Objectively True

John Dewey was born on this day (20 October, 1859).  Celebrate by trying to develop a creative new solution to an old problem.

We thus reach a technical definition of education: It is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience.  The increment of meaning corresponds to the increased perception of connections and continuities of the activities in which we are engaged. — Education as Reconstruction

Short film #2 in Phillip McReynolds‘s American Philosopher series offers a few pieces of information that divide up into histories of the early lives of contemporary American philosophers and the early life of philosophy in historic America. The former, tales about the temptations of philosophy in the early lives of modern thinkers, makes up the majority of the segment’s 10 minutes. It offers a good potopourri of experiences which led those interviewed into the “life of the mind”–ranging from those whose privileged and intellectually-amiable environments invited the depth of thought to those hardships or lack of privilege seemed to demand it. Many of their stories sound as if they would be quite interesting, if they were more thoroughly fleshed out. There were a few noticeable themes (each with exceptions) among the stories, such as an initial interest in pursuing religious questions or the experience of the befuddled parent when each philosopher broached his or her intended career choice.

All in all, I don’t think much of what was revealed was unexpected. I have seriously considered academic philosophy, and my gateway into such considerations stem from my personal experiences with both ends of the experiential gamut described by these philosophers. For instance, on the one hand, I grew up in an environment wherein thought was considered something to be nurtured. This is one of the best privileges youth can be given, in my humble opinion¹. I think this kind of philosophical thought reflects the traditional Aristotelian sentiment that philosophy begins in wonder. When allowed and encouraged to think philosophically, these thoughts and the concomitant practical manifestations of their realization are rewards which encourage yet more reflection. I only wish more youth had these experiences growing up.

The second general category of experiences which led those interviewed to lean philosophical relate to observed and felt problems or injustices. This type of motivation better reflects Simon Critchley’s assertion that “Philosophy begins in disappointment.”. People see or experience something which seems at odds with the notion of a just or moral universe, and they need to explain it in order to feel that it can be ameliorated (or perhaps simply to cope).

While I suspect that it was the latter of these two options which more closely describes my experience (at a young age, I was deeply affected by certain historical moral failures of humanity, not to mention a few salient tangible examples of contemporary moral and economic inequity), once again I am tempted to take the both/neither approach to conceiving of these two different motivations for engaging philosophical thought. If anything, philosophical thought—and I would like to emphasize American philosophy in particular here—has to do with coming to conceive of the wonder of experiences while simultaneously recognizing the deficiencies of the world. In other words, we can conceptualize moral ideals, be amazed by the capabilities of the human mind, and feel awe of nature yet we also witness moral failure, mental error, and destruction and disorder. It better characterizes philosophy, I think, to say it begins in realizing the discrepancy between the ideal (and experienced) wonder and the actualized experienced disappointment.

From the sound of these interviews, it sounds like most of these thinkers began struggling with these sorts of issues at a very young age.  Part of me finds this a bit discouraging, actually.  Although I did get a bit of philosophy early on in life (Somehow, I took it upon myself to read² Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, the State, and Utopia when I was in middle school.  There were a few other odd text tidbits I picked up in high school, but I distinctly remember remember not knowing who Plato was my freshman year of college).  This is partially disheartening because it makes me feel a bit behind in the race for deep-enough philosophical thought, but I find it worrisome much moreso because I fear that many who were not encouraged to think deeply at an early age will have great difficulty conceptualizing things critically later on in life…and, yes, I do know that this is dangerously close to the fallacy of denying the antecedent.

The last little chunk of this mini-film discusses the first American philosophers.  They begin with a good candidate, Jonathan Edwards (b. 1703) and skip all the way to Ralph Waldo Emerson (b. 1803–a century later).  While this I think agreement on this is pretty widespread, I’m tempted to say there must be some other major philosophical figures, especially political-philosophical figures, who qualify as American philosophers.  I’d love to hear some good suggestions on who they might be and what how they made sense of their worlds.  Surely, as implied by the close relationship anecdotally drawn between religious thought and philosophy in the examples of these interviewees, there were a few creative ministers or theologians who qualify as searching for philosophical answers to the “big questions”.  I have found this Dictionary of Early American Philosophers to page through, but it all seems a slough of names at this point.  Suggestions are welcome.

