The Power of Discovery in Science

 The power of discovery in science is the ability to distinguish new dimensions in things, new dimensions that can become correlated into functional relationships, idealized into an internal measurement system, and captured in the formulas of a theory. The power of discovery is the ability to articulate wholes into new kinds of parts and new kinds of relationships among parts: to articulate a moving body into mass, acceleration and the force that it undergoes, or to distinguish "heat" into the two factors of "quantity of heat" and "temperature." When such parts are articulated, the thing in question itself becomes seen as a new kind of whole. And progress occurs by zigs and zags: the new theory suggests new measurements and instrumentation, and these in turn suggest new wholes and parts and new theories.

[Robert Sokolowski, Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions: Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology, University of Notre Dame Press (Notre Dame, IN: 1992) p. 150.]

Apples

In various places online, they are talking about apples, in part because of the Apple Rankings website, whose weird and quirky rankings have earned it the enmity of cidermakers and apple lovers worldwide. I am certainly not an apple expert in anything like the way that a cidermaker would be, but I have eaten a lot of apples in my lifetime. I don't eat as many as I used to, but I have had all sorts of apples. So I thought I'd say a few things about apples.

(1) When it comes to cultivation, apples are immensely weird. The apple is an unstably reproducing fruit-bearing tree. If you take a variety of apple and plant it in your yard so that it grows into a tree, you will virtually never get apples of the same variety. In order to grow a variety of apples, you have to take apple branches of that variety and graft them into a new tree. Then every apple of that variety is ultimately from one tree whose branches were grafted into other tree, and then other branches from those branches and so forth. This also means that actual apple varieties that come from just growing trees are mind-bogglingly diverse. Virtually every natural-grown apple tree has a different variety.

(2) Almost everyone's sense of what apple varieties taste good is distorted. Most of the apples that most of us buy most of the time have been sitting around in cold storage for months. In order to store them for months, they are usually picked too early so that they will ripen off the tree. This a huge issue, because there is an immense difference, for any variety, between a ripe apple just off the tree and an apple picked early and stored.

(2) An excellent example of this is the much-maligned Red Delicious. Discovered by accident, coming into prominence in the 1890s, in the 1940s it became the apple, the favorite of all favorites. The Red Delicious became popular because it was -- in fact, still is -- one of the best sweet-tasting apples. It has a nice aroma, a balanced flavor that involves a nice sweetness without being crazy-sweet or very tart, and at the right time, it is very nicely crisp. It doesn't hurt that it's on the large side and that it spoils relatively slowly. It was the first really good sweet apple that you could transport all over the country and put in grocery stores everywhere. Why, then, is it so despised today? Well, roughly, it's because even it has limits. A Red Delicious apple at its peak is an extraordinarily good apple. But it doesn't stay at its peak long; it relatively quickly becomes merely OK, and then goes into a long, slow decline. So as grocery stores relied more and more on apples stored for a long time before they even reached the shelves, Red Delicious dominated, but at the same time the Red Delicious apples most people were eating were farther and farther down the decline slope. Eventually it was overtaken by Gala and Fuji and Braeburn apples, and then it was all over. You can barely find them anymore.

(3) Lots of people enjoy a good Honeycrisp, to the extent that people often say it is the best apple. It is not, and they are very, very wrong. But it was an apple that was specifically chosen to be marketed for its juiciness; it has larger cells than most apples do.  The relatively recent Cosmic Crisp (a cross between Honeycrisp and Enterprise) is probably the easiest to obtain improvement on it; essentially, it's a Honeycrisp that stays at its peak longer and declines in quality more slowly. It's also much less temperamental than Honeycrisp, which is why it's so easy to obtain -- as a decently sweet apple that lasts well and is easy to grow, the entire apple industry has reasons to market it as widely as possible.

(4) The Gala is the apple that toppled the Red Delicious, and while it's not the tastiest apple, I like it quite a bit, because it's a very good all-around apple. It doesn't excel at anything, but it does moderately well at everything: decent for eating raw, decent for baking, decent for sauce.

