Annaya
Cedars grow tall on Liban hills,
life beyond grasp of human will;
flame is bright over muddy grave
of a hermit-saint who hid his face;
the heart is kissed by burning light
as cedar soars to sun and sky,
is charged with day without a night,
and burns but is not burned.
The Bacchae
The god of wine and revel
made dizzy the city's prince
and omens darkly muttered
with a strange malevolence.
But the king kept to his folly;
he was slain by the godly bull,
carried home in his mother's arms.
Amen: the gods are cruel.
You are proud in your ways, O mortals!
Better it were to mourn
than to march through mocking streets
to where the beasts are torn.
You are vain with vain cosmetics:
you think to hide your soul;
you boast of civic order
when destruction is your goal.
You speak the name of Justice?
But Justice walks with sword
to slit the throats of mortals
with a fate no charm can ward.
And when your life is over
we will see the path you've trod:
in place of boasted glory
just the mocking of the god.
Intimations
With silver ray the moon now smiles
on leaves that tremble in the wind;
with laughing eye you beam at me
and breathe soft flutters through my heart,
to make me royal here and now,
more blessed than kings imperial.
For in your face I see a life.
It winds its way in front of me
and all of me will flow along
that path into the dancing sea.
No heaven on this earth is found.
No joy will pour in endless rain.
But this a man may have:
to say a word, to keep a word,
to choose a path with living heart,
and, best, to look back at the end
and know he chose the better part.
Dryad
Cast your glance at me, O dryad-nymph!
Let branch and bough and leaf send forth a glimpse
of spirit sighing free like inner breeze
within the living sap of oaken tree.
Let smiles like the sun's rays on your leaves
shine forth to light the day, and pleasures keep
in store for me along this way my life has made,
that I may rest and stay beneath your shade.
Saturday, June 09, 2012
Dashed Off
As usual, just putting some of my dashed-off notes up. Use with caution.
Since art does not require deliberation, deliberation is not required for having ends.
Contempt is a weakness in the contemner.
Laughter is the diamond in the crown of reason.
It is corrosive to demand apology when only concession is required.
A funeral should provide the fitting closure to a journey by being a thanksgiving for the sharing of a life and a remembrance that our lives in coming to an end show their substance and weight.
Music paints pictures of motions by representing rises and falls, slides and steps and soars, shades of force and textures of sound. To some extent these are conventional -- what in one culture is seen as the ascent of a scale may in another be seen as the descent of a scale -- but this is true of painting as well.
The adaptation of the changing condition of humanity to the gospel is always needed in every age of the world.
Irrational natural explanations are no less irrational for being natural.
Much nonsense has been written about evolution that treats it as a single kind of change when it manifestly is not.
Asserting the same thing in two different ways can be a very useful thing to do.
how to assess extraordinary evidence -- anything assessible like ordinary evidence is ordinary evidence
free choice as a necessary precondtiion of rational evaluation
the rational choreography of a Platonic dialogue
There are two kinds of epiphany. Some people are like the shepherds at night, taken by surprise, or a-sudden. But others are like the Magi, thinking through their destination and the way to it, having to find their way by reason and advice. But both have their epiphany.
The historical record has large holes to hide things in; even our best such records can miss extraordinary things, as we have sometimes found by new discovery.
Excessive focus on tiny strands of argument is a common weakness in philosophical reasoning; one learns much from such focus, but not all reasoning is wisely treated as a mere aggregate of little bits.
teaching as casting one's bread upon the water
Teachers are facilitators and catalysts: they simplify and accelerate the process of learning. But for the same reason they have limited effect on the essentials of learning.
We cannot account for the actual as we find it without considering the actual as also potential.
Practicing law is like engineering with an incomplete, and sometimes unstable, physics.
The only hopeless students are the ones who run away.
associative chains as inference facilitators
Love in the will activates or energizes love in the passions; but other things influence the passions as well.
Wars are often lost in their first conception.
HADD accounts of religion presuppose that agency is not conceptually confined to the ordinary agents of our experience, but that it admits of much, much wider possible extension.
To consider & test: Defenders of well-entrenched philosophical positions are more likely to argue for stalemate, rather than victory, in their defenses.
All divine attributes are essentially divine.
The inability to handle situations involving ambiguity is a sign of logical frailty, not logical strength.
philosophical argument as position play (go)
People often talk about entitlement when all they have established is need or prudence.
In politics rewards are often leashes.
Necessity has no slippery slope.
There are two kinds of verbal dispute: practical disputes about stipulation and theoretical disputes about classification. Neither is automatically silly or pointless; what is silly or pointless is to treat one as if it were the other.
We cannot adequately contextualize historical events unless we think in grand sweeps as well as in precise details.
The construction of arguments is precision work.
urgency, impact, and trend of philosophical problems
Intellectuals too often forget the distinction between their private interests and the interests of intellectual life itself.
crafts of a free people
the Allegory of the Cave as a transcendental deduction of the Good
liturgical refreshment of senses
Too little of what passes for critical thinking is concerned with means-end reasoning.
but-for causation
The best action movies work by focusing on the aesthetics of daring -- one notices that clear failures are the ones that either lose a grasp on daring entirely -- nothing is really dared, or, at least, nothing is felt to be so -- or subordinate it to non-daring-related spectacle, not as a respite or refreshment, but on a large scale.
Lv 19:19 as a figure for not mixing the covenant of God with other things, or for carefully distinguishing what pertains to each law ("Keeping statues")
Bene docet qui bene distinguit.
cascade failures in argument
argument weakening
(1) by modal subalternation
(2) by quantitative subalternation
(3) by terminal qualification
(4) by qualititative qualification
(5) by inferential qualification
It is better to speak of hard fortune than bad fortune, hard luck than bad luck, for it is always by its nature merely a difficult opportunity.
It is fortitude that makes it possible for anger to become an instrument of reason.
Antecedent credibility establishes suitability for being a provisional hypothesis.
Pursuit of the pleasant or pleasing is not the same as pursuit of pleasure.
economy, decorum, & equity as principles of politics and governance
Grace perfects nature, but here we must be careful. For grace perfects nature not necessarily according to natural ends but according to ends beyond natural ends, namely, divine ends. Grace perfects nature by preparing it for the transfiguration of glory.
Questions are only as simple as their context.
There are many different kinds of persuasion; arguments in particular can have several distinct persuasive functions.
The primary purpose of experimental controls is to increase the salience of desired information.
We can see Godel as having set up, indirectly, a hierarchy of intellectual risk for mathematical systems.
Natural selection can get no closer to belief as such than value/referent structure-types.
Debunking arguments are causal arguments.
mere hesitancy vs judicious suspense
Danger is an aesthetic concept.
oppression as the fruit of imprudence Pr 28:16
It is possible to aestheticize or ethicize any natural statement simply by adding a relevant modality.
faith as extending the horizon of reason, or rather rational certainty
mere conjunction vs. conjunction in the idea of a whole
petitio principii, ignoratio elenchi, etc. all have counterparts in defining -- fallacies of definition
dominance and submission symbolisms in philosophical argument -- these become mroe extensive and more easily identifiable in the modern period
We live our lives according to the audience we think we have, within the limits of memory.