There are a couple of nice little nuggets I’d like to pull out of this second video of American Philosopher.  First, I was excited to see the late John E. Smith join the video as an interviewee, though he seemed not to be mentioned in the teaser.  Smith was a great distiller of good information, and his work Spirit of American Philosophy has much merit.  That said, I am a bit skeptical about the claims he makes about the origin and character of archetypal American philosophy.  While it’s easy to see that pragmatism as an trend more readily absorbed into American academia.  Here are some of the claims from the film blurbs that I’ll address in kind.

• “I think our practicality had so much to do with our need to subdue a continent.” –Smith
• “I don’t think that pragmatism would ever have existed without the USA.  I just don’t think it could have developed on the soil of European philosophy at that time.” –Sartwell
• “There’s a tendency among Americans to want to solve problems.” –Lachs

While I’m all for American philosophy and the laudable insights of pragmatism, phrases like this go a bit too far.  Sure, the American context may have been conducive to the flourishing of practical thought, but to say that America is the only possible progenitor of this thought is narrow-minded.  I think already in the time of Ancient Greek philosophy there are some decent examples of a pragmatic turn (Aristotle expresses a number of these characteristics).  Roman philosophy expresses a bit of this tendency, as do a number of aspects of Eastern philosophies (of which there is an implicit, almost chauvanistic, dismissal in Sartwell’s comment).  Furthermore, there is a sense in which Europe was already leaning towards a practical form of Existentialism (evident in Nietzsche and Heidegger, I think), and now the continent has their own pragmatists (Habermas, Vattimo, etc.).  I sincerely doubt Americans want to solve problems more than people in other countries, nor are they necessarily in general more practical.  My sense is that what got America a reputation for solving problems and being pragmatic is simply that a few of the proponents of such ideas found their way into higher academia and were accepted anyway¹.  America is great and we’ve had some great philosophical insights, but let’s not give ourselves too much credit or resort to denying the possibility of historical counterfactuals wherein we didn’t provide such thought.

More interesting to me were Bernstein’s reflections on the relevance of philosophy to the American practicality (as opposed to the relevance of practicality to it’s philosophy).  It is actually surprising, if the textbooks are to be believed, that philosophical thought (particularly Enlightenment European philosophy) would have had such a powerful influence on the statebuilding process.  The founding fathers myths and stories are dripping with tales of inspiring figures with particular philosophical ideas conjoined with the concomitant practicality required to compromise where necessary to make them effective.  Likewise, American history is at least characterized as following a trajectory of philosophical self-awareness at the time of various social revolutions.  As Bernstein put it, “you couldn’t make any sense of America without understanding philosophy.  Very frequently the most significant progressive moments in American life is a coming together of a certain kind of practical-idealism.”  I nearly laughed when I heard the start of this sentence, but Bernstein, Anderson, Campbell, and Anne Rose (also not mentioned in the teaser) actually make a pretty decent, if succinct, case for this idea that philosophy is actually relevant to progress in American culture ².  I have elsewhere read exchanges between Bernstein and Rorty arguing more broadly on this topic–whether philosophy really has the ability to impact culture.  I have always thought that whether or not it was true (I suspect it is) that Bernstein’s position is the more “pragmatic”; in other words, it is good for us to at least act like philosophy can influence culture and human progress.  Nobody is arguing that it can provide insight, so there is no need to dismiss the possibility that that insight can have a fruitful consequential bearing on our practical experiences unless we have a more effective replacement.

Also interesting was the brief defense of philosophy as a bastion of practicality.  John Sturh and David Vessey (both uncredited in the teaser video) made this point by essentially stating that philosophy is the only discipline that really systematically gravitates towards questions of what we ought to do–or how our choices and actions can be used to alter ourselves and our world.  It’s certainly an argument I would love to flesh out more in discussion.