(5) The apple that has been near the top of the heap for the longest period of time is the Granny Smith. It was first discovered in the 1860s, and was the first of the great apple varieties, for the same reasons that led to the dominance of Red Delicious much later. Its great advantage is that was tart enough to be a decent baking apple, but unlike many cooking apples, it was sweet enough to eat raw. It's also crisp and has an unusually long shelf-life and -- a not inconsiderable point -- it's extremely easy to tell whether it's ripe. When it's good it's the healthy Granny Smith green; as it proceeds it becomes increasingly yellow. It is the Swiss Army knife of apples; it excels at almost everything you could want an apple to do, and is in many ways my personal favorite. There are other apples in its league -- Esopus Spitzenburg is a good one -- but in general they are all harder to get, precisely because very few apples are able to stay good as long as a Granny Smith.

(6) The Fuji is another popular variety; it makes a decent applesauce, although I don't favor it for much else. I've heard it described as the apple variety for people who like pears, and that seems probably about right.

(7) Apple fashions are unpredictable, but an apple that may be on its way to popularity is the Arkansas Black; a bit on the tart side, but also long-lasting, it was a popular roadside stand apple whose popularity spread by word of mouth before it started becoming available in supermarkets. In a way it's a lot like the once very popular Winesap variety.

(8) I always see Rome apples in the grocery store. Rome is not a very flavorful apple at all; the reason it stays around seems to be that it cooks very well, keeping a nice texture, and cooking brings out more of its apple flavor.

(9) Wickson apples are mostly used for cider, but they have an interesting taste -- they are very tart and very sweet at the same time, so that if you eat a good one raw, it's almost like eating sour apple candy. They are rarely in grocery stores, but cidermakers love them. I know very little about cider apples, really, but it's a cider apple that I would bet is among the very best. The long-enduring champion among cider apple varieties is the Dabinett, which is still popular after over a century, and a lot of ciders are made with it.

(10) I eat a lot of Cripps Pinks these days; they are easy to get, and I like the taste quite a bit. They are almost never sold under their variety name, but under the trademarked name, Pink Lady. It was a cross between Golden Delicious and Lady Williams, and is basically a better version of Golden Delicious, although it doesn't look much like one. It's popular in supermarkets in part because it has a crazily late harvesting season.

What is your favorite apple variety?

Habitude XIV

 Next we must consider the distinction of habitudes, and about this four things are asked. Further, whether many habitudes can be in one power. Second, whether habitudes are distinguished according to objects. Third, whether habitudes are distinguished according to good and bad. Fourth, whether one habitude is constituted from many habitudes.

To the first one proceeds thus. It seems that there are not able to be many habitudes in one power. For with those that are distinguished according to the same thing, one being multiplied, the other is also multiplied. But powers and habitudes are distinguished according to the same thing, namely according to acts and objects. Therefore they are multiplied in similar ways. Therefore there are not able to be many habitudes in one power.

Further, power is a sort of simple impulse [virtus]. But in one simple subject there is not able to be diversity of accidents, because the subject is cause of the accidents, but from one simple thing nothing seems to proceed except one thing. Therefore in one power there is not able to be many habitudes.

Further, just as body is formed through shape, so power is formed through habitude. But one body is not able to be formed all at once by diverse shapes. Therefore neither is one power able to be formed all at once by diverse habitudes. Therefore several habitudes are not able to be all at once in one power.

But contrariwise is that the intellect is a power, in which nonetheless there are habitudes of diverse kinds of knowledge.

I reply that it must be said that, as was said above, habitudes are sorts of dispositions of something existing potentially to something, whether toward nature or to the operation and end of nature. And of those habitudes that are dispositions to nature, it is clearly that there are able to be several in one subject, because the parts of one subject can be taken in diverse ways, according to whose disposition habitudes are named, as, if we take the humors of the parts of the human body, in the way they are disposed according to human nature, there is a habitude or disposition of health, but if we take like parts such as nerves and bones and flesh, in their disposition in ordering to nature, there is strength or weakness, but if we take members such as hands and feet and suchlike, in their disposition of fitness to nature, there is beauty. And thus there are several habitudes or dispositions in the same thing.

But if we speak of habitudes that are dispositions to works, which properly pertain to powers, then there are also can happen to be several habitudes or dispositions in the same thing. The reason for this is that the subject of a habitude is passive power, for active power alone is not subject to any habitude, as is obvious from what is said above. But passive power is compared to the determinate act of one species as matter to form, in that, as matter is determined to one form through one agent, so also passive power by reason of one active object is determined to one act according to species. Thus, just as severalobjects can move one passive power, so one passive power is able to be the subject of diverse acts or completions according to species. But habitudes are sorts of qualities or forms inherent in powers by which power is inclined to determinate acts according to species. Thus to one power several habitudes are able to pertain, just like several acts of different species.

