Wintry Smile

Today I had lunch at Peppers with Jason and two other grad students to talk about applying. The conversation ended up just wandering around, with a lot of metaphysics thrown in, since I didn’t actually have a lot of specific questions. The net result is that sometime during the conversation, I realized that I’ve subconsciously decided to apply this year unless I just can’t get the work done. So, let there be a conscious decision.

I am applying to grad school this year.

I also decided to ask Keith Simmons and Alan Nelson for recommendations. I’m told that it’s no problem that Keith only knows me from a set theory reading group, and Alan has only taught me as a visiting professor. Apparently a recommendation from him would carry a lot of weight, even more than I realized. That’ll be four recommendations if each of them ends up being willing (Bill Lycan and Ram Neta are the other two).

Oh yes, time to take the GREs.

John Roberts told me this morning that even though November 18th is the deadline for my thesis defense, it isn’t when my final draft is due. More like penultimate, possibly antepenultimate. Still, Nov 18th is precisely 7 weeks from today. Even after making some progress this week, I’m way behind where I need to be. Time to cut back on Go and AIM–if I have the strength.

…less salacious than it sounds. I’ve been mildly sleep deprived for a long time now, but I don’t have any major obligations until next tuesday, and I plan on spending most of the spare time in bed.

…but oh did I need that guilty self-congratulatory feeling.

Me: I need to send this to New Zealand
Girl behind the counter: “Is this just letters/papers?”
Me: “Yeah, it’s just a manuscript.”

That’s the entry for Peter Van Inwagen’s Material Beings, a book that I read a while back and now need a page number from. Given the nature of the book and the length due date, I’m fairly certain I can narrow it down to one of 5 people who has it out of the library. Still, it could easily take as long as a week to track him down and humiliatingly beg to have a look at the book.

Plan b: remove that thankfully inessential citation from the paper and continue.

The comment spam has ceased being interesting, so I’ve deleted what’s coming in, and turned on word verification to stop more from appearing. Although I’ll miss the compliments, I don’t think they’ll ever match the silver tongue of my first secret admirer.

I don’t really have a theory of how Supreme Court nominees should be evaluated, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not like this:

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, was much less satisfied with the nominee’s responses to questions about whether there is a “right to die.”

“Do you think the Constitution encompasses a fundamental right for my father to conclude that he does not want to continue - he does not want to continue - on a life-support system?” Mr. Biden asked.

“Well, Senator,” the judge replied, “I cannot answer that question in the abstract because - “

“That’s not abstract,” Mr. Biden interjected. “It’s real.”

Mr. Biden found the long back-and-forth less than illuminating, referring at one point to “this Kabuki dance we have in these hearings here, as if the public doesn’t have a right to know what you think about fundamental issues facing them.”

Of particular interest is the bold ontological assertion that abstract objects are not real. While there are certain moods in which I agree, I find Professor Biden’s excursion into metaphysics to be a bit of a non-sequitor. That said, John Roberts’ confirmation could well be such a disaster that it doesn’t matter how bad the stated reasons for opposing him are. Paraphrasing a bit, I’d sooner confirm Godzilla than John Roberts.

The Vatican would desperately like to purge American seminaries of gay men, and are preparing by conducting an investigation to find all the mutants.

Edwin O’Brien, archbishop for the United States military, told The National Catholic Register that the restriction should apply even to those who have not been sexually active for a decade or more.

I really hope that they don’t think this one through too carefully.

It is unknown how many Catholic priests are gay. Estimates range widely, from 10 percent to 60 percent.

I was writing a long post detailing my lack of faith in the entire project of giving a theory of reference during these past two days. Shortly before finishing, I made the mistake of expressing some of the same thoughts to Ed and thought “oh wait, I’m just doing a bad job of rehashing Stephen Stich’s argument from The Fragmentation of Reason.” So instead of the long post, I’ll just give you the money shot:

I think that analytic philosophy went insane recently

There’s two long posts waiting in the wings, one on Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” and the other on Benjamin and fascism, but they might die equally horrible deaths.

Or some comment spam on that last post. You be the judge:

“You have a knack for
writing. I read about 20
blogs a day, and skim about
30 more, so I mean it! We
can all use improvement, but
you certainly are better than
most I’ve read.”

But don’t get your feelings hurt, international man of mystery!

“I’m going to be starting a blog
soon, about affordable seo [ed: link removed]
(I know, it sounds strange!) but
if you don’t mind, I might drop
you a line just to get a little advice.
Ok?”

Oh how I anticipate that day.

In the meantime, read about how spammers are sort of like aliens.

How could a monarch stoop to dressing so much like a member of the petty-bourgeoisie? In the next generation we will have kings earning their MBAs and selling yard tools.

Rejoice! The california state legislature passed legislation rendering the marriage law gender neutral. It awaits the signature of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who may well still veto it, in which case there aren’t enough votes to push it through (at least I think not).

What I really love is the governor’s position, however: “Schwarzenegger’s office has repeated that he believes the issue should be decided either by a vote of the people or a court decision” (emphasis added). All the more evidence that the judicial activism issue is a red herring.

Trying to write for my thesis is becoming a nightmare. Not only is the organization absolutely impossible, I’m really struggling to decide what demands to hold the theory to, so that I’m honestly unsure whether I’m defending Dennett or attacking him, half of the time.

I’m reasonably sure of a number of points, but I have no idea how to work them into a thesis. I’m also worried that everything I’ve written so far is a dead end that I won’t be able to use once/if I clarify these problems.

My first stab at the problem was good enough, but I ultimately decided not to submit it on grounds of unresponsiveness:

1. What is the Physical Education Activities Program at UNC trying to accomplish through formulating activity standards?

The physical education activites program at UNC attempts to foster a fascist youth movement centered around the cultivation of an aesthetic of bodily perfection, especially that of the virile young man.

3. Does elitism foster mass-participation in physical activity? Briefly explain your answer.

Elitism is naturally at the core of any fascist movement: the individual learns that he must submerge his private goals into the collective will of the fatherland as it is expressed by the leaders of the nation. Having made peace between individual and state via this submission, the individual then participates in the mass-physical activity dictated by the reich.

4. Physical activity has been shown to provide some protection against several chronic diseases. Name four of these diseases.

Democracy, Modernity, Enfeeblement, Faggotry.

More tactically sound were the following responses:

To 1) The physical education activities program at UNC attempts to promote a culturally relevant approach to fostering physical education that is congruent with the economic and moral necessity of healthy physical activity. PEAP attempts to combat the well documented decline in physical activity following puberty, a period of transition which many UNC students have previously experienced. Thus, these students are at risk for declining levels of physical activity, and PEAP attempts to shelter them from this possibility.

To 3) While some might see elitism as the cornerstone of any regimen of physical education, drawing upon the lengthy cultural history of the Olympian ideal and the correlatory focus on the virile young man, this conception of physical activity seems more likely to promote a spectator society that is detrimental to the possibility of mass-participation in physical activity. Elitism, however natural it may seem, is likely to cause many students to become alienated from physical activity, seeing their own physicality as a flawed cariacature of those privileged by the elitist doctrine, a result which can only be strengthened by the Judeo-Christian conception of the body as an impure and temporary resting place for the soul.

To 4) Physical activity is known to absolutely obliterate coronary heart disease, adult onset diabetes, hypertension and depression.

…until there’s a legal battle over disciplinary action taken against high school students because of their facebook profiles. From a pragmatic perspective, I really can’t imagine what they thought they were doing by launching this new service.

A 22 year old man from Nebraska named Matthew Koso is being charged with statutory rape after he impregnated and then married a 13 year old girl last year. What makes the case newsworthy is that normally marriage is de facto protection from statutory rape charges, even if it’s marriage after the conception or birth of a child. The New York Times profile of the case is surprisingly sympathetic to him, if I read it correctly.

I was going to post about all the interesting features of the case, but was struck by the fact that in a number of instances, I can’t decide whether a given feature of the situation is exculpatory or damning (in terms of prosecution, mind you..at an ethical level the situation seems clearer). What makes this aspect of the law intellectually interesting is the presence of a fairly strong intuition that the law needs to exist without the well-developed rationale necessary to make a case like this clear.

“My fucking phone says that it’s roaming. I am standing outdoors in the middle of UNC’s campus. I am NOT roaming. Can you please inform me of whom I need to murder in order to solve this problem?”

I made the pilgrimage to Fransesca’s in Durham to play go tonight. I took a 9-stone handicap from a 15 kyu player and easily won, then took a 9-stone handicap from a 10 kyu player and lost miserably after a few blunders. Let’s say I’m 20-22 kyu.

If time permits, I’ll continue being a nerd this coming semester.

Bill Lycan once attended a talk attempting to explain what licensed us to be paternalistic to our children in Kantian ethics. His observation was that when a theory must employ complex arguments to accomodate the obvious it’s a problem for the theory even if the defense works.

I have a related suspicion of results where extremely simple methods are used to prove something extraordinary. Fitch’s paradox is an example. There’s an appealing principle that all truths are knowable: in principle, for any true statement, someone would be able to know it. Some things that could have been known can no longer be. I think there would be literally no way to know where the atoms that make up my body were 1000 years ago even given perfect knowledge of the laws of physics and perfectly accurate measuring instruments. In other cases, knowing one thing rules out knowing something else. Suppose I cat-sit breakbeat and bossanova. Kittens move around a lot, so I might have to choose to either know the location of Breakbeat at 10:53 or Bossanova is at 10:53. Any of these individual things could have been known but the principle doesn’t imply that one person, or even everyone put together could simultaneously know every true statement.

