Badgerous Philosophy, Music and Life: A Badger's Soliloquy
Sunday, February 29, 2004
Very Tired Badger
Pretty crazy 5 days, I must say. Since finding out on Wednesday that I had 2 days to prepare for my first ever job interview, I pretty much have not stood still. I think I'm going to slow down this week and maybe try and do some real work...
Interview went well - nice people, great company - so we'll see what feedback I get. After that, I had a boozy 2 days (nights) in London bars with my friend Adam. We ended up in the King's College London union on Friday night and the University of London union on Saturday, so a fairly student-heavy couple of nights. Good fun, though.
Today I went round to Jim Mullen's house and had a jam. Awesome guy - go and buy all of his records!! We went through Solar (by Miles Davis), Impressions (John Coltrane) and a few other things. Happy days.
Had an interesting chat on Saturday with an artist from St Martin's College, (very prestigious school indeed), about his work on the infinite. It was an amazing coincidence because my aesthetics course has been focusing on the sublime for the last week, a concept that is very much tied to (if not constituted by) our concept of the infinite. He had this interesting idea of doing a performance piece with a school choir singing rounds. Rounds really do go on for ever. (And ever, and ever, and....) We talked about the fact that humans tend to lack any sufficient grasp or conception of the infinite, hence the importance of trying to represent, (or at least try to gesture towards), it in art. He noted that it is perhaps more fruitful to start with the idea of zero, or nothing, as representative of infinity, as this avoids encouraging the tendency simply to imagine something extremely large as being infinite. I wondered whether the development of perspective in painting had given us a ready framework within which to represent infinity - for instance, imagine a group of lines converging towards some point on a canvas, as one might paint a road disappearing into the distance. However, this sort of artistic metaphor is still lacking something, of course - lines still must be painted within a spatial framework and thus conceptualised spatially, thus inviting back the tendency to think of the lines as enclosed in some way. I mean, our conception of space arguably is void of any substantial grasp of the possibility that space might be infinite. Perhaps we can grasp that possibility purely intellectually - I might entertain the proposition that space is infinite, (much in the same way that I might entertain the proposition that there might be a square circle - but I have no substantial grasp of what such a thing could be like); but this does not amount to any substantial representational capability regarding space as infinite. Our representational capacities, it seems, presuppose bounds - the basic units of our percepts, i.e. objects, have edges, boundaries etc. With these thoughts in mind, I concluded that the most effective medium within which to try to communicate something about the infinite would be a non-spatial one, such as with music.
posted by Will at 7:53 PM
I just got offered an interview with Bechtel on Friday! They are pretty much the world's largest construction company, so would be fantastic to work for. They had told me that they weren't pursuing my application, but obviously saw the error of their ways ;)... Joy joy joy joy joy.......
posted by Will at 11:52 AM
Monday, February 23, 2004
Ashburton Grove
Arsenal have just secured funding for their new stadium at Ashburton Grove. They'll hopefully move over there in August 2006. Whilst this is great news for the club, I'm a little sad that they'll be leaving Highbury, which was 50 yards from my primary school.
posted by Will at 1:36 PM
Sunday, February 22, 2004
Weekend Frolics
One highly badgered badger reporting in this evening. Embarking on 3 heady days (nights) of fun and festivity does tend to test one's powers of endurance... Last Thursday we had the soopa doopa jazzerator, Jim Mullen, come and play for the university jazz society that I run. Jim is an absolute legend. He invited me to go and have lunch and jam with him in London next weekend, so I'm pretty chuffed. Must practice lots this week to make sure my chops are up to scratch!
Friday was my friend Casey's 21st party. The theme was "'C', with a touch of class". I went as Clark Kent, wearing a suit and tie with my shirt safety pinned back to reveal a Superman t-shirt underneath. Went down rather well. Had a chat with a lady on my table about the film Donnie Darko and realised that I had missed a crucial piece of information in the plot... Had better watch it again soon to avoid embarrassment at future dinner parties.
Last night I was in Preston for my friend Nick's 21st. (Like buses, these birthdays...) Theme was "Northern Monkeys and Southern Fairies", on account of Nick's having gone to school up north (hence lots of northern friends) and his going to uni down south (hence lots of southern friends). Foxy was good enough to lend me some suitably southernish 'chap attire', (blazer and cravat). I wore my trilby hat too, which was great fun. Housemate Sam went as a fairy - pink fishnet tights, a tutu and pink top. Deeply, deeply disturbing. Horrible, in fact... Scarred.... Mentally....
Regarding my post on contextualism, the following issue has been pointed out to me.
If one is a contextualist, then there is a danger in accepting all instances of the following schema:
1. X knows that p
2. Y knows that p
t.f. 3. (X&Y) know that p.
The danger lies in the fact that 'knows' may in premise 1 have a content different from that in premise 2. Thus, the 'know' in 3 may either equivocate or conflate the contents of 'knows' in 1 and 2: the shorthand 'know' cannot adequately represent the differences between 'knows(1)' and 'knows(2)'.
However, 1-3 seems to be a standard and felicitous inference. Thus, if contextualism undermines 1-3, then contextualism might be thought to have unintuitive consequences. It might be thought that the seeming validity of 1-3 thus ought best be explained by an invariantist account of the content of 'knows'.
However, the contextualist could respond as follows. Certainly, 1-3 seems felicitous and contextually variant readings of 1 and 2 would undermine the conjunction in 3. However, consider the following:
4. Will is here.
5. Bruce is here.
t.f. 6. (Will and Bruce) are here.
This argument only has intuitive force if it is presupposed that 1 and 2 are uttered in the same context. Nobody would find this argument intuitive, or convincing, if it were suggested that 4 were uttered in my bedroom and 5 in Wangaratta. One could thus suggest that 1-3 seems appealing because we assume charitably, as with other context sensitive terms, that the context is the same across the whole argument. (One could say something similar regarding the force of the sceptical argument, but that's another story.) Thus, the fact that contextualism undermines instances of 1-3 should be of no great consequence, so long as we appreciate the underlying presuppositions behind the seeming intuitiveness of the argument.
In fact, this seems fair. Consider the following case.
1*. Bruce (loutish, uncouth, uneducated) knows that smoking causes cancer.
2*. Dr Sheila (eminently informed cancer specialist) knows that smoking causes cancer.
t.f. 3*. (Bruce and Dr Sheila) know that smoking causes cancer.
If Bruce and Dr Sheila are chatting casually together over a pint and no particularly high standard of knowledge is assumed, then an attribution of knowledge about cancer to both would be acceptable: a consistent context keeps the argument valid, as we said. However, assume that Bruce is drinking alone in his low-standard context and that Dr Shela is elsewhere giving a lecture at a medical conference, attended by the top professors in her field. 1* and 2* may still be true relative to Bruce's and Dr Sheila's contexts, but now it seems to me, at least, that 3* is not so intuitive anway. If one parses 2* as requiring higher standards for knowledge than 1*, then it seems to me as though the natural response to 3* would be to deny that Bruce and Dr Sheila know in the same sense that smoking causes cancer. It is perhaps only if we parse 1* and 2* whilst unaware of their differences in epistemic standards that we think that 3* follows. However, I'd be interested to see if people share my intuition on that one.
posted by Will at 8:31 PM
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Mediocre England, Marvellous Contextualism
I suppose a 1-1 draw away to Portugal is a respectable result.... but the fact that we created only a handful of chances seems a little troubling, especially given that our attacking line up was pretty much at full strength. Hopefully our Svengali Sven can work a bit of magic before Euro 2004.... Glory for Ledley King though - what a match! Looked like our most experienced player!
Tomorrow I have a seminar on a paper about contextualism by Ram Neta. Here's how it goes.
Here's a sceptical argument about knowledge of the external world:
S1. If I know that I have hands, then I also know that I am not a brain in a vat (or in the Matrix, or whatever).
S2. I do not know that I am not a brain in a vat [BIV]
Therefore, SC. I do not know that I have hands (by modus tollens, S2, S1).
This argument seems convincing: if I cannot rule out the possibility that I am a BIV, then surely I cannot rule out the possibility that I do not have hands. Hence, I cannot know that I have hands.
However, obviously having hands is a paradigm example of something that we do think we know about. I seem quite felicitously to say things such as, 'Pete knows that he has hands': what I have said seems true. So, we have two conflicting claims: the sceptic claims that we do not know that we have hands, whereas I quite normally claim that we do know that we have hands. So, something has gone awry somewhere.
[Intermission: this is where most people start saying things like, 'philosophers are so full of s***, they spend all day sitting in armchairs by logfires thinking up far-fetched arguments for completely unintuitive claims, and on tax-payers' money to boot!' Despite my sympathy for heavily moderated versions of this sentiment, I still think that the philosopher is doing something useful here. By offering a seemingly far-fetched argument against basic knowledge claims, the philosopher is inviting us to investigate into a) what is wrong with the argument S1-SC that causes it to contravene our intuitions about knowledge, b) what knowledge actually is, c) whether we have as much knowledge as we think we do, and so on.]
So, the contextualist says that what has gone wrong is that the two claims, that we do and do not know that we have hands, are not actually in conflict at all. This might seem odd, for superficially the claims seem to constitute a basic contradiction. However, the contextualist says that the content, that is, the meaning of 'knows' changes between the context in which we are taking on the sceptic in S1-SC and the context in which I ordinarily make seemingly bona fide knowledge attributions. Thus, given the difference in content between the two claims, there is no immediate contradiction between them. We might reformulate them thus: we know(O) that we have hands, and we do not know(S) that we have hands. Plausibly, knowledge(O) has lower standards than knowledge(S): perhaps the former does not require us to rule out the possibility that we are in the Matrix in order to know something. Thus, we can retain the intuitive truth of ordinary knowledge attributions, so long as we do not raise the standards of knowledge to such a degree that far-fetched possibilities become relevant.
So, here's the problem that Neta looks into in his paper. Everyone admits that the sceptical argument is deeply puzzling: we've been worrying about it, insofar as it seems to undermine our claims to ordinary knowledge, for thousands of years. It also seems true that, when we communicate with people using language, we know the meanings of the terms that we use - we have quite sophisticated beliefs, intentions, purposes etc. regarding how to use words to communicate quite specific messages to others. So, the claim goes, if it were just the case that 'knows' means something different in the S1-SC context than in an ordinary context, then why did we not know about this earlier? Surely the contextualist must claim that we are thus ignorant about the contextual variation in the meaning of 'knows'. However, this has been deemed an unacceptable 'error theory' about our knowledge of the meanings of the terms that we commonly use.
So, how does one respond? How do we defend the claims that the meaning of 'knows' is context sensitive and that we have genuine linguistic knowledge about the meaning of 'knows'? The challenge seems rather flat-footed to me. It seems to suggest that, unless we have a complete understanding of the meaning of a term, including all of its contextual nuances, then we are in error in some way. Even though the relevant factors in determining the meaning of 'knows' in a given context may be related to our own beliefs, intentions etc. in communication, we should not suppose that we need have infallible access to these beliefs in order to count as genuinely knowing the meaning of 'knows'.
These issues run deep. There are massive questions about which mental states (beliefs etc.) are doing the determining of the content of 'knows' in a given context, about self-knowledge, about linguistic competence and the conditions for understanding the meaning of a word, about what determines a context.... Man - I never thought theory of knowledge would have so many implications! And all that just from considering a [seemingly crazy] argument about brains in vats.....
posted by Will at 11:41 PM
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
Blogville
So, this evening I went to see Dogville, the new film by Lars von Trier. Needless to say, this film has been rather controversial, especially in the States. I suppose that this is largely because the film is one gargantuan, relentless and brutal indictment of certain elements of society within the States.
The setting for the film might be seen as the ultimate conclusion of the Dogme film movement founded by von Trier and others in 1995. The Dogme 'Vow of Chastity' for film makers decreed that 'shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found)'. Dogville, however, eschews location altogether, shooting on a bare, black soundstage with nothing but chalk lines demarcating the various buildings and streets of the town. This is minimalism taken to a point that outruns even the Dogme ideology. In removing the focus on setting, the emphasis is placed entirely on the cast and on the story itself.
As with his other films, von Trier yields a magnificent performance from his leading lady: Nicole Kidman is to Dogville as Bjork was to Dancer in the Dark. On the run from the mob and in need of shelter, Kidman lands in Dogville and is given sanctuary. In return, she works for the towns' people, as they give her protection from the police and gangsters that seek to uncover her.
The tale, as with other von Trier films, takes several bitter twists. Mental and physical abuse, imprisonment, exploitation and betrayal take hold, as Dogville's residents feed a downward spiral of treatment towards Kidman, following the peak of a utopian 4th July celebration. This was surely a metaphor for the supposed decay of American values after the pinnacle of liberalism encapsulated by the American declaration of independence.
The decay is thematic, dealing with the effective enslavement of Kidman, the ostracism of her following her attempt to escape from her plight and atmosphere of fear towards her once the town become suspicious of her intent in their community. The intended metaphor should be clear, but the montage of photos of black Americans during the depression inserted in the end credit sequence make sure that the message is driven home in a grittily audacious fashion.
The film ends with a masterful revelation of Kidman's true situation and captures a debate between Kidman and her gangster foe that elucidates the moral dilemma facing both Kidman and the people of Dogville. My take on this was that the gangster and Kidman represent two antithetical ethical and political positions: hard line right-wing conservatism and ultra-left liberalism. The former is exemplified by the gangster's advocation of death for Dogville's inhabitants, the latter by Kidman's forgiving and minimally retributive mindset towards them. Naturally, it is implied that Kidman's ultra-liberalism and lack of apposite retribution in fact fuelled the moral decay of the people of Dogville, leading them to sink so low into the ethical abyss that the only seeming way out was an ultimate punishment. Thus, the two ideologies are remarkably entwined, one feeding off the other, resulting in an ultimately unsatisfactory conclusion. Perhaps, then, this argument is supposed to favour a less extremist view of ideologies, whereby the occasion for, or appeal of ultimate retribution is eschewed by imposing lesser, preventative constraints upon the actions of others. But that was just my interpretation.
In all, I can see why Dogville is controversial - but then I also think that it is a work of genius, and hence necessary to see. The film is so rich in metaphor, so thought provoking and insightful that I should think that one ought to try to extract the universality of its message, even if one finds its rhetoric offensive.
posted by Will at 11:27 PM
Monday, February 16, 2004
Vagueness and Arsenal
Oh how I do love the FA cup. Arsenal 2 Chelsea 1 --> Glory, Arsenal 2 Chelsea 1 : t.f. Glory. Yes, that is my FA cup sentiments captured in beautifully simple modus ponens form. My housemate and I felt mildly, and justifiably prophetic with regard to the match. We had agreed beforehand that the match would probably be won by new Arsenal signing Antonio Reyes and that this would be the start of Reyes' stardom in this country. So, 2/2, methinks. Unfortunately, looks as though the Gunners are going to draw Liverpool away in the quarter final. We are certainly going to have a tough run in to the final!
England didn't do too badly in the rugby either, Dallaglio quietly effective in his return to the captaincy after his ignominious demotion from that position on drugs allegations. Robinson showed a few moments of genius, I thought, especially his try scored down the right flank.
So, I've been thinking about vagueness again. It's been 2 months since I handed in my 11,000 word monster on vagueness and I can honestly say I've been quite pleased to work on other things for a while! However, I read through the paper again a few days ago and saw a few errors and also ways to incorporate my recent work on minimalism about truth. This is ominous, for I can feel a growing temptation to return to the paper and beef it up, even though this will be completely pointless as far as my final degree mark goes......... Perhaps I shall wait until I have a few months to kill, maybe on a beach in Mexico, and return to it then. Of course, the obvious decision would be to start a graduate degree and use the essay as a foundation for my thesis. However, this is not going to happen.... at least, not this year.... Damn these decisions!!
posted by Will at 7:09 PM
Saturday, February 14, 2004
I tell thee, it's Proper Bo!
My discovery of the week, (perhaps year), has been Bo Selecta! - a Channel 4 comedy series. I can't believe I've only just seen my first episode, (well, 5 episodes, actually), as it's been around for ages. But anyway, it's soopa doopa! I tell thee, it's proper bo!
I made this discovery last night, after our house Big Lebowski night. The BL is a Cohen brother's film, (I think one of their best, perhaps alongside O Brother, Where Art Thou?), about an easy going guy called the Dude. The Dude's rug is micturated upon by some hoodlums who mistake him for someone else and, well, the tale goes on from there...! The object of a BL night is to drink a White Russian, (vodka, Kahlua and milk), every time that the Dude has one. This is evil, for the Dude drinks rather a lot. So anyway, the BL session was followed by some Bo Selecta! watching, which capped off a great night. I think I was due a night of sheer excess after a 4am stint finishing my finals essay Wednesday night, followed by 5 hours sleep and a trip to London for my job application exam thingy. By the time I finally handed in my essay on Friday, I was absolutely shot! I was fairly pleased with it though - I ended up making a claim that I have not seen anywhere else: that the conditions for the truth-aptitude of a sentence may be context-sensitive. Hopefully it will go down well in the department...
I'm shortly off out to fraternise with my fellow Valentineless Bristolians. However, I need to be in bed in time to ensure that I get enough sleep to be on good form for Arsenal's FA Cup match against Chelsea tomorrow!! Can't wait - my Gunners shirt is on the back of my chair in anticipation. Glory glory Arsenal.......
posted by Will at 6:59 PM
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
We like the moon
Just in case some of you have not seen, and learned to love, Spongmonkeys, check out the We Like the Moon song. Not for the faint-hearted, mind you.
posted by Will at 6:29 PM
Contextualism and Degree Modifiers
There's an interesting debate going on over at Matt Weiner's blog about a problem for contextualism. The problem is that 'knows' does not seem to admit of degree modification, such as might be exhibited in statements such as 'S knows that p better than he knows that q'. These sorts of claims seem fairly unnatural; or so the argument goes. Might be worth taking a look.
posted by Will at 2:36 PM
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Means-Tested Fines
Today in Finland a millionaire was fined £116,000 after being caught driving at twice the speed limit. This is due to Finland's policy of means-tested fining. That's over 6 times the average salary in Britain for one speeding ticket! If we had adopted this system, I wonder how much Cherie Blair would have been fined for 'forgetting' to buy that train ticket....
posted by Will at 7:10 PM
Monday, February 09, 2004
Radiohead and Conceptual Analysis
Radiohead are awesome! I just got hold of Hail to the Thief, which has been on repeat on Winamp for most of the day. Radiohead come from my hometown of Oxford, so I suppose that this makes me awesome by proxy. I see no flaw in that reasoning. HTTT won a Grammy for best engineered album last night - nice to see the album getting some recognition! Radiohead also have a great reputation on the jazz scene. Brad Mehldau is a notable lauder. (Is that even a word?!) Mehldau has done jazz instrumental covers of Exit Music (OK Computer) and Everything in its Right Place (Kid A). Groovy.
So today I was reading a paper by Frank Jackson, Graham Oppy and Michael Smith called Minimalism and Truth Aptness. Jackson and Smith are Canberra people - Jeremy Smith (son) is a buddy of mine and has been known to comment on Badgerous. Anyway, this paper really got me thinking about philosophical method, what constitutes a viable philosophical enquiry or analysis, and so on. In sum, What is it that philosophers do? I've always wished I had a neat response to this question - I seem to encounter it on a weekly basis, usually with an element of implied cynicism. But then I suppose philosophers do tend to keep themselves to themselves somewhat, so no wonder the public at large is pretty lost as to what philosophy is, does, aims at etc.
So, I suppose I'll have a (naive, probably flat footed) stab at answering the question.
Jackson is probably one of the most notable defenders of a philosophical methodology called 'conceptual analysis'. The 'analysis' bit tells a historical story: modern Western philosophy post-Frege is often called 'analytic philosophy', due to its emphasis on analyses. For Frege, the analyses in question were logical: he sought to translate seemingly problematic sentences about numbers and non-existing entites, for instance, by representing their content in a logical form and and then show how their troubling nature could be removed once this true underlying form had been revealed. So, for instance, Frege thought that a sentence such as 'Santa Claus does not exist' poses a problem for us, insofar as we see it as a subject-predicate sentence; for how could it be that the property of non-existence is predicated of Santa Claus? Surely a thing must exist in order for it to bear properties. This has been called the 'paradox of non-existence'. Frege's solution was to analyse the sentence, not into subject-predicate form, but into a logical system whereby the linguistic role played by 'exists' is captured by a non-predicative operator: the existential quantifier. This avoids the problem of having to predicate a property of a non-existent thing.
So, anyway: Frege was into logical analyses. Lots of people following Frege thought that revealing the logic of sentences and concepts (such as EXISTENCE, PROPER NAME, NUMBER and so on) would pave the way to philosophical nirvana.
Against this tradition, we find the later Wittgenstein, who largely repudiated logical analyses of the above sort. Whereas a Fregean would seek the one true logical representation of a natural language sentence, Wittgenstein stressed that natural language does not fit so easily into a formal mould. The massive variety of uses that we make of words, Wittgenstein argues, precludes the possibility that any defintive account of their underlying form could be given. Rather than seek theoretical, logical explanations of the functioning of natural languages, we ought only to describe the features that we see before us. So, this is perhaps not so much analytic as descriptive philosophy. (A massive simplification, but let it suffice!)
In many respects, I think that Jackson's method of conceptual analysis draws on aspects of both Fregean and Wittgensteinian methodology. Jackson defends the core Fregean notion of analyticity, whereby certain things are true purely in virtue of the laws of logic, or 'in virtue of meaning/definitions alone'. However, he seems to hold the view that our best way of accessing such truths, of seeking out the true nature of our concepts, is to try to make clear 'folk intuitions' or 'platitudes' that surround the concept. So, it would be a viable part of an analysis of the concept TRUTH, for instance, to summarise the folk truths that are associated with the concept. In this way, then, conceptual analysis is descriptive: it 'leaves things as we (the folk) find them'.
So, what do philosophers do, then? Well, by this view, they seek to analyse concepts. This involves seeking out truths that characterise the folk's view of the concept. It also involves seeking theoretical formalisations of concepts, which may involve logical analyses of them. However, any logical formalisation should be informed by folk platitudes, such that intuitions regarding the concept are not violated by formal representations. What, then, do the folk think about JUSTICE, CONSCIOUSNESS, TRUTH, KNOWLEDGE, and so on? Can we uncover truths that are analytic, that is necessary and logical in nature, that can help us to understand the concept? Can we formalise these truths to constitute a theory, the philosophically best explanation of all the truths that we uncover in our analysis? If so, then we're doing philosophy pretty well.
So, today I was alerted to the art of Googlewhacking by my housemate Sam. Googlewhacking was made famous by comedian Dave Gorman, who wrote a book about travelling around the world to meet all those whose sites he had Googlewhacked. But what is it?!, I hear you cry. To successfully Googlewhack, one must find two terms that, when entered into the Google search engine, yield just one search result. Both terms must be in the Google dictionary and the site matched must not be a glossary, random list of words etc.
My first ever Googlewhack was 'philosophizing gustation', (click on the link to see the site that matched those terms. It was about a sceptical approach to religion, which I suppose is fairly apposite).
However, I sooooo nearly got a Googlewhack with 'soliloquising badgers', which would have been too good to be true, given the name and nature of this site... I did only get one site matching that coupling, but Google, (gits), did not have the -sing variation of soliloquizing in their rubbish rubbish dictionary, so it failed to class as a bona fide Googlewhack. It was in the OED though!!! I feel fairly aggrieved at that, I must say.
Talking of Google, my computer scientist buddy Jonny Henderson, (who plays organ in my Hammond Organ Trio - you can download some of our tracks at his site), told me that blogging has seriously undermined the search system for which Google became famous. Apparently, mass 'noise' from blogs, say, in the event of a large news story, can lead viable news sites to be ranked less highly than blogs on Google search results. Furthermore, due to the number of links that bloggers seem to put on their pages, Google's searching system, (which logs number of links to relevant sites, as well as site content), can hike up blogs on search rankings also. Apparently, all this may lead to Google introducing a search engine just for blogs. I don't know what I think about that yet.
This week is going to be fairly hairy. I must finish my finals essay (5,500 words), by Wednesday in order to prepare for a test that I have to sit for a prospective employer in London on Thursday. It is a 'Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal' test, which involves lots of time-pressured questions about inferences, presuppositions, deduction, interpretation and evaluation of argument. Being a philosopher, this should be eminently doable. In the analytical section of my GRE, (which I took back in the days when I thought I'd apply to American philosophy grad schools this year), I even managed to pin the fallacy of denying the antecedent onto an article about road traffic accidents, which tickled me somewhat. I'm such a moron sometimes. posted by Will at 1:00 AM
Saturday, February 07, 2004
Al Pacino
In preparation for tonight's screening of the much-heralded Angels in America, I thought I'd say a few things about Al Pacino. Last night, perhaps subconsciously/inadvertently warming myself up for Pacino's inevitable gruff growls and high-octane rants, I watched Any Given Sunday, a film about a coach (Pacino) for the beleaguered Miami Sharks American football team, who is going through a mid-life crisis. He ends up enjoying vicarious spiritual enlightenment through the trials and tribulations of a jumped-up rookie quarterback.
So anyway. Pacino has always struck me as something of a one trick pony. He does the grizzly cop/depressed alcoholic divorcee/super-charged streetwise/well disguised sensitivity/could well be dangerous 'thing' all too well. Maybe he's the best actor around in that sort of role. Maybe he defined the role. But I always seem to end up feeling that I've seen it all before. I certainly don't learn anything new about the intricacies of the human condition by watching Pacino reassert his screen presence year after year.
Contrast the 'new' (newer) generation. Edward Norton has played characters as varied as a Nazi gang leader and murderer (American History X) and a schizophrenic travelling salesman (Fight Club). Kevin Spacey has reassessed suburban mediocrity (American Beauty) and our conception of the criminal mastermind (The Usual Suspects). Johnny Depp has epitomised subtlety and loneliness (Edward Scissor Hands) whilst also excelling at portraying the outlandishly comical (Pirates of the Carribean). I could go on.
I love Pacino, but I'd like to see him try something new sometime soon. Although, in saying all that, I haven't seen Angels in America yet, so I'd better issue a clause to release me from commitment to the above.... 'I, Will Davies, am free to deny all knowledge of the above come 12am tonight.' Glory.
posted by Will at 7:54 PM
Pornolizing
My ever-loving sister just told me about pornolizing. After typing in your URL, you are taken to your site, which you find strewn with porno slang. I guess it's testiment to my rather base sense of humour that I found this funny... But hey! Click to see badgerous pornolized. (Please don't click if you are easily offended! Sorry Gran!)
posted by Will at 5:21 PM
Friday, February 06, 2004
Non-cognitivism and priority
Two great philosophy blogs, Thoughts, Arguments and Rants and Opiniatrety have furnished their sites with links to badgerous. Go pay a visit to find out what a real, (as opposed to undergraduate), phil blog looks like. Otherwise, you can stay here and help me with my finals essay.....
I've been thinking hard all day about minimalism, even though my reasoning has been somewhat clouded by the residual champagne in my system from last night... Ended up on Foxy's sofa debating about the nature of pictorial and musical representation until 4am. Gritty. This is what a night of jazz and funk does to a man.
So, I say I've been thinking about minimalism... Really, I got kinda stalled on a question regarding the relative explanatory/analytical priority of certain anti-realist, (specifically, emotivist), theses.
The way I see it, there are 3 key theses:
1. Psychological: moral attitudes are not beliefs, but pro-/con-attitudes.
2. Semantic: expressions of moral attitudes are not truth-apt.
3. Metaphysical: there are no moral facts/properties.
The problem, then, is which of these theses is analytically prior, or, indeed, whether there is any relative priority at all within the emotivist's theory. I was primed to this issue by an interesting paper by John O'Leary-Hawthorne and Huw Price. Here are the arguments that I thought might shift the balance one way or the other.
A. Moore's open question argument, as utilised by Ayer and others, seems to suggest that semantic and metaphysical considerations are prior to psychological considerations. The argument can be taken as a reductio of the view that moral terms refer to properties, that is, it is a reductio of a semantic thesis. Moreover, the conclusion is metaphysical/ontological: that there exist no referents of moral predicates. The only psychological considerations in the argument pertain to linguistic understanding, which does not seem to me to relate to the emotivist thesis that moral attitudes are not beliefs. So, given the lack of moral properties, we can explain why moral attitudes are not beliefs: we cannot represent moral properties because there are none.
B. Given the argument from Hume's theory of motivation, we can deduce that moral attitudes are not beliefs independently of any semantic or metaphysical considerations, (other than those that are assumed in Hume's account of psychology and the modal relations between beliefs and desires). This would seem to suggest that, if we start with Hume, (as many emotivists and non-cognitivists in general seem to), then the psychological thesis will be analytically prior to the other two.
A and B seem to pull in opposite directions, which is what is troubling me. I suppose that we might think that both arguments are relevant to the formulation of emotivism and hence adopt a no priority view. I just don't know.
Task for tomorrow: figure out the details of how the outcome of the priority discussion will affect discussion of minimalism as an option for emotivism.
posted by Will at 8:57 PM
Apologies
Unfortunately, I've had to change comments providers - Commentthis were rubbish and their server kept crashing. With any luck, the new provider will stay online.
This does mean that all of the comments on previous blogs have been lost, but we'll start again anew! No drama, methinks.
posted by Will at 1:22 PM
Minimalism
Today I've been reading about minimalism about truth, the thesis that it is necessary and sufficient for any predicate T to count as a truth predicate that it satisfy the following conditions:
1. That there be an equivalence between assertions of a sentence S and S being presented as true (that is, S being predicated by T).
2. That T satisfy the schema, S is T just in case (iff) S. (There are variations on this schema that we can ignore for now.)
3. That not-S be apt for T-predication if S is apt for T-predication.
4. That T be distinct in linguistic function from 'justified' and other evidentially governed predicates.
5. That tokenings of 'S is T' respect our intuitions regarding S's corresponding to some fact in the world.
The next question is, Which statements qualify as apt for T-predication? That is, Which statements might be true or false?
This question is of some relevance, given the discussion (Feb 2nd) about realism and anti-realism. The anti-realist about ethics claims that statements such as 'murder is wrong' are not T-apt: they are neither true nor false. We thought that this was a kinda weird position, given the role of such statements in our language, (we seem commonly to use such sentences to express things that we hold as, or believe to be true). So, might minimalism about truth extend to ethical statements? That is, might ethical statements qualify as T-apt?
Say that a sentence S is (minimally) T-apt just in case:
6. S is used assertorically in common discourse, (that is, S is commonly asserted as true).
7. An utterance of sentence S is to be classed as being used assertorically just in case the syntax of the utterance meets certain conditions:
a. S may be negated.
b. S may be taken as the antecedent or consequent in a conditional, (If S, then ...; If ...., then S).
c. S may be the object of some propositional attitude, (I believe that S, I wonder whether S, I hope that S, etc.)
and just in case S features in rule-governed patterns of usage, whereby standards/norms of correctness and incorrectness are applicable.
So, the argument might go, ethical statements meet conditions 6 and 7 and hence qualify as T-apt. (Ethical statements are used assertorically, may be negated, used in conditional arguments, taken as the object of propositional attitudes, and are governed by norms of correctness in their usage.) Thus, anti-realism is false: ethical statements are T-apt.
Questions to consider tomorrow:
Q1. How far should we take the syntax of natural language expressions to reveal their aptitude for semantic evaluation?
Q2. Do standards of correctness/incorrectness qua rule-governed usage imply T-aptitude? Might we think that certain utterances are rule-governed and yet not T-apt?
Q3. Why should logical embeddability (as in negations, conditionals, etc.) imply T-aptitude? In sentences about borderline cases of vague concepts, such as S*: 'Borderline Freddy is bald', we can quite comfortably concede that S* can be negated, placed in conditionals, etc, and yet maintain that S* may not have a truth value. Does minimalism hence presuppose bivalence? (Read Horwich on T-value gaps.)
The Value of Blogging, Comediennes and Poncey Bars
You know, I've long been unsure about the academic value of blogging - at the very least, I had no prentensions that Badgerous would be of any great value in this respect. But just yesterday I had a lecture on contextualism in which my favourite philosophy blog, Thoughts, Arguments and Rants, (run by Brian Weatherson, an Australian philosopher, which is always reassuring!), was referenced on our course hand-out. Brian had given a variation on a famous case in favour of contextualism about knowledge, which sought to show that perhaps things were not as groovy as first thought. I thought that it was great that our course tutor had pointed us towards such an 'untraditional' source. Things are moving forward, people.
I guess, if one had thought about the importance to academic progress of debates in seminars and in question periods post-lectures, the value of blogging should have seemed obvious. So long as one can assure a reasonably philosophically competent readership, the comments on blogs should serve a similar purpose: to allow large-scale discussion of an issue, without the restrictions and precautions that one might take in publishing a paper.
On a lighter note, I went to see my friend John do a stand-up comedy gig last night. He was compere for a comedy night at a local pub/hotel, so I went along with about 10 others to support him. The headline act, however, was a comedienne from London and, I'm sorry to say it, but, she just wasn't funny. At all.
Speaking to John afterwards, we tried to think of reasons why it is so uncommon to find a genuinely funny comedienne on the circuit, whereas there seem to be plenty of above-average male acts out there. Perhaps this is to do with lack of opportunities for women to get into comedy, maybe due to the fact that the comedy scene is pretty male dominated at the moment. This might lead to a lack of gig practice, mentorship and perhaps even a lack of other female inspiration for new material.
Sure, there are counterexamples: on TV, we have Jo Brand, Victoria Wood, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, the successful all-female comedy show Smack the Pony and others. But I think that, when it comes to club comedy, local circuits and such like, the lack is more pronounced. I'd be interested to hear people's experiences - maybe someone can prove me wrong!
After the comedy, I went to the opening night for a new student night at a local nightclub/bar. It had been, up until yesterday, a members only joint, so we were supposed to feel 'privileged' at having the opportunity to go there. Well, I did not feel privileged at all. The place was poorly decorated, outlandishly expensive and full of posers, modelling the latest fashions-as-dictated-by-FACE-magazine. To be honest, I'd rather have a pint of Kroney in my grungey local and play a game of pool in my combats and trainers than pay £3 for a G&T, endure the eye-sore of shoddy plastering and spend the rest of the night wondering who on earth in their right mind could decree wellington boots and mullets to be fashionable. In saying that, however, I did get in free, so not a complete loss.
posted by Will at 4:28 PM
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
Mighty Wind and Jazz
Just a quick blog today - I have to get to a lecture on Contextualism.
So yesterday I saw a great film directed by Christopher Guest of the Spinal Tap fame. It was called Mighty Wind and was about a reunion concert for loads of folk musicians from the 60's and 70's. It was absolutely hilarious!! One of my fave bits was a spiritual ceremony performed by a husband and wife pair of musicians, worshipping their 'unusual Deity': COLOUR. Bizarre. The great thing was that all of their clothes clashed really badly: you'd think that their Deity would look out for their colour scheming!
This Thursday is our Jazz Funk Soul night in the Mandela Bar, for all you Bristol peeps. Gig starts at 9pm, featuring the Kevin Figues Quartet. In two weeks, we've got JIM MULLEN coming up to play for us. If you haven't heard Jim, then I recommend you go out and buy one of his albums asap! He's Britain's greatest guitarist.
There was some excellent blogging yesterday on moral facts, truth and such like - I'm really pretty chuffed that people are taking this site on! I must say, it helped me clarify a few of my own thoughts on the matter - I've even had one idea for my finals essay born out of that discussion!
posted by Will at 12:19 PM
Monday, February 02, 2004
Truth and the Oscars
Today I'm going to be thinking about truth. Pretty heavy for a Monday, really. My question is, what, if anything, makes statements like 'murder is wrong' true or false?
For statements like 'water is H2O', or 'the Patriots won the Superbowl', the truth-maker is surely some fact or state of the world: the chemical property had by water molecules and the final score of the American Football game last night. But what about moral statements? There do not seem to be any properties of the world that make something right or wrong, good or bad; at least, not as one might discover under the microscope or by some other empirical analysis. There is no science of ethics.
Some people, (called Realists), think that there are actually moral facts. Given the lack of any likely candidates for moral properties in the natural sciences, the Realist will tend to say that moral facts are closely related to other, scientifically viable properties. They will try to analyse or explain moral properties in terms of these latter properties.
Others, (Anti-Realists), disagree. However, it is then up to them to explain how moral claims might be true or false; for they deny that there are any truth-makers for such claims. Some bite the bullet and deny that statements such as 'murder is wrong' can be either true or false. This is my problem: we certainly ordinarily use such sentences to express things that we hold as true, so are we just wrong in talking in this way? Or can we account for the use of such sentences in moral discourse in some other way, which will not commit us to the reality of moral properties?
This topic carries over into other areas of value-judgement, for instance, in the arts. So, an analogous question would be, What makes the statement 'City of God is a great film' true or false?
In fact, I think this is a really important question. If we hold, in some sort of Anti-Realist way, that 'City of God is a great film' is neither true nor false, then how can I be justified in thinking that the film should win the best director Oscar, (which it surely should!)?
In saying that, however, I do not deny that LOTR III has to be acknowledged somewhere in the Oscars. I think that it should get best film: I mean, has anyone ever seen a film better than LOTR III?! However, I think that S. Coppola's Lost in Translation is going to be a fierce rival in both the film and director categories. I found LIT almost too melancholy, but certainly visually stunning.
posted by Will at 11:50 AM
Sunday, February 01, 2004
Welcome! I decided to set up badgerous as a means of keeping friends together, exchanging ideas and general miscellany. Hope it works....
This week has been pretty cool. I went out on Friday for my housemate Sam's 21st - Pizza Express followed by some heady boozing at Warehouse. For his present, my housemate Will and I sponsored an otter at London Zoo. It's a great system they have set up there - £45 gets you a 'share' of any animal... although they don't tell you exactly which part of the animal is yours... curious.
I'm writing a finals essay on metaethics this week. It's all about the truth-conditions of ethical/moral statements, such as 'lying is wrong', 'benevolence is praiseworthy', and so on. You can check out an introductory article on the topic here.
Well gang, I'll hope to see some posts up here in the near future!!
posted by Will at 1:40 PM
About Me My name is Will Davies and I am a graduate in philosophy from the University of Bristol in the UK. Here's a pic of me with philosopher Frank Jackson. From September, I shall be on the graduate training scheme at Bechtel Corporation. You can view my profile here.