In the end, I think SIU Carbondale’s Randy Auxier really does the best job of giving a good “American character” to the conception of the American Philosopher:

It’s not the Anglo- or European- American experience; it just includes that.  It includes the Native American experience.  It includes the African American experience.  And all of these things come together to form the context of insight, intuition, and experience that gives rise to the philosophy.  You couldn’t have Ralph Waldo Emerson without the combined influence of all of those different traditions.  There is something in Pragmatism and American Personalism, American Idealism, and even in process philosophy that expresses the American experience.  The thing that I would say characterizes that most adequately has to do with a certain–not only practicality–but a certain assumption about the inseparability of the way a person lives and the way a person thinks. –Auxier

While Auxier is guilty of a few simplifications about what could have caused what, he does a good job of capturing the complexity and variety of “American” philosophy in a way that neither dilutes its definition to the point of meaninglessness nor narrowly overemphasizes specific content…other than the fact that this implicitly cuts the cord between so-called American philosophy and the defacto standard of philosophy in America, contemporary analytic thought.  Sartwell also has a quoteable nugget right at the end of this short which hints at many of the same assumptions:

I think the way I have tried to answer some philosophical questions has changed the way live…or, the way I live has changed my answers to philosophical questions.

The artificially spliced in editorial comment from Lachs, “That’s very American”, couldn’t have been a more apropos way to end the short film.

There’s a new film (or series of eight rather short films, I guess) by Phillip McReynolds called American Philosopher.  You can watch the whole thing online, and it’s a pleasure that I recommend taking.  Quite frankly, it seems mostly to be a bunch of spliced-together interviews with a few major living (or recently living) academic philosophers.  There’s not too much unity of thought, other than the vague thematic American-philosophical self-reflection and a few shared terms, and the discussion does not get too deep or technical.  It is, however, an easy watch and it’s great to hear how these thinkers reflect on their work and environment after years of being immersed in it.  I’m going to do a quick series of posts walking through my reactions to the 8 ‘films’.

Part 0 of 8 is just a little teaser.  It begins with a brief little reflection by the late Richard Rorty:

I think that the Socratic ideal of self-knowledge is replaced among contemporary intellectuals by the Nietzschean idea of self-creation.  The life of the intellectual is not a matter of finding out what finding out what has been inside himself or herself all the time, it’s a matter of becoming someone new

I’m more than a bit confused about the relevance of this little thought nugget ¹, but there seems to be a smattering of dangling opinions here and there in the film, so I’ll write it off as a teaser for that aspect.

The teaser is nice enough to give us a good sneak preview of the interviewees.  As someone who considers American philosophy to be one of my primary influences, especially among relatively contemporary thinkers, I was excited to see the roll call.  First up, Richard Rorty, an incisive thinker from whom I have read a lot.  While I disagree with Rorty on some key things, I believe him to be one of the best recent examples of a public intellectual that actually has an influence in America.  ²

Another featured philosopher with whose work I am well acquainted is The New School’s Richard J. Bernstein.  It would be misleading for me to mention Bernstein as anything less than among my favorite thinkers, especially among those currently living³.  Douglas Anderson is also featured.  I’ve read his book on Peirce, Strands of System: The Philosophy of Charles Peirce, and found it to be quite good in most respects.  Thomas Alexander,who like Anderson resides at the very American SIU Carbondale, also makes an appearance.  He has contributed some great thoughts on Dewey.  Joseph Margolis–who has himself produced some works summarising, distilling, and contextualising American philosophical thought in general–is interviewed as well.  Crispin Sartwell, who I have found provocative yet insightful, gets a lot of airtime in the film.  The salient Hilary Putnam makes a few brief cameos.  John Lachs provides his insight (which comes off as delightfully just-outside the American philosophy cadre, I think because he’s a Santayana scholar⁴.  John Lysaker, Erin McKenna, James Campbell, Michael P. Hodges, Richard Schusterman, Scott Pratt, Russell Goodman, Bruce Wilshire, Judith Green, and Lucious Outlaw also contribute positively to the discussion, though I am not familiar enough with their other work to say more about them.

This short preview ends with the philosophers naming a good list of questions, a few of which I think are distinctly of interest to contemporary American philosophy, but most of which are just interesting for academic philosophers in general.  A few of those questions, seem even to be of the type that some American philosophers would not bother worrying about; for instance, Rorty would certainly poo-poo Judith Green’s question “What is Justice?” or Bruce Wilshire’s quick list of pesudo-metaphysical questions as being unhelpful.  The fact that these thinkers might have been pushing these questions as relevant for the American Philosopher probably speaks to the divisiveness of its character makeup, which makes it interesting.

