Perhaps the real golden age of philosophy is quite recent.Perhaps it is a mere "bag of shells" into our living past. My thesis is that the real golden age in (western) philosophy occurred between the years 1880 and 1920. Between two Dayton brothers' receipt of a patent on the cash register in the former year and consolidation of power by the Bolsheviks in Russia with their Civil War victories of the latter year. ["Western" above very much includes Russian. It does not include Japanese, though, so the works of Kitaro Nishida, though written within this period, and discussed on this blog not long ago, will not be highlighted on the list below.] Here are some of the outstanding works of philosophy and of philosophy-adjacent intellectual and creative fields, published in this forty-one year period 1880 - 1920 within the West. Most are books, some are poems, articles or lectures. I have not made any typographical distinction among them. Each seminal work is named i...
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In our four further discussions of the Edmonds book this week, we will break little if any truly new ground. We will try to go more deeply into some questions that we raised last week. First, I mentioned last week that Wittgenstein's discussion of the foundations of mathematics after an exposure to Brouwer's views was what brought him fully back into philosophy. I omitted a related point. Wittgenstein did eventually write up his thoughts on that subject. REMARKS ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF MATHEMATICS was published after his death, in 1956. There he makes the remarkable observation that what is called "losing" in chess may constitute winning in another game. That is his analogy. His example involves "Russell's system," the logicism/logical apparatus of PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA. A proposition could be proven the case in Russell's system yet sti...
There are at least three views of the relationship between the manifest world and the scientific world. The manifest table makes itself available to me when I sit at the chair. It is brown, firm, solid, makes a certain noise when tapped by one's fingers, and so forth. The scientific table, though, consists of some number of electrical charges whizzing about through otherwise empty space. Expand each image of the table to an image of the world. So: what is the relationship between the two worlds/tables? As I began -- there are at least three theories extant. 1. Scientific realism. The scientific world-view is the right one. The manifest view is mere appearance, a derivative from perceptual abilities that themselves are derivatives from the competition to survive. 2. Scientific pragmatism. The manifest view is the real one. We live, in a non-negotiable way, in its world. Science posits various theoretical agencies, like those tiny charged particles, because it is useful to do ...
Psychologists at the University of Barcelona have reached a conclusion that matches intuitive expectations: they have found that people who believe in pseudosciences such as astrology and water dowsing generally require less evidence before reaching a conclusion than do those who are skeptical of the claims of such "sciences." Psychologists Javier Rodríguez-Ferreiro and Itxaso Barberia conducted their experiment on undergraduate psychology students, most of them women. One of the tests they conducted involved a jar with blue and red beads. The undergraduates were told the jar was either “mainly red beads” or “mainly blue.” They were presented with a small box of beads. They were asked to guess which of the two jars the beads in that box had come from. If the box had ten beads and eight of them blue, they would reasonably guess that they came from the jar of mainly blue beads. If the box had five beads and three were blue, they'd be gullible to conclude that there was mo...
If anything screams "established science" it is the image of the periodic table. Invented 152 years ago, it now adorns the walls of every high school science classroom on the planet. I knew there had been changes over the years -- those two rows at the bottom especially turn out to be the fruit of discoveries subsequent to Dmitri Mendeleev. So I recently did some googling, looking for celebratory articles about this two years ago, as the icon passed the 150 years mark. What I found was disturbing. The mountains may crumble and Gibraltar may tumble type of disturbing. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132190-400-three-reasons-why-the-periodic-table-needs-a-redesign/
The world needs more forthright retractions. The tendency, given the nature of the human ego, is to defend one's own record. This is a temptation perhaps especially for highly intelligent people, who bend their intelligence to defend what they see as their legacies, and thus find themselves looking back and fighting defensive wars. Frances Arnold is obviously very intelligent -- she is a recent winner of the Nobel in Chemistry! -- yet she resisted whatever temptation in that direction she may have felt. https://retractionwatch.com/2020/01/02/nobel-winner-retracts-paper-from-science/?utm_source=quora&utm_medium=referral Three cheers!
A few days ago, Henry asked my in the comments section to a post about a Wesley Salmon quote whether our knowledge of the basic natural forces and laws -- gravity, inertia, etc. -- is at bottom inductive? I said I didn't think so, and described the actual method of discovery as guess-and-test, or "abduction" in Charles Peirce's terminology. Today I'll go a little further into the distinction. The bottom line is that the "riddle of induction" shouldn't be all that worrisome because induction is seldom used. Abduction is the name Peirce (pictured above) gave. Unfortunately, it is also a synonym for kidnapping, but that isn't the point at the moment. Abduction in the relevant sense is inference to the simplest explanation for a phenomenon. It is often just a hunch or guess. Our knowledge about the laws of nature arose through abductions. Benjamin Franklin abducted: that it would be more economical to believe that the static sparks that ar...
Back in 2003, an intelligent-design advocate named Francis Beckwith wrote a book, Law, Darwinism, and Public Education, published by Rowman and Littlefield. Although Beckwith was clearly out of sympathy with Darwinism, the point of the book wasn't about biology. It was about the establishment clause of the first amendment of the Constitution. Beckwith's view was that "intelligent design" was an alternative scientific hypothesis, and that accordingly it is appropriate -- and not even remotely an official establishment of religion -- to teach that hypothesis as one distinct from Darwinism within public schools. That book might have gone unnoticed -- like lots of other books saying the same thing -- had it not been taken up by an enthusiastic review (technically a "book note,") in the Harvard Law Review for January 2004. The reviewer, one of the student editors of the HLR, was Lawrence VanDyke. The note, appearing in such a high-visibility periodical...