Yet, suppose there is an unknown truth, call it p. That p is an unknown truth is unknowable: if we knew “p and nobody knows that p” then p wouldn’t be unknown. So, the existence of an unknown truth, p, implies the existence of an unknowable truth. Dilemma: either every true statement is known (by someone at some time), or there are unknowable truths. Given this choice, you should accept that there are unknowable truths. The dilemma can be formally presented in quantified modal logic without any difficulty–I don’t really know modal logic at all but can follow the proof. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy explains in more detail.

There’s a promising line of challenge to the above argument made by Dorothy Edgington, based on distinguishing between “knowing in a situation that p” and “knowing that p in a situation.” The distinction goes as follows. Let p = “Anna is walking to the door of Johnson St,” and no one in Johnson St. knows that p. So “p and no one at Johnson St knows that p” is true. But I, sitting on the curb, know “p and no one at Johnson St. knows that p.” You can scale things up from Johnson St. to the entire world and attempt to dissolve the paradox. Roughly, in our situation, no one will ever know that p, but there are alternate situations in which someone could know that p. Call him Peter. If Peter is capable of finding out that no one in our situation ever knew P the problem is dissolved. As always, there are a lot of epicycles to be had here. In particular, the talk of Peter knowing about people in our situation is extremely problematic given the standard treatment of modality. Every so often, I try to wade into the literature surrounding this solution, but inevitably get depressed by its dreariness and the way that the central issues seem to very quickly get lost.

What I really want to say in response to the Fitch’s paradox is this: you have missed the point by the way you’re treating the knowability principle. It’s attractive to treat the principle as the bare assertion that for any truth, that truth is knowable. Certainly that is sufficient for the knowability principle to be true.

I think the real assertion of the knowability principle is that there is an entirely general conceptual scheme, capable of representing any aspect of the universe. This scheme is capable of representing the objects that make up the universe, the patterns that relate them, as well as evaluative discourse surrounding them (the disciplines of ethics, aesthetics, epistemology). Moreover, a culture blessed with this conceptual scheme would be in principle able to acquire evidence about any aspect of the universe implicated in their conceptual scheme. I’m firmly committed to the existence of such a conceptual scheme. More contentiously, it’s my opinion that the contemporary western world’s science and humanities are potential ancestors of this conceptual scheme. Our competence as representers of the world is capable of increase without bound. Performance limitations will always prevent us from knowing a great many things that we’d like to know. Since it requires quite a great deal of knowledge to even have a given conceptual scheme, performance limitations will almost certainly prevent us from even acquiring the ideal conceptual scheme. I can’t argue for these claims here, though.

I ran into my old macroeconomics professor at the Daily Grind today. It’s a tactical mistake, but I’m both too literal and too vain to substitute “I’m a bum” for “I’m working on my thesis.” So for the sake of my self-respect, I need to get better at my pitch. Here’s the first draft:

I’m trying to defend Daniel Dennett’s theory of how we attribute beliefs and desires to other people. He says we attribute beliefs and desires by assuming people are fairly rational. To start off with, we assume people want what they need to survive: they want food, water, shelter, they want to avoid things that are dangerous. We also assume that people know about obvious features of their environment. The reason we attribute those beliefs and desires is so that we can predict people’s behavior. This also works by assuming that people are rational. If you’ve I’ll predict that you do whatever is rational to satisfy your desires given what you believe. That’s the basic outline, and it’s pretty plausible at first. The first real problem is that Dennet isn’t very detailed. He gives us this story that works for the obvious cases: you think I believe there’s food in the refrigerator, so you think I’ll open the fridge when I’m hungry. But, if you know me, you might also think I believe the war in Iraq is hopeless or that the theory of relativity is true. It’s hard to see how you get from the obvious beliefs all the way to the really complicated ones. The other big problem is defining rationality, because it’s a very slippery concept, and also because it really seems that people do irrational things: they smoke or they play the lottery, maybe. Or they think we’re winning the Iraq war.

I know they’ll stop me before I get through all that, but whaddya think? Is it comprehensible? Do I sound like I’m wasting a year of my life?

Products of my all-nighter:
2 emails sent to professors
1 hazy recollection of reading the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy article on Edmund Burke
1 desire to read Reflections on the Revolution in France
1 desire to read In the Beginning (Go book)
1 frustration with the UNC library for being closed on Sundays during the summer intersession
1 beautiful 7:45 AM run
1 posting of something I wrote 15 hours ago
1 breakfast (first in months)

I ran continuously from the time I left my apartment stoop to the moment I returned for the first time ever. I ran much more slowly than usual, and proper running form eluded me after being awake for 20 hours: I’m sure I resembled nothing so much as a bobblehead doll. But the distance is the really important thing for now: doing intervals and other speed training involves being able to run long distances without collapsing.

I’m arguably more productive when I don’t sleep. Get some coffee in me, and it’s thesis-gibberish time. Bill will never know what hit him.