Tag: philosophy

Success

“This series of lectures on proof-theory is a priori dedicated to mathematicians and computer-scientists, physicists, philosophers and linguists ; and, since we are no longer in the XVI—not to speak of the XVIII—century, it is doomed to failure. […] This being said, plain success is not the only possible goal ; mine might simply be the exposition of a disorder in this apparently well-organised universe, in which logic eventually took its place between two beer mugs and the Reader’s Digest, and does not disturb, no longer disturbs—a sort of fat cat purring on the carpet.”

–Jean-Yves Girard, The Blind Spot

Freedom Evolves?

Here are some quotations from Freedom Evolves which may help you decide whether you want to bother reading it (I enjoyed it).

“To say that if determinism is true, your future is fixed, is to say… nothing interesting. To say that if determinism is true, your nature is fixed, is to say something false. […] The confusion arises when one tries to maintain two perspectives on the universe at once: the ‘God’s eye’ perspective that sees past and future all laid out before it, and the engaged perspective of an agent within the universe.” (p. 93)

Another on different viewpoints:

“Population geneticists tend to shun all discussions of bodies, structures, and real-world events that somehow compose selection events and instead just talk about the effects on the gene pool of one hypothesized change or another. […] Imagine a tennis tournament in which contestants just strip to the buff and get carefully examined, pairwise, by sports doctors and coaches who vote on which of each pair advances to the next round, until a winner is declared. Population geneticists would appreciate the point of such strange practice, but would acknowledge that since the judges’ criteria ought to be grounded in the rough-and-tumble of actual play, it is better to let the players go at it and let their actual contests decide the winners. Still, they would insist, you don’t have to watch. [… W]e can stand back and just tabulate eventual winners and losers, but we mustn’t forget that the contests do go on. Thinking happens, and how thinking happens affects which memes do well.” (p. 188)

On Dennett’s choice of tactics:

“I see him [Daniel Wegner] as the killjoy scientist who shows that Cupid doesn’t shoot arrows and then insists on entitling his book The Illusion of Romanic Love. […] Wegner and I agree on the bottom line; what we disagree on is tactics. […] I prefer to make the same points by saying that no, free will is not an illusion; all the varieties of free will worth wanting are, or can be, ours—but you have to give up a bit of false and outdated ideology to understand how this can be so. Romantic love minus Cupid’s arrow is still worth yearning for. It is still, indeed, romantic love, real romantic love.” (pp. 224-225)

And this is lovely, from Wegner’s The Illusion of Conscious Will:

“A voluntary action is something a person can do when asked.”

I’m not sure Dennett likes it, but it’s a hell of a lot better than some of the BS I’ve heard recently in a conference and read.

Logic and Reasoning: do the facts matter?

Had a read of Logic and reasoning: do the facts matter? by Johan van Benthem. Covers much ground in a short space and I found it thought provoking. Here’s a quick sketch of the bits I liked.

Van Benthem mentions the anti-psychologism stance, briefly the idea that human practice cannot tell us what correct reasoning is. He contrasts Frege’s view with that of Wundt; the latter, he argues, was too close to practice; Frege was too far. He argues that if logics were totally inconsistent with real practice then they’d be useless.

Much logic is about going beyond what classical logic has to offer and is driven by real language use. Van Bentham cites Prior’s work on temporal structure, Lewis and Stalnaker’s work on comparative orderings of worlds, work on generalised quantifiers which was driven by the mess of real language and for instance produced formalisations of quantifiers like most and few. Generally, van Bentham argues, “one needs to move closer to the goal of providing more direct and faithful mathematical renderings of what seem to be stable reasoning practices.” You want your logic to be more natural, closer to the phenomena. Conceptions of mathematical logic were driven by the terms that appeared in rigorous proofs, so the linguistic stuff is just widening the set of practices that are modelled.

Correctability in a logic is more