Disclaimer: these thoughts are a bit raw and not well explained here, but I need to start posting to develop my thoughts more.  Disclaimer 2: yes, x can be 0.

Okay, admittedly, the title of this post sounds like a dumb question.  And while I know that in most cases, the former answer is the “true” answer, it was the lame possibility that there are instances wherein the latter is more true which kept me up thinking for a little while the other night.

On the one hand, in the physical  world, things seem pretty clear cut–at least at first.  Let’s say I have a souvenir from president Taft:

A Souvenir

If I happened to get two souvenirs, I’ll have… wait for it…

1 + 1 = 2 souvenirs... go ahead and check!

…two souvenirs.  1 souvenir + 1 souvenir = 2 souvenirs.  Genius!

Hello World!

Now, let’s get more abstract.  We’ll start with a teeny-tiny programming lesson.  In common programming languages, the = symbol has an additional function beyond expression equation and evaluation; it is also used to assign variables.  There are two common ways of assigning variables, by reference and by copy.  Assigning by reference simply assigns that variable as a “pointer” which points (or references) a particular space containing the value of the variable.  An assignment by copy takes the value of the initial value of the variable and copies it into the new variable.

The standard in the PHP language is variable assignment by copy.  Thus, if I type

A = 5

B = A¹

…then B is also equal to 5, but if I later change the value of A:

A = 9

…then B still retains its value as 5.  In essence, this means that every variable name used in PHP code is by default a placeholder for its value, rather than a link to a particular “place” in a computer’s memory.  Thus, just like in the real world, it generally makes sense that A + A = 2A because in PHP this is like saying: (the value of) A combined with (the value of) A is equal to two times (the value of) A.

However, in a language like Python–which assigns by reference by default–after setting B = A, if I alter the value of A = 9, then the value of B becomes 9 as well.  This is because the A and B variables both refer to the same “place” in the computer’s memory, so when you change the value in that place, it appears as changed to all of the variables that reference that space.  This is where there appears to be a different relationship with reality.  Because A and B (and, of course, A and A) are not simply copies of a value but are actually references to the same object, the objects of their pointers have the same identity.  In PHP, the objects of the separate variables cannot be said to be completely identical because  even if they have all other qualities in common, they represent different places in the computer memory; however, in Python, the objects of the variable pointers hold all qualities in common.  As anyone who remembers Leibniz’s Law knows, any two things sharing all attributes are the same thing.  What does it mean to add a thing to itself, when each object in the addition equation is merely a pointer to that object?  In other words, I’d like to make the case that in Python, A + A is not like doubling the value of A.  It is not like having one souvenir and having another souvenir.  Rather, I think that, given the way the language defaults its variable assignments to references, A + A is like pointing to the same souvenir twice, but not working with the value.  In other words, I think in this case the more appropriate equation is A + A = A.  In the same manner that pointing to the same souvenir twice still only leaves you with one souvenir, pointing to the same A twice ought only leave you with one A.

That said, yes, I understand that programming languages are more pragmatic than systematic.  If that were the actual function of the + operator on referenced variables, it would hardly be worthwhile.  Furthermore, all of the operators in programming language imply more function than is implied in their natural language definitions.  In other words, using the + symbol (as with other symbols * / % – etc.) implies that the factors involved will be treated as values.  The value role which I have claimed was missing from the default Python variable model is just played by the operator, rather than the variable itself…but that doesn’t mean this little thought experiment was completely pointless.

Back to the real world…

This actually makes a lot of sense coming back to the physical world.  Let’s  say I ask you how many Stings there are:

Sting

Sting

There  are really two ways of looking at this; we have either one Sting or two.  To map this back onto the programming discussion, these images can be taken on the one hand to refer to the Sting.  In this case, each image itself would not “count” , because both images refer only to a single thing (person).  They are, by this understanding, mere pointers to the physically extant sting (I’ll call him ontological Sting, because he has being).  Having two pointers is just as if you pointed to Sting twice…you wouldn’t say that there are two Stings in that case.

On the other hand, we could say that both Stings count.  Using our programming language metaphor, we could say that each Sting image copies the value of the Sting–at least for our purposes, and because they have value aside from their referent we can count them.  Thus, we would have two (non-ontological) Stings.

This hints at my first point.  Basically, it seems to me that math, even simple sums and counting numbers, is 1) too abstracted and too rigid to account for ontology (being) and because of this 2) it does a poor job of accounting for identity, and as a result 3) it can lead to ambiguity that when not addressed leads  to error or confusion.   In other words, because there is no link between being and the abstract concept of number (this has been true at least since the West abandoned the simple Greek conception of counting numbers), there is a live translation issue when going from the real to the abstract and when going from the abstract to the real.  While it is certainly true that we get around just fine most of the time with our assumptions about the identities and numbers, I bring this up to propose that taking it into account from time to time might provide us with a little insight where we could use a little creativity.

To be sure, there are a few workarounds for the identity-less nature of numbers (even at a basic enough level for me to understand).  We’ve all played around with those factorial problems (think: “how many possible order configurations are there for Jan, Jim, and Jill to stand in a single-file line?”), for instance, but while these techniques offer us some of the effects of taking identity into account, they still lack a truely correlative relationship with what can be said to be or what can be said to have such-and-such an identity.  ²

What strikes me as rather unusual about this is not simply that nobody seems to pay attention to the lack of a relationship between mathematics and ontology, but that people seem to have never thought about this lack of relationship despite the fact that ontology seems to me to be psychologically prior. At least in my limited, subjective experience, I have found that ontological assumptions predated and founded mathematical assumptions, but I am known to be an edge-case in many things.  If you are tenacious enough to still be with me at this point, I hope you can help describe your history learning mathematics in a manner that will either affirm or counter my own experiences.

Let me be a little more clear.

I can very vividly recall learning multiplication and somewhat clearly recall my thoughts learning addition.  For multiplication, I remember being rather incredulous.  We were started with addition problems like “4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 = ?” followed by examples like “4 x 5 = ?”.  The fact that you could replace the one operation with the other, that you could–by say counting the number of fours and using that result as a factor–obtain the same result as adding that many fours or counting by as many fours…it all seemed to me to be a parlour trick which might hold true in some cases–but it certainly could not be known to hold true in all cases.  It took a lot of examples to convince me that this could be thought of as a mathematical rule.  The same was roughly true, I more  vaguely remember, of addition.  The fact that every time you counted four apples and another three apples, you could combine them and count them up to seven apples… it seemed like a neat trick, but I was initially skeptical, and it took a number of examples to convince me.

I don’t know if I am an unusual case or not, but as described to me, it seems I learned most of my fundamental mathematics inductively.  I took examples from what existed in the world  and tested them for consistency against rules and language I was given until I accepted them as true conventions.  In other words, for me, ontology was more fundamental than mathematical abstractions.  Many so-called mathematical necessities came to me a posteriori, and I do not know whether it is safe to assume this is common.

To get back to my point, I think there is an oft-ignored relationship between being and number which ought to be unearthed from time to time, and I think that relationship is one upon which our more abstracted conception of mathematics is dependent.  In many or most cases, it can be convenient or beneficial to forget this relationship while we experiment with the great, complex language of mathematics and find a way to relate it back to the world…functional relationships, irrational numbers, even negative numbers and zeros seem to have a much more distant relationship to ontology.  In many cases, they may have more effect on our conception of being than vice versa (where do the notions of anti-matter or charge come from, if not from mathematics?), but I don’t think that means we can ignore that initial relationship.

• Everyone you know that has watched a commercial for Bob’s NewWidget purchases Bob’s NewWidget and thinks that it is the greatest invention.
  • You are given the opportunity to watch the commercial.  Do you take it?
• Everyone you know that has taken a certain drug BNW purchases Bob’s NewWidget and thinks that it is the greatest invention.
  • You are given the opportunity to take the drug.  Do you take it?

Now we’ll change things slightly:

• Everyone you know who has read a certain book comes to believe that free market capitalism is the only viable economic system for the future of humanity.
  • Do you read the book?
• Everyone you know who has taken a certain drug FMC comes to believe that free market capitalism is the only viable economic system for humanity.
  • Do you take the drug?

and, finally…

• Everyone you know who has read a certain book comes to believe that God exists and has a personal relationship with them.
  • Do you read the book?
• Everyone who has taken drug BPG comes to believe that God exists and has a personal relationship with them.
  • Do you take the drug?