I've heard that Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, used the issue of the chemical composition of the Sun to illustrate his idea of questions that could not be answered. Since it is obvious (in Comte's view) that we can never get a sample from the inside of the sun to test, we can never know what it is made of, and such an inquiry should be written off as "metaphysical," not positive. Silly philosophers, eh? It is very easy in hindsight to say that Comte shouldn't have been so dogmatic about the possible reach of human knowledge, or the specific means by which chemical composition can be determined. What about the inside of a black hole? Can we say anything definitive about THAT? If so ... how? since we can't go there? Or, if anyone of us could get within the "event horizon" for a time, we couldn't get information back. In a recent blog post, a physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, considers whether the question of the contents of a bl...
I saw a video recently by a flat Earther. (Never mind for now how it came about that I was watching such a thing -- largely by accident.) What was odd was the bit where the flat Earther earnestly tells us that he doesn't want to be a flat Earther. It is, after all, a pain in the ass being an 'out' flat earther. It involves expounding on a conspiracy involving NASA and the analogous agencies of several other governments, lots of other people and institutions, etc., and it involves trying to dislodge everybody else's prejudice in favor of stuff that they have been taught since first grade. He doesn't want to be entangled in all this, our video host assures us. Because he'd much rather be about his day job. What's the day job? Warning people about chemtrails. I kid you not. Personally, I know how he feels. I'd much rather not blog about the faeries who threaten vengeance upon us as a species for the cancellation of Sabrina the Teen-Aged Witch. ...
On March 19, Anna Stubblefield pleaded guilty in a very high profile criminal case. I don't know off hand whether I have written about it in this blog before. [Later Insertion. I have not specifically mentioned Stubblefield here -- I have discussed an underlying controversy ....] Stubblefield has pleaded guilty to aggravated criminal sexual contact with a man known to the public only as DJ, a man with severe cerebral palsy. She has claimed that she has been communicating with DJ through "facilitated communication" (FC) and until agreeing to this guilty plea she had taken the view that they had a consensual romantic relationship, consent conveyed through the FC. [Later insertion. The validity or otherwise of FC is the underlying controversy mentioned in the first use of brackets above. Nearly two years ago I posted here my review of the Donvan/Zucker book about autism. I briefly discussed FC in that context. Autism was not part of DJ's condition.] Senten...
Back in 2005 a British climate scientist, James Annan, made a bet for US$10,000 with two Russian physicists who were skeptics about global warming. The Russians, Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtseva, took the position that the years 1998-2003 had been as warm or warmer than the years 2012-2017 would be. The three scientists involved in the bet agreed that win/lose would be determined by temperature data from the US National Climatic Data Center as it was then known. (It has changed its name to the National Centers for Environmental Information.) Now we near the end of the latter of the two periods covered by the bet. The Russians will be the payors. Congrats to Annan, and actually to all three for conducting science according to the Popperian rule. Popper didn't say you actually have to risk money on falsification, but still ... My final comment on this point will be that the outcome of the bet wasn't even remotely close. In the graph above, which was compile...
In the fifth century in India, astronomer Aryabhata contemplated the fact that the moon can hide the whole of the sun during a solar eclipse. The two have the same visible size from the earth, then, although it was clear to Aryabhata that the sun was a good deal larger. He discussed this in a dispassionate mathematical way, one which offended the religious sensibilities of the day. Vedic scripture suggests that the moon is farther from the earth than the sun is, which Aryabhata realized was plainly wrong. Indeed, another great scholar of the day, Brahmagupta, who wrote both on scripture and on astronomy, both criticized Aryabhata for his impiety, AND then proceeded to build on Aryanhata's work in his own astronomical writings. There the matter lay until the 11th century, when Alberuni, an Iranian/Islamic scholar of the golden age of such scholars, became fascinated with Indian culture and history. He made this comment: "We shall not argue with him [Brahmagup...
Good to have him on board. Bill Nye, the "Mr Wizard" of '90s television, suggested last year that philosophy is wasted effort. In a YouTube video, he said "philosophy is important for a while," -- presumably adolescence -- but it isn't something serious people should persist in. He ended his brief YouTube discussion with the odd line, "drop the hammer on your foot and see if you don't notice it." I'm not sure what philosophical view he thought he was refuting with that one. But it was presumably in the tradition of Dr. Johnson "refuting" Berkeley. Except that even Johnson (who was being a wise-ass himself) didn't think he was responding to philosophy as a discipline. Anyway, critiques of Nye's comments appeared quickly, among them one by Olivia Goldhill that seems to have come to his attention and done some good. On April 15, 2017, Goldhill wrote on the subject of Nye-and-philosophy again, this time with a triu...
Recently in my twitter feed I encountered a use without explanation of the initials NLP (of course tweets don't allow for much by way of explanation). I wasn't familiar with them, so I did some googling, and was left unsure whether the tweeter had meant "Neuro-Linguistic Programming" or "Natural Language Processing." Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP1) is a fringe-science therapy in the manner of EST or even Scientology, using language that suggests a Chomskian foundation, though the impressive language is just for show. Natural Language Processing (NLP2) on the other hand, is a field of computer engineering that seeks to give computers the ability to understand and speak English, French, Mandarin, etc. ... and ideally to pass the Turing test. The phrase behind NLP2 seems straightforward and commonsensical, although it refers to a demanding and technical body of scientific work. The phrase behind NLP1, on the other hand, seems like it must refer to s...