Neurath's Boat

Good news!

Pandagon is back!  There was such a void in my bloglines without them.  Especially Amanda, she's so hot.  Er, I mean, so insightful.  I'm glad my girlfriend doesn't read my blog.

I love stuff like this

Someone has determined that the best curve to match the rate at which razors are increasing the number of blades they have produces razors with infinitely many blades in 2015.

Brave New World

I was reminded of this work recently for fairly random reasons, and started thinking about it again.  I have to say that after I read this, I had a hard time sympathizing with what appears to be the standard interpretation of the novel.  Admittedly, the standard interpretation also appears to be the author's own, but I have never been one to defer to authorial intention.  I don't seem to get as many responses as I would like when I ask my readers for their thoughts (no doubt because I have so few readers), but I'll try again.

Which character do you consider more admirable, between Mustafa Mond and the savage?  Why?  I suppose I've hinted at my answer, but I'll only post a more detailed explanation if I get at least two responses.

Understanding the Other

Discussions are more likely to be productive if you adopt some sort of principle of charity, and try to understand the position of your opposition in a way other than concluding that they are stupid, insane, dishonest, or otherwise evil.  Of course, sometimes you do have evidence that people are stupid, insane, dishonest, or evil, and it's best not to deny that evidence, but that should never be the first hypothesis to seek out.

I do try to follow this principle.  In some cases, it's not too difficult.  I apparently disagree with, say, Orac to a considerable degree when it comes to politics, but I have something of a picture of a certain kind of conservative mindset, which I think fits him from what I've seen of him, which doesn't involve any of the undesirable attributions.  I think he's wrong about a number of things, of course, but I don't think any of the false things he believes (according to my mental picture of him) are obviously false, and for that matter I'm not even certain that they're false; I just think the evidence is against them, and so at worst he's making subtle mistakes evaluating evidence (and I admit I may be the one making the mistakes).

On the other hand, there are cases where the undesirable attributions are necessary.  The leaders of the intelligent design movement, for example, are clearly liars.  The self-styled "pro-lifers" that Amanda is always ranting about (the ones that are blatantly misogynistic, which seems to include most of the leaders and activists, though I hope a minority of the general public who would call themselves pro-life) can surely only be placed in the evil category.  W is dishonest, evil, and possibly stupid (I think probably not insane, but three out of four would already be impressive).

Still, there's a category I have a tremendous amount of trouble with.  I honestly can't come to grips with a large number of people who believe in various religions.  While of course some of them are in fact stupid, insane, dishonest, or evil, I've certainly known some that I'm quite confident are none of those things.  But this leaves me at a loss to determine how they could possibly believe what they believe.  I think this blog may have a religious believer reading it, and the rest of you are free to suggest your methods of coping with this issue, if you've ever considered it.

The enemy notes an interesting trend

I wonder why this would have been happening in recent years.  Possibly a few people getting left behind by the economy the Republicans insist has been going so swimmingly?  Of course, Hinderaker seems to imply the solution to more poor people needing help is to cut the programs that help them; it seems to me that this has already been tried in recent years, and might have just a bit to do with producing the current situation.

Divine Right of Kings

A noted libertarian blog provides an unusually sophisticated justification for the unlimited authority King George seems to keep trying to claim.

In fairness, the post was of course not intended seriously; it was for opposite day, apparently.  However, it struck me as an opportunity to reflect on the issue that has so consistently annoyed liberals like myself (I consider myself a liberal in both the classical and modern sense, and see no contradiction there whatever); the tendency of so many who call themselves libertarians to make excuses for right-wing big government authoritarians.  I hope that tendency will decline with the general decline of King George's popularity, but it continues to make it very hard for me to have much respect for the libertarian faction.

Rules

Matthew Yglesias mentions a rule which sounds quite plausible to me.  Of course, anybody who looks at my picture in the corner will probably suspect I'm biased.

Imaginative Resistance

I consulted my philosophically innocent person about another popular issue in philosophy recently.  All right, so I suppose I consult her often enough that she probably doesn't count as philosophically innocent any more.  She does have some wild intuitions, though, so she's very valuable from the perspective of shaking my complacency about what is or is not really intuitive.

In any event, the issue is that many philosophers have claimed that there is an interesting difference in our ability to imagine the truth of factual claims vs. moral claims.  We're easily able to imagine things we know to be false; Nelson losing at Trafalgar, humans having been placed on earth by aliens rather than evolving, time travel, wizards with the ability to alter reality by the force of their wills.  It is claimed that we have more difficulty imagining the truth of moral claims we hold to be false; imagining that Hitler was a good person (without changing any of his deeds, obviously), imagining that enslaving those of different skin color is morally right, imagining that suffering is good for its own sake.

My victim was inclined to deny the data.  To some extent, that is what I am inclined to do.  I am strongly inclined toward consequentialism, so if asked to imagine that some action normally viewed as reprehensible is good, I need only imagine that it increases overall happiness and I'm there.  Of course, this won't get me to imagining that suffering is good for its own sake, but I wonder if I should say that claim is conceptually impossible, because badness and suffering are too closely linked, and so imagining it is difficult or impossible for the same reason other conceptual impossibilities are difficult or impossible to imagine.

This does leave two issues, though.  My victim didn't think this much work is required; she thought it was unnecessary to specify, even vaguely, the worldly circumstances which would make a strange moral claim true; she thought you could just imagine it as easily as you imagine any other silly thing, with no more need to fill in the details than we have when we imagine time travel or magic.  I'm not sure if I agree with that intuition.

Secondly, if I'm right and my victim is wrong, then it should be harder for a deontologist to imagine crazy moral claims being true than for a consequentialist to do so.  I wonder if those who have made this claim have indeed been overwhelmingly deontologists.

"Theories and Their Interpretations"

I just heard this paper by Larry Sklar.  Among the topics he raised was the issue of what he called "quasi-positivist" intepretations of certain kinds of puzzling scientific results.  This is the tendency of physicists, confronted with a situation where multiple seemingly quite different interpretations of a theory produce identical theoretical results, to retreat to a claim that the theory is really about those results, and so that the seemingly different interpretations amount to the same thing.

Sklar gives several examples of scientists doing this in practice, and most interestingly from my perspective he suggests that this might provide a different perspective on traditional positivism.  If positivism is viewed as a generalization of all these partial quasi-positivist projects, then Sklar suggests that some of the traditional objections to positivism will seem to be missing the point.

Since quite a number of the leading positivists were physicists (Mach, Schlick, Carnap, a good candidate for a list of the three most influential positivists, is also a list of two physicists and one person whose study of physics got to the Ph.D. candidate phase), and Sklar's examples are all drawn from physics, this interpretation may have the further virtue of reflecting what the positivists were really up to.  That would certainly explain why they always did seem to think their critics were missing the point (that was quite explicitly Carnap's attitude to the Quinean criticisms).

Putnam's Paradox

So I've been thinking about this recently for some reason (I guess I'm always thinking about issues surrounding realism and anti-realism).  In his discussion of Putnam's paradox, David Lewis wonders briefly why Putnam supposes that only an ideal theory is guaranteed reference and truth, when a version of the model theoretic argument can show that any theory is guaranteed reference and truth.  He supposes that Putnam is assuming that our theories are forward-looking, so that their intended interpretations are as according to some future ideal theory.

This seems obviously right to me.  However, I think it shouldn't have been that hard to get to that point.  The lesson Lewis ultimately draws from Putnam's paradox is that global descriptivism can't work; the meanings of the entirety of our language and theories can't be determined by picking what would make them as true as possible, because a cunning interpretation can make virtually any theory true of virtually anything.  This is despite Lewis's enthusiasm for local descriptivism; for individual words and concepts, it is a good approach to interpret them to refer to whatever makes the most, or at least the most important, of our beliefs about them true.

That strikes me as absolutely the point of Putnam's paradox.  We can always interpret some part of our theory in light of other parts of our theory.  This is surely why Putnam only draws the conclusion that an ideal theory must be true.  Any less than ideal theory can always be interpreted in terms of future, more extensive theories, and can turn out to be partly wrong on the basis of that latter interpretation; only a theory that is as inclusive as possible is immune to being so interpreted by further theory.

Of course, from the conclusion that global descriptivism is false, Lewis moves on to maintain that we need some constraints on interpretation beyond making our theory, whatever it is, come out as true as possible.  Infamously, he maintains that theories should be interpreted as much as possible as referring to his perfectly natural properties and things which are built out of them.  The Canberra Credo maintains that Lewis was right about pretty much everything, except modal realism.  If I were to construct a credo, it would say that Lewis was right about pretty much everything, except perfectly natural properties.

Instead, I would say that it makes no sense to try to interpret a complete, ideal theory; all interpretation is internal to our theorizing, and whenever we're evaluating some theory, it is always in light of some further theoretical commitments.  I take it that this was the real point of Putnam's internal realism, as well as the old Logical Positivist rejection of metaphysics (I assume Putnam's "internal realism" terminology came from Carnap's distinction between internal and external questions; Carnap of course rejected external questions).

I should probably look up van Fraassen's paper on Putnam's paradox as well.  I'm usually in sympathy with van Fraassen.