In all these cases, of course, we assume that there are no other side-effects of the drug/book/commercial.  Tease out what matters between these different scenarios, if anything in fact, distinguishes them.

Mull briefly on this claim:

Any argument which stems ultimately from induction, because it is based on generalizing from a limited observation rather than from the whole set of data, cannot be verified to be true.

Is it self-referencing, self-refuting, defensible, or something else?

I would like to think that there is something meaningful manifest in the fact  that I happened upon Dr. Harry Frankfurt‘s somewhat-philosophical work On Bullshit on the same day that I started doing actual practice essays for my upcoming GRE.  Frankfurt’s piece is remarkably

Harry Frankfurt, professor emeritus of Princeton

short, and contains a few interesting observations about the supposed nature of “bullshit”–the sort of deceptive claptrap/hogwash which Frankfurt sees as utterly ubiquitous.  While I wouldn’t award the book any prizes for exhibiting exhaustiveness  or exceptional reasoning–nor for providing any earth-shaking conclusions or consequences–it is illustrative at least insofar as it demonstrates that there is much to be said about this odd phenomenon so prevalent that we hardly take note of it (though, frankly, I think a good, in-depth psychological approach might have been more  revealing).

Still, the work’s pertinence and timeliness for me is a testament to its broad applicability.  I speak, of course, of my recent attempts at engaging the Graduate Recognition Examination’s analytical writing component.  To be most fair, I am scarcely a fan of academic grades and testing in general (I think they ought to be used, but in moderation and with somewhat restricted authority over one’s grades, future, and so on), but let us reserve this point for a later journal entry… Quite frankly, after reading some sample questions and “ideal” answers from test practice experts (Kaplan, Princeton Review, Peterson’s, ETS, Barron’s, and friends), I have come to the conclusion that the GRE’s writing component is a carefully-crafted attempt at getting one thing from its victims: bullshit.

This is not a mere ad-hominem (ad-examinem?) attack on my part.  As Frankfurt illuminates, the term, though it does have a pejorative connotation, does not denote an outright lie.  Rather, I mean to accuse the writing component of encouraging the creation of drivel, and nursing the already-commonplace skillset that allows people to promulgate misleadingly content-devoid hogwash.  This may seem pretty benign, in fact, especially to many of my close friends who (like myself, surely) have already developed a rather acute attachment to this sort of rhetoric.  I disagree.

Most of the writing prompts seem to follow a similar form; basically, an uncontextualized nugget of text presents or assumes an overly generalized dichotomization of some topic, and then selects one of the options with little or no substantiation or reason.  The example which I randomly chose to write about today fits this norm pretty well:

In most professions and academic fields, imagination is more important than knowledge.

Perhaps I am so steeped in the tradition of philosophical dichotomy-smashing, or perhaps it has been too long since I have been trapped in some middle-school classroom bombarding me with inspirational posters lauding generic goods like imagination and knowledge, but offhand it seems to me that vague concepts like knowledge and imagination can neither be neatly separated nor have their quasi-practical features like “importance” compared without proper practical context.  In general, is knowledge more important than imagination?  This question seems to me to be inane.  At the extremes, knowledge devoid of imagination seems to me to be impotent, likewise with  imagination devoid of knowledge.  In the abstract, I simply don’t think that these two generic mental states can be organized hierarchically, and I suspect that those who think that they can be have not been very reflective about the topic–in other words, in responding to such an essay prompt, they would simply select their choice capriciously or based on a loose, unreflective preference for whichever option they desire.

I am not arguing, of course, that there is no difference between imagination and knowledge, nor that we cannot distinguish the two notions.  Rather, I am arguing that to make a determination about practical aspects of these vague general terms, one has to consider the specific contexts, and probably only the best results in any case will be achieved by utilizing the highest possible levels of both manners of thinking (again, given the allowance of the circumstances).  If I am given an example in situ, I can actually make some kind of real determination about whether to emphasize my imagination or my knowledge.  If I am, for instance, drafting a legal document to articulate an already agreed-upon end, then I had best focus on my knowledge of established court procedures to ensure the validity of the document.  Yet it may be almost entirely by virtue of my imagination that I can reconceptualize the arrangement of court evidence which allows me to prove my client’s innocence (or as a prosecutor to prove his guilt).  With proper context, examples like these can certainly allow us to distinguish one of these vague terms from another and place a value on each by which they may be compared.  When the only situational information provided is limited to presumably all the activities which occur “in most professions and academic fields”, then I could utilize either of these aforementioned examples to demonstrate the superior “importance” of either of these two concepts.  In other words, the truth does not matter–neither to ETS nor to the student responding to the seemingly meaningless prompt.¹

