If anything needs to be changed, it is the labeling of these restrooms. Instead of calling them men's and women's rooms, call them male's and female's rooms, since gender is not identical to sex. — darthbarracuda

Let's just have restrooms, as you guys call them, unmarked by gender, and let there be someone keeping an eye on them at all times, a restroom-concierge.

Let's not separate the 'we' who decide the important things from the 'lgbt', or any other group of people we want to name who are different from 'us'.

It looks like the French have said Non to TTIP. Good for them.

I was just looking at interesting maps of London, and thought - you could probably map the Establishment by people, meetings and societies. I think of it as an elaborate network of people who know other people who know other people who are the real movers in one institution or another. Back in my college days I met a few people who have since become Part Of The Establishment. I think they learn early on how to recognise each other, the invisible equivalent of a secret handshake. Rather startlingly, a lot of them can't do the simplest things in life, they are so busy being Established. When the brother of a friend, a man high up in an international organisation, found himself deserted by his wife, he had no idea how to operate the washing machine. When Tony Blair announced in 1997 how he was going to 'modernise' Britain, it turned out he didn't know how to operate a computer mouse. Of course, the UK Establishment may operate by different rules, with breeding counting for more than elsewhere.

I confess I find my corner of Western society perplexingly unchaotic. Social cohesion continues in spite of everything. When the bastards in high places cut benefits, we provide food banks and charity shops. When They decimate adult education we make U3As to provide our own. Pace Agustino this is mostly done by kindly agnostics who believe in civil society. I wish they would stop so the revolution can get started - then I find I've turned into one of these civilians myself. Oddly enough, it makes me happier, doing stuff with other people. I worry that it can't be good for us.

My difficulty is...Who are you - who is anyone - to say to other people, 'It would be better if you didn't procreate?' Most people do procreate. Who are you - who is anyone - to say they know better than most other people about something so fundamental? It seems sorely lacking in humility and wisdom. One lives one's life according to one's own lights. To believe one has been granted some special insight that most other people lack - and that it makes ethical sense to tell them so - that's not how I see things.

Who all is involved in "The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists" and why did the NYT know nothing about this? — Bitter Crank

The icij has hq in Washington DC and a number of US journalists in its membership: https://www.icij.org/index.html

In my opinion, the need for justice (i.e. vengeance) is, in most cases, an outdated mode of operations. — darthbarracuda

Angry individuals or groups may seek vengeance. An orderly society requires justice. The two ideas, justice and vengeance, are entirely different and should not be confused. Even those who disagree with one another strongly on issues from determinism to abortion need to find a consensus on the principles of justice, or we shall all go to the dogs.

The incarceration rate itself seems to me an indicator of something about a society. Russia and the United States, for instance, have appallingly high rates of imprisonment. To face a long term of imprisonment for trivial acts of theft seems to be profoundly unjust. Practically speaking that is a bigger issue at the moment than the problems of determinism.

I wasn't aware, and I don't really know how UK law works. If the baker had refused to write "Deny gay marriage" would he have been guilty of discriminating against Christians? — Hanover

The UK law is summarised here: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/discrimination/about-discrimination/equality-act-2010-discrimination-and-your-rights/

It protects you against religious discrimination as well as discrimination on various other counts (nine in all) including sexual orientation.

The odd thing about the case of the Belfast bakers is that they claimed that they were happy to serve anyone, regardless of sexual orientation; but they just wouldn't put a pro-gay marriage slogan on the cake and have it known that it was baked by them.

Lots of old legislation was codified together in 2010, so naturally there are various areas where it remains to be clarified by judges how they will interpret it.

You may not be aware of the case of the bakers in Belfast who were found guilty of discrimination for refusing to bake a cake with the statement 'Support gay marriage' on it. Peter Tatchell, the long-time gay activist here in the UK, wrote a nuanced article about how he thought there should be a distinction between say a baker offering *services* to different groups that one might personally disapprove of, and being required to endorse an opinion the baker disagrees with. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/01/gay-cake-row-i-changed-my-mind-ashers-bakery-freedom-of-conscience-religion

Sorry, slow to respond. I suppose I think of the two strands, appealing to the same core notion, as trailing back to Hobbes and Locke, and therefore representing quite different notions of the role of rulers, reason and the social contract.

I brought up 'state of nature' and I think your strictures are wide of the mark. From Rousseau to Rawls thinkers have addressed these issues by working from these 'fables', because they arguably make good starting-points, they're not cunning devices conjured up by the Koch Brothers so we don't see things clearly.

For me a human being begins, finds themselves unavoidably in a social situation. How shall we get along together? Any group rapidly finds some minimal rules are necessary, if only, initially, to *prevent* coercion, i.e. to curb bullying and enable mutuality. Even the simplest social group finds it needs infrastructure, work-sharing, role-allocation, some loose definition of aims.

That's the place I begin. There will be sanctions against certain kinds of behaviour; then there will be sanctions if the first sanctions are disregarded. Here's one place coercion begins, starting I suppose from something like an imagined 'state of nature' (as both Rawls and Nozick start).

Another place to begin of course would be among the bullies, among groups that like fighting and competing, who think coercion is 'natural'. There are of course some quite hi-falutin theories built on that idea.

Wherever one begins, it's hard to see how one doesn't eventually arrive at a social contract of some kind, unless one simply accepts power/hierarchy/violence as self-managing. Then, within a social contract, to me it's a confusion to group all forms of supposed coercion together.

A society has to have some form of taxation, a human is a social animal, there is no opting out of all societies; one can move if one has the resources, or one can come to terms with where one is.

The supposed coercion involved in giving birth seems to me similarly a strange philosophy of impossibilism. These two activities, social grouping and making new humans, are going to keep happening and the search for wisdom involves partly working out how to come to terms with these things. To live by resentment of taxation or birth-giving seems a futile, nihilistic path.

Beyond that, I'm for minimising coercion. Kindness and overtures for peace generally make life more endurable, and even pleasant. But there are many occasions when it's necessary to oppose bullies and coercers, and it certainly isn't possible to oppose them effectively without sometimes giving them some of their own medicine. The danger then alas is that the process of such violence or quasi-violence gives people a taste for it. (We should be clear though that there are some little-explored areas where the modern State is coercive, for instance in the grotesque incarceration rates in the US, Russia and nowadays here in the UK too)

Generalized label: Red Green
Form of government: Social democracy with power delegated to the lowest possible level commensurate with the issue
Form of economy: Mixed economy with no limited liability to the incorporated. Steady-state (over lifetime of a business cycle) not growth as macro target.
Abortion: Woman's right to choose up to an age of infant-viability decided by independent experts.
Gay marriage: Anyone can marry anyone.
Death penalty: Against
Euthanasia: Something like the Swiss/Dutch models
Campaign finance: Strictly limited
Surveillance: Part of modern Statism that needs to be rigorously reduced.
Health care: Universal, basic care free paid by taxation/compulsory insurance.
Immigration: Enriches us but we need agreed formulae for numbers over time
Education: Radically rethought to remove present militaristic/Statist regimentation. Free, funded by general taxation.
Environmental policy: 100% renewability
Gun policy: Highly restricitive ownership and use..
Drug policy: Decriminalize and supervise.
Foreign policy:Ethical, biased against military intervention.

I think heroism is being muddled with bravery/courage. A hero is a type in a narrative. I remember Shakespeare's Troilus & Cressida, where Hector and Achilles are represented as rather shallow moronic heroes, strutting about battlefields. What do they know of life's travails?

I'm also amazed that db said that it was rational not to be afraid. I don't think heroes and rationality mix well, although virtue is indeed something to be rational about.

Hi jorn.

...the difficulty in grasping how something like one’s own 1st person experiences could come about, from the world of 3rd person perspective. — wordpress blog

First, you have to explain the converse. I know who I am, but what is this 'world' of which you speak? How, from an infantile almost undifferentiated world of me-ness (if there is such a thing) comes this so-called 3rd person perspective? At least, how come the differentiation? My new pal Heidegger (well I've read 'Being and Time' a second time and seem to understand it) argues we begin with ourselves, our own being, Dasein, and stuff that's present or ready.

I feel you have to put your arguments about this first. Otherwise you just assume some sort of naive realism without saying that you do, and leave people like me behind. I think of human identity as a social question. I can masquerade as several different people, in different places and times, but the modern world of Statism and surveillance wants me to be just one. Dammit, they're even trying to stop me using cash so they can keep track of the unitary me.

I am wary of dwelling on the Game of Life, except as a rule-based game of something. Maybe its hubristic title puts me off. It's just a game people play on computers to me, of less interest than re-reading Wittgenstein's remarks about rules.

In Haugeland's paper I am struck by two things for starters. One is how to talk of patterns seems to mean we must talk of, just accept, 'elements' as primitives of some kind, in the frame we're discussing, to be able to talk of a pattern of elements. Thus in a pattern of dots a dot is primitive; by contrast in a land of the blind, for instance, only a raised, tactile dot would be primitive, and a visual dot would lack meaning. Perhaps this is related to Pierre-Normand's point about regarding something as 'objects' at all: what we call objects depends on our schema.

My second point is about rationality. 'Rationality is the mother of intention.' Haugeland quotes Dennett approvingly. I'm interested then to know what rationality is. It worries me that it's question-begging, if we look for something primary and call it patterning, but then it turns out it's grounded on this other even more primary thing. An example in my current studies is about the distinction between rationality of action and the rationality of action-explanation. There's a Davidsonian view of that, for instance, which turns every explanation of action into something propositional. There's a different view (there are lots, I don't mean it's one or the other) which argues that the grip of certain strong emotions explains some action, without need for a propositional attitude. The latter suggests we can find order even in those spheres of our activities where we are arational or irrational; the former seems to lean towards a notion that the observer and the actor must both be rational creatures in some way to start with. Well, I think this may be as muddled as I am but the muddle is about Haugeland's core principle: what is rationality when she's at home? Why does it have to be specified separately in thinking about patterning?

I'll make my case, which I take to be continuous with Haugeland's thinking, in a followup to this post. — Pierre-Normand

I've got an area I'd like to explore but will wait until Pierre-Normand has made his further case. Very rewarding essay to bounce off.

Please, being-frank, please, I have been-adjacent-to to lecture 7 in a ready-at-hand series about being-with Heidegger today and I'm being'd out. I have fallen, I confess I am truly inauthentic and all I crave is my ownmost.

I hope you don't mind an inconsequential quibble, but radiocarbon dating relies on carbon-14, which has a rather short half-live (5,730 years), and isn't reliable past 62,000 years. A variety of other isotopes enable radiometric dating all the way back (with ever coarser resolutions) to several billion years in the past. — Pierre-Normand

Quibble accepted :)

In the moment, even experience is timeless. I don't place any of my experiences in time until I've passed into a different state of experience. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Some of my momentary experiences are plans for future action, and some are memories of past action, each understood to be going to happen, or to have happened, in a certain time-scale. How can one say that such experiences aren't placed in time?

I don't think the mere appeal to prehistory suffices, though, which is all these criticisms ever amount to.

The past, if you like, is like a rule of thumb: it's a schema for extending the way something can be manipulated 'backward.' It's projected by experience, not something that was 'really there' as if before it. — The Great Whatever

There can be an appeal to the historical imagination, whether or not one believes one is talking about something that was 'really there'. On Meillassoux's and my historical account, using our historical imaginations, certain events pre-dated the presence of homo sapiens on our local planet. That schema seems fine to me and makes no realist assumptions. If it's not ok, all sorts of archeological, paleontological and similar discourse has to have new caveats placed on every page. That's where I'm defending his right to a point of view, and claiming that this is a disagreement with the Schopenhauer turn of phrase.

What Meillassoux goes on to fret about, as I understand him, is that in a certain scientific schema, we 'know' beyond reasonable doubt - indeed we can 'know absolutely' - that certain events happened in certain time-scales before homo sapiens, via radiocarbon dating, and that because of this, all we think we know about contingency and necessity has to be rethought. For myself, that's where I don't follow him. But if others feel they've understood him better than me, I'd be glad of their tuppenny worth.

Others can look at you when you're busy with something (I have experience of this, I get cluster headaches) and say to you, 'I think you're getting a headache'. They recognise familar signs. Then they make allowances in chat with you for the fact that you're always grouchy when you have a headache.

But perhaps all I'm saying is that the boundary is permeable, I'm not sure myself. How do we understand each other? I have recently read some stuff by Karsten Steuber, he has interesting things to say. One can start with the Stanford entry on Empathy which he wrote: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empathy/

The phenomenon which fills the first present must at once be known as causally bound up with and dependent upon a sequence of phenomena which stretches infinitely into the past, and this past it self is just as truly conditioned by this first present, as conversely the present is by the past — Schopenhauer

To defend Meillassoux (though I don't agree with him in the end, but to be fair) it seems to me that one can 'get' this Schopenhauer sentence and yet disagree with it. It's an imaginative statement about a particular way of re-living the beginning of knowledge. But there might be knowledge to come which would bring the feeling of that moment into question.

Thanks for your reply csalisbury. I did read After Finitude, but it was at least five years ago. However I still remember thinking that his notion that, for example, the situation vis a vis prehuman or "ancestral" entities is really different in principle from that of entities that are currently merely extremely distant to us in space or distant within 'human' time doesn't make sense.

I mean if we say that humans have been around for 1 million years, just for argument's sake, would it follow from Meillasoux' standpoint that objects more than 1 million light year's distant enjoy a different ontological status, because the light we are receiving from them was emitted prior to the advent of humans, compared to objects less than a million light year's distant? — John

John, I think there is a missing 'not' in your first para here - 'is not really different in principle' - and if so I agree with you. I don't understand Meillassoux's distinction, in the quote csalisbury cites, between inferences from distant objects (purportedly because the consciousness of them is now) and distant events-in-time (purportedly because such events are antecedents of the onset of givenness). In both cases - far-flung parts of the cosmos, and long-ago events - the inferred events precede the onset of givenness, and in both cases the consciousness of them is now. Either the ancestrality problem should apply to both, or neither.

(accepting the term 'givennes' to be going on with)

Maybe the others who think Meillassoux is on the button here could explain?

If the hypothesis holds (that the "disconnect" or boundary is due to basic identity), then we may have to contend with our predicament. — jorndoe

Is there such a boundary? Humans, as compared to their nearest animal relatives, study each other a lot. I have very particular ways of talking about my pain, but if I talk to a doctor, they are likely to understand much more about what's going on in my body than me.

My wife says she knows when I'm unhappy about something because of certain physical gestures I make. Most people 'know' things about their intimate friends or relatives in this way, 'better than I know myself'.

Also, I think it's a category mistake to infer issues about 'personal identity' from ideas about 'identity' as ontology. The same word is in the phrase, so some similar factors apply, but a lot of different factors do too. Things that are identical to each other don't say 'I' or 'me', or indeed anything at all; to my mind this is a key difference between the notion of their identity and my notion of yours or mine.

I'm a Brit married to an American. Well, she is now a Brit too though you wouldn't know to hear her accent, but she has pledged allegiance to the Queen (something us Brits don't have to do in the ordinary course of things). I feel increasingly European; at university, in the city, wherever I go in the UK there are people from other European countries being smarter than us Brits. It will be odd if we Brexit, now that we've got such a lovely tunnel and Germans buy Land Rovers and everything, but even if 'we' vote that way it will take years of negotiations to fail to reach an agreement about how to do it.

Oh and isn't America a continent rather than a country?

So that I may improve the document. Making improvements does not imply any sort of responsibility. — Philo Sofer

There is no value for me, though, in that, since to me, if you disclaim responsibility for your own writings, they are inauthentic. The least it's reasonable to expect is an existential commitment on your part to your side of a debate.

If the regress argument for ultimate responsibility impossibilism is sound, then I cannot be ultimately responsible for creating the document. — Philo Sofer

But what then would the value be in discussing it with you? Are you not accepting responsibility for your views, or just not accepting 'ultimate' responsibility?

To take one point: I hold you responsible for the document outlining your philosophy. Do you accept your own responsibility? How does 'ultimate responsibility' fit into this?

Replying to Un, just jovially...I believe if you are with David Lewis regarding possible worlds, all possible worlds exist, it's just this one that is actual. But really (sic) you sound like an Aristotelian at heart.

But if there is no truth to a crime, then why the dog and pony show of having trials and convicting people? If there is no actual way in which Ms. Halbach was killed, then why do we care so much? I think we care, because this is a situation where the rubber meets the road, and we all think someone did murder her a certain way, and the jury is supposed to decide whether the prosecution showed this beyond reasonable doubt. We're all realists when it comes to murder. It's crazy to think otherwise. — Marchesk

I think we mutually consent to a highly-developed system of justice, and the 'fairness' we expect of justice runs deep in us: you can hear young children playing arguing fervently about fairness. So, on the contrary to you, I feel we recognize the workings of justice as a form of drama, in which the stakes are as high as the potential sentence - not to mention all the other stakes involved, from the bereaved's desire for satisfaction, to the investigators' and lawyers' reputations, to the public's wishes as audience.

We care very much because we care about human life, empathize with the sufferers (and the investigators and judiciary), and believe in some sort of fairness which is embodied in our judicial system. The phrase 'beyond reasonable doubt' suggests to me that 'truth' as you call it is on a scale, here, and that that factor is re-emphasized by the 'lower' standard of proof in civil cases, where the balance of probabilities is all that needs to be taken account of. This is drama, probabilistic in its judgments, but the actors' lives are exactly as portrayed by themselves. I don't see what 'realism' has to do with it at all. (But then, I used to write crime fiction so maybe I'm irreparably tainted by that :) )

I'm looking again at Wittgenstein's Blue Book, just a reminder of how it begins if you're interested:
' WHAT is the meaning of a word?
Let us attack this question by asking, first, what is an explanation of the meaning of a word; what does the explanation of a word look like?
The way this question helps us is analogous to the way the question "how do we measure a length" helps us to understand the problem "what is length?"
The question "What is length?", "What is meaning?", "What is the number one?" etc., produce in us a mental cramp. We feel that we can't point to anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to something.(We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it.) '

My guess is that the most common use of "true" has to do with deception. Consider the requirements of a good lie. It has to be believable. It has to be a possible world. What is the truth in these cases? The actual world. — Mongrel

The plausible is not the true. I feel much conversation hinges on plausibility not truth. And the pleasure of fiction seduces us by being plausible...ok, so what if...? - and then...?

Now, my Heidegger reading has already reached 'Higher than actuality stands possibility.' For me actuallity flits by and then is irretrievable, ah, memories, evidence, ghosts, what am I to believe? All we can do is make up dialogues and narratives about it. The possible is great fun, and rebounds back on the actual. Rub on a lamp of Moliere's and a genie appears to grant a wish, tell a marvellous story. So they say over in 'fiction'. Or over there in 'science', it turns out we can use lamps for wifi - who'd have thought there was even such a possibility until some geek imagined it?

To suggest that the truth doesn't matter is itself a truth claim. Hence, it clearly does matter, otherwise, the person making such a claim would never make it in the first place. — Thorongil

I can't say I agree with that. Someone who says that the aesthetic doesn't matter isn't making an aesthetic claim, they're claiming that aesthetics lacks importance in a schema involving various other things which presumably are more important.

But indeed it feels like the way analytic approaches keep talking about truth; it seems like a residue that will never evaporate :)

Interesting. I got interested in AP for wanting to know how their answers to questions would vary from H's. So.... I would love to hear from you after you've digested some of H's ideas.

I've long wanted to do a group reading of the OWA. Maybe you'd be interested after your sojourn? — Mongrel

I would. I'll be reading that in mid-Feb if all goes according to plan.

I don't know what to do with that. I look out at history and present day affairs and I think... that's it. The world is full of bitch monsters getting what they want. And the ones that correspond to my normal, sober self... what are they doing? Embracing death? Yea, sort of.

Do you know what I mean? — Mongrel

This would make a great premiss for a novel, by the way. The quiet decent woman who discovers she can disclose the inner Bitch Monster after the right amount of alcohol. And slowly she starts disclosing BM more and more...

I am mildly mean when drunk but only in a hopeless, there-he-goes-again way...mostly I don't drink now, and this is part of distancing things. But I have different ways of recognising that within me are all sorts of dark possibilities. In a sense it's mean to judge other people till you see something of them in you.

To me you are conflating the monstrosity and the achievement of getting what they want, though. Determination and persistence are also available to the gentle and radical :) 'Why do sinners ways prosper?' one can despondently ask one day (http://www.bartleby.com/122/50.html for the Hopkins poem), but then there are the likes of Jimmy Carter and Taylor Swift, seemingly decent people doing the right thing...(unlike Woody Allen, the sardonic commentator who finds himself in the moral mire eventually)...and lots of people I know who quietly make the world of civil and civic society run, unsung Honorary treasurers and voluntary carers...not embracers of death...

What did you come up with on the Heidegger front? — Mongrel

I'm not going to pop up with anything pronto on that front. I'm attending a course of lectures starting tomorrow, so it may be March before I even have a semblance or appearance of knowing what H is talking about!

Thanks for all your comments! I think I may have fuel to keep going with my scheme. Does it matter if it makes sense to anyone else? In the final analysis... probably not. — Mongrel

The one extra thing I'd add is that Habermas isn't much read by us Anglo-Americans, and so far I only know his stuff mostly second-hand, but he does have a different way of approaching these things, which would fall into the 'pragmatic' rather than correspondence or coherentist camps. Worth adding to the reading. For him it's a question of the linguistic community 'validating' talk among themselves, as far as I grasp it at one remove.

But regarding crimes and misdemeanors, you're saying you sort of insulated yourself from the world and its truths? Does that work? — Mongrel

I think 'insulated' is too strong, but I created a buffer-zone. I hit rock bottom, and from then I started looking for other things to care about - that I might care about. To me this is a little like getting over addiction, in that if you think about what you used to be addicted to all the time - well, in my case - you never get over it. Your life is still about the thing you're forsaking, like a lost lover. The only way forward I found was to invest myself in different activities, from games to physical exercise to...well, one thing is philosophy, though I am not very interested in Ethics, more in Metaphysics, Epistemology, Mind and Language. I find the analytic approach to ethics amazingly banal, it's as if sociology and politics haven't been discovered yet. But what we mean by 'what we mean', all that stuff, it turns out, fascinates me :)

I'm still a backroom boy for the UK Green party locally (because I believe the Greens are right, if a minority sport), still I hope a generous person. But the weight of other people's crimes and misdemeanours, the burden of feeling I ought to do something about them - that's mostly lifted. What, after all, is it that's burdensome about how other people act? I see that insight in Landru sometimes: that in his view 'The unexamined life is not worth living' means me, and my life, not a lot of rules about other people. A lot of people express well-thought-through opinions about other people's lives, and nevertheless have as I see it an unexamined life themselves.

As a non American ... :) Mine was a political moment, during the 1997 election in the UK, when I felt I realized that a really small number of people were capable of manipulating events. Often they have a pious- sounding front man like Tony Blair (or they are such a person). And they lack a moral sense. For a while this depressed me terribly. Eventually I somehow went back into myself, and found a kind of detachment from human affairs I didn't used to have.

This is not at all how I used to see the world. In a way though, in the long run I feel more at ease with myself, less urgently feeling I should *do* something. These bastards are stronger than me. I need my own space of reasonableness. I can't ignore the unpleasant triumph of evil people, but I can understand that I'm not responsible for them.