Sometimes a more inaccurate model will allow for more fruitful lines of research.
the duty of practices of joy
Long chances may win long games.
Confirmation is always with respect to a context.
the sheaf of middle terms in a conclusion
liturgy as a source of richness of life
Demonstrations rise like spires from a seething sea of dialectical negotiations.
The faithful hold their bishops to the faith as will moves reason to believe.
Selection-based accounts of functions are only viable if they work by restricting possible functions rather than by positing functional ends.
the circulatory system of the Church: missionary travel and epistolary correspondence
Long after moral truths are no longer understood, cargo cult imitations of morality will endure.
Contrastive explanations are implicitly reduplicative.
If integrity is a good, there are sins against oneself that harm only oneself.
We can make sense of sins against oneself whether we are utilitarian, Kantian, or Aristotelian.
the need for hortatory institutions, especially in democratic societies
The decisions of courts need to be as predictable as the need for ingenuity in the face of the new can allow, so that citizens may take this into account.
contrastive explanation & final causes
All great ideas take years to develop.
ideational drift & the loss of learning
justification as grounding
justification as accounting
justification as rectifying
The thing about leaping to conclusions is that you can always recover from it.
"A quest is always an education both as to the character of that which is sought and in self-knowledge." MacIntyre
entitlements: right, desert, title
Avoiding proximate occasions of sin requires not just evasion but also development of the habitudes that make them no longer proximate occasions of sin.
It is notable that so much of the Matter of Britain is French and that so much of the Matter of France is Italian.
While you can standardize competence, you can only inspire excellence.
questions as imperatives
mass as an activity of a body
Statistics is the study of nomologies and anomalies in collections of measurements.
a fortiori by argument weakening
a fortiori by superparity
superparity : parity :: ≥ : =
(1) reality of the world
(2) intelligibility of the world
(3) real definition
(4) natural classification
Cumulative experience allows recognition; recognition allows insight.
People have become suspicious of crucial experiments, but they still treat virtually all abstract arguments as if they were supposed to be crucial in exactly the same sense.
Family resemblances can be defined with respect to types.
Disputes in economics are either purely technical or primarily ethical.
good-natured humor as a sign of sanity
the dervishness of life
The Faith is too much to put in a party platform or a social policy.
the Aeneid & the cost and worth of vocation
The Age of Gold is at angles to every present age.
We verify the emotions of others by participation in them.
Fear is less honest in tendency than hope.
on treating 'harm' as a taboo-like concept
The natural ends of work and business are, first, necessity, and, beyond that, creative fruition. Profit, on the other hand, is merely the delight of business, as pleasure is the delight of sex. Whoever is in business to make profit *rather than* to create is a dissolute libertine, and, like all dissolute libertines, will only be preserved from destruction, and the destruction of others, by sheer chance. One may indeed take profit as an end in business, but only as the crown of creation.
The function of an institution in broader society cannot be separated from the justifications it is seen as having.
Satire displays incongruity; hence its associations with humor, since humorous things are in some way incongruous. But the reverse is not true, and sometimes the incongruity is not supposed to induce laughter, but to distress, or to puzzle, or to emphasize, or to make suspicious.
treating laws of nature as a belief revision system for cases of nomological counterfactuals
convenant as mutual law
covenant as law mutually agreed
Remoteness of material cooperation generalizes complicity; proximateness specifies it.
Callicles's attack on philosophers as acting like boys picks up on the childlikeness of philosophical inquiry, its innocence in the use of the question, Why?
inference rules as accessibility relations among propositions
Tolkien's Elves are magical because they make poetry real; they do not merely personify trees in words, they wake the persons in them.
Being human is partly a learned behavior.
Massive complexes of evidence are negotiated by 'feel', that is, by passion and inclination organized by the desire for truth. Such things are handled synoptically.
Conscience cannot be kept private; it tends to the public by nature.
Autonomy is merely a way of talking about authority.
Arguments chiefly change beliefs by shifting sympathies.
It is natural to human beings to embody their beliefs in their material environment; otehrwise the beliefs come to seem tasteless.
utility, loyalty, deference, purity, dignity, and equity as facets of justice
solidarity as a link between dignity and purity -- purity vs complicity
In the last analysis, people must be taken on faith; there is too much of them not to do so.
(1) No consistent distinction can be made between justice by nature & justice by convention.
(2) Any consistent account of the good life includes self-discipline.
(3) True politics makes the people more just.
(4) Injustice is more to be feared than death or suffering.
Peace is a kind of wholeness.
There is no true freedom of worship where there is no freedom to live religiously.
requirements of natural law vs 'aspirations or wishes of natural law' (Maritain)
Socrates's dialectics is a positional game constructed largely by quiet moves.
The architectures of music and language are as important to civilization as those of stone.
Every virtue has a solidarity appropriate to it.
People are more convinced by arguments to which they contribute something than they are by other arguments.
We only love ourselves properly when, loving God, we see ourselves as we are, and all the joy and sorrow of it: icons of God under the shadow of death. And when we love ourselves as such, we finally know what it is to love our neighbor as ourselves; and it is then that the second law is like to the first.
poetic arts of advice & counsel
atheism as larger solipsism (cf. Merleau-Ponty on Malebranche & the cogito)
The political power of the literary is a subtle but constant pressure; like all subtle, constant pressures, it is easy to overlook but can in the long term accomplish extraordinary things.
Rule is more about attracting the wise, the capable, and the noble than about giving commands.
analytic, synthetic, and synoptic approximation
logical, psychological, sociological, and ethical dimensions of the strength of an argument
progress as the opiate of the intelligentsia
Excessive focus on defense immobilizes.
Common good establishes rights in common.
Joy and Sorrow are bound by Light and Glory.
re-enactments of intellectual arguments
causation as a foundational concept of ethics
Hurt feelings are not grounds for exception to laws.
the sense in which learning begins with trust (fides)
the sense in which learning begins with understanding (intelligentia)
the sense in which learning begins with experience (experientia)
The history of philosophy is by its very nature a real -- although imperfect -- dialectic.
The human race working together, or even a fragment of it, has in some ways a less sophisticated cognitive agency than a single human being, but in some ways a more powerful one.
In the moral life, great changes are sometimes needed, but more often subtle refinements are more valuable: delicate detail-work rather than massive reconceivings.
The transfiguration tells us that it is the Son who suffers.
Moriah//Sinai//Tabor
We do not directly study power, whether active or passive; we study it by recognizing a certain unrestrictedness or unlimitedness in the actual.
The first thing a debunking argument must do is avoid debunking itself; and then from then on out it must not add anything that would lead to self-debunking.
Debunking arguments encourage special pleading.
Ethics must deal with the unusual, but it must deal most with the everyday.
The standard of competence for an ethicist is being able to give people ethical guidance for the circumstances under which many people actually live -- having this history, being faced with those choices and problems, having these resources, starting with those institutions and practices.
Even when something is morally permissible, that does not mean it is prudent to do.
Discussions of moral permissibility cannot ignore particulars, for these can affect the permissibility. It matters that this person is doing it, not that; it matters that these are the circumstances, not those.
There is no contextless moral permissibility.
When Kant says that religion is recognition of all duties as divine commands, he means rather that religion is the recognition fo teh fact that such an interpretation of duties is admissible given the character of duty.
Moral law may be complete in itself, but moral action is not until moral law is completely integrated with the conditions of human action.
Infants are communal members (qua wards) of their family and of society at large, not private property of their parents.
Indulgences are penitential practices suitable for substituting for other penitential practices, and certified as such by the Church as extension of its sacramental ministry of reconciliation.
The great sin of the intellectual is to support evil because it is interesting; it is a very great sin.
Exchanges may themselves be gifts.
potential parts of justice and the surplus of gift over exchange
The man who starts with fictions may discover truths, but the man who starts with nothing discovers nothing.
Every proverb is the seed of a story.
Scientific inquiry gets its value more from identifying the potential than from identifying the actual.
Eustathian vs Meletian lines of orthodox response to Arianism
From the distinctions of (1) the same and the different, (2) the actual and the potential, and (3) the consistent and the inconsistent, and these alone, if they can be granted to be actual distinctions of actual relevance to the real world, we can build almost all of classical metaphysics.
Hume's paradoxes in Treatise 1.4.2 shoudl be regarded as closely analogous to ancient Greek paradoxes about change. Indeed, they both are in the one genus of paradoxes of sameness and difference. Take this analogy & run with it.
Proportioning belief to evidence in Hume's account requires restraint of one's passions; any other reading of it is non-Humean.
Pascalian Wagers as arguments that we can and must sometimes proportion belief to practical reasons as well as theoretical reasons (all Wager arguments actually do this for specific domains)
The love of novelty has a worse reputation than it deserves; neither Malebranche nor Hume are fair in their criticisms. It is on strongest ground when it is not used alone; and even when alone it is at least harmless and often mildly beneficial -- if it is moderate. And it is as much an impulse of discovery as surprise or curiosity.
principles of credulity for each kind of inquiry, serving as initiators
principle of credulity for sensation
By testimony society itself becomes a cognitive instrument.
the mythopoetical aspect of scientific theory (verification of likely stories)
Mathematics begins with imagination rather than sense.
Cataphatic theology is recognition; apophatic theology is purification.
The sin of legalism doesn't just involve condemning others unjustly; it also invovles excusing oneself unjustly.
Legalism and anomianism have a sort of symmetry in the vices they feed.
ritual sacrifice the template for moral sacrifice
theodicy & the problem of formulating cases of conscience for God
Memory plays a more important practical role than speculative role, although, of course, our reason and reasoning are always both practical and speculative.
"Every morally obliging authority and force is founded essentially in the light of truth." Rosmini
the circulatory system and immune system as quasi-cognitive subcognitive systems
We must trust in order to learn what is trustworthy.
Future-loss accounts of why murder is wrong reduce murder to theft. This should strike more people as odd than it does. But it raises the question of what you'd get if, holding an account of the wrongness of usury, or lying, or ruthlessness, constant, one assimilated murder to that instead; and also what would happen if theft were instead reduced to murder. Think on these things.
A scold will inevitably be charged with hypocrisy. This will usually be right, but the charge will be made regardless of whether it is.
We experience coherence as a feature of the external world insofar as we experience it having a history.
Understanding based on ridicule is generally illusory.
resentment as a fellow-feeling
Since art does not require deliberation, deliberation is not required for having ends.
Contempt is a weakness in the contemner.
Laughter is the diamond in the crown of reason.
It is corrosive to demand apology when only concession is required.
A funeral should provide the fitting closure to a journey by being a thanksgiving for the sharing of a life and a remembrance that our lives in coming to an end show their substance and weight.
Music paints pictures of motions by representing rises and falls, slides and steps and soars, shades of force and textures of sound. To some extent these are conventional -- what in one culture is seen as the ascent of a scale may in another be seen as the descent of a scale -- but this is true of painting as well.
The adaptation of the changing condition of humanity to the gospel is always needed in every age of the world.
Irrational natural explanations are no less irrational for being natural.
Much nonsense has been written about evolution that treats it as a single kind of change when it manifestly is not.
Asserting the same thing in two different ways can be a very useful thing to do.
how to assess extraordinary evidence -- anything assessible like ordinary evidence is ordinary evidence
free choice as a necessary precondtiion of rational evaluation
the rational choreography of a Platonic dialogue
There are two kinds of epiphany. Some people are like the shepherds at night, taken by surprise, or a-sudden. But others are like the Magi, thinking through their destination and the way to it, having to find their way by reason and advice. But both have their epiphany.
The historical record has large holes to hide things in; even our best such records can miss extraordinary things, as we have sometimes found by new discovery.
Excessive focus on tiny strands of argument is a common weakness in philosophical reasoning; one learns much from such focus, but not all reasoning is wisely treated as a mere aggregate of little bits.
teaching as casting one's bread upon the water
Teachers are facilitators and catalysts: they simplify and accelerate the process of learning. But for the same reason they have limited effect on the essentials of learning.
We cannot account for the actual as we find it without considering the actual as also potential.
Practicing law is like engineering with an incomplete, and sometimes unstable, physics.
The only hopeless students are the ones who run away.
associative chains as inference facilitators
Love in the will activates or energizes love in the passions; but other things influence the passions as well.
Wars are often lost in their first conception.
HADD accounts of religion presuppose that agency is not conceptually confined to the ordinary agents of our experience, but that it admits of much, much wider possible extension.
To consider & test: Defenders of well-entrenched philosophical positions are more likely to argue for stalemate, rather than victory, in their defenses.
All divine attributes are essentially divine.
The inability to handle situations involving ambiguity is a sign of logical frailty, not logical strength.
philosophical argument as position play (go)
People often talk about entitlement when all they have established is need or prudence.
In politics rewards are often leashes.
Necessity has no slippery slope.
There are two kinds of verbal dispute: practical disputes about stipulation and theoretical disputes about classification. Neither is automatically silly or pointless; what is silly or pointless is to treat one as if it were the other.
We cannot adequately contextualize historical events unless we think in grand sweeps as well as in precise details.
The construction of arguments is precision work.
urgency, impact, and trend of philosophical problems
Intellectuals too often forget the distinction between their private interests and the interests of intellectual life itself.
crafts of a free people
the Allegory of the Cave as a transcendental deduction of the Good
liturgical refreshment of senses
Too little of what passes for critical thinking is concerned with means-end reasoning.
but-for causation
The best action movies work by focusing on the aesthetics of daring -- one notices that clear failures are the ones that either lose a grasp on daring entirely -- nothing is really dared, or, at least, nothing is felt to be so -- or subordinate it to non-daring-related spectacle, not as a respite or refreshment, but on a large scale.
Lv 19:19 as a figure for not mixing the covenant of God with other things, or for carefully distinguishing what pertains to each law ("Keeping statues")
Bene docet qui bene distinguit.
cascade failures in argument
argument weakening
(1) by modal subalternation
(2) by quantitative subalternation
(3) by terminal qualification
(4) by qualititative qualification
(5) by inferential qualification
It is better to speak of hard fortune than bad fortune, hard luck than bad luck, for it is always by its nature merely a difficult opportunity.
It is fortitude that makes it possible for anger to become an instrument of reason.
Antecedent credibility establishes suitability for being a provisional hypothesis.
Pursuit of the pleasant or pleasing is not the same as pursuit of pleasure.
economy, decorum, & equity as principles of politics and governance
Grace perfects nature, but here we must be careful. For grace perfects nature not necessarily according to natural ends but according to ends beyond natural ends, namely, divine ends. Grace perfects nature by preparing it for the transfiguration of glory.
Questions are only as simple as their context.
There are many different kinds of persuasion; arguments in particular can have several distinct persuasive functions.
The primary purpose of experimental controls is to increase the salience of desired information.
We can see Godel as having set up, indirectly, a hierarchy of intellectual risk for mathematical systems.
Natural selection can get no closer to belief as such than value/referent structure-types.
Debunking arguments are causal arguments.
mere hesitancy vs judicious suspense
Danger is an aesthetic concept.
oppression as the fruit of imprudence Pr 28:16
It is possible to aestheticize or ethicize any natural statement simply by adding a relevant modality.
faith as extending the horizon of reason, or rather rational certainty
mere conjunction vs. conjunction in the idea of a whole
petitio principii, ignoratio elenchi, etc. all have counterparts in defining -- fallacies of definition
dominance and submission symbolisms in philosophical argument -- these become mroe extensive and more easily identifiable in the modern period
We live our lives according to the audience we think we have, within the limits of memory.
Sometimes a more inaccurate model will allow for more fruitful lines of research.
the duty of practices of joy
Long chances may win long games.
Confirmation is always with respect to a context.
the sheaf of middle terms in a conclusion
liturgy as a source of richness of life
Demonstrations rise like spires from a seething sea of dialectical negotiations.
The faithful hold their bishops to the faith as will moves reason to believe.
Selection-based accounts of functions are only viable if they work by restricting possible functions rather than by positing functional ends.
the circulatory system of the Church: missionary travel and epistolary correspondence
Long after moral truths are no longer understood, cargo cult imitations of morality will endure.
Contrastive explanations are implicitly reduplicative.
If integrity is a good, there are sins against oneself that harm only oneself.
We can make sense of sins against oneself whether we are utilitarian, Kantian, or Aristotelian.
the need for hortatory institutions, especially in democratic societies
The decisions of courts need to be as predictable as the need for ingenuity in the face of the new can allow, so that citizens may take this into account.
contrastive explanation & final causes
All great ideas take years to develop.
ideational drift & the loss of learning
justification as grounding
justification as accounting
justification as rectifying
The thing about leaping to conclusions is that you can always recover from it.
"A quest is always an education both as to the character of that which is sought and in self-knowledge." MacIntyre
entitlements: right, desert, title
Avoiding proximate occasions of sin requires not just evasion but also development of the habitudes that make them no longer proximate occasions of sin.
It is notable that so much of the Matter of Britain is French and that so much of the Matter of France is Italian.
While you can standardize competence, you can only inspire excellence.
questions as imperatives
mass as an activity of a body
Statistics is the study of nomologies and anomalies in collections of measurements.
a fortiori by argument weakening
a fortiori by superparity
superparity : parity :: ≥ : =
(1) reality of the world
(2) intelligibility of the world
(3) real definition
(4) natural classification
Cumulative experience allows recognition; recognition allows insight.
People have become suspicious of crucial experiments, but they still treat virtually all abstract arguments as if they were supposed to be crucial in exactly the same sense.
Family resemblances can be defined with respect to types.
Disputes in economics are either purely technical or primarily ethical.
good-natured humor as a sign of sanity
the dervishness of life
The Faith is too much to put in a party platform or a social policy.
the Aeneid & the cost and worth of vocation
The Age of Gold is at angles to every present age.
We verify the emotions of others by participation in them.
Fear is less honest in tendency than hope.
on treating 'harm' as a taboo-like concept
The natural ends of work and business are, first, necessity, and, beyond that, creative fruition. Profit, on the other hand, is merely the delight of business, as pleasure is the delight of sex. Whoever is in business to make profit *rather than* to create is a dissolute libertine, and, like all dissolute libertines, will only be preserved from destruction, and the destruction of others, by sheer chance. One may indeed take profit as an end in business, but only as the crown of creation.
The function of an institution in broader society cannot be separated from the justifications it is seen as having.
Satire displays incongruity; hence its associations with humor, since humorous things are in some way incongruous. But the reverse is not true, and sometimes the incongruity is not supposed to induce laughter, but to distress, or to puzzle, or to emphasize, or to make suspicious.
treating laws of nature as a belief revision system for cases of nomological counterfactuals
convenant as mutual law
covenant as law mutually agreed
Remoteness of material cooperation generalizes complicity; proximateness specifies it.
Callicles's attack on philosophers as acting like boys picks up on the childlikeness of philosophical inquiry, its innocence in the use of the question, Why?
inference rules as accessibility relations among propositions
Tolkien's Elves are magical because they make poetry real; they do not merely personify trees in words, they wake the persons in them.
Being human is partly a learned behavior.
Massive complexes of evidence are negotiated by 'feel', that is, by passion and inclination organized by the desire for truth. Such things are handled synoptically.
Conscience cannot be kept private; it tends to the public by nature.
Autonomy is merely a way of talking about authority.
Arguments chiefly change beliefs by shifting sympathies.
It is natural to human beings to embody their beliefs in their material environment; otehrwise the beliefs come to seem tasteless.
utility, loyalty, deference, purity, dignity, and equity as facets of justice
solidarity as a link between dignity and purity -- purity vs complicity
In the last analysis, people must be taken on faith; there is too much of them not to do so.
(1) No consistent distinction can be made between justice by nature & justice by convention.
(2) Any consistent account of the good life includes self-discipline.
(3) True politics makes the people more just.
(4) Injustice is more to be feared than death or suffering.
Peace is a kind of wholeness.
There is no true freedom of worship where there is no freedom to live religiously.
requirements of natural law vs 'aspirations or wishes of natural law' (Maritain)
Socrates's dialectics is a positional game constructed largely by quiet moves.
The architectures of music and language are as important to civilization as those of stone.
Every virtue has a solidarity appropriate to it.
People are more convinced by arguments to which they contribute something than they are by other arguments.
We only love ourselves properly when, loving God, we see ourselves as we are, and all the joy and sorrow of it: icons of God under the shadow of death. And when we love ourselves as such, we finally know what it is to love our neighbor as ourselves; and it is then that the second law is like to the first.
poetic arts of advice & counsel
atheism as larger solipsism (cf. Merleau-Ponty on Malebranche & the cogito)
The political power of the literary is a subtle but constant pressure; like all subtle, constant pressures, it is easy to overlook but can in the long term accomplish extraordinary things.
Rule is more about attracting the wise, the capable, and the noble than about giving commands.
analytic, synthetic, and synoptic approximation
logical, psychological, sociological, and ethical dimensions of the strength of an argument
progress as the opiate of the intelligentsia
Excessive focus on defense immobilizes.
Common good establishes rights in common.
Joy and Sorrow are bound by Light and Glory.
re-enactments of intellectual arguments
causation as a foundational concept of ethics
Hurt feelings are not grounds for exception to laws.
the sense in which learning begins with trust (fides)
the sense in which learning begins with understanding (intelligentia)
the sense in which learning begins with experience (experientia)
The history of philosophy is by its very nature a real -- although imperfect -- dialectic.
The human race working together, or even a fragment of it, has in some ways a less sophisticated cognitive agency than a single human being, but in some ways a more powerful one.
In the moral life, great changes are sometimes needed, but more often subtle refinements are more valuable: delicate detail-work rather than massive reconceivings.
The transfiguration tells us that it is the Son who suffers.
Moriah//Sinai//Tabor
We do not directly study power, whether active or passive; we study it by recognizing a certain unrestrictedness or unlimitedness in the actual.
The first thing a debunking argument must do is avoid debunking itself; and then from then on out it must not add anything that would lead to self-debunking.
Debunking arguments encourage special pleading.
Ethics must deal with the unusual, but it must deal most with the everyday.
The standard of competence for an ethicist is being able to give people ethical guidance for the circumstances under which many people actually live -- having this history, being faced with those choices and problems, having these resources, starting with those institutions and practices.
Even when something is morally permissible, that does not mean it is prudent to do.
Discussions of moral permissibility cannot ignore particulars, for these can affect the permissibility. It matters that this person is doing it, not that; it matters that these are the circumstances, not those.
There is no contextless moral permissibility.
When Kant says that religion is recognition of all duties as divine commands, he means rather that religion is the recognition fo teh fact that such an interpretation of duties is admissible given the character of duty.
Moral law may be complete in itself, but moral action is not until moral law is completely integrated with the conditions of human action.
Infants are communal members (qua wards) of their family and of society at large, not private property of their parents.
Indulgences are penitential practices suitable for substituting for other penitential practices, and certified as such by the Church as extension of its sacramental ministry of reconciliation.
The great sin of the intellectual is to support evil because it is interesting; it is a very great sin.
Exchanges may themselves be gifts.
potential parts of justice and the surplus of gift over exchange
The man who starts with fictions may discover truths, but the man who starts with nothing discovers nothing.
Every proverb is the seed of a story.
Scientific inquiry gets its value more from identifying the potential than from identifying the actual.
Eustathian vs Meletian lines of orthodox response to Arianism
From the distinctions of (1) the same and the different, (2) the actual and the potential, and (3) the consistent and the inconsistent, and these alone, if they can be granted to be actual distinctions of actual relevance to the real world, we can build almost all of classical metaphysics.
Hume's paradoxes in Treatise 1.4.2 shoudl be regarded as closely analogous to ancient Greek paradoxes about change. Indeed, they both are in the one genus of paradoxes of sameness and difference. Take this analogy & run with it.
Proportioning belief to evidence in Hume's account requires restraint of one's passions; any other reading of it is non-Humean.
Pascalian Wagers as arguments that we can and must sometimes proportion belief to practical reasons as well as theoretical reasons (all Wager arguments actually do this for specific domains)
The love of novelty has a worse reputation than it deserves; neither Malebranche nor Hume are fair in their criticisms. It is on strongest ground when it is not used alone; and even when alone it is at least harmless and often mildly beneficial -- if it is moderate. And it is as much an impulse of discovery as surprise or curiosity.
principles of credulity for each kind of inquiry, serving as initiators
principle of credulity for sensation
By testimony society itself becomes a cognitive instrument.
the mythopoetical aspect of scientific theory (verification of likely stories)
Mathematics begins with imagination rather than sense.
Cataphatic theology is recognition; apophatic theology is purification.
The sin of legalism doesn't just involve condemning others unjustly; it also invovles excusing oneself unjustly.
Legalism and anomianism have a sort of symmetry in the vices they feed.
ritual sacrifice the template for moral sacrifice
theodicy & the problem of formulating cases of conscience for God
Memory plays a more important practical role than speculative role, although, of course, our reason and reasoning are always both practical and speculative.
"Every morally obliging authority and force is founded essentially in the light of truth." Rosmini
the circulatory system and immune system as quasi-cognitive subcognitive systems
We must trust in order to learn what is trustworthy.
Future-loss accounts of why murder is wrong reduce murder to theft. This should strike more people as odd than it does. But it raises the question of what you'd get if, holding an account of the wrongness of usury, or lying, or ruthlessness, constant, one assimilated murder to that instead; and also what would happen if theft were instead reduced to murder. Think on these things.
A scold will inevitably be charged with hypocrisy. This will usually be right, but the charge will be made regardless of whether it is.
We experience coherence as a feature of the external world insofar as we experience it having a history.
Understanding based on ridicule is generally illusory.
resentment as a fellow-feeling
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
Introduction
Opening Passage:
Summary: Death Comes for the Archbishop is the story of Father Jean Marie Latour and his closest friend, Father Joseph Vaillet, as they attempt to revive the old, large, and neglected territory of New Mexico. The story is episodic, consisting of an introductory prologue, from which the above is taken, and nine episodes in the life of Fr. Latour. "Death Comes for the Archbishop" is the name of the last of these episodes, but it makes a fitting title for the whole, as well, because that is very much what this novel is about: from the moment we come into this world death is already coming for us, but in the meantime there are many good and beautiful things to do. Both Latour and Vaillet are well-rounded characters, good men but very human, and they do, indeed, do many good and beautiful things, along with the simple people they have come to serve and guide, but it requires many sacrifices along the way. You feel by the end that you know them well.
The novel is fiction, but Latour is based loosely on the life and history of the French missionary Jean-Baptiste Lamy.
Favorite Passage:
Recommendation: Had I realized the book was this good, I would have read it long ago; those who say it is one of the great American novels are not exaggerating. Filled with lush description and vivid characterization, it makes its mark. Very highly recommended.
Opening Passage:
One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome. The villa was famous for the fine view from its terrace. The hidden garden in which the four men sat at table lay some twenty feet below the south end of this terrace, and was a mere shelf of rock, overhaning a steep declivity planted with vineyards. A flight of stone steps connected it with the promenade above. The table stood in a sanded square, among potted orange and oleander trees, shaded by spreading ilex oaks that grew out of the rocks overhead. Beyond the balustrade was the drop into the air, and far below the landscape stretched soft and undulating; there was nothing to arrest the eye until it reached Rome itself.
Summary: Death Comes for the Archbishop is the story of Father Jean Marie Latour and his closest friend, Father Joseph Vaillet, as they attempt to revive the old, large, and neglected territory of New Mexico. The story is episodic, consisting of an introductory prologue, from which the above is taken, and nine episodes in the life of Fr. Latour. "Death Comes for the Archbishop" is the name of the last of these episodes, but it makes a fitting title for the whole, as well, because that is very much what this novel is about: from the moment we come into this world death is already coming for us, but in the meantime there are many good and beautiful things to do. Both Latour and Vaillet are well-rounded characters, good men but very human, and they do, indeed, do many good and beautiful things, along with the simple people they have come to serve and guide, but it requires many sacrifices along the way. You feel by the end that you know them well.
The novel is fiction, but Latour is based loosely on the life and history of the French missionary Jean-Baptiste Lamy.
Favorite Passage:
"Well, we are getting older, Jean," he said abruptly, after a short silence.
The Bishop smiled. "Ah, yes. We are not young men any more. One of these departures will be the last."
Father Vaillant nodded. "Whenever God wills. I am ready." He rose and began to pace the floor, addressing his friend without looking at him. "But it has not been so bad, Jean? We have done the things we used to plan to do, long ago, when we are Seminarians,--at least some of them. To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that."
Recommendation: Had I realized the book was this good, I would have read it long ago; those who say it is one of the great American novels are not exaggerating. Filled with lush description and vivid characterization, it makes its mark. Very highly recommended.
Friday, June 08, 2012
Argument/Temperament Compatibilities
I've been thinking on and off the past few months about the relation between temperament and assessment of argument. It's a fascinating question, and raises the possibility that there might be arguments that will tend only to appeal to certain kinds of temperaments, regardless of how well the argument is expressed, or assessments of arguments that are heavily affected by temperamental differences.
A good candidate for this sort of thing is the family of ontological arguments. There are several different things that are called 'ontological arguments'. They tend to be well-liked by philosophers for a typically philosophical reason, namely, that most people think they fail but there is no agreement on what is wrong with them. But the other interesting feature of ontological arguments in general is that they tend to appeal to very, very logical people. Indeed, if you like the big champions of various ontological arguments, people like Anselm, or Leibniz, or Godel, you realize very quickly that these are not logical amateurs; they think at a logical level well beyond most people. And while it's purely anecdotal, if you talk to people who reject these arguments, but who do very serious logical work in general and have actually studied them at some length, you can often get stories from them about how at some point, for however brief a period, the ontological argument they were looking at it seemed stunningly, obviously sound. Perhaps it was something they ate, or how much sleep they were getting, but for perhaps just one moment they thought, "Holy moly, it might actually work!" Other people, however, regard them as just obviously not right because they are, for lack of a better phrase, so rational as to be suspiciously like a sleight of hand. Most such people don't really have an especially good reason, and, as I said, one of the things philosophers love about ontological arguments is that everyone comes up with completely different 'obvious' reasons why they won't work, many of which are inconsistent with each other or would have really bizarre consequences for reasoning if actually accepted. So perhaps there is an issue of temperament here: people who have temperamental inclinations to think abstractly will react to the argument differently from those who are temperamentally inclined to think very concretely. And one can imagine that, as there are more cautious thinkers and more bold thinkers, more suspicious thinkers and more generous thinkers, that these temperamental differences in and of themselves, regardless of any other factor relevant to assessing an argument, might sometimes be the full explanation for why people assess a particular argument in different ways.
It really shouldn't be surprising. We know that moral and scholarly habits can affect assessment of arguments, at least at the extremes; honesty, and prudence, and scholarly caution. But if second nature can have such an effect, it's not surprising that first nature would, even if in a rougher and looser way. And if you think about your own reasoning, you don't consider every single argument you come across with the same studiousness; you prioritize, and some arguments simply dismiss as bizarre, and some you tag as interesting and in need of further thought. It's difficult to see how we could do this in a way that temperament wouldn't affect at all. And you've only to look around, if you can't see it in your own case, that a lot of people clearly have a taste for particular kinds or styles of arguments. Likewise, we talk about critical thinking, but critical thinking is just a taste for certain kinds of reasoning, identified as good, over others, identified as bad. That is, all we mean when we talk about it is having good taste in reasoning or avoiding bad taste in reasoning. And taste again, is a kind of second nature, or habit, rooted in first nature, which includes temperament.
I find people tend to worry that this somehow makes the whole act of evaluating arguments irrational, but this doesn't seem to follow. It's certainly not true that all assessment of arguments can be explained by temperament. Temperament is relatively stable, but people shift their positions all the time; temperament is difficult to change, but people can often be persuaded. There are many other factors at work, many of which are quite objective. But it does create the complication that there may be perfectly good arguments for which we have no taste, or which would we would have difficulty accepting simply due to our temperament or personality, and that, likewise, between two people who disagree about whether an argument is a good argument, there might be no difference beyond a difference in taste or natural preference. If so, I don't think this would change a great deal; it would have to be taken into account, but wouldn't require a huge revision in thinking.
A good candidate for this sort of thing is the family of ontological arguments. There are several different things that are called 'ontological arguments'. They tend to be well-liked by philosophers for a typically philosophical reason, namely, that most people think they fail but there is no agreement on what is wrong with them. But the other interesting feature of ontological arguments in general is that they tend to appeal to very, very logical people. Indeed, if you like the big champions of various ontological arguments, people like Anselm, or Leibniz, or Godel, you realize very quickly that these are not logical amateurs; they think at a logical level well beyond most people. And while it's purely anecdotal, if you talk to people who reject these arguments, but who do very serious logical work in general and have actually studied them at some length, you can often get stories from them about how at some point, for however brief a period, the ontological argument they were looking at it seemed stunningly, obviously sound. Perhaps it was something they ate, or how much sleep they were getting, but for perhaps just one moment they thought, "Holy moly, it might actually work!" Other people, however, regard them as just obviously not right because they are, for lack of a better phrase, so rational as to be suspiciously like a sleight of hand. Most such people don't really have an especially good reason, and, as I said, one of the things philosophers love about ontological arguments is that everyone comes up with completely different 'obvious' reasons why they won't work, many of which are inconsistent with each other or would have really bizarre consequences for reasoning if actually accepted. So perhaps there is an issue of temperament here: people who have temperamental inclinations to think abstractly will react to the argument differently from those who are temperamentally inclined to think very concretely. And one can imagine that, as there are more cautious thinkers and more bold thinkers, more suspicious thinkers and more generous thinkers, that these temperamental differences in and of themselves, regardless of any other factor relevant to assessing an argument, might sometimes be the full explanation for why people assess a particular argument in different ways.
It really shouldn't be surprising. We know that moral and scholarly habits can affect assessment of arguments, at least at the extremes; honesty, and prudence, and scholarly caution. But if second nature can have such an effect, it's not surprising that first nature would, even if in a rougher and looser way. And if you think about your own reasoning, you don't consider every single argument you come across with the same studiousness; you prioritize, and some arguments simply dismiss as bizarre, and some you tag as interesting and in need of further thought. It's difficult to see how we could do this in a way that temperament wouldn't affect at all. And you've only to look around, if you can't see it in your own case, that a lot of people clearly have a taste for particular kinds or styles of arguments. Likewise, we talk about critical thinking, but critical thinking is just a taste for certain kinds of reasoning, identified as good, over others, identified as bad. That is, all we mean when we talk about it is having good taste in reasoning or avoiding bad taste in reasoning. And taste again, is a kind of second nature, or habit, rooted in first nature, which includes temperament.
I find people tend to worry that this somehow makes the whole act of evaluating arguments irrational, but this doesn't seem to follow. It's certainly not true that all assessment of arguments can be explained by temperament. Temperament is relatively stable, but people shift their positions all the time; temperament is difficult to change, but people can often be persuaded. There are many other factors at work, many of which are quite objective. But it does create the complication that there may be perfectly good arguments for which we have no taste, or which would we would have difficulty accepting simply due to our temperament or personality, and that, likewise, between two people who disagree about whether an argument is a good argument, there might be no difference beyond a difference in taste or natural preference. If so, I don't think this would change a great deal; it would have to be taken into account, but wouldn't require a huge revision in thinking.
Premiseless Argument
We often think of premises as necessary for inferences, but this depends to some extent on what one counts as premises. Here is a simple example, although since it uses a system that most people don't know, Peirce's existential graphs, it needs a bit of explaining.
Peirce's existential graphs are a purely diagrammatic way of doing logic, in which logical steps consists primarily of making and erasing shaded ovals on a blank sheet of paper according to some very, very basic rules. Obviously it would be a pain to reproduce the shaded and unshaded ovals here, so we'll do a work around using brackets; you can imagine a pair of brackets as a large oval on a page. Whether it is shaded or not depends on what surrounds it. Thus this is a shaded oval:
[ ]
This is an unshaded oval in a shaded oval:
[ [ ] ]
This is a shaded oval within an unshaded oval within a shaded oval:
[ [ [ ] ] ]
So if you count pairs of brackets, the first or outermost pair is always shaded, and every even pair represents an unshaded oval, every odd pair represents a shaded oval.
The basic way the system works is this. You take a blank sheet of paper, which Peirce calls the Sheet of Assertion, and this is your universe of discourse -- the whole universe of things that are relevant to whatever you'll be talking about. You draw your premises on the sheet with pencil. A shaded area represents a negative. An unshaded area represents the positive. A line to the left, called the line of assertion indicates that something is definitely in the universe of discourse (colloquially, that some exists). This allows you to say, "There is something that is not a phoenix":
-[-phoenix]
And also "There is nothing that is a phoenix":
[-phoenix]
And things like "There is a phoenix who rises" and "There is a phoenix who does not rise" and "There is no phoenix who rises":
-phoenix-rise
-phoneix-[-rise]
[-phoenix-rise]
There are three things you can do once you have any premises drawn, which Peirce calls Permissions. They are, roughly:
(1) You may erase any graph-instance on an unshaded area as you please, and you may insert a graph-instance on any shaded area that already exists. (Shaded areas themselves are not considered graph-instances.)
(2) Any graph-instance may be repeated in the same area, or in any area enclosed within that area, provided that any lines of assertion have the same features each time; and for any graph-instance already repeated in this way, the innermost instance (or either if they are in the same area) may be erased.
(3) Any vacant ring-shaped area may be collapsed; any vacant ring-shaped area may be created by shading and erasure. (An area is not vacant if crossed by a line of assertion, even if nothing else is in it.)
And that's all; with this you can do nearly everything you would learn in an undergraduate logic class. It's a bit tricky to use, at times, because it wasn't designed to be easy to use but to break down reasoning to its very bare essentials. But you can do predicate calculus with it (and it can be extended even further to do modal logic). And as it happens, we don't need the full system here, because we won't need lines of assertion. And in this context we can see that you can have an argument that does not start with any premises.
(1) We start with the blank sheet.
(2) Third Permission allows us to draw
[ [ ] ]
(3) Then Third Permission allows us again to put in more ovals:
[ [ [ [ ] ] ] ]
(4) Then First Permission allows us to add a letter representing a proposition, any proposition you please, in a shaded area:
[ a [ [ [ ] ] ] ]
(5) Then Second Permission allows us to repeat the letter in another area:
[ a [ [ [ a ] ] ] ]
(6) Then First Permission allows us to add another letter:
[ a [ [ b [ a ] ] ] ]
And this, as it happens, is logically equivalent to "If a, then if b, a" or as we would usually represent it: a -> (b -> a). And we started with a blank sheet empty of premises. (If you want to see how this looks in the real graph format, see Sowa's commentary about halfway down.)
Of course, it's true that you can't get conclusions if you don't have anything at all to start with. Besides premises there are two other sources of information: the universe of discourse itself and the rules of inference. In this case we've drawn out a limit of possibility for the three Permissions -- no matter what universe of discourse you are in, whatever result you get using the Permissions will be consistent with a -> (b -> a). So we can call the universe of discourse and the rules of inference principles of argument, and say that every argument requires principles. But not every argument requires premises, as we see here. The only possible alternative is to claim, Tortoise-like, that (1) positing a universe of discourse and (2) every rule of inference are premises, in which case, also Tortoise-like, you are really claiming that all arguments are infinitely dense -- between every premise there are infinitely many premises, whether we explicitly name them or not -- and infinitely long -- whenever we identify a premise, there are infinitely many premises already on the table, namely, all the rules of logic and their every possible combination. You can have some arguments with no premises, or every argument with infinitely many; you can take your pick, but you are stuck with one of the two.
Peirce's existential graphs are a purely diagrammatic way of doing logic, in which logical steps consists primarily of making and erasing shaded ovals on a blank sheet of paper according to some very, very basic rules. Obviously it would be a pain to reproduce the shaded and unshaded ovals here, so we'll do a work around using brackets; you can imagine a pair of brackets as a large oval on a page. Whether it is shaded or not depends on what surrounds it. Thus this is a shaded oval:
[ ]
This is an unshaded oval in a shaded oval:
[ [ ] ]
This is a shaded oval within an unshaded oval within a shaded oval:
[ [ [ ] ] ]
So if you count pairs of brackets, the first or outermost pair is always shaded, and every even pair represents an unshaded oval, every odd pair represents a shaded oval.
The basic way the system works is this. You take a blank sheet of paper, which Peirce calls the Sheet of Assertion, and this is your universe of discourse -- the whole universe of things that are relevant to whatever you'll be talking about. You draw your premises on the sheet with pencil. A shaded area represents a negative. An unshaded area represents the positive. A line to the left, called the line of assertion indicates that something is definitely in the universe of discourse (colloquially, that some exists). This allows you to say, "There is something that is not a phoenix":
-[-phoenix]
And also "There is nothing that is a phoenix":
[-phoenix]
And things like "There is a phoenix who rises" and "There is a phoenix who does not rise" and "There is no phoenix who rises":
-phoenix-rise
-phoneix-[-rise]
[-phoenix-rise]
There are three things you can do once you have any premises drawn, which Peirce calls Permissions. They are, roughly:
(1) You may erase any graph-instance on an unshaded area as you please, and you may insert a graph-instance on any shaded area that already exists. (Shaded areas themselves are not considered graph-instances.)
(2) Any graph-instance may be repeated in the same area, or in any area enclosed within that area, provided that any lines of assertion have the same features each time; and for any graph-instance already repeated in this way, the innermost instance (or either if they are in the same area) may be erased.
(3) Any vacant ring-shaped area may be collapsed; any vacant ring-shaped area may be created by shading and erasure. (An area is not vacant if crossed by a line of assertion, even if nothing else is in it.)
