Trump is to be applauded for at least one thing; he 'drained the swamp'... — EnPassant

Presumably to have it filled instead by wife beaters like Rob Porter, thieves like Scott Puritt, and sexual assault defenders like Bill Shine.

-

And on a different but related note, Trump is officially the best friend dictators and tyrants have ever had in the West, bar none. The EU of course, being the enemy instead. Because the president of the United States being a powerful defender and apologist of bloodletters and an antagonist to his closest allies is totally how things should be.

(On reflection, given things like Regan's illegal efforts to arm tortuers and murderers like the Contras, Trump is perhaps just abiding by American precedent. And this to say nothing of the Saudis).

Russia's actions were hostile, but it's a little ridiculous to whine about — frank

Apologist trash.

This discussion was merged into Donald Trump

I wasn't talking about the reviews.

Mm, its much easier to wax nostalgic for 'lost knowledge' than it is to actually engage in argument. A favorite strategy of facists everywhere.

I care more about getting it right than exploring a dead end. — Sapientia

Mm, I never said anything about 'getting it right' so dunno what you're on about.

This may be getting a bit off topic but one of the strange things I've noticed about the genuinely wealthy - at least since I've been around "old money" over the past 10 years - is their general avoidance of the sort of status symbols so admired by the poor and middle classes within America. — Erik

I can't remember where I read it but this is a genuine phenomenon - something like 'status symbol creep': as status symbols of the rich become more widely acknowledged, what counts as a status symbols shifts in order to maintain that symbolism. And the shift in spending form the rich has moved from goods and tangibles to services, insurance, 'experiences' (holidays, etc) and education instead: things that are harder to 'see', but end up 'opportunity hoarding': it's no longer goods which are exclusive, but the means to accumulate them. Anyone can save up and buy a Prada bag. Good luck sending your kid to Harvard.

Ah, but the working class are just temporarily embarrassed elites Baden. So really you're hurting the working class.

There's an fun Zizekian analysis to be made here. One of Zizek's long running themes is that what binds communities together are shared secrets and 'in-jokes' - or more specifically, knowledge of which kinds of transgressions of official rules are actually OK (think of the new employee who doesn't realize that everyone leaves early on Friday. Were he or she to really insist on the rule, he or she would be cast out from the 'group'). The idea is that these shared transgressions are quite literally the glue that brings communities together (much more so than any shared ideals or identities).

Anyway, Trump's political effectiveness lies in the way he wields those rules, and identifies all the more strongly with them: he taps into this shared underbelly to acknowledge and play with those rules. Hence the 'wink wink' character of his tax evasion stuff, for example. The upshot of course is that Trump then is anything but an outsider here to 'bend the rules'. On the contrary, his success lies in adhering to the rules more effectively than most. Outsiders, true outsides, who aim to alter the rules of transgression, are the real threat to the order of things. Trump is, for the most part, right at home in the political environment he finds himself in. Which is a sad indictment on that environment.

I'll just say that some posts from Streetlight have recently got me reading some figures like Connolly differently — John Doe

*squeals*. The world would be a better place if people read more Connolly! Also - this kind of thing, where one is persuaded not at the level of belief, but at the level of 'topic of interest' is one place where I think persuasion has a role on forums like these. Some of my most consequential shifts in thought haven't been from changing an already held position, but having an interest aroused where it would not have done otherwise. My recent dips into math were triggered in part, I'd say, from some interactions here. Undoubtedly there've been more instances of this.

Edit: To put it in terms I like to use: I've been persuaded about questions, not answers. The most interesting interactions on the forum are not - are never - 'oh you're right', but 'oh I didn't think about that'.

Discussion for the sake of persuasion has always been the least interesting and least significant part of participation in a forum like this. The interest has always instead been looking for other perspectives or other angles from which to evaluate one's own POV. The challenge is in trying to formulate arguments to address the unexpected and the unforseen, to expand and explore implications that one may not have come up with by yourself. Persuasion is just the frorth on the wave that is participation here.

