheless, have been seen to depend. The angelic observation would have been a purely empirical one. The possibility of a subsequent analysis of these causes by the self-conscious animal himself, which would afford an explanation of their agency, by referring it to a rational combination of simpler elements in them, would not alter the case to the animal intelligence, just as a rational explanation of flight could not be reached by such an intelligence as a consequence of known mechanical laws, since these laws are also animal conditions, or rather are more material ones, of which our ange...
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In his classic book, PRAGMATISM, William James tells a story about a squirrel. Or, maybe it is about something else. You decide. He asks us to consider an argument among camping buddies in the Berkshires. It seems that a squirrel had gotten itself positioned on the trunk of a tree so that the tree was in between its own body and the body of one of the campers, on the other side. The camper, wanting to catch sight of the squirrel, started walking around the tree. The squirrel (randomly so far as we can tell, not out of anti-observer animus) moved around the tree to which it clung, in such a way as to keep itself on the opposite side from the man. When they had each travelled in this way 360 degrees around the tree, an intriguing question arose. Had the man at this point gone round the squirrel? James noted that the man had gone round the tree, and the squirrel had stayed on the tree. This was enough for some of the disputants -- he had gone roun...
One dictionary definition of "eudaemonism" is "a theory that the highest ethical good is happiness and personal well-being." If we are going to relate eudaemonia (literally, a good guardian spirit) to the English word "happiness" we should understand that happiness as so understood cannot be merely pleasure, or some positive sum count of pleasures versus pains. I won't attempt a formal definition, but it suggests a long-term pattern of living well, in an inner condition of serenity, and possessed of the resources adequate to a temperate and rational creature. I am thinking of this because I recently found the phrase "a pragmatist sort of eudaemonism" in a book review. I gather that would be a view that actions should be judged by whether they help the actor (and or affected-persons-in-general) achieve happiness. Not pleasure ...happiness. A sort of midway point between Bentham and Aristotle. It is small wonder that the phrase was N...
Working within a branch of experimental psychology called psychophysics, scholars argue about "just noticeable differences," thresholds of perception, and related postulations. Consider the volume of sound as an issue. It seems intuitively there should be sounds that are different from one another in an objective sense (mechanically measurable) in that one is louder than the other, but that are not perceived as different by human beings. After all, we did not evolve as mechanisms for the precise measurement of sound, We evolved, to be simple about it, to survive and reproduce. That does not require ideally good distinctions in these matters. So there should be some just noticeable difference between sound A and sound B as to volume, such that if I hear any pair closer in volume to each other than those two, I will perceive them as identical. Right? Likewise with weights? Put one object in my left and put another in my right and ask me to tell you which is heavier....
... and the D&D chart. Devotees of role-playing games are familiar with "alignment" on a two-axis system. It is considered a critical way to define a fantasy character. One axis is law-versus-chaos. The other axis is good-versus-evil. Each axis has two extremes and a "neutral" position in the middle, allowing for a grid of nine. In essence, "good" means respectful of life. "Evil" means disrespect for life. "Order" means obedience to authority and, presumably as a correlated matter, reliability. "Chaos" means resistance to authority, which can in turn means unreliability as an ally. In the world of comic book characters, Superman is "lawful good". Batman is "neutral good". He'll follow the rules or he'll evade or break then in order to control the criminal element (the evil characters) in Gotham. Chaotic good? Someone like the Punisher. Someone with the same goal -- opposition to the plain...
I've decided that I'm against rhetorical questions. They are a lousy turn of phrase and they're almost always of use only to someone who is up to no good, who is seeking obfuscation rather than clarity. Say what you mean say I! And ask what you mean to ask. But don't ask what you mean to say. "What's the problem with kids today?" If someone "asks" that, and I try to answer it, "many of the politically conscious of them are understandably worried that..." I am often interrupted by, "But didn't you realize I was asking rhetorically?" "Well, I think the question warrants an answer...." "AH so you admit not knowing what a rhetorical question is!" I admit to knowing who a jackass is when one presents himself. I can also recognize a wildly anti-pragmatic use of language.
Aeon published a story recently about American pragmatism's influence and evolution in India. The story, written by Scott Stroud, condensing Stroud's recent book on the theme, centers on Bhimrao Ambedkar, a man who had returned to India after studying philosophy under John Dewey at Columbia in the 'teens of the 20th century. Ambedkar is a fascinating figure -- of the "untouchable" or Dalit caste, he became one of the framers of the new Republic of India's constitution in the 1940s. That is him (standing and dressed in black) in the photo, when he formally presented the final draft of the new constitution to the president of the Constituent Assembly. He was already then a member of the first cabinet upon Independence, Nehru's cabinet. Ambedkar's title was Law Minister. What had he learnt from Dewey? Certainly one great theme of Dewey's writings, around the time that he would have been teaching young Bhimrao, was his unhappiness with the ...