To the first it must therefore be said that, as in natural things diversity of species is according to form, but diversity of genus according to matter, as is said in Metaphys. V, for they are different in genus whose matter is different, so also the diversity of objects according to genus makes for distinction of powers; thus the Philosopher says in Ethic. VI that for things of another genus there are also other compartments of soul. But diversity of objects according to species makes for diversity of acts according to species, and consequently habitudes. Whatever is diverse in genus is also diverse in species, but not vice versa. So too of diverse powers there are diverse species of acts, and diverse habitudes, but it is not needful that diverse habitudes be of diverse powers, but there are able to be several in one. And just as there are genera of genera and species of species, so it can also happen that there are diverse species of habitudes and powers.

To the second it must be said that power, although it is indeed simple according to essence, is nonetheless multiple in impulse [virtute], according as it extends to many acts that differ in species. And thus nothing prohibits there being in one power many habitudes of different species.

To the third it must be said that body is formed through shape as through its proper termination, but habitude is not a termination of power, but is disposition to act as ultimate term. And so there is not able to be several acts all at once in one power, save insofar as one is comprehended under another, just as there cannot be several shapes in one body, save according as one is in the other, like the triangle in the square. For the intellect is not able to understand by many acts all at once. But it can know many things all at once by habitude.

[Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2-1.54.1, my translation. The Latin is here, the Dominican Fathers translation is here.

Links of Note

 * Gregory B. Sadler, Reading Recommendations About Alasdair MacIntyre's Works

* Pierre Aubenque, Cameron F. Coates, & Khafiz Kermov, The Cosmology of Prudence (PDF)

* Ronald Purser, AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself, at "Current Affairs"

* Aldo Filomeno, Humeans Should Suspend Judgment on the Humean Account of Laws (PDF)

* Henry Oliver, Jane Austen's first biographer, at "The Common Reader"

* Daniel D. De Haan, The Power to Perform Experiments (PDF)

* Tara Isabella Burton, Believe for Your Own Sake, Not for "the West", at "Wisdom of Crowds"; 'memetic Christianity' is a potentially useful term.

* Miguel Garcia Godinez, Institutional Proxy Agency: A We-Mode Approach (PDF)

* Klaus Corcilius, Aristotle's De Motu Animalium, at the SEP

St. Ambrose

Today was the feast of St. Ambrose of Milan, Doctor of the Church. From his work On the Holy Spirit (Book I, Chapter 16, section 184).  

If you seek Jesus, forsake the broken cisterns, for Christ was wont to sit not by a pool but by a well. There that Samaritan woman found Him, she who believed, she who wished to draw water. Although you ought to have come in early morning, nevertheless if you come later, even at the sixth hour, you will find Jesus wearied with His journey. He is weary, but it is through you, because He has long sought you, your unbelief has long wearied Him. Yet He is not offended if you only come, He asks to drink Who is about to give. But He drinks not the water of a stream flowing by, but your salvation; He drinks your good dispositions, He drinks the cup, that is, the Passion which atoned for your sins, that you drinking of His sacred blood might quench the thirst of this world. 

The Achievement of Letting Things Appear

 When we move from the darkness into the light, it becomes possible for us to let many things appear that could not appear in the dark. The presence of light lets us see things like trees and tables, which we can touch but not see when there is no light, and it lets us see things like colors and pictures, which cannot be present at all while we remain in darkness. We are all familiar with light as that which lets such things appear to us. However, there is something besides light, something we can call, metaphorically, another kind of illumination, that is also at work when things appear to us; this is the achievement of letting things appear. It comes about in us, and if it did not take place, going from darkness into light would not do us much good. Only because we are engaged in the achievement of letting things appear do we normally prefer light to darkness, and there are also times when we achieve manifestation better in darkness than in the light.

[Robert Sokolowsi, Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions: Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology, University of Notre Dame Press (Notre Dame, IN: 1992) p. 3.]

Music on My Mind

 

Alex Williams (with Gigi Perez), "Eternity".