Aden Evens - Logic of the Digital

:up:

Sweet summer lamb, you think there is hope!

The OP is a fine series of entirely unargued-for assertions. Shame there is nothing to discuss as a result.

Giorgio Agamben - Karman: A Brief Treatise on Action, Guilt, and Gesture


If you have to pick one, which would you recommend?

Significance.

"When the word causa—starting from Aristotle’s definition of the four types of cause: material, formal, efficient, and final— becomes a fundamental term of the philosophical and scientific lexicon of the West, it is necessary not to lose sight of its juridical origin: it is the “thing” (cosa) of the law, what gives rise to a trial and, in this way, implicates people in the sphere of the Law. The primal cause is the accusation."

- Giorgio Agamben, Karman: A Brief Treatise on Action, Guilt, and Gesture

The problem with insisting that there is no such distinction and thus to reduce (in a sense) perceiving to believing/disbelieving tends to show up when trying to account for perceptual error -i.e. not the mere withholding of full assent to a proposition, but a genuine belief, based on vision say, that something in the environment is a certain way visually when it in fact is not that way. In those cases, the pressure to move from "something appears to be F" to "something actually is F" remains. — jkg20

I agree with this so far as it goes, but I wonder just how far it does. After all, are we not already operating in the sphere of 'is' claims here? That is, if something I took for reality turns out, in the final analysis, to be 'just an appearence', doesn't this passage from one to the other already presuppose reality? Isn't the 'result' the same? i.e. appearence-talk is tributary to is-talk? Or put yet otherwise: the problem of appearance is that it is not-reality. Reality here wears the pants - there is no reification of appearance into a quasi-standalone-entity.

The problem then isn't that we can't know reality prior appearance, but we can't even discuss a reality without appearances. — Hanover

The above applies to this as well: while this may well be true, the (Cartesian) problem remains diffused: if we can't discuss a reality without appearances, then the problem of trying to make the move from appearance to reality is not one, insofar as they are something of a package deal. There might be another, separate problem, about how to understand the exact status of each in relation to the other (something like: "is there a reality without appearences?)" , but this would not be the same problem as the one being addressed. It's important, I think, to keep these two issues apart. Snakes seems to be making a similar conflation, although his confusion seems to be deeper.

I have to admit I've been puzzling a bit over Sellars' wording in the bit I've quoted re: "an episode or a state... of knowing", which, it's true, does seem to refer to a state of an agent. But I kinda wanna have my cake and eat it too, and say that that this claim is itself tributary to the co-extensive claim that facts themselves are irreducible to 'sheer observation'; and that, as Sellars will put in various ways, all 'observational knowledge' (of the form "X is a reliable symptom of Y") presuposes a nexus of concepts (the 'logical space of reason') which allows it to be acknowledged as a fact:

"For the point is specifically that observational knowledge of any particular fact, e.g. that this is green, presupposes that one knows general facts of the form X is a reliable symptom of Y. And to admit this requires an abandonment of the traditional empiricist idea that observational knowledge “stands on its own feet.”" My own attempt to paraphrase this was to say that "one cannot simply 'read off' a claim of knowledge from a state-of-affairs". If this is the case - and let me know if you think I've erred - then the issue is more of a a minor one in which I've simply picked the wrong quote to shore up a (right) reconstruction. But of course I'm still working though this so happy to get feedback.

Yeah, Sellars was super influenced by Witty, although he does diverge with him on some issues. What I like about the Sellarsian take is that he provides a more robust account (for me at least) of why we shouldn't start from doubt. I like the way in which he pin-points a common point of departure (the asymmetry of reality/appearence), and then shows where, exactly the Cartesian approach goes wrong.

No, I maintain the "the colour of the tie" is simply an ambiguous property — Pseudonym

It takes a philosopher to say this. So much the worse for philosophers.

