I encountered recently the phrase "the process theory of causality." I asked myself, in accord with the lingo of our time, "is that a thing?" So of course I did some googling. The answer is: Yes. It's a thing Here is a pertinent link I discovered via such googling. : https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199279739.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199279739-e-0011 The process theory of causality (PTC) holds that causal processes are more fundamental than the events they are often said to link. We say "A caused B." The act of striking the match against a hard surface caused it to light on fire. But what really exists is a single underlying process over time, where both A and B are abstracted parts of that whole. John Venn is said to have gotten the PTC underway, saying: "Substitute for the time honored 'chain of causation' so often introduced into discussions on this subject the phrase 'a rope of causation' a...
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The Nobel Prize for Physics was split three ways this year: one theoretical cosmologist and (as a duo) two observational astronomers. Theory and observation nicely balanced out, like matter and anti-matter, each getting half the prize money. That meant that the astronomers each got one-quarter of the money. James Peebles, then, the theoretician, was rewarded for his "theoretical discoveries on physical cosmology." He has worked on the Big Bang, dark matter, dark energy, etc., and has written influential textbooks teaching the future aspirants to be Nobel-Prize-level Physicists what all of those phrases mean. I've never taken the courses that use such textbooks, so I won't try to say any more, except that Peebles, a Canadian, is widely credited with turning the "Big Bang" from a speculative and somewhat woolly concept into something precise and quantitative. The more interesting half of the award, to my mind, went to the founders of a new b...
Wow. In the notorious Dallas case in which a police officer shot and killed a man for the crime of sitting in his own home, on his own couch, eating ice cream ... and since then has defended her action on the grounds that she thought it was her home and that he was one of those dangerous seated ice-cream eating intruders who are popping up everywhere these days ... in THAT case, the judge instructed the jury that it could consider the Castle doctrine in possible mitigation of the homicide. Wouldn't one think the Castle doctrine (the notion that, be it ever so humble, one's home is one's castle) would work AGAINST her? After all, it was not her castle. Truly bizarre. "Blue lives matter" and hardly any other lives do. Your castle is your castle until someone in blue decides it is hers. That is the takeaway. Well, at any rate, I cynically thought that was the takeaway until the jury actually came in with a conviction on murder. Apparently, the Castle thi...
The US Supreme Court is back to hearing cases. On its very first day of the new session, it heard a dandy. KAHLER v. KANSAS asks whether, especially in the context of capital punishment, a state can constitutionally take the insanity defense off the table. The 14th amendment to the US Constitution provides that “no state shall … deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Supreme Court has long held that the due process requirement is most stringent for the first of those threats, a proposed deprivation of life: that is, there is a “super due process” required for application of the death penalty. In a matter that the Court will hear Monday, lawyers for a death row inmate will argue that a Kansas law abolishing the insanity defense in a capital matter deprived their client of this necessary super due process of law, and they will ask that his sentence be overturned. You might say, "ah, surely with the two new Trump appoi...
Yesterday in this place, I discussed how Lawrence VanDyke made a splash while studying law at Harvard. To catch up: he posted a book note in the law review there making clearly out-of-his-depth arguments about evolution, natural selection, and the establishment clause of the first amendment. Let me note parenthetically that I haven't been mistyping his name. In contrast to one-time chimney sweep Dick Van Dyke, Lawrence spells his surname without a break. The only interesting thing about the typographical oddity is that it gives me a chance to use the illustration I have chosen. Anyway: about Lawrence... he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and entered the practice of law with the New York firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Starting in 2012, though, he began working for the office of solicitor general. In three different states. This as a career path is a new one on me He worked as Assistant Solicitor General of Texas (2012), then Solicitor General of Montana (20...
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...
An uncle of mine used to make a point of not buying, or reading, any newspaper with a Sunday publication date. He would explain this in a mutter about the day of rest. When I was of a certain age, I thought I understood this. He meant that reading the paper was a form of labor for him -- presumably laboring as a conscientious citizen to remain well informed. And HE would not do that labor on a Sunday. But that isn't what he meant. Later I discovered he felt anger toward the non-Christian or inadequately Christian folks who put out a paper on a Sunday. This did not make sense to me. Although still quite young and inexperienced with the working world, I knew enough to understand that most of the work involved in the Sunday (morning!) papers must have been done on Saturday. My uncle did not regard Saturday as the sabbath, yet he was unhappy about that work because of the date printed on it. Or maybe he was especially unhappy about the guys driving the delivery trucks. At ...