And that's all; with this you can do nearly everything you would learn in an undergraduate logic class. It's a bit tricky to use, at times, because it wasn't designed to be easy to use but to break down reasoning to its very bare essentials. But you can do predicate calculus with it (and it can be extended even further to do modal logic). And as it happens, we don't need the full system here, because we won't need lines of assertion. And in this context we can see that you can have an argument that does not start with any premises.
(1) We start with the blank sheet.
(2) Third Permission allows us to draw
[ [ ] ]
(3) Then Third Permission allows us again to put in more ovals:
[ [ [ [ ] ] ] ]
(4) Then First Permission allows us to add a letter representing a proposition, any proposition you please, in a shaded area:
[ a [ [ [ ] ] ] ]
(5) Then Second Permission allows us to repeat the letter in another area:
[ a [ [ [ a ] ] ] ]
(6) Then First Permission allows us to add another letter:
[ a [ [ b [ a ] ] ] ]
And this, as it happens, is logically equivalent to "If a, then if b, a" or as we would usually represent it: a -> (b -> a). And we started with a blank sheet empty of premises. (If you want to see how this looks in the real graph format, see Sowa's commentary about halfway down.)
Of course, it's true that you can't get conclusions if you don't have anything at all to start with. Besides premises there are two other sources of information: the universe of discourse itself and the rules of inference. In this case we've drawn out a limit of possibility for the three Permissions -- no matter what universe of discourse you are in, whatever result you get using the Permissions will be consistent with a -> (b -> a). So we can call the universe of discourse and the rules of inference principles of argument, and say that every argument requires principles. But not every argument requires premises, as we see here. The only possible alternative is to claim, Tortoise-like, that (1) positing a universe of discourse and (2) every rule of inference are premises, in which case, also Tortoise-like, you are really claiming that all arguments are infinitely dense -- between every premise there are infinitely many premises, whether we explicitly name them or not -- and infinitely long -- whenever we identify a premise, there are infinitely many premises already on the table, namely, all the rules of logic and their every possible combination. You can have some arguments with no premises, or every argument with infinitely many; you can take your pick, but you are stuck with one of the two.
Wednesday, June 06, 2012
Drive-Ins
Jimmy Akin notes that the first drive-in movie theater opened on June 6, 1933; and thinking about drive-in movie theaters certainly brings back memories.
I spent parts of elementary and middle school, and then later senior year of high school, in Carlsbad, New Mexico, a dusty but charming little town. Like most dusty by charming little towns, it has quite a few quirks arising from the combination of various historical accidents and the general lack of things to do. So, for instance, Carlsbad has a mall, but for large parts of the town it wasn't very conveniently located, and there was little to do there except buy clothes. So instead of going to the mall to hang out and see people they might know, they went to Wal-Mart -- still do, from what I understand. In a town the size of Carlsbad, you're very likely to meet someone you know there. There were lots of other quirks.
One of these quirks was the fact that everyone called the movie theater the 'walk-in'. And the reason for that was the extraordinary popularity of the Fiesta Drive-In. If you were going to movies, people would assume that you were going to the drive-in, unless you specified that you were going to the other place, which everyone started calling the 'walk-in'. Carlsbad had had a Fiesta Drive-In long before, but it had shut down. However, in 1989, a businessman named Brad Light re-opened a fully updated drive-in with FM stereo sound and a pretty decent concessions stand; and since you paid by the car, it was also a cheap way to take the family out for entertainment -- a movie that would cost a family thiry or forty dollars at the walk-in would cost ten or fifteen at the drive-in. It was a hit.
One of Carlsbad's traditions is what is known as Christmas on the Pecos. The Pecos River runs right through Carlsbad, and many of the most fancy houses and wealthiest people in the town are found along it. So every Christmas season they run river tours along it so that everyone can see the Christmas decorations. Houses that don't participate have a slight tendency to get vandalized, and there's a social status element to participation, so participation is quite good -- the householders along the Pecos usually pull out all the steps. Quite a sight. In any case, you could always recognize Brad Light's house because his Christmas display would include a little replica of a drive-in movie screen with a projector that would play old cartoons.
Alas, it seems that Light, while awaiting trial on charges of light drug trafficking, died in early summer of 2010 of a drug overdose, thus shutting down the Fiesta. A sad thing, really; he always came across as quite a decent guy (although, of course, I was not very old at the time), but seems to have fallen in with the wrong 'friends'. I think the theater's been sold and is reopening again under new management. It will be interesting to see how it works out. A lot of what made the Fiesta work was that Light put his heart and soul into it; it's very unlikely to have any new owners who will do as much. On the other hand, the perpetual problem of what to do, and especially what to do on weeknights, will always require a solution. And what else are you going to do? Go to the walk-in?
I spent parts of elementary and middle school, and then later senior year of high school, in Carlsbad, New Mexico, a dusty but charming little town. Like most dusty by charming little towns, it has quite a few quirks arising from the combination of various historical accidents and the general lack of things to do. So, for instance, Carlsbad has a mall, but for large parts of the town it wasn't very conveniently located, and there was little to do there except buy clothes. So instead of going to the mall to hang out and see people they might know, they went to Wal-Mart -- still do, from what I understand. In a town the size of Carlsbad, you're very likely to meet someone you know there. There were lots of other quirks.
One of these quirks was the fact that everyone called the movie theater the 'walk-in'. And the reason for that was the extraordinary popularity of the Fiesta Drive-In. If you were going to movies, people would assume that you were going to the drive-in, unless you specified that you were going to the other place, which everyone started calling the 'walk-in'. Carlsbad had had a Fiesta Drive-In long before, but it had shut down. However, in 1989, a businessman named Brad Light re-opened a fully updated drive-in with FM stereo sound and a pretty decent concessions stand; and since you paid by the car, it was also a cheap way to take the family out for entertainment -- a movie that would cost a family thiry or forty dollars at the walk-in would cost ten or fifteen at the drive-in. It was a hit.
One of Carlsbad's traditions is what is known as Christmas on the Pecos. The Pecos River runs right through Carlsbad, and many of the most fancy houses and wealthiest people in the town are found along it. So every Christmas season they run river tours along it so that everyone can see the Christmas decorations. Houses that don't participate have a slight tendency to get vandalized, and there's a social status element to participation, so participation is quite good -- the householders along the Pecos usually pull out all the steps. Quite a sight. In any case, you could always recognize Brad Light's house because his Christmas display would include a little replica of a drive-in movie screen with a projector that would play old cartoons.
Alas, it seems that Light, while awaiting trial on charges of light drug trafficking, died in early summer of 2010 of a drug overdose, thus shutting down the Fiesta. A sad thing, really; he always came across as quite a decent guy (although, of course, I was not very old at the time), but seems to have fallen in with the wrong 'friends'. I think the theater's been sold and is reopening again under new management. It will be interesting to see how it works out. A lot of what made the Fiesta work was that Light put his heart and soul into it; it's very unlikely to have any new owners who will do as much. On the other hand, the perpetual problem of what to do, and especially what to do on weeknights, will always require a solution. And what else are you going to do? Go to the walk-in?
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