The conversation is disanalogous. John was wrong about the color of the tie. He did not know what color it was. One wonders if your interlocutor knows or does not know the quickest way to London from Paris. But this is not part of your conversation.

So it is his understanding of the meaning of the question which is wrong, not his knowledge of the tie's of colour. — Pseudonym

An odd distinction.

But he was only asked about the color of the tie simpliciter. And he was wrong.

But John's knowledge of the color of the tie is - or was - wrong. The tie is not blue.

All Bob is doing is... — Pseudonym

What else would you have him do?

Maybe, maybe not. But one knows or does not know the color of the tie. Does one know it's 'properties'? Seems like a bunch of philosophical sky-castling. A non-issue pretending to be an issue.

There are two properties - its colour under natural light and its colour under electric light. — Pseudonym

No one is asking about 'properties'. Just the color of a tie.

The normative claim is not about which constitutes knowledge, but about which is appropriate to use in discourse. — Pseudonym

An odd distinction.

So what am I missing here? — Pseudonym

Normativity.

Claire Colebrook - Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics, and the Digital
Seb Franklin - Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic

So basically a power trip then.

But I do think that the structures in pure mathematics behave quite similarly to natural phenomena for the purposes of research; you can be guided by mathematical phenomena in much the same way as you'd be guided by nature or the real. — fdrake

This is all great (sorry for late response - been busy!). Actually alot of it reminds me - and helps me put into starker relief than I was previously able to - of one of Rosen's other papers (found here [PDF]) on how it's often forgotten that a great deal of math is actually modelling of other bits of math itself ("a great deal of what passes for pure mathematics is really applied mathematics; it is essentially modelling in the above sense, except that the external referents assigned to a particular formalism are themselves mathematical in character").

And this allows me to maybe start exploring one of the things I've been getting out of my recent (and very preliminary) engagements with math, which is that while there does seem to be something to the idea that the world exhibits a certain 'mathematicality', it seems far more accurate to say instead that mathematics exhibits a certain worldliness. That is, that there is an immanent 'logic' that math exhibits that is exactly parallel with the logic of, well, anything else. So it's not that 'everything is number' - as per the Pythagoreans - but that number 'partakes' (to use an uncomfortable Platonic trope) of the same logic that everything 'non-numerical' does (a 'flat' ontology which does not privilege number but places it on the 'same plane' as everything else).

Deleuze in fact develops something like this in D&R, where, after taking the calculus as a model for his understanding of what he calls 'Ideas', he tries to address the seeming privilege he accords to math and insists that it's not that he's 'applying' math to other domains, but rather that each domain (he lists: 'physical, biological, psychical or sociological') has 'a calculus' of it's own. Borrowing from the vocabulary and ideas of the mathematician Albert Lautmann and referring to 'a dialectic' in place of what I called a 'logic' above, he writes:

"It must be said that there are mathematical, physical, biological, psychical and sociological problems, even though every problem is dialectical by nature and there are no non-dialectical problems. ... the differential calculus belongs entirely to mathematics, even at the very moment when it finds its sense in the revelation of a dialectic which points beyond mathematics. ... It is not mathematics which is applied to other domains but the dialectic which establishes for its problems, by virtue of their order and their conditions, the direct differential calculus corresponding or appropriate to the domain under consideration. In this sense there is a mathesis universalis corresponding to the universality of the dialectic."

So I wanna say that there's something right about the Pythagorean intuition that mathematics seems to structure the world, but to reply that it's not that that structure is mathematical, but that mathematics expresses, in its own way, that structure (or 'dialectic' or 'Logos' - 'wild Logos' as Merleau-Ponty once said).

But the question of how people come to recognize similarities surely is. — Snakes Alive

Oh?

Well, one can't obviously deliniate conditions of use prior to there being some circumstance in which they arise. All I'm saying is that to say talk of similarity and categorization boils down to psychology - as if this were not entirely contentious - is itself... entirely contentious. And ripe for philosophical engagement.

