December 2011
21 posts
11 tags
P or not-P
The past few days has seen an interesting discussion emerge on the Foundations of Mathematics listserv (FOM), which grew out of link to a recent article by Frank Quinn in Notices of the AMS, “A Revolution in Mathematics? What Really Happened a Century Ago and Why It Matters Today.”
Quinn’s article highlighted the role of the Law of the Excluded Middle (also known as tertium...
8 tags
Sir Michael Dummett obituary →
Sir Michael Dummett has died at the age of 86 on 27 December 2011. He was one of the most renowned philosophers of his generation. He sometimes characterized late-twentieth century analytical philosophy as Post-Fregean philosophy, and although he wrote voluminously about Frege and acknowledged the obvious influence, Dummett’s own philosophy diverged considerably from Frege’s...
7 tags
A Point of View: The endless obsession with what... →
I could be charitable and say that it is “interesting” when a news outlet attempts to promote more substantial fare, and one ought of course to encourage rather than discourage such efforts. After all, Ortega y Gasset published many of his writings in newspapers before they were repackaged as books. A hundred years ago that was a lot like bloggers today repackaging their posts as...
16 tags
A Thought Experiment in Tyranny
Here’s another political thought experiment:
Suppose that you faced a forced choice between two forms of tyranny, and that you had to choose at least one (and at most one) form of tyrannical government from the two alternatives: 1) a tyrannical government derived from local peoples and local institutions, or what we may call a local tyranny, or 2) a tyrannical government not derived from...
4 tags
Of Tough and Tender Minds
William James famously made a distinction between “tough minded” and “tender minded” persons. In his lectures on pragmatism, he laid it out schematically like this:
The Tender-Minded
Rationalistic (going by ’principles’),
Intellectualistic,
Idealistic,
Optimistic,
Religious,
Free-willist,
Monistic,
Dogmatical.
The Tough-Minded
Empiricist (going by...
5 tags
The man who saved The Resurrection →
This BBC article by Tim Butcher is about a young soldier whose decision not to fire his company’s artillery may have saved one of the greatest paintings in Western art history, The Resurrection fresco by Piero della Francesca.
This reminded me of another story of another young man who had traveled to Kyoto as a student, and who happened to be present when its bombing was being contemplated....
4 tags
The End of the Chinese Dream →
Social Mobility (or the lack thereof) in China
This Foreign Policy magazine story about growing discontent in China over the income gap between rich and poor and increasing class stratification is interesting in many ways. The problems of ordinary “working class” Chinese described in the article sound very much like the discontents of the “Occupy” protesters in western...
5 tags
The vicious delight in their viciousness
Truly vicious individuals seek plausible deniability for their viciousness as consciously as self-seeking politicians seek plausible deniability for decisions they know to be controversial but which they nevertheless judge to be politically expedient. (The politician is a pragmatic deconstructionist, engaging in acting under erasure, as the deconstructionist engages in writing under erasure.)
The...
8 tags
The Iraq War: Recollections →
Yesterday I tweeted the link to these eight recollections of the Iraq war presented by George Friedman of Strategic Forecasting, which has apparently hired a lot of Iraq War veterans. The literature on the experience and the lessons of Iraq will continue to grow in the coming years. It will be a measure of the relative intelligence to US military institutions as to how many of the lessons will be...
5 tags
Language and Human Interest
There is a well known story that the languages of the peoples of the far north have a great many terms for snow. I discussed this some time ago in a post on my other blog, Oregon Rain, where I also cited the Wikipedia article Eskimo words for snow. This claim is now considered to be problematic, though it remains interesting as a concrete application of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
I once pointed...
7 tags
Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Time
The foundations of later ages of history are laid down in the height of a present age, at a time when the eclipse of that present age by ages yet to come is as unimaginable as the nature and character of the ages that will eventually replace it.
The present was implicit within the past just as it contains the incipient future, and that future will, in its turn, incubate a further future.
There...
4 tags
Lockheed Martin rolls-out final F-22 Raptor →
The final F-22 has been built, topping the number of the world’s first fifth generation fight at 187. The production line is shut down, and its presumptive successor, the F-35, is already referred to in the press as a “troubled program.”
I have argued that the F-22 is a superior airframe to that of the F-35 (Settling for Second Best), although the F-35 unquestionable possesses...
6 tags
A principle, its limitations, and its lesson
The Principle:
The mediocre man believes that participation, engagement, and involvement are prerequisites — necessary conditions — of knowledge and understanding.
To be sure, knowledge and understanding may be the result of personal involvement with a given truth, but just as there is no guarantee that an involved party will derive the knowledge implicit through personal involvement...
4 tags
A Thought on Nerds
As of this writing, there are 319 definitions of “nerd” at Urban Dictionary. These definitions run the gamut from adulatory to insulting. The number one Urban Dictionary definition of “nerd” is “One whose IQ exceeds his weight.”
Like the term “impressionist,” which was introduced as an insult but was eventually adopted into general use without a...
7 tags
An Horrific Thought Experiment
What is the difference between hope and mere survival? It can be difficult to tell.
Suppose you let an individual get a good grip on bar, and then hung them out over a pit of crocodiles or sharks or something similarly hungry and flesh-eating. Suppose, also, you gave this individual no hope, and simply told them that they can hold on as long as they like, but eventually they would fall and be...
7 tags
Spacemen in Uniform
I started reading science fiction novels before I was a teenager, while I was still in grade school. I developed a taste for long novels, to the point that I eschewed short stories and would not be bothered by them. I breezed through Dune while I was still in my pre-teen years. Though I wasn’t as much an enthusiast of fantasy novels, I read the Lord of the Rings novels about the same time....
4 tags
The Tongue of the Other
In science fiction films one often finds the action facilitated by a universal translator that, as if by magic, is able to accurately and instantaneously translate between human and alien languages. Such devices show science fiction at its weakest, invoking a deus ex machina as a plot device — more often, to make a story work that would fail without it.
I have noticed in more recent...
6 tags
The Pacific Theater, Then and Now
Pearl Harbor Day, the Pacific Theater Then
Today is the anniversary of Japan’s attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor. We remember the attack and the lives lost, we remember the war that followed, but much beyond this general outline is generally known only to specialists in military history.
From a tactical standpoint, the attack was a spectacular success. Surprise was nearly...
5 tags
Kepler 22-b: Earth-like planet confirmed →
It has been said that good planets are hard to find. This is true, but we are slowly getting a little better at it. Good planets are still hard to find, expensive to find, and hard to reach, but now we know that, about 600 light years away from us, there is a good candidate for an “earth twin.” That is to say, we know that there is a smallish, rocky planet orbiting an ordinary star in...
8 tags
Dialectic of the Infinite
The Greek Thesis
It is well known that, for the Greeks, perfection was a finite good. Perfection was a function of delimitation. The Greeks made a distinction between peras (πέρας, the limited, bounded, and definite) and apeiron (ἄπειρον, the unlimited, unbounded, and indefinite), with the clear moral connotation that The Good belonged to peras and all deviance (recalling that, for the Greeks,...
6 tags
What's with the attitude?
Twenty years ago there was a well-intentioned but feeble campaign to try to get New Yorkers to be a little less rude in their daily interactions with others. This was called, “Lighten up New York,” and it predictably didn’t make much of an impact. New Yorkers are routinely rude, and are well known for this. Some probably take pride in it. Perverse pride is human, all-too-human....