For those of you who may not know: the image here is not me. It is just what you get if you search for a stock image of a man waving goodbye. I am waving my own internal goodbye these days to the ideology of anarcho-capitalism, which for particularity I used to call Rothbardian anarcho-cap. It may come as news to some readers that there are varieties of anarcho-cap but, take it from me, yes there are. Rothbard's is different from, say, Molyneux's. I no longer care enough to try to explain why. But I wasn't exactly a Rothbardian either. I understand now that my anarcho-cap was unique. It embodied chiefly a sense that (1) the myth of sovereignty is the source of most of the evil in the world, (2) by debunking that myth we can help move humanity forward to a new and (in consequentialist terms) a better equilibrium -- better than anything that can be achieved on a globe shared among nation-states, and (3) that new equilibrium will look like a lot like a supercharged capita...
In the old days he built his reputation as a tough prosecutor on insider trading and other securities fraud cases. Later he leveraged that reputation to become Mayor of New York. Through the luck of the draw, it was Giuliani who happened to be Mayor when airplanes flew into the twin towers, and he became "America's Mayor." That is the history to which people allude when they ask "whatever happened to" the old Rudi witht he tough cop rep. The reputation was never based on much, except for the fact that for an ambitious man, seeking higher office and finding himself in possession of prosecutorial discretion. That was enough: the idea of going after Wall Street tycoons made perfect sense. Tom Wolfe coined the phrase years ago: "the great white defendant." THAT is what a prosecutor wants and what Giuliani triumphantly found is such as Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky. I argued years ago, on general pro-capitalism grounds, and from the pages of The Pr...
Continuing with our thoughts from yesterday.... What are we saying when we say we know that 45 + 303 = 348? That depends on what we understand numbers, and arithmetic, to be. I think the sensible course is to adopt an operational/pragmatic view of mathematical knowledge according to which it is a shorthand for facts concerning the way the world works. In G.E. Moore's spirit, I might hold up a hand, "here is one hand." Then I might hold up another, :"Here, also, is a hand." Finally, with both of them in my field of sight, I can say, "there are two hands here." So we can take 1 + 1 = 2 as settled. But 45 + 303 might be tedious to prove in that way, with some object other than hands (marbles?). Further, there would be the threat of false refutations. I might lose track of the first marble before I collected the 348th. Then I'd count them all and declare that the real answer to the question must be 347! A naive empiricism about such matters becomes...
Here's a link to a fascinating diagram that surely represents a lot of work and thought, https://chrisblattman.com/2014/11/17/positions-philosophy-science/?fbclid=IwAR0N9hy9FqL7Oo4czEp7TZOQ2r2xczO2jpH6TTWS5lEWW7tS1zLFNM07xbs I hope you'll each follow the link and look around at the diagram. I won't try to reproduce it here. I'd either have to make it prohibitively small or crop some of it. Instead, my visual here is a diagram of quarks fusing. The underlying question behind the philosophy of science, as least as it is portrayed in this chart, is the following: is a "quark" (for example) a real thing -- part of the furniture of the universe, like the tree just outside my window -- or is it merely a useful postulate? As you can see if you follow the link, the fellow who prepared the graph takes the distinction between realism and anti-realism to be fundamental. The distinction is represented by a blank space in the middle -- and both positions are rep...
Let's state The Prisoner’s Dilemma explicitly. Just 'cause I'm in a mood. Suppose two criminals have together robbed a bank. Police have captured and are interrogating them both. The police could get them both on a lesser charge (say, reckless discharge of their weapons) even if neither confesses on the big charge (the armed robbery). They are interrogating the prisoners in separate facilities, thus with no chance to communicate. The police offer each prisoner, simultaneously, the following deal: “Confess, ratting on your buddy, and you will be set free. We will convict your buddy and he will serve three years in prison. If you refuse to confess, your buddy may well take this same deal, and you will serve three years in prison, he will walk free. “If you rat on him and he rats on you, we’ll have to convict and punish both of you.But we won’t w ant your cooperation to go unrewarded, so in that case we promise a one-year cut on your sentence...
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...