I think that a reasonable argument could be made as to the harmlessness  of the essay in itself.   Indeed, of the forms of B.S. described by Frankfurt, this seems to be the least overtly dangerous–a rather unintentional variety  which “is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about”.  Furthermore, the essay’s influence will be quite limited.  Presumably, it will only ever be read by two (or in some cases three) likely jaded professional test-graders, who will get only a couple of minutes during which to reflect on the work.

I wonder, though, if there are broader consequences of accepting the authority of such a component on an exam like this.  Undoubtedly, the GRE has an influence on who is admitted into graduate schools in the USA.  I anticipate the counterargument that one’s admittance into any school is probably almost never alone decided by his or her score on the GRE’s writing component; this is true.  However, my impression is that GRE scores are often taken as one of the first excuses for filtering out applicants, if only because these scores are a quick and dirty method for getting some objective value for the level of education from applicants from such diverse educational backgrounds.  This is significant because it means that most applicants to most programs leading ultimately to many, many professional and academic jobs will have been forced to score well on their GRE’s, and more specifically to demonstrate their ability to excel at generating bullshit².

It feels, once again, like time to ping-back to the internet (I’m here, big guy!).  I caught a lot of hype a week ago about abandoned blogs (the New York Times claims 95% are dead!), so I thought I would at least make some feeble attempt at proving to myself that I can keep writing every now and then.  To forgive myself for never spouting my thoughts, I formerly had the allowed myself the excuse of a busy end-of-semester, and now I will grant myself the excuse of having no stable internet access–but this excuse will only carry me so far.

Since I was last writing somewhat regularly, have learned and read a fair amount–a healthy legion of unfinished posts in my publishing queue attest to this.  I rather hope to polish up a post or two on what I have learned about Levinas and religion, Levinas and political systems, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the history of the classical world, relativism, Jurgen Habermas, naturalism, Re:, Hangedup, and a few other broad topics like languages, reason, atheism and theism, poverty, and the like.

In the meantime, the Summer Support Group for Philosophers has kicked off, with one meeting under its belt.  We focused that session, as well as the upcoming one, on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus.  My immediate reaction to the work was mixed.  If you have not had the pleasure of skimming the work, I suggest trying it.  You can find copies of the Ogden translation (the version I am reading) all over the web, but I suggest finding a good tabular or tree layout version to help encourage you to read it the way it was intended (read: the way I didn’t read it the first time).

So far, Wittgenstein has proven to be a pretty decent discussion generator.  I am not quite sure of his laconic/aphoristic approach was meant to ensure ambiguity or clarity, but it certainly seems to me that the former is the end result.  At times, the lack of explanation for his terminology is befuddling, and it is easy to lose track of the point of his work entirely from time to time.  Still, many of Wittgenstein’s propositions have proven to be good points for discussion–including such greats as 1, 2.0123, 3.02,  3.328, 3.333, 4.002, 4.003, 6.45, 6.54 (don’ t look ahead!).  So far I can see much of Rorty’s thought in this reading already, but I am trying hard to resist the temptation to defer to the Rortian interpretation–while I may be getting a good idea of how Rorty read Wittgenstein, my suspicion is that his reading might not be completely faithful to the author’s own thoughts.  In fact, I rather wish I would have better used my Rorty-reading time to finish trudging through Principia Mathematica, because this probably would have made Wittgenstein’s responses to Russell more intelligible.  Luckily I had the foresight to pick up a little Frege reading beforehand.

