Sanctions are not a generally motivating factor when it comes to law; people who follow the laws are only sometimes thinking of the sanctions, and in fact many times people are not very aware of what the sanctions are, at least outside extreme cases. People seem more motivated by, 'This is how we do things' -- i.e., socially -- than by 'Or else', and people both demand the 'or else' to wield against social deviation specifically and get angry if it is wielded against people doing 'what everyone does'.
To be right often, we must be wrong often.
Evaluating is often harder than creating and applying is often harder than analyzing.
Since social institution always presupposes normativity of some kind, normativity as such can't be socially instituted; it arises naturally in social contexts; get a bunch of sufficiently cognitive agents in cooperation, and you have normativity. It just is part of what such cooperation has to involve.
We construct norms because normativity is natural to us.
durability of argument-form
(1) Take an argument.
(2) In use, people tend to vary it a bit.
(3) An argument is more durable if minor plausible variations keep conclusion roughly the same.
"A man without religion is a maimed man." Gaudi
Language is a system of rites.
"A consturction only becomes interesting when it can be placed side by side with other analogous constructions for forming species of the same genus." Poincaré
The mathematics for physics is drawn out of causal structures, particularly of measuring devices.
Social progress in any aspect involves many small improvements over many domains, which eventually start interacting with each other.
"Home is the part of the universe so thoroughly elaborated by our tendencies that it has become for us, so to say, an enlarged sphere of disposability." Patočka
fictive lived-experiencing of the past
Nothing we actually know is merely singular.
The capacity to abstract is essential to sign use, because things are signs in a respect.
In speech we instrumentalize our voice & philosophers of language often do nto do justice to this.
Signs often come in complexes so that we can pick one representamen out of the whole as convenient (e.g., spoken words -- written words -- associated gestures & expressions -- iconic representations).
-- Metonymies and synechdoches perhaps come out of treating things themselves as such sign-complexes.
Measurement always involves getting the right causal interactions under the right conditions.
In language we often use words to operate on and modify words and their meanings.
intension/remission -- quality as quasi-quantity
estimate/approximation -- quantity as quasi-quality
Every human person has an implicit wisdom; the difficulty is unfolding it.
Mt & Lk: Christology by causation
Mk: Christology by remotion
Jn: Christology by eminence
agak-agak -- v., to estimate/guess; adj, involving guesswork
agaration: estimation
When human beings reject a transcendent order, they gravitate to a totalitarian one.
being as showing itself to other being, being as showing other being to yet other being
Temporal measurement requires presence to a clock, and spatial to a boundary; presence is thus more fundamental.
Fully to understand oneself as a creature requires the concept of nothingness. (the 'distance between being and nothing')
"It was not nonexistent things that needed salvation, so that a command alone would have sufficed, but the human being, already in existence, who was corrupted and perishing." Athanasius
When we look at genuine and successful prediction, it always begins with retrodiction.
(1) Either infinite regress of causes or state.
(2) If infinite regress, there is something with unlimited power for effect, i.e., the series and what maintains it.
(3) If state, there is a first cause, with unlimited power for effect.
In artistic matters, the sacred becomes secularized and the secular becomes sacralized.
regulative, educative, and nobilitative right & wrong
Shared biological reasoning has the force, in reasoning, of mutual obligation.
It is important to the function of physical theory that its equations not be happenstance equations, that they are Box and not merely True. V=kP needs to be true not here and there, now and then, but true in all relevant possibilities. (The tricky thing, of course, is that we may not know the exact range of relevant possibilities -- studying this is one of the standard paths of scientific discovery.)
"It is amazing how much one can learn from just following the grammar of scientific utterances."Judea Pearl
"Data do not understand causes and effects; humans do."
One of the fundamental problems in modern politics is that honest attempts to correct evils lead easily to temptations to injustice.
'a medium, a tangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy and comfort'
grave goods as a sign of respect for persons as persons
Charles Elton and niche-convergence: "the tendency...for animals in widely separated parts of the world to draft into similar occupations" (Animal Ecology)
-- Achinstein on design-, use-, and service-functions
'Episteic virtues' in analytic philosophy are generally just moral virtues in contexts of inquiry. (They are inquiring subjective parts of moral virtues.)
As we move from art -> prudence -> knowledge -> understanding -> wisdom, we move roughly from dealing with the less common to dealing with the more common. ('Roughly' because each higher can 'use' the lower quasi-instrumentally.)
All virtues have 'self-regarding' and 'other-regarding faces, btu the 'roles' of these faces differ according to the virtue.
Human beings know together, but even in knowing together do not know in precisely the same way.
We are all both persons and ghosts or echoes of the persons we are.
We always share some credit for the success of our inquiries with others.
Since intellect thinks allt hings, the presence of what is foreign to thinkign all things hinders and obstracts it; what appeared within would impede what was without.
Judicial review is powerful because it is in fact a notwithstanding power. However, judicial review is also the progressive explicit recognition by the courts of limtiations to their own authority.
It is not so much that truth must be tested and deepened over time as that we must be.
The oldest known extant statue is the Lion-Man of Hoblenstein-Stadel, carved out of ivory with flint knife between 35000 and 40000 years ago. It had to be reconstructed out of more than 200 fragments, 'glued' together with a reversible mix of beeswax, artificial wax, and chalk. It was found with bone tools, worked antlers, beads, and pendants. A similar but smaller image was found at Hohle Fels.
The earliest known extant humanish artifacts are knapped stone tools at Lomokwi 3 in Kenya, from about 3.3 million years ago, predating the genus Homo, and thus associated with either Kenyanthropus or Australopithecus. The next definite tools are Oldovan, beginning about 2.9 million years ago, and Acheulan (apparently a significant leap forward) about 1.7 million years ago & associated with Homo erectus, which is not only manipulating and hammering stone but creating hand axes. The Mousterian, beginning about 160000 years ago and associated with Neanderthals, shows a massive variety of tools using stone and antler with remarkable precision. The Aurignaian, beginning 43000 years ago, associated with Homo sapiens, expands this even further and includes jewelry, cave art, and figurines.
If I meet a lion in the prehistoric savannah and tell it I am no threat, is this religion? If I have made a figurine and show it to the lion to communicate the same, is this religion? If I get by unscathed and think the lion understood my message, is this religion? If the figurine represents an actual line and I talk to the figurine as if a friend, is this religion? If I like the figurine because I feel lionlike, is this religion? If I identify with the figurine, which I take to represent both me and the lions, is this religion? If I take it to represent lions generally, including myself, is this religion? If I wear and display the figurine whenever I need to deal with lions, is this religion? If I ask the figurine to help me when I need to deal with lions, is this religion? If I ask the figurine to help me when I need to deal with lions, is this religion? If I share food and drink with the figurine to get on the good side of lions, is this religion? Anthropologically, these are all kinds of things that human beings do spontaneously in some form or other.
The use of human body lice, which are clothing-dependent, to date clothing suggests that humans wore clothes about 40000 to 170000 years ago; residues and deposits suggest about 120000 years ago. Clothing tools are known to have existed (sewing needles in particular) about 50000 years ago (associated with Denisovans).
The earliest definite evidence of controlled use of fire is at Wonderwork, from about 1 million years ago; any earlier & it becomes unclear whether it was really controlled. Yulambo Falls shows clear evidence of fire-use tools about 180000 years ago. The earliest extant fired pottery is from Xianrendong about 20000 years ago.
term, connection, direction
To find invariants, you need causal reasoning about what varies.
It is an eror to think that because Euclidena diagrams can be visually inspected that they therefore work entirely by visual inspection.
"As strange as it may sound, the notion of probability raising cannot be expressed in terms of probabilities." Judea Pearl
"The proper way to rescue the probability-raising idea is with the do-operator; we can say that X causes Y if P(Y|do(X)) > P(Y)."