As for the deadly intellectual minefield that are 'properties': https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties/

Right, so the intelligibility of 'ordinary language' is itself indexed to conditions of use: this is entirely fair. But you've simply assumed without argument that properties-talk and psychology-talk are the right way to approach issues of similarity and categorization. I think you're sneaking in a theory - or at least the outlines of one - while pretending you aren't. I don't buy your 'nothing to see here' approach. I think you are complicit in what you deny.

Indexing intelligibility to 'ordinary language' (if by this you mean 'language used commonly') is quite clearly wrong. People may and do come up with novel (and intelligible) uses of talk all the time. Outsourcing intelligibility to anthropology is a dead end.

But 'properties-talk' is very fraught (no less fraught, I think, than 'universals-talk'): this little train and this small ball are both toys for Johnny - do they share a 'property'? (I'm not saying they either do or they don't: I'm just saying it's not so straightforward as you make it out to be. It's not clear that 'property-talk' is the right way to talk about similarity).

This is a psychological question... — Snakes Alive

While I largely agree that the question of universals is more or less rubbish, it seems to me that its no less a jumping of the gun to say that the question is psychological. Could similarities and the classifications thereof not have something to do with 'the things themselves', as it were? Prima facie this does not seem an unintelligible path of inquiry. Perhaps the fact that we discern similarities between things and categorize them accordiningly also has something to do with our phisiologies, or our uses of language, or a mix of the above, which might also include psychology. Surely, one of the tasks of philosophy is to 'get the mix right', as it were. But to conclude at the outset that the type of question is psychological just is it's own kind of philosophical position, surely?

Interesting stuff. One thing it has me thinking is this: in the OP, I had to try and condense Rosen's presentation by focusing heavily on the idea of a common measure as a way to pedagogically make clear what I/Rosen meant by commensurability. However, one thing Rosen emphasizes - and that I did not mention for economy's sake - is that the idea of commensuribility requires no reference to a common measure at all. That is, insofar as two values can be defined by reference to a common third value, its easy enough to actually get rid of the common value and define the two values in reference to nothing but each other. If A and B are our length, C is our common measure, and n and m are integers:

(1) A = mC, and B = nC, then we can cancel out C such that:
(2) A/B = m/n
(3) B = A(m/n)

So that now, length B is measured in terms of (rational) units of A. This is where the assumption of commensuribility becomes properly insidious because now there is no 'external referent' which acts as a 'real world' mediator between values. Once you define a length in terms of units of another length, what you end up with is a 'closed system' which becomes impossible to get out of (Rosen: "Once inside such a universe, however, we cannot get out again, because all the original external referents have presumably been pulled inside with us. The thesis [of commesurability] in effect assures us that we never need to get outside again, that all referents have indeed been internalized in a purely syntactic form").

And in fact, this is the real upshot of commensurability: not simply the idea that there is a common measure between things, but that everything inside a formal system can be measured in terms of other things within that system without remainder. And this is what the 'disaster' is: the expulsion, if you will, of any external referent which would 'ground' the seeming self-sufficiency of such a self-enclosed system. On the flip side then, what incommensurability is, ultimately, is the non-identity (or the non-coincidence) of what can be measured with what can be constructed (the irrationals again are exemplary: the discovery of the irrational forced us to expand our universe of number so as to make measurement and construction commensurate again, which, as I've tried to point out, simply caused problems further down the line).

So this is all not strictly about measurement per se, and I have no beef whatsoever with the awesome innovations of measurement theory. Instead, it's about the relation between measurement and the things so measured, and an attempt to delineate the proper bounds of that relation; a spin, if you will, on the idea of a Kantian-inspired 'Critique of Pure Math', in which if measurement is left to it's own devices to see the world only in it's image, you end up with all sorts of transcendental illusions like Zeno's paradox and so on.