the 'argument from equals' in the Phaedo — Wayfarer

I've been mulling over your post and I don't have a simple response to it. I might spend some time actually looking at the Phaedo and then start a thread on it. In the meantime, I have some remarks.

1. I think it may not be possible to resolve our differences, because I am not sure they can be expressed cleanly, that there's some proposition or set of propositions you hold true and I false, for instance. Maybe, but I have my doubts.

2. There is a broad sense in which you seem to believe there is a world of concrete particularity, accessible to the senses, and a world of abstract generality, accessible to reason. It looks like there's little room for disagreement; I can't taste or see or touch the relation of equality, only things that are or are not equal.

3. That's not so far from Hume's observation about causality, but he didn't conclude that we can learn through rational insight what we cannot learn by looking; he concluded that the belief in causality is in some sense a fiction, a useful simplification.

4. If Plato's argument is right -- not clear to me yet -- if the concept of equality is unlearnable, then we might also conclude that we have no such concept, rather than concluding it must be innate.

5. "But of course we have the concept of equality!" --- We are adept at doing the things that having a concept of equality was supposed to explain, certainly. But if we cannot have such a concept, then the explanation must change.

6. It seems to us we see the entire environment before us, like a high-definition movie on a screen, our visual field. This is false. There is no such rendering of our environment present anywhere in our brains, and could not be. The truth is that we move our eyes frequently, much more than we are aware of, and we see a section of about a degree or two of our visual field clearly each time; the complete visual field is patched together without our awareness, giving the impression of a seamless whole.

That's an example of how an explanation can change to make something impossible possible.

7. The assumption that we must have the abstract concept of equality to judge whether two sticks are the same length suggests a computational model of the mind, with abstract rules being applied to concrete cases as they come up. I have my doubts.

8. Presumably the argument against materialism will continue before birth: if it's not a concept that could have been learned, it will also turn out to be a concept evolution could not have provided us with.

9. As you see it, Plato provides a dispositive argument that equality cannot be learned, but we have the concept, therefore ... If that argument is watertight, there's no need to consider empirical evidence, which could only mislead us.

10. On the contrary, I'm inclined to look at the research. Mathematical concepts have always been a central focus of developmental psychologists from Piaget on down to today. Parents and teachers spend time teaching children how to count, how to recognize shapes, similarity and difference, and so on, or at least providing them the appropriate setting for learning those concepts.

11. At what age do children actually acquire the concept of equality? What does the proto-concept look like, and how do they use it? Are there differences between cultures?

12. Mostly I think making claims about what can be learned and what cannot without looking at the development of children is worse than a waste of time.


As I said, I may post something about Plato, just because it might be interesting, though, not because it would lead to anything.

Christianity is kind of odd in that the central figure doesn't really demonstrate characteristics we'd think of a masculine. Jesus is a pacifist. He's compassionate. He's a son, not a father. Maybe he represented some kind of shift? Not sure — frank

Don't we worry, we fixed that.

No one likes to think of art as a business or trade. — apokrisis

I want to say there's a famous holograph of Balzac, page with the title of the new book at the top, and the rest of the page is full of calculations of how much money he'll make from it, which debts he'll pay off, and so on.

We do also argue to persuade, and sometimes the success of that persuasion is more important than the method. — Isaac

The general view is that there's good persuasion, which follows the rules of logic, and bad persuasion, which doesn't.

I'd rather switch that around and say logic is partially descriptive of at least some the types of persuasion we find good, or think usually work, etc.

That there are valid arguments that aren't persuasive is obvious: if you don't accept a premise, doesn't matter that the conclusion is properly derived. (Multiple ways not to accept premises too.) So persuasive arguments seem to be a subset of valid arguments. But it's not like that because a lot of arguments aren't deductive. So really it's a matter of the two overlapping.

But I still think persuasion is primary, and what we see with non-persuasive but valid arguments is escape, a derivative use of tech that originates as a type of persuasion. It's similar to how I've come to think there is a core use of language in the simple, direct account of what I know that you don't, basic narrative, but that form can be repurposed to lie, and, well, everything else.

we could do the same thing self-consciously and perhaps improve our reasoning. — Srap Tasmaner

@Wayfarer @wonderer1

I want to add that this is not the only option.

I'm interested in @Pantagruel's suggestion that there may be more of the analog input in the system than the digitized projection of that reality. That's really interesting.

But in a general way you could choose to self-consciously do something *different* from what your hardware does on its own, and I think this is kind of the goal in practices like meditation and phenomenology. The question that arises is how far back into the simplification process you can get, and we keep finding that the answer seems to be, not as far as you might have hoped. There are things your brain's going to do whether you like it or not.

But that still leaves some options. Can you catch it in the act? To some degree maybe you can, and again that's where I see meditation and phenomenology, but again the issue is how early in the process you catch something before it gets simplified for you.

But you may also be able to learn how your brain simplified and that in itself can be valuable.

And you can make some effort to un-simplify, to re-complexify.

Lots more to this.

You never know what battles the people around you are fighting. — frank

Yeah, contrary to the story I tell over in the intuition thread, every time I see someone driving aggressively I try to tell myself they're rushing somewhere for an emergency. I'm not always convinced by my argument, but I do it all the same.

Amen!

I suppose what I meant to say is that mathematics allows for utter precision, whereas, in reality, things are generally not mathematically precise. — Wayfarer

Certainly.

To paraphrase Bertrand Russell, we model the world mathematically not because we know so much about it, but because we know so little. — Wayfarer

That's very nice, but there's a lot more to say. We only can know a little because of the creatures we are. Bandwidth is small and reality is big.

It's only those aspects which can be quantified that provide mathematical certainty. — Wayfarer

Or, again, the other way around. Nothing can "really" be measured, but only approximated. We can call what we end up with certainty or precision, but it's really usability, since processing power is also limited. That math is more precise is the whole point. I'd like to say that simplifying the world or experience into a usable form just is the mathematical impulse. It's not that some aspects of the world can be measured and some can't. Everything can be turned into math.

And the mathematical impulse to simplify and make computable -- that's also obviously what's going on with logic.

It's funny how when you read Plato, he talks as if these are all the same thing -- you know, the way he'll say "those of you interested in philosophy and mathematics, in music and astronomy". That is, those of you who have noticed how we simplify the world in order to think about it and recognize that we could do the same thing self-consciously and perhaps improve our reasoning.

gravitas — frank

Always been an important word to me, yes.

The nasty version of "Man in the Arena" is the quote from Steinbeck: "Critics are like eunuchs gathered around the marriage bed to watch a whole man perform the act of creation." Jesus.

The one change I would make to The Man in the Arena is that I don't see any need to denigrate the weak and the timid. I get the sentiment, and I've tried to teach my kids, both the boys and the girls, that life ought to be an adventure. But there's no call to point out when anyone stumbles, whether he's strong or weak. You see what I mean? It's bad for the soul.

do you guys think most science textbooks waste the student's time by going through the history of how a theory came to be developed? — Count Timothy von Icarus

No. My issue wasn't really with the use of history per se, but with how it was or wasn't connected to other points being made, which would hold for any sort of obiter dicta in a post. I left in the detail that it was a specifically historical point as an opening for defending a different view of what sorts of connections between points are required in an argument.

I remember the specific moment I decided to trust my intuition. I was in college, at the library studying, and some guy came in and dropped his books on the next table over from where I was and dropped into a chair. I glanced over and thought to myself, dumbass. And then I upbraided myself -- Why do you do that? Don't be so quick to judge. Don't jump to conclusions, you don't know that guy. After a while he left and I left shortly after. I was heading for the stairs that were right next to the elevator and he was standing there, repeatedly pushing the down button. We were on the second floor. I decided right then that whatever I had picked up on when I first saw him, I was right. Dumbass. Probably hungover dumbass. I have trusted my intuition ever since.

But I don't actually know what he'll say. — Srap Tasmaner


Turns out you do! — Isaac

No I didn't!

I like the point about proxy victims. That's similar to points you've made before about how to understand the statistics of risk, stuff that's second nature to you but that I have to think through. This was very clear.

Not sure I buy the point about the elite trying to distract us from the real issues. I mean, of course that's a real thing, in many cases well organized and funded -- but shouldn't you apply the same statistical approach to whether Helen Mirren's mouthing off is necessarily part of such a scheme?

Maybe you see that a little differently, her speech as part of a regime of distraction by its effect, regardless of her personal status as co-conspirator. I'll leave that for you to sort out.

Facebook — Isaac

Facebook. ::facepalm::

So yeah, adherence to the rules of rational discourse are a really good guide, partly because they themselves are a cost outlay, they show good intent. — Isaac

Good one! Should have thought of that.

(Heard a fascinating theory along these lines of the origin of organized religion: there have to be burdens, like dietary restrictions and so on, as bona fides of your seriousness about being a member of the group; and these are only necessary because human communities had grown large enough that you might not know right off whether someone is one of us or one of them. Religion then steps in as a kind of passport, offering proof of group membership by having these up-front costs. A shared religion indicates a level of trustworthiness, so then religion can even cross borders and enable the maintenance of trading ties and so on. But again, it has to cost you something more than professing membership or no one will think it a reliable indicator of your trustworthiness. Another way of handling the cheapness of talk there.)

One other thing that occurs me, that comes off the idea of the sentiment of rationality being the feeling of release under tension, is that a lot of what we actually do is more rhetoric than logic, in this sense: if you think of storytelling as the art of withholding information -- so that the audience feels anticipation and is eagerly engaged, anxious for the next reveal -- then we make our little step-by-step points so that the audience will keep getting a little hit of the sentiment of rationality. I put it that way because it's like the way casinos take all your money by giving you occasional trivial payouts. Part of that manipulation, I've always heard, is that the win must come at irregular and unpredictable intervals -- by building in uncertainty about whether the next spin will be the next win, tension and anticipation can be maintained, but no one can maintain that state of tension indefinitely so you have to allow some occasional release.

Around here, that's something like uncertainty about where the steps are headed. When do I find out what the point of all this is? When do we get to the part I'm going to balk at? When do you admit what you're really driving at? And you can see the impatience building all the time; having suffered through a handful of points, feeling like their grasp of the issue is thoroughly established by the hurdles they've cleared so far, people start wanting to get to the big showdown. Part of what's going wrong here might be that step-by-step argument is too predictable, and while taking each step might be in itself satisfying, the process as a whole doesn't have the same hypnotic effect that gambling and storytelling do.

What does get people engaged is the surprise conclusion. You agreed to A and B, and voila! A and B entail C! Didn't see that coming did you! Then you get a big rush of rationality, which you'll have to struggle to shake off before you can examine whether A and B really do entail C. (And you'll hope they really do, because that was cool!) The thing about religion I described near the top, that hit me that way, as an awfully clever idea (which I'm not sure I conveyed very well).

very bad PR — BC

It was the sort of bullying that has no place in my idea of being a good man.

But the slapping is not apocryphal.

You understand, right, that it doesn't matter if the idea was factually accurate? It's how Americans wanted to think of themselves, and how I learned to think of the American ideal of manhood. You didn't enjoy war or seek glory; it was something you did if you had to. Maybe that was propaganda, to distract from whether you had to. Also doesn't matter.

You're probably right. It's my childhood reading of history I'm referencing.

I withdraw aspersions I cast in the direction of Sherman.

Was Patton also not the jackass I took him for? Brilliant warrior, sure, but a jackass.

Discursive or conceptual cognition operates by casting concrete particulars in symbolic terms, which relies on general concepts or universals. But there is always a gap between the ideal rational cognition made possible by symbolic thought and the concrete totality. I remember being very struck by this when I moved from the high-school physics of vectors and formulas to university physics, where the plethora of approximations involved in real-world calculations were suddenly being considered. — Pantagruel

Doesn't this reflect the distinction between mathematical idealisation and reality? The former allows for complete precision as a matter of definition, of which the reality is always an approximation. — Wayfarer

I think mathematics could be construed as the extreme limit of ideal-theoretical symbolization? The golden ratio appears in organic forms, but these instantiations are close approximations to the mathematical ideal. — Pantagruel

I hope no one minds me going back to this part of the thread. There's something here I don't understand.

Both of you describe reality as approximating the mathematical ideal.

Isn't it the other way around? Isn't the mathematics a simplification of reality? When you fit a curve to your data, you don't say the data approximate the curve. --- I mean, you can, if you like, proclaim the simple formula a physical law, and explain the variance however you like, confounding this and that, and claim that in the right conditions the data would better "instantiate" the law. But you don't have to take that seriously. All you're saying is that the formula's predictions are pretty good, and in some circumstances even better. How is nature supposed to "instantiate" mathematics? Are we sure we know what that means?

You can say the same thing about, for instance, musical notation, that it's a simplification of actual music making. There was music before notation, before music theory. That musicians now play from a score, so that they in some sense "instantiate" that score in performance, changes nothing. They still do more in performance than is recorded in the score. It's a sort of ahead-of-time simplification of what a performance of it will turn out to be.

And the real question is whether logic is a similar simplification of reality -- or perhaps merely a simplification of the relations between our concepts. For instance, there's just no chance that color perception actually works the way it's suggested here -- there's the freaking dress, for example -- and we've all been in situations where we were perfectly willing to attribute two different color terms to an object. (Most recently, for me, a debate about a coworker's pants that I was dragged into.) The necessary exclusion of other colors by any color looks like a simplification of how we use our color concepts.

All these simplifications do good work and save real time and energy. They are useful approximations of reality, not the other way around.

I would expect courage to tend to manifest differently in men and women. — wonderer1

I'm not sure I would, though it would fit nicely with that thing I posted about risk long ago.

But you hit the other thing I wanted to bring up!

Everyone agrees that masculine and feminine traits and behaviors -- whatever their proximate or ultimate origin -- can manifest in both men and women. Nobody's got dibs on anything.

But it does make a difference who's doing the manifesting. The example everyone agrees on is that women who behave in masculine ways (self-assertive, whatever) are often given a hard time for it.

But I think what I mean by being "a good man" is somewhere around here, it's the specific meaning that attaches to a man manifesting masculine traits. -- I'd almost rather say that it's about the way a man manifests feminine traits as well, but that's not quite it.

A couple reference points that resonate with me, for better or worse. If they're problematic, I stand to learn something.

There's the Raymond Chandler statement I posted earlier in the thread.

There's Jack Shaefer's novel Shane, basis of the movie. I remember reading it and thinking it perfectly nailed a certain American conception of masculinity, the reluctant hero.

In a similar vein, there are these odd pairs of generals in American military history: Grant and Sherman, Bradley and Patton. Sherman and Patton both thought of themselves as warriors in the grand European tradition, flashy seekers after glory. Grant and Bradley were somewhat business-like men who hated war.

I remember as a kid reading, probably in the American Heritage history of World War II, a story, possibly apocryphal, that German troops were a little unnerved the first time they faced Americans. They had fought the British, and the British, heirs to a grand military tradition the Germans could understand, sang as they entered battle. But these Americans were silent, grim. Americans weren't there for glory, but to do the job and get back home.

And what connects Chandler to this chitchat about war is that a good man is willing even to do unpleasant things if they must be done, and does them in part so that no one else has to. Private investigation is a nasty job, but one that needs doing and Philip Marlowe does it nobly, so far as that can be done. Shane wants never to pick up a gun again, having lived by one in the past and not happy about it, but someone has to face the bad guy and he's the only one who can. He steps up, and does what's necessary, but not for glory, and even though it costs him.

There's plenty more, these are just some things I know made an impression on me. They all involve a certain kind of resolve that others can depend on.

The other side is that I think a good man shows restraint as well, and doesn't use his strength -- within which I'd include privilege, being a man in a society where men have power and status -- recklessly or out of self interest. Chandler captures a lot of that too -- particularly in the sentence I thought would raise some eyebrows:

I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin — Raymond Chandler

The thing is, that's about power and status, rather than sex. The woman of higher station than him would have to be "seduced". The virgin is presumably young and unworldly and he would be "taking advantage". Taking advantage of his position in any sphere is not something a good man does. He doesn't lord it over his employees, doesn't smack his kids, doesn't take advantage of vulnerable young women. (There are probably no good men in The Iliad, by this definition.) This is all in the "with great power comes great responsibility" vein.

There's plenty more to say, but there's something anyway.

Got it. I guess in the long run, it also won't matter that I said "Robert Fulton" instead of "James Watt".

Were Hegel, Coltrane, Chappelle, Napoleon good dads?

Of course in practice that doesn't really matter either way as their few offspring were immediately swallowed up in the anonymity of a much vaster pool of population growth. But likewise, even their achievements were something else someone would have done - or at least done similarly enough not for it to count as a material difference in the unfolding of larger human history. — apokrisis

Why the "similarly enough"? Why did the universe or human history need someone Coltrane-ish? Why did it need jazz at all?

What on earth can anyone do that would count as a "material difference in the unfolding of larger human history"? If Fulton hadn't invented the steam engine, someone else would have, or they wouldn't, and humanity would hurtle toward the end a little slower or a little faster or about the same, depending on what happened instead.

To say something this weird about any individual, let alone an individual whose life work is meaningful to a great many people, you have to take a perspective from which nothing matters but the cold, hard truth that we're all doomed in the long run. Not going to argue with that.

I just don't understand what "material difference" means in this context. There's no difference that makes a difference to the Big Sky.

We're even now

Accelerationist!

Tankie — frank

For the record, no, not at all. Just realistic. I tell my son, who's further left than I am, though perennially at war online with the tankies, that as far as I'm concerned there's an empirical case for capitalism and I point at Why Nations Fail. I think that analysis is pretty sound and capitalism is fundamentally inclusive. That it eats through institutions has often been a good thing. But it'll eat through ones we don't want to, that's all, as it's eaten through American democracy.

There aren't any states per se. — frank

Sure, my simplistic history was *not* talking about the modern nation-state, which comes after and out of feudalism, but central authority. "State" the way anarchist historians talk about it.

No matter, you're much better versed in the history than I am, I think, so my thumbnail is going to be a tough sell.

One of the cool things about capitalism is that money is never bigoted. It doesn't matter who you are, if you have cash, you have power — frank

That's the official story, certainly, and honestly I tend to agree, but I recognize that this is not the story as some people read it. I'm thinking of anti-colonial theory in particular. From one way of looking at history, the rise of capital is an incident in the history of race. And I'm sure there are people who see it as an incident in the history of patriarchy.

I tend to see capital as indifferent. If chattel slavery's working, fine, but if it becomes a source of inefficiency then it's got to go. In the long run, capital is an acid that will eat through any institution you've got. Roughly how I see it.

One thing I've been thinking about as this thread rolled along is that I don't feel any desire to be a "real man" as that phrase is used today, but I'm still pretty invested in being "a good man". I don't know how women think about that sort of thing, not quite sure I could articulate what I mean by it, but I'm pretty sure I don't mean the same thing I would mean by "a good person".

That resonate with you?

Any other guys feel that way?

Sure, but here's the thing. The simplest history of power seems to go like this: first comes patriarchy, then the state, then capital. We have some reason to believe that the shift from 2 to 3 was a displacement, that the state is still around but serves at the pleasure of capital.

But what about the shift from 1 to 2? Certainly it looks like men invented the state, but what's the dynamic there? Is the state just another way of advancing men's interests, or did the state move to the top of the food chain, leaving patriarchy in place but making it subservient, using it?

Does capital just build on and make use of patriarchy as it does the state? Or is it men pursuing the good of men all the way through, using the state and using capital?

Even if the state and capital use patriarchy, are they also dependent on it as a foundation? Take down patriarchy and capital falls?

All of these options are the pretty stupidly reductionist, but it may be one of them has the main story right and just needs some nuance.

All of that's true -- I also thought of the example of Henry Louis Gates who, even before he was arrested for trying to enter his own house, lived every day of his life knowing he carried a "risk factor" for arrest he could do nothing about.

But none of that addresses @Isaac's specific claim (I mean, he wasn't actually specific) that economic oppression is more important than any of that stuff, real though it is. He might argue that all of these other sorts of oppression are just tools of capital, and addressing that is how you deal with racism, sexism, whatever. But I don't actually know what he'll say.

I have absolutely no respect for anyone who can't tell the difference, and until the former is sorted, any space wasted on whatever minor inconvenience the latter might have to endure is a travesty. — Isaac

It's true, you are a tanky!

For the sake of argument, someone might hold the view that the two sorts of oppression are related, and for evidence would point out that the child whose image you posted lives in world men have arranged to suit themselves.

You'll point out that it wasn't just men but wealthy and powerful men. And that's true, but that just brings us back to the same issue: the sort of wealth and power we see in the world, and the means of acquiring and accumulating them, the whole system traces back to men, since before there were such disparities.

Or so I imagine someone could argue.

I suppose there's something to be learned from anthropology here. Do we have examples of highly stratified but non-patriarchal societies? Do we have examples of patriarchal but (otherwise?) generally egalitarian societies?

I had to look that up! — Isaac

Did you use Yahoo! or did you get someone to help you ask Siri?

In other words, we take our best guesses as to the goals of the people we're interacting with into account when we model their behaviour all the time, language is no different — Isaac

There's something David Foster Wallace said about the appeal of fiction, and it's kinda heartbreaking since he ended up taking his own life: because we get to peek into their minds or otherwise get an explanation for why they do what they do, fictional characters are understandable, and it's pleasurable to think (or pretend) that real people might be understandable. What I don't think he said out loud is, It gives you the idea, or the vain hope, that someone might understand you.

I've been reading a lecture of James on "The Sentiment of Rationality." He makes a point, from physiology, that the pleasurable feeling of calm and order we associate with understanding and rationality is not just that of unimpeded thought and action -- which he emphasizes elsewhere -- but release under tension. It's impedance followed by free flow. Solving a problem, grasping an idea you struggled with, and so on, all obvious examples.

Together those tell a story about the friction in a conversation and why we engage in it anyway, but something's missing, right? We have communication in the first place because the cost of listening to you is lower than the cost of finding out everything for myself, you know, assuming you know something it would be helpful for me to know.

Talk is cheap. Listening is pretty cheap, but if you don't know anything I don't, it's not cheap enough, unless it's also a way to do something else, strengthen social ties, manage status, that kind of stuff.

Now we can say that we engage in the kind of conversations we do here because we're in the habit of sharing our knowledge and learning from each other, and that all adds up to a communal process of learning. Swell. It's just that in a given conversation, I won't know at first if you're any help, to me or to the project. So now there's this whole process of exploring your ideas just to find out if it's worth exploring your ideas. That's a lot of friction, and it's starting to look like a pretty heavy investment on a speculative basis. I'm gambling with my time and energy when I talk to you.

Anything up to here you'd disagree with?

Next steps then would be all about managing risk, reducing the time until I know whether the investment was a bust, improving the reliability of my guesses about whether I'm going to learn anything or otherwise aid the social project, and so on. And the rules of discussion would be about risk management. Make sense?

maybe rudeness and blue hair will cure global warming — Isaac

Okay Boomer

That's exceptionally gracious of you.

a lot of what you write in response to my posts is not to me, but about me — Wayfarer

Well in this thread, yeah, and I feel bad about that.

I acknowledge that my general stance is contrarian with regards to philosophy as it is nowadays understood and taught — Wayfarer

Which is fine by me. It's just hard to engage with you because every argument you present quickly morphs into all of your arguments. We start out changing an oil filter and end up taking apart the whole car.

Okay, occupational hazard, Issues connect to one another, arguments depend on one another, there are assumptions to suss out, all that. And there's a place for synthesis as well as analysis. I wouldn't lay down some rule that we only deal with one thing at a time and everything else is off-limits. Philosophy just doesn't work that way, and shouldn't. But we have to be mindful of the cats we're herding and take the opportunity to control the complexity when we can do so without doing violence to the discussion. The best discussions move up and down gradients of abstraction and connectedness, taking now the wider view, now the narrower, bringing in new issues at one moment and keeping things out at another.

You don't make any point by trivialising the argument — Wayfarer

I make a point about the form of the argument.

The issues at stake are considerably more subtle, and more significant, but I won't try to explain them again. — Wayfarer

Ansel Adams had a young photographer friend, and once a year they'd get together to talk (and maybe drink, I don't know), and the young photographer would bring a stack of prints with him. Adams would go through them, giving his feedback, and sorting them into 'yes' and 'no' piles. One time, he stopped and said, "Every year you bring this one, and every year I put it in the no pile. Why do you keep bringing it back?" Answer: "If you could see the climb I had to do to get that shot --" "Doesn't matter how hard it was to take the picture," responded Adams. "It's still a lousy shot."

Doesn't matter how subtle or significant the issues are, you've still got to follow Grice's maxims, and you've still got to connect one point to another, just as you would arguing about where to eat.

I'm open to being convinced there's another approach available, but I'll tell you what's not going to work for me, that it just comes down to choosing sides. You write as if you're rooting for your team, and it's always a good time to make any point that supports your 'side', whether it's directly responsive to anything, whether it's even connected to the last point you yourself made. I don't call that dialogue but cheerleading.

I think 'philosophy' also works. — plaque flag

Philosophy's a big tent, so it gives the impression of open-mindedness. But it's a fact that the practice of philosophy does not much resemble the practice of science. There are handful of famous (to maybe a hundred people) changes of mind (half of those are Hilary Putnam), but otherwise?

I'm not dumb enough to think scientists come in to work, grab a cup of coffee and check the reports of last night's observations so they know which theory deserves their credence today. It's slow. But revision large and small is built into the enterprise. Over in philosophy, the revision we see has the character of an arms race. --- I meet your objection through a small adjustment to my theory; you raise a new objection, and I make a new adjustment. Whole different deal.

Watched an episode of Nova the other night about the footprints at White Sands. Cool stuff, but how old? Most were guessing 12-13,000 years because the oldest Clovis site dates to 15,000. Results of carbon-dating: 23,000 years. There will be debate, and some new tests to replicate the date, but eventually everyone will agree to reshuffle our understanding of the populating of the Americas. Nothing like this is even conceivable in philosophy.

What did I get wrong? — fdrake

I could answer but I've already gone way over the line discussing the posting styles of members here. I allowed myself to start this thread for the wider issues it might raise and never intended to get into a back and forth about how people write. I had my reasons for giving in and doing just that, but no more.

Is it a form of asceticism, an epistemological veganism? — plaque flag

My third time posting this! Enjoy.

My taste is for keeping open house for all sorts of conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework. Provided that I can see them work, and provided that they are not detected in illicit logical behaviour (within which I do not include a certain degree of indeterminacy, not even of numerical indeterminacy), I do not find them queer or mysterious at all…. To fangle a new ontological Marxism, they work therefore they exist, even though only some, perhaps those who come on the recommendation of some form of transcendental argument, may qualify for the specially favoured status of entia realissima. To exclude honest working entities seems to me like metaphysical snobbery, a reluctance to be seen in the company of any but the best objects. — Paul Grice

I won't say that institutional science doesn't have its shortcomings and its blindspots, but that's just the nature of institutions. Science itself is not some close-minded affair, but the best way we know of overcoming closed-mindedness. That's what I want to stay connected to.

Where were most of the Tory male leaders educated? — Amity

This is a thing. I could hunt up the name of the author -- believe I heard her interviewed on Intelligence Squared.

Anyway, she wrote a book about party leadership and the Oxford Union, citing Boris Johnson as an example of what you get. The Union encourages a certain performance style, a kind of charm and an ability to think on your feet, but mainly the ability to say things that have a convincing ring to them, even if you're making it up. Britain, she claimed, is run by men very good at sounding like they know what they're doing, but who in fact have only the most superficial grasp of policy.