Author: Andi

Particulars

“In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep, I have loaded the lectures with concrete examples…”

—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Fodor on evolution

Over the years, people keep proposing theories that go: “what everybody really wants is just …” (fill in the blank). Versions fashionable in their times have included: money, power, sex, death, freedom, happiness, Mother, The Good, pleasure, success, status, salvation, immortality, self-realization, reinforcement, penises (in the case of women), larger penises (in the case of men), and so on. The track record of such theories has not been good; in retrospect they often look foolish or vulgar or both. Maybe it will turn out differently for “what everybody really wants is to maximize his relative contribution to the gene pool”. But I don’t know any reason to think that it will, and I sure wouldn’t advise you to bet the farm.

—spotted over here in an old Mindhacks post.

Protection

I like this, but the analogy is a bit… crude.

“Zoos display an irresistible passion for the preservation of endangered species. A number of these are being protected, later to be released back into the wild. In the meantime, however, ‘the wild’ has disappeared! It is the same with human beings: ideally, they are recycled in human isolation cells (thalassotherapy, psychoanalysis, luxury health clubs, hospitals or asylums), and later released back into social life — in the meantime, however, the social environment has disappeared!”

—Jean Baudrillard, in Fragments

Weary?

“Discussions of minor problems in traditional logic are in these days generally regarded as a bore. They are commonly prefaced by an apology, and the people who chance to see such things in print, wearily remark, ‘Good Lord, yet another one!’ Such is the fashion. We are apt to forget that boredom is often the shadow cast by an enthusiasm; and that the wailing from him who is bored, is the complaint of one who can neither escape from, nor enter into, the interest which, for these very reasons, is to him so exasperatingly stale and unprofitable. This does not mean that all men are under a moral obligation to delight in what interests any one of them. But neither should the lone individual tremble at the possibility that what interests him may weary others. Rather let him state his interest plainly, and to those who fail to share it, wish a kindly ‘God speed’ as they depart.”

– Roelofs, H. D. (1927). The Distribution of Terms. Mind, 36, 281-291.

The phrase “in the interests of economic well-being”

Appears all over British government documents. This explains what it means, in a 2000 Commons committee debate on the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill:

“There is the provision for action—the tasking of our intelligence agencies—in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom. Those who have followed these matters know that that is a well-worn provision. It is in existing legislation, and is provided for in the European Convention on Human Rights. It sometimes causes puzzlement as to what it can mean.

“Examples of where it might be useful are where there is instability in a part of the world where substantial British economic interests were at stake, or where there was a crisis or a huge difficulty about the continued supply of a commodity on which our economy depended.

“The House will notice that the Bill restricts the activities of the SIS and GCHQ for safeguarding the economic well-being of the country to the acts or intentions of persons outside the United Kingdom. […]

“The examples that Douglas Hurd gave are clear. One is coded speak for oil—

“the continued supply of a commodity on which our economy depended.“

A good way to think about truth

“My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of truth-teller or truth-telling as an activity. By this I mean that, for me, it was not a question of analyzing the internal or external criteria that would enable the Greeks and Romans, or anyone else, to recognize whether a statement or proposition is true or not. At issue for me was rather the attempt to consider truth-telling as a specific activity, or as a role.”

Discourse & Truth, Concluding remarks by Foucault. (Spotted here.)

Science for the half-wits

A bit from Jean Yves-Girard‘s latest rant, The phantom of transparency:

Still under the heading « science for the half-wits », let us mention non monotonic « logics ». They belong in our discussion because of the fantasy of completeness, i.e., of the answer to all questions. Here, the slogan is what is not provable is false : one thus seeks a completion by adding unprovable statements. Every person with a minimum of logical culture knows that this completion (that would yield transparency) is fundamentally impossible, because of the undecidability of the halting problem, in other terms, of incompleteness, which has been rightly named : it denotes, not a want with respect to a preexisiting totality, but the fundamentally incomplete nature of the cognitive process.

Inner speech in the news thanks to Kylie

The best coverage of the story comes from The Sun [link now defunct]:

THE majority of people simply have a brain inside their bonce.

But not KYLIE MINOGUE.

The Aussie pop Princess manages to keep a whole committee inside her 39-year-old cranium.

She has so many conversations with said committee that she sometimes thinks she’s been speaking to friends and family.

A Kylie committee spokesperson (Kylie) said: “It’s not about having two different personalities – it’s about having a whole committee in your head.

“It’s about having this discussion with the committee about something really important, and assuming it took place for real.

“Like, recently, I was telling my friend William Baker about my next tour and what we’re going to be doing on it, and he was looking at me, like, ‘What tour, when?’

Quite a lot of research has been done on the properties of inner speech. Some from a rapid search:

  • Oppenheim and Dell (2008) [Inner speech slips exhibit lexical bias, but not the phonemic similarity effect. Cognition, 106, 528-537] asked participants to remember and recite tongue twisters. They found lexical bias (making word over nonword errors) in both overt and inner speech; a phonemic similarity effect (misproducing words with similar phonemes) in overt speech; but no phonemic similarity effect in inner speech. The latter effect was detected by allowing participants to report when they had mispronounced a word, indicating that their inner speech has successfully reproduced it.
  • Autistic people use inner speech to the same extent as neurotypicals (Williams, Happé & Jarrold, 2008 [Intact inner speech use in autism spectrum disorder: evidence from a short-term memory task, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 49 (1), 51–58]).
  • In tests of multitasking it has been found that doing two tasks, A and B, in an order something like ABABAB… results in slower reaction times and more errors than if you do something like AAA…BBB…. Disrupting inner speech increases the switch cost for the former pattern (Emerson & Miyake, 2003 [The role of inner speech in task switching: A dual-task investigation, Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 148-168]).
  • McGuire, Silbersweig, Murray, David, Frackowiak and Frith (1996) [Functional anatomy of inner speech and auditory verbal imagery, Psychological Medicine 26, 29-38.] examined neural correlates of inner speech and imagining someone else speaking. Inner speech was associated with increased neural activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus; imagining speech showed activity in the same area, the left premotor area, and left temporal cortex.