23 Tuesday Sep 2014
Posted in cats, Personal History
So, it turns out, my cat is dying.
This isn’t big in the way of surprises – he’s 18 years old – but it is hard nonetheless: I’ve known him for 17 of those years, and he’s been my companion for 16. There aren’t many people I’ve known as long, and I include on this list most of my family. (We’d been cheerfully estranged for many years, then started reconnecting for various reasons, with the final train-wreck coming in the form of FaceBook. Classic “don’t do it, wuss.”)
15 Monday Sep 2014
Posted in Critical Thinking, General Philosophy, Objective Morality
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Are there such things as “objective values”? That is, are there values that have a claim to objective reality in much the same way as the laws of physics? Or are all value claims subjective, nothing more than a matter of personal taste and desire, without any special reference to what is real beyond the fact of the desire?
Caution needs to be exercised here, as the framing of the questions above pose a false dichotomy. In addition, asking about objective values is a different question from that regarding the existence of objective morality. Values can be morally neutral, whereas morals are a very definite sub-collection of values. It is possible that some values might be objectively real (chocolate is objectively yummy not because we like it, but because it is just the best thing in the world), without ever entailing (in the logical sense of formal implication at the deepest levels of meaning) that any objectively real morals exist. Conversely, there can be objectively real moral values which nevertheless offer no further implications to the full range of other values, or even to other putative moral values. The relations involved are not simple ones, and do not involve set-theoretic/mereological containments (A is a smaller part of B) nor any necessarily transitive implications (that is, A implies B, and B implies C, therefore A implies C.) Connections – insofar as they exist at all – are “thin,” and can fade with the (metaphorical) “distance” between acts of evaluations, intentions, meanings, and values themselves.
06 Saturday Sep 2014
Posted in General Philosophy, Politics
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I am not an economist, nor do I play one on TV. (This might be a good thing – the not being an economist, I mean; the TV thing is just an habitual sop to the argumentum ad vericundiam.) Legitimate expertise is the kind of thing one ought take seriously while, at the same time, false authority needs to be viewed with the deepest skepticism only when it is not dismissed out of hand as fatuous twaddle. I actually do have a little bit of legitimate expertise when it comes to economic theory, but I would be very hard pressed to demonstrate this point to you beyond the act of simply demonstrating it, which I will do below. Rather than attempt to provide embedded links, I’ll offer sources for further reading at the end of my remarks.
Economists in the formal sense – that is, persons with advanced degrees in the subject – tend (in my extremely unscientific and aggressively biased opinion) to be, on the whole, extremely unscientific and aggressively biased. Nowhere in scholarship and academic studies is rampant ideology so un-shame-facedly remunerated as in economics. This is a problem, since it rewards all manner of blatant logical fallacies (confirmation bias, (which is technically a psychological failure of reasoning, rather than a logical one) hasty generalization, sharp-shooter fallacy, for example) and discourages taking actual data seriously. Logic, principles, evidence and facts do not pay as well as major corporations and political parties with agendas to be served. Since no one is paying me for my analyses, I’ll actually risk holding that up as a virtue here. And (for whatever it is worth) I have actually studied the subject a little, little bit. (Bits of this also tie in with my earlier remarks on socialism.)
03 Wednesday Sep 2014
Posted in Critical Thinking, General Philosophy
Making sense of things is a process of variously discovering and applying logical coherence, empirical adequacy and – the hard one – narrative intelligibility. Narrative is the subject of this post.
Narrative is a fancy word for “story telling.” And there is quite a story to tell.
Let us go back a bit, and by “a bit,” I mean before human beings even existed. Why would early hominids ever develop language in the first place? Did it somehow facilitate hunting? Well, other pack hunters like lions, dolphins, and troops of chimpanzees do not seem to suffer from its absence. (The latter group will evidently go out on murder raids against their own kind, again without any assistance from language.) Exactly what information could one convey with language, while hunting, that observation, practice and hand signals could not do better? Just imagine one hunter using language to assist in the hunt: “HEY FRED! CIRCLE AROUND TO THE LEFT! THERE’S A HERD OF ANTELOPE RIGHT OVER TH… oh … Never mind.” As anyone who has ever hunted in any capacity – or merely thought about the subject for an instant – will instantly recognize, stealth is of far greater importance than extended communication.
29 Friday Aug 2014
In making sense of things – of anything, really – there are at least three factors involved: logical coherence, empirical adequacy, and narrative intelligibility. The last item there, “narrative intelligibility,” is the tricky one, and the one that many people tend to forget about. So I will deal with that in a separate post. Not only are logical coherence and empirical adequacy rather more straight forward to deal with, I’ve already said a fair amount bout about logic as such and about methods of formal analysis in previous posts. Still, it would be worth while to say a few words about what is meant by “coherence” before addressing the topic of empirical adequacy.