I might try to keep more info about thoughts and future readings for the summer group at another location, where members of our smallish group might enjoy doing public exegesis.  For now, I have put up a message board on the yet unused ThoughtAndPraxis.com.

recommended listening: Low’s “A Little Argument with Myself”, from the album Trust (hear it on Youtube or buy it at Insound)

I recently took it upon myself to read Charles Taliaferro and Stewart Goetz‘s work Naturalism (for sale here).  I highly recommend the book for anyone looking for a good summary of some considerations of modern philosophy on the topic of naturalism.  The work is pithy, cogent, and I think easy to follow even for those not well-versed in the technical jargon and historic arguments surrounding this traditional metaphysical debate.  I would caution, though, that I think that the book seems to me overly critical of some features of naturalism, and also to me seems to overgeneralize many characteristics which I think abound in naturalists and non-naturalists alike.

I had the great pleasure of being introduced to Taliaferro last fall, and will likely be meet him again in a few days, so I took the time to throw together a little gut-reaction response to the work Natualism (which, I rather think might be better titled “Against Naturalism”, which indicates better that the purpose of this book seems to be the construction of an argument against naturalism, rather than some merely informational and “objective” presentation of historic facts and debates).

Here is my response to their work (in either ogg vorbis or mp3 format).

If you don’t feel like taking the 15 minutes to listen, here’s the gist of my thoughts, without most of the explanatory substance:

1. Yes, I agree with Goetz and Taliaferro that naturalism as they characterize it (through examples) stands on shaky ground, but…
2. Naturalist perspectives, being based on the ever-expanding realm of scientific advancement, are not simply reductionist.  Rather, their role can expand as our empirical observations and theories about these observations expand.  My feelings on this follow from my (mildly Kuhnian, i think) view that science is a primarily pragmatic rather than epistemological endeavor.
3. Because science offers us the opportunity to challenge traditional “supernatural” explanations, it bears the possibility to act as a corrective check for, or at least calls us to critically reflect upon, our folk psychology/physics/philosophy/metaphysics/dogmas.
4. Finally, I think that a strict, parsimonious, positive naturalism is not just likely epistemically problematic–it is psychologically untenable even for its most outspoken adherence (but so is anti-naturalism in some ways).  In the long run, though, if the apparent choice is between accepting on or the other tradtional dogma (either naturalist or unnaturalist), I would just assume have both perspectives around as long as possible duking it out, as neither seems wholy cogent to me.  With the argument preserved, we can pragmatically utilize one assumption in one context generally (say, anti-naturalism for religion; naturalism for science), but allow these perspectives to challenge each other in their own contexts as well.  In this way, I hope we can either realize that these distinctions are irrelevant, or that they are somehow complimentary, or that some better alternatives exist instead–and enjoy the fruits of continued argument.

What struck me as interesting, was that when I was looking for some alternative perspectives on naturalism while writing my response, one of the first results provided by my friend Google was lil’ ol me.  Yes, on the first page of my google results was an entry that I posted in October last year, entitled “Hobbes and Modern Science v. Descartes“.  Back in October, though, I was sort of on the other side of the argument.  Back then, I was chastizing modern science for its naturalist assumptions, rather than lauding it for bringing options to the table–at least until the end of the article.  In the end, though, it seems that both today and last october, I was arguing from one side (first against naturalists, then against anti-naturalists) in order to get to the middle.  In both places, I criticized dogmatism, dualism, and hubristic assumptions that we already know what types of substances make up the entirety of the cosmos.

The major discrepancy between my old article and my new one, it seems to me, is that I was content to characterize science in my October post as presuming the sort of materialistic naturalism that Goetz and Taliaferro seem to see in it, but this week I argued that that view of science is short-sighted.  Which description is more accurate?  In a way, I think both.  I think the end paragraph of my recorded response hints at the answer.  It seems that real human beings simply don’t portray stable, context independent dispositions of this sort.  In one context, we might all predictably be naturalists (say, when you consider whether or not you should worry about a 1,000 anvil falling on you from above), and in others we may all be anti-naturalists (say, when considering our plans for the future or interpreting our emotions).  It may simply not be possible to separate these two categories in a way that is both meaningful and able to be held by a real person over time.

Also, if you’re in the Sioux Falls area, I heartily implore you to come to Charles Taliaferro’s talk at the Augustana Naturalism Symposium this week; it will make your life better.

Also, I tried to stream my recorded response to Naturalism, but it does not seem to work for me.  Try it, if it shows up for you: