"You are sad," the Knight said in an anxious tone: "let me sing you a song to comfort you.... The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes.'"
"Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested.
"No, you don't understand," the Kinght said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name is called. The name really is 'The Aged Aged Man.'"
"Then I ought to have said, 'That's what the song is called'?" Alice corrected herself.
"No, you oughtn't: that's another thing. The song is called 'Ways and Means': but that's only what it's called, you know!"
"Well, what is the song, then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
"I was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is 'A sitting on a Gate': and the tune's my own invention."
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass.
Saturday, January 01, 2005
There Ain't No Gold and There Ain't Nobody Like Me
I headed out from Toronto to Boston on Tuesday. I took the Greyhound bus, so the trip was fourteen hours (actually, it ended up being twelve and a half, but that's because the driver on the last leg somehow managed to get an hour and a half ahead of schedule). Boston isn't far from Toronto as the crow flies; but a bus has to go around a Great Lake. It turned out to be even cheaper than I expected, which meant that even on a grad student's budget I could afford a little splurging here and there.
This is Peace Bridge, between Buffalo, New York and Fort Erie, Ontario. Over $7 billion (US) in commercial merchandise is carried over it each year, making it one of the most important ports of entry in North America. It was constructed to commemorate 100 years of peace between Canada and the United States, and was dedicated August 7, 1927 (I noticed this in particular because August 7 is my birthday). The site was chosen to be near where the last shots of the War of 1812 were fired, and the revolutionary decision by Canada and the United States in the aftermath (due in great measure to Richard Rush, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State after the War of 1812) not to put defenses on the border. May God grant that the example for which it stands be remembered and admired through the ages.
In any case, having crossed Peace Bridge without much trouble, I continued on the bus, via Syracuse, to Boston, arriving on Wednesday. I got a bit lost trying to get where I was trying to go, but got a nice exposure to old Boston in the process. Bostonians, by the way, are quite courteous; I was very impressed. I checked into my hotel, the Boston Milner, which I thought a nice hotel. If you like big rooms, you wouldn't like it, though; I got upgraded to a bigger room when I checked in, and it was still one of the smallest hotel rooms I had ever been in. Given the price of the rooms, which wasn't bad but also wasn't cheap, it might turn people off. On the other hand, the staff is quite good, and it has a great location - I was in a much better part of the city than those silly people who actually got rooms in the Marriott where the convention was held. I tell you, I don't know what people are thinking when they only fly into conventions on planes and only stay at the hotels in which the conventions are held; one might as well eat entirely at Burger King whenever you're in a foreign country, for all the worth you get out of such a plan of action.
But I'm rambling again. By the time I got to the hotel, I wasn't feeling that well; I went to registration to check in, but felt progressively worse as time went on. I had intended on going to the Society of Christian Philosophers session that evening, but wasn't feeling well enough to do much of anything. I just stayed in my room and watched TV. It is astonishing how little there is to watch on cable. I ended up watching Dogma. I had seen the ending before, but never the beginning. It's a very neo-Gnostic movie, complete with Metatron and a forgotten apostle. Quite interesting, actually, despite a lot of bad humor; but, then, I've always thought that Gnosticism sometimes makes good fiction even where it obviously makes absurd theology.
I felt much better the next day and attended a nice colloquium later on early modern epistemology - there was more Leibniz than I really liked, but I was glad to have caught it. James Bednar of Vanderbilt had an interesting paper on Hume's Dialogues, good enough that I will have to say something about it here at some point. And then I caught the bus home, returning this time by way of Rainbow Bridge at Niagara Falls.
Despite the mysterious illness of the first day, I enjoyed myself considerably. Reading around at what other people have said, I'm not sure if that's due to the objective goodness of the time I had or my subjective cluelessness as to what was going on around me. But it was still enjoyable.
This is Peace Bridge, between Buffalo, New York and Fort Erie, Ontario. Over $7 billion (US) in commercial merchandise is carried over it each year, making it one of the most important ports of entry in North America. It was constructed to commemorate 100 years of peace between Canada and the United States, and was dedicated August 7, 1927 (I noticed this in particular because August 7 is my birthday). The site was chosen to be near where the last shots of the War of 1812 were fired, and the revolutionary decision by Canada and the United States in the aftermath (due in great measure to Richard Rush, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State after the War of 1812) not to put defenses on the border. May God grant that the example for which it stands be remembered and admired through the ages.
In any case, having crossed Peace Bridge without much trouble, I continued on the bus, via Syracuse, to Boston, arriving on Wednesday. I got a bit lost trying to get where I was trying to go, but got a nice exposure to old Boston in the process. Bostonians, by the way, are quite courteous; I was very impressed. I checked into my hotel, the Boston Milner, which I thought a nice hotel. If you like big rooms, you wouldn't like it, though; I got upgraded to a bigger room when I checked in, and it was still one of the smallest hotel rooms I had ever been in. Given the price of the rooms, which wasn't bad but also wasn't cheap, it might turn people off. On the other hand, the staff is quite good, and it has a great location - I was in a much better part of the city than those silly people who actually got rooms in the Marriott where the convention was held. I tell you, I don't know what people are thinking when they only fly into conventions on planes and only stay at the hotels in which the conventions are held; one might as well eat entirely at Burger King whenever you're in a foreign country, for all the worth you get out of such a plan of action.
But I'm rambling again. By the time I got to the hotel, I wasn't feeling that well; I went to registration to check in, but felt progressively worse as time went on. I had intended on going to the Society of Christian Philosophers session that evening, but wasn't feeling well enough to do much of anything. I just stayed in my room and watched TV. It is astonishing how little there is to watch on cable. I ended up watching Dogma. I had seen the ending before, but never the beginning. It's a very neo-Gnostic movie, complete with Metatron and a forgotten apostle. Quite interesting, actually, despite a lot of bad humor; but, then, I've always thought that Gnosticism sometimes makes good fiction even where it obviously makes absurd theology.
I felt much better the next day and attended a nice colloquium later on early modern epistemology - there was more Leibniz than I really liked, but I was glad to have caught it. James Bednar of Vanderbilt had an interesting paper on Hume's Dialogues, good enough that I will have to say something about it here at some point. And then I caught the bus home, returning this time by way of Rainbow Bridge at Niagara Falls.
Despite the mysterious illness of the first day, I enjoyed myself considerably. Reading around at what other people have said, I'm not sure if that's due to the objective goodness of the time I had or my subjective cluelessness as to what was going on around me. But it was still enjoyable.
Friday, December 31, 2004
Berkeley and the Unconceived
There is an interesting post at Fake Barn Country on Berkeley's unconceived tree. The author makes the error, I think, of being too vague about conception and thought. Berkeley has something fairly precise in mind when he talks about ideas and conception. Consider the following possible line of objection in the post:
But one can very well say that we do not, in fact, conceive of impossible things like the 'largest prime number'; we simply use the words 'largest prime number'. And there is nothing in Berkeley's theory to prevent saying this; in part, because it is precisely along the lines of the sort of thing Berkeley says. Merely because you use words meaningfully (in a linguistic sense), it does not mean you have a notion to correspond with those words (nor does it mean that you've said something consistent). And on (b) it isn't actually very clear what one can mean by saying that I can conceive the existence of a tree whose existence I cannot conceive. The same point arises with another response to Berkeley that's discussed:
And another:
But it isn't obviously absurd to say that the story is conceptually confused; that is, it isn't clear that the story it gives is coherent, and even if it is coherent, it isn't clear that its coherence is a problem for Berkeley. (It's coherent, of course, even on Berkeley's view, to say that no one has told a story about the tree about which I am currently telling a story; it would be incoherent, however, to say that I have a story about a tree about which there are no stories, simpliciter, and it is this that Berkeley would claim to be parallel to the case of matter. Such things make great fiction, but bad philosophy.)
The author's own suggestion is very interesting; but I'm not very clear why it's supposed to be plausible. I think of a tree does, prima facie, appear to imply A tree is thought of by me, because they seem to be saying simply the same thing. And if this is so, I'm not sure why the issue of the relation between the thinker and the thing is going to make any difference to Berkeley's argument. If I claim, "I have an idea of a tree of which I can have no idea," what generates the contradiction is not the relation between thinker and tree, but the contradiction in saying "I have an idea I do not have". It's like the old invisible pink unicorn example; one cannot see a unicorn one cannot see. And one needs no theory of seeing to recognize that this is so. Likewise, one needs no theory of thinking to see that we cannot think of things of which we cannot think.
My own view, only very roughly thought out, is that Berkeley is quite right: we cannot say that we conceive an unconceived thing, or perceive an unperceived thing, properly speaking, without contradicting ourselves. And I don't see that there is any problem with saying this; we cannot have ideas we cannot have, we cannot have perceptions we cannot have. Berkeley needs more for his idealism than just this, but he's right on this point.
[We do, of course, have a notion of not conceiving, because sometimes we don't conceive things. But this doesn't imply that we can ever conceive of something unconceived, properly speaking; it just means we know we are not always conceiving everything. When we do conceive things, they are not unconceived; when we are thinking about things, we are thinking about them. The things themselves, however, can still be in some sense independent of us, external to us, and continue to exist when we are not thinking about them; and Berkeley, in fact, accepts all three of these claims. In this argument he merely denies that we can ever have in mind the being of something that is properly speaking 'without the mind'; and his interpretation of the three claims does not treat the independent, external, continuing existence of things as 'without the mind'. In other words, he breaks down the internal/external dichotomy that undergirds external world skepticism.]
Even if Berkeley is right that we cannot, without contradicting ourselves, conceive of an unconceived tree, this does not imply either that (a) we do not in fact conceive of such things (after all, we can conceive of impossible things like the largest prime number), or that (b) there could not be an unconceived tree (the link between imaginability and possibility is not nearly so strong as Berkeley supposes).
But one can very well say that we do not, in fact, conceive of impossible things like the 'largest prime number'; we simply use the words 'largest prime number'. And there is nothing in Berkeley's theory to prevent saying this; in part, because it is precisely along the lines of the sort of thing Berkeley says. Merely because you use words meaningfully (in a linguistic sense), it does not mean you have a notion to correspond with those words (nor does it mean that you've said something consistent). And on (b) it isn't actually very clear what one can mean by saying that I can conceive the existence of a tree whose existence I cannot conceive. The same point arises with another response to Berkeley that's discussed:
Although his argument purports to show that I cannot conceive of any particular unconceived tree, it seems to leave open the possibility that I can have the thought that there is some tree that is unconceived. That is, I may be able to have thoughts about unseen trees that are descriptive, rather than directly referential.
And another:
Consider the following story:
Once upon a time, there was a universe with nothing in it except for a single tree. Since there were no people or thinkers or anything else in this universe, the tree just sat there for all of time, and no one ever saw it, or thought about it, or told a story about it. The end.
My story is boring and probably lacking in literary merit, but it is not incoherent. Since Berkeley’s argument – even when weakened with the quantifier response – claims that it is inconsistent, the response in question is insufficient to stop Berkeley from proving something absurd – that my story is conceptually confused.
But it isn't obviously absurd to say that the story is conceptually confused; that is, it isn't clear that the story it gives is coherent, and even if it is coherent, it isn't clear that its coherence is a problem for Berkeley. (It's coherent, of course, even on Berkeley's view, to say that no one has told a story about the tree about which I am currently telling a story; it would be incoherent, however, to say that I have a story about a tree about which there are no stories, simpliciter, and it is this that Berkeley would claim to be parallel to the case of matter. Such things make great fiction, but bad philosophy.)
The author's own suggestion is very interesting; but I'm not very clear why it's supposed to be plausible. I think of a tree does, prima facie, appear to imply A tree is thought of by me, because they seem to be saying simply the same thing. And if this is so, I'm not sure why the issue of the relation between the thinker and the thing is going to make any difference to Berkeley's argument. If I claim, "I have an idea of a tree of which I can have no idea," what generates the contradiction is not the relation between thinker and tree, but the contradiction in saying "I have an idea I do not have". It's like the old invisible pink unicorn example; one cannot see a unicorn one cannot see. And one needs no theory of seeing to recognize that this is so. Likewise, one needs no theory of thinking to see that we cannot think of things of which we cannot think.
My own view, only very roughly thought out, is that Berkeley is quite right: we cannot say that we conceive an unconceived thing, or perceive an unperceived thing, properly speaking, without contradicting ourselves. And I don't see that there is any problem with saying this; we cannot have ideas we cannot have, we cannot have perceptions we cannot have. Berkeley needs more for his idealism than just this, but he's right on this point.
[We do, of course, have a notion of not conceiving, because sometimes we don't conceive things. But this doesn't imply that we can ever conceive of something unconceived, properly speaking; it just means we know we are not always conceiving everything. When we do conceive things, they are not unconceived; when we are thinking about things, we are thinking about them. The things themselves, however, can still be in some sense independent of us, external to us, and continue to exist when we are not thinking about them; and Berkeley, in fact, accepts all three of these claims. In this argument he merely denies that we can ever have in mind the being of something that is properly speaking 'without the mind'; and his interpretation of the three claims does not treat the independent, external, continuing existence of things as 'without the mind'. In other words, he breaks down the internal/external dichotomy that undergirds external world skepticism.]
Back
As you could probably guess, I'm back from Boston. I'll probably post about it this weekend. I didn't do as much as I'd hoped at the APA, because when I actually got into Boston I wasn't feeling very well; but it got better. Boston's actually a great city; I wish I had had a few more days (and dollars) to spend.
Best wishes for the New Year!
Best wishes for the New Year!
Newest Christian Carnival
The last Christian Carnival of the year is up at MediaSoul. Posts I found particularly interesting:
* On the Holy Family at "NOTES"
* Learning from Shepherds at "3:17"
* The Silmarillion at "Semicolon"
Naturally, there are others of interest; go see.
* On the Holy Family at "NOTES"
* Learning from Shepherds at "3:17"
* The Silmarillion at "Semicolon"
Naturally, there are others of interest; go see.
Philosophers' Carnival VII
The Philosophers' Carnival is up at Mixing Memory. My contribution was the post on the Humean account of analogy. Other interesting posts include one on Ockham's Razor and Clayton Littlejohn's In Defense of Almeida and Oppy. Go see what it has to offer!
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
"Ramblin' Man, Why Don't You Settle Down?"
I'm off to Boston for the next two days; I'll probably be back Friday morning, and I don't think I'll be doing any blogging before then.
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