“Coherence” is a fairly well-liked word in philosophical circles, but its meaning tends to be given short-shrift especially among logicians. For these latter, “coherence” is often treated as meaning nothing more than formal consistency, which is to say, if “p” is a proposition, then it cannot be the case that both p and not-p are true. While this is a valuable resource in formal arenas and in matters of mathematical proof, it is pretty weak-tea from a more general, philosophical perspective of coherence. Whitehead offers the following characterization:
22 Friday Aug 2014
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algebraic reasoning, Climate change Denial, Critical Thinking, Logic, mathematics, Relational thinking, Statistics
Statistical thinking is one of the most important formal methods of engaging reality available to human beings. Sadly, it is also one of the more difficult, because human beings, in general, have absolutely no intuitive sense regarding probabilistic claims or statistical analyses. The people who do such things – even the ones that do them poorly – only reach such a stage of analysis after a significant amount of disciplined education. For the rest of us (and I must perforce include myself in this list) our statistical guesses only rise to the level of the merely appalling on those rare occasions that they are not completely idiotic. Quite usable texts can be had for the downloading (although the interested reader might consider supporting the Open Intro foundation), but one still requires no small measure of determination to “climb Mount Statistics” on one’s own. It is a challenge I’ve never completed at any substantive level, making this post more than a trifle daunting. However, even lacking any measure of expertise on the subject, there remain a few intelligent things that can be said, even by someone like me.
20 Wednesday Aug 2014
Posted in Personal History, Politics
Canfield Drive is a pretty, residential street. Nestled up against a drainage creek on one side, and the Northland Golf Club on the other, the houses up by the main avenue are older, but well kept and trim. The only clutter in the yards are such toys as one would expect in houses that are homes to families with small children. Further down the narrow, winding lane are relatively new apartment complexes. These are handsomely laid out with carefully manicured yards and balconies, ample parking spaces for the tenants, pleasantly shaded by mature trees all along the way. 
The cars one sees are all in good condition; there are no rusty beaters laying about, but solid, well maintained vehicles.
17 Sunday Aug 2014
Posted in Academia, General Philosophy, Personal History
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This one is rather more personal than most of my entries, so I beg your patience.
The title above is based on a pet saying of a friend of mine; the meaning is a little more complicated than a first reading might suggest.
It has to do with something most of us have witnessed – and many have not only participated in, but actively brought about – when exactly the wrong person, at exactly the wrong time, takes exactly the wrong stand, for exactly the right and noble reasons, all without the slightest hope of “survival,” much less success. (Usually they/we literally survive, but with physical and emotional scars that are added to an already long list.) Witnessing such a train wreck, you say to yourself (because the disaster is too overwhelming to even say it out loud): “Oh dear god; don’t do it wuss …” But you can see that it is already too late; even though it has not yet been done, it certainly is going to be.
13 Wednesday Aug 2014
Posted in Critical Thinking, General Philosophy, Philosophy of Logic
“I’m never going to use that!” Variations of this war cry are frequently lodged in protest against that Torquemada-ish, 7th level of hell known as “high school algebra.” I am inclined to sympathize with this lament, but not for the reasons one might suppose. The problem, you see, lies not in the pragmatics – the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the subject – but rather in the pedagogical techniques and intentions with which it is presented. Algebra, as it is almost universally taught in secondary school, is little more than a peculiarly mangled arithmetic. Algebra as it ought to be taught is relational logic, it is algebraic reasoning.
So what does the above mean?
08 Friday Aug 2014
Posted in Uncategorized
I’ve been away on vacation for the past 8 days, and have nothing substantive to say on my own account. (Don’t worry, that won’t last for long … )
But I thought this might be a good time to mention an upcoming event that is rather near and dear to my heart: the 2015 International Whitehead Conference.
Alfred North Whitehead is, hands down, one of the most important and original thinkers in the entire Western canon. My own not so modest — but, at least, peer-reviewed! — reasoned and researched evaluation of his contributions may be found HERE. (The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an excellent resource, specifically aimed at a non-academic, non-specialist audience. But they do seem to be down for maintenance a great deal of late, especially over the weekends. If you have trouble pulling up the article, I beg your patience and encourage you to come back sometime during the week.)
Cooking up food for thought & Shanarchy. I am a Philosopher, writer, meditation & mindfulness teacher, & artist.
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Loving Wisdom Beyond the Academy
Science, logic, and ethics, from a Whiteheadian Pragmatist perspective (go figure)
THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION 