in this post I put my philosophy training to work

So the American Senate recently passed the FISA bill, which would grant Bush the legal right to privacy violations — violations that he has already committed, and which used to be felonies (circa one week ago). Translation: Bush hates freedom, Democrats are weak, tomorrow’s another day.

An unusual wrinkle arises when we consider Obama’s role in all this. The fundamental question is, how are Democratic voters supposed to endorse a candidate whose liberal chops have yet to be proven? He speaks the rhetoric of moderation, of reconciliation. Well that’s very nice, but endorsing niceness does not quite meet any adult standards for public policy. Substance matters too. If Obama wants to fight the charge that he’s an inexperienced newbie by playing the wisdom card, then he’ll have to show some wisdom every so often, i.e., by making passionate and rational arguments on actual policy. 

HatchInBrooklyn disagrees:

It’s time to put the “Obama Caved On FISA” talk to an end.

Obama may have promised to support a filibuster of an earlier FISA bill that contained retroactive immunity for telecoms. But we all know that it takes 40 votes to sustain a filibuster. Obama may be the de-facto leader of the party, but ours a fractured party. And with so many conservative red-state-Dems in our party’s caucus, plus others like Feinstein who are apparently too beholden to the powerful telecom companies in their states to vote the right way on this, a filibuster on this FISA bill was simply not a realistic possibility. The Dems could barely muster 40 votes for even the most watered down of all the immunity amendments. Obama and Senator Clinton both voted the right way on all three of them, and we progressives should all be proud of them for that.

Oh, why don’t you shut up and obey the commands of justice already. Beneath the Dear Leader faction of the Republican party (which by all indications is now in the wane), Red state Dems have a libertarian element. Speak to that.

Rise from your grave, O Rudolph

There is no such thing as a natural language, as in a natural system of semantics that is specifiable by satisfaction conditions and T-sentences. Even the sentences within our so-called idiolects are higgledy-piggledy and under constant revision due to the freedom of interpretation one can make of sentences in context (think of the Lewisian semantic contextualist insight), thus failing to meet the expectations of classical conceptual theories. If there is an idiosyncratic lexicon, it consists of conceptual atoms (i.e., whatever patterns we consider it useful to store in memory as primitives) that have large parameters of application with respect to the kinds of inferential roles they might play, and more importantly, the kinds of questions they might answer. These patterns are not tractably specifiable, and do not directly enter into sentences (thus lack compositionality), but they are all we’ve got. When it comes to the kind of systematic, inference-supporting sort of thing that is connected to determinate beliefs, there are only drafts of languages. When we draft languages, we specify (often arbitrarily) the boundaries of a concept by construing discrete conceptions. Importantly, when we consult our intuitions about meanings, we are exercising a kind of contextually inspired judgment-call that ignores the regularities behind our use of both words and sentences — this is why it is inappropriate to say there is an idiolect, because whatever is rigid is fleeting, and whatever can be sustained is innocent of our expectations.

This view, I think the correct view, holds the following mish-mash of positions:
a) Descriptive lexical atomism. Words can be identified with concepts, and concepts are the only feature of our idiolects that last long enough to support interpretations of linguistic activity across time. This lends itself to a conceptual role interpretation of foundational holism.
b) Inferential relations and compositionality only hold with respect to our conceptions, which are artificial and fleeting. An inferential role interpretation of foundational holism is unstable across time and only works in making sense of drafts of languages. However, it is internally stable to the nth degree, and so supports a kind of imaginary and artificial analytic-synthetic distinction (among other things).

All this should reek of Carnap. Rise from your grave, O Rudolph…

lab rat from hell

[With apologies to the Bastard System Operator from Hell]

Ring ring. 

Gotta man the phones. Retail people are supposed to do it, but they are scum, dealing with teenagers who are stealing Prada frames. Stay cool, focused. Pick up phone.

“FuckyouforcallingLenscrafters, my name is Lenny, how many I help you?”
“… what”
“Sir?”
“What did you say”
“I said ‘thank you for calling Lenscrafters, my name is Lenny…’”
“That’s not what I heard”
“I’m sorry we only treat eye impairments, please visit your doctor for more information on how to treat hearing problems.” Hang up.

Ring ring.
“Thankyouforcallinglenscraftersthisislennyspeakinghowmayihelpyou”
“Hey”
(pause)
“Uh, hi.”
“How are you?”
Pause. Do I know this person? Should I recognize the voice? Shit. Just give the stock answer.
“I’m alive.”
“Haha”
“Yeah.”
“Listen…”
(pause, sound of breathing)
“I, uh… ordered glasses four days ago… you guys said that it would take four days to arrive… by special order…”
“Yes sir, it usually takes about two weeks to arrive by special order from our affiliate.”
“But I was told four days…”
“No, you were told seven to ten days.”
“But I was told…”
“Sir, our name is ‘Lenscrafters’. But what we do best is craft lies.”
“oh”

Ring.
“Jose’s glasses emporium, my name is Slave Laborer number seventeen, how may I direct your call?”
Hangup. That was easy!

Ringy dingy.
“Thank-”
“YES WHERE ARE MY GLASSES I NEED THEM TO SEE”
“Aha, interesting. Well, while we cannot give you any temporary glasses, we do have a temporary solution. Did you know that if you scrunch your fingers up into little circles like a fist, and allow just a bit of light through between the arch, and then look through it, your vision will be distorted? This will correct for the problematic shape of your eyeballs which causes bluriness.”
“BUT I NEED TO DRIVE”
“You’re driving me crazy right now, ha-ha! Sorry, just a bit of dry humor there, thanks for playing along.”
“WHAT DON’T BE A SMARTASS I WANT MY GLASSES OR I WILL TAKE MY BUSINESS ELSEWHERE”
“There is no ‘elsewhere’. We’re a de facto oligopoly. Our parent company owns a half-dozen subsidiary lens-manufacturing companies, all of which give the appearance of competition, but which are in fact simply sister-branches of one large conglomerate. The only competition within the scope of our vast consumer base is Wal-Mart optical, another oligopoly. The rest are an aggregate of small businesses who are frankly of no significance.”
“WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH MY GLASSES”
“Nothing. But I see you have polarized reflective lenses on order. Did you know that the Ancient Principle in classical metaphysics predicts that every visible point upon a reflective surface will look like it originates from the intersection of the reflected rays and perpendicular of incidence? Taken to logical conclusions, this means that concave reflective surfaces will allow you to see into infinity and beyond. Frankly, isn’t that worth the wait?”
“SHUT UP WHERE ARE MY GLASSES”
“Your glasses should arrive within six days.”
“OH OKAY WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST SAY THAT”
“It’s not the goal that matters, it’s the journey.”
It’s much easier to encourage them hang up on you than vice-versa.

there’s a noise in my head! what horror!

On the same note, I have to say something about the newest riff on the “media causes mass insanity” plot coming to a theatre near you. I’m talking about the indie horror flick called “The Signal“, and it is excellent.

Critics have had mixed feelings about its plot structure, which is admittedly idiosyncratic. The movie was written/shot in three parts, and each part was the brainchild of one of the three directors. The first part, “Crazy in Love”, shows the entire population of the city of Terminus turning into homicidal maniacs after being exposed to a strange swirling transmission over television, phones, etc. The plot centers around the lovers Ben and Maia, who are coming to grips with having to confess their affair to Maia’s husband, Lewis. The second part, “The Jealousy Monster”, is about Lewis’s mad search for Maia, which takes a wrong turn when he crashes a happy couple’s New Years party. Appropriately enough, the story ends with Ben’s search for Maia in the third part, “Escape from Terminus”.

Maia’s husband Lewis is one of the first to be afflicted by the transmission, and he is both the story’s main antagonist, and an amazing villain at that. Throughout the movie, you get a genuine sense that you really do understand why Lewis is doing what he is doing — his motives aren’t mysterious, they’re both intelligible and completely understandable — but never for a moment do you actually sympathize with him, because he is a complete monster. This kind of villain is a refreshing and intelligent antidote to the ethical-gray-area style of realism that was so important to people in the 1990s, and which brought us the army after army of anti-heroes and sympathetic villains.

I want to focus on the scenes that feature Lewis, because he’s a vital figure in the story. I will argue that critics have failed to appreciate the centrality of his role, and this has led them to think that the story suffers from a lapse in continuity. Worse, in some cases this confusion is exacerbated by a failure to “get” some basic elements in the craft behind making a horror story.

The second segment is the strongest and most original part of the movie, despite the fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that it understates the screen time of its main protagonists, Ben and Maia. Rather, Lewis takes the center-stage, terrorizing the houseguests with his paranoid dementia for a solid half-hour.

Now, this was also the part of the story that confused some people. On first blush, I think that some were unable to absorb what was going on in part because the segment worked so well at disturbing the viewer, by way of bouncing back and forth between black comedy and just plain horror. Some saw this oscillation of mood as being thematic babel, but actually, the back-and-forth between comedy and horror is a common device used by horror writers. Danse Macabre 101 tells you that, if you don’t give an audience the chance to laugh, and to feel relief in between horrific moments, you will exhaust their spirit. The success of both the original and the remake of Dawn of the Dead are examples of the “recharge the audience’s batteries” technique put successfully into action.

All this is just to say that people shouldn’t confuse a storytelling strategy that has to do with evoking a mood for awkwardness of plotting and confusion of themes. I suspect that people will make this mistake more often when dealing with horror films than, say, suspense thrillers, exactly because they confuse the target of their feelings; i.e., by directing their feeling of disgust on the quality of craft in a movie with its effectiveness at evoking disgust. That’s what horror movies are meant to do (though when it comes to good horror films, that’s not all that they do). But of course, the distinction between “my disgust created by the picture” and “my disgust for the picture” only holds up for horror fans. If a person is not a horror fan, then all horror movies will be bad movies to them. But this only tells a wary reader that they aren’t equipped with the standards that are needed to make sense of the craft behind a horror film.

The other thing, which I briefly alluded to before, is that the second segment derails from the first and third segments and focuses only on Lewis’s dementia. This could be misinterpreted as a lapse in continuity, unless you accept that Lewis is possibly one of the most central characters of the film. In a sense, he is more important thematically than either Ben or Maia. This is consistent with the fact that Lewis plays a central role in all three parts. To some extent, the entire film can be read as a character study of him.

With most critics (Marlow Stern, linked above, is no exception) you don’t even get the sense that they have any interest in exploring the craft behind the themes and moods used in films, even at a superficial level. For this kind of critic, there are just adjectives, boo-words like “awkward” and “overboard”, which vaguely point in the direction of something like an interesting thought, but which never cash out into even perfunctory reasons.

(Maybe I shouldn’t take these things seriously, except that the same critical laziness is pandemic in philosophy, too. I am frustrated to say that the outer fringes of philosophical life over the past decade (i.e., the lives lived by the majority of career philosophers) must be understood as The Great Idle, reflected in the prominence of puzzle-solvers, question-makers, intuition-followers, and sycophants. The sharpening of good judgment and the development of intellectual virtue takes a backseat to the studied analysis of what Sidgwick had for breakfast.)

Anyway, I came away from the film very impressed. I get the sense that the Zeitgeist is moving in the direction of trying to provide an antidote to the critique of middle-class postmodern culture posed in Don Delillo’s satire “White Noise”. Far from being derivative, the recent cluster of films can be read like an ongoing conversation about alienation in contemporary middle class (sub)urban life. “The Signal” does not exhaust the possibilities here, and I think the material can be fruitfully drawn in more directions.

But, to end on a “boo” that would be familiar to Stern: at least “The Signal” does a fair bit more than flops like Stephen King’s “Cell”.

credit where it’s dr. due

The newest incarnation of Dr. Who lives up to a certain longstanding tradition in science fiction: that those fonts of genius that give up the absolute best stories imaginable (think, say, Walter Miller’s “A Canticle for Leibowitz”, and certain episodes of The Outer Limits) also provide its worst (Miller’s “Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman”, and certain episodes of The Outer Limits).

I just wanted to point out, for the purposes of posterity on this blog (WordPress’s best kept secret!) that Steve Moffat’s writing for Dr. Who have been brilliant and beautiful with few exceptions. They stand out like little islands of awesome amidst a sea of awful — to give you some idea, the most recent Moffat episode, a multilayered Borgesian-themed thriller called “The Silence in the Library”, comes right on the heels of a very special (non-Moffat) episode featuring Agatha Christie. (I don’t want to dwell on the negative, but there it is.) Sometimes you have to give things a chance, and you’ll get a delightful surprise.

Sometimes things explode, too. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with running away from an explosion, is there? Fireballs are so hot and destructive.

kingstorming

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who, upon hearing that a room full of literary critics has exploded in a ball of flame and destruction and burnt paper, would say how awful it is, etc.; and there are those who would laugh. I would say that analytic philosophers would, on the whole, fall into the latter camp (well, so long as Frederick Crews was assured to be safe and sound). Granted, literary criticism is a wonderful field that is full of interesting insights; but it is only that way so long as it is also reviled. For once you take fiction seriously as fiction, it becomes harder and harder to suspend disbelief. The other option is to take fiction seriously as reality, in which case you end up being a Barthesian textual-idealist (i.e., a douchebag). It’s really quite the puzzle for serious people.

With that in mind, I recently attended a lecture by Mark Kingwell (University of Toronto), who mostly does social philosophy. His talk was from his upcoming book, “Opening Gambits”. The topic of the lecture was what we do in philosophy: what philosophy is about, what it can accomplish, and how we might fruitfully understand it as a kind of art. (The talk itself was too artful and raconteurish for me to understand as a straight-up argument. I guess that makes for an interesting style, but it also makes me 100% certain that something or other was lost in translation.) He had three central claims, at least as I can gather: that a central part of philosophical endeavor is, or ought to be, playfulness; an amusing aside about the four ways to understand the notion of philosophical relevance; and (here my memory is fuzzy) that philosophical problems presuppose the possibility of solutions, and he casts doubt on the reality of problems.

The vision that Kingwell has in mind for philosophy, summarized in a word, is “play”. Philosophers are people who play with ideas. That’s their task. Well, this is good news, so long as we already suppose that philosophy is fiction. And if philosophy really is like art, then it would be a good idea. For I suppose that, when trying to engage in a cooperative exchange with other people, charity demands a feeling for play and playfulness. That’s the only way to get the most out of our interactions with others; we suspend our own disbeliefs so that it doesn’t get in the way of understanding somebody’s else’s beliefs.

Sadly, one trouble, as was remarked by one questioner (and given a disappointing ad hoc denial by Kingwell), is that it isn’t clear how moral dilemmas get solved when all we have is play. Philosophy involves judgment, and judgment cannot exist without the very serious possibility of a sense of closure. Kingwell gives us opening gambits, but no closing ones. Frankly, it is as if Kingwell’s vision of philosophy is of one great big brainstorming session.

Oh, fair enough, I guess. So with no further ado, here is the next biggest philosopher:

edutaining

I love Jared Diamond. If the book Collapse is any indication, his scholarship is meaningful, relevant, earnest, epic, and accessible (though still demanding). But earlier, I was listening to a PBS documentary that tracks the content of Guns, Germs, and Steel. During a segment on the first wave of the brutal European colonization of Africa, we hear the dulcet tones of Peter Coyote narrate the first unhappy encounter between Anglo and Zulu:

Suddenly out of the darkness swept a native African army. Their victims barely had time to fire a single shot from their rifles before they were completely overwhelmed. Within hours, nearly 300 voertrekkers [European pioneers] lay dead.

Nevermind the whole imperialist atrocities thing for a moment. I found that this bit of historical flourishing was the second most confusing thing that I’ve ever seen Peter Coyote take part of (second only to the increasingly bizarre and gassy plot to The 4400). I, like most people, assumed that slightly more than a single shot could be fired within the span of hours. Unless their numbers were, like, 299 children plus one gunslinger. Or the Zulus held them down and tickled them for a few hours, before killing them.

I won’t blame Mr. Diamond, of course. I doubt he wrote the script. But I do blame Hilary ClintonPBS edutainment. Seriously. Edutainment just hasn’t been the same since Bill Nye disappeared from the face of the earth, Carmen Sandiego was bumped off Interpol’s most wanted list, and Ghostwriter went on the picket line. It’s a downward trajectory here people.

my plan for utopia

I know nobody wants to hear arguments that use “the world would be a better place if…” as the first part. BUT! The world would be a better place if everyone listened to / came to love Porcupine Tree. I listen to Fear of a Blank Planet (and its extension Nil Recurring) incessantly.

on the subject of trust…

[via Poorman].

Glenn Greenwald comments on the tumbleweeds surrounding the latest American propaganda effort:

It has now been more than ten days since the New York Times exposed the Pentagon’s domestic propaganda program involving retired generals and, still, not a single major news network has even mentioned the story to their viewers, let alone responded to the numerous questions surrounding their own behavior. This steadfast blackout occurs despite the fact that the Pentagon propaganda program almost certainly violates numerous federal laws; both Democratic presidential candidates sternly denounced the Pentagon’s conduct; and Congressional inquiries are already underway, all of which forced the Pentagon to announce that it suspended its program…

After I wrote about Williams’ blog item yesterday, his blog was deluged with commenters angrily demanding to know why he has failed to address the NYT expose. In response, Williams wrote a new blog item last night in which he purports — finally — to respond to the story…

But [Williams's military analysts Wayne Downing and Barry McCaffrey] in particular had all kinds of ties to the Government, the defense industry, and ideological groups which gave them vested interests in vigorous pro-war advocacy — ties which NBC News knew about and failed to disclose, all while presenting these individuals to their millions of viewers as “independent.” Is there anyone who thinks that behavior is anything other than deeply corrupt?

Well, my mandate for this awful blog is to be as contrarian as I can be without damaging my integrity to the point of vomiting out my ears. So, in answer to your question: YES, Glenn Greenwald! Me!!! I’ll give Brian the benefit of the doubt.

like, you know, whatever

It’s always nice to see serious talk about applied epistemology, because these discussions happen only once every millenium.

David Lewis argued: If belief is the same as certainty, then a timid student who reliably gets the right answers in class, but who is very timid and unconfident, should not count as someone who possesses the relevant knowledge. But since timid correctness does intuitively count as knowledge, we should widen our conception of knowledge to include the student’s true justified intuitions. In this, Lewis proves once and for all that wallflowers are always the real troublemakers.

Now assume that’s true. Kvanvig remarks:

Given such a position, true belief has something going for it in terms of a connection to action that knowledge doesn’t. To use Socrates’s example, you’re better off hiring a guide with true opinion about how to get to Larissa than hiring one with knowledge when that knowledge isn’t accompanied by belief. For, as in Lewis’s student example, we can expect hesitation and indecision from those who know but lack belief, and we have no such similar expectation concerning those with true belief. In fact, in the student case, if Lewis is right, the student might know and simply refuse to answer at all because of the lack of belief. The analogue in Socrates’s example would be a knowledgeable guide who won’t go any further at some point on the journey because he is uncertain which way to go.

Kvanvig’s asks whether or not we should value timid-knowing at the same level as mere true belief. The criterion for value is, evidently, pragmatic value — confidence helps me to trust in the knower, perhaps because we suspect that a timid knower will break down under the stress at some point and stop answering questions. So it looks like the true believer gets a higher score than the timid knower. Kvanvig’s conclusion is that Lewis would emphasize the virtues of the true believer over the timid knower, at least in practical contexts.

This is an important discussion, because people often forget — or try to forget — that questions of trust play deeply into questions into the epistemic worth of testimony. Since testimony, knowledge by acquisition, is one half of epistemology, we would be fools not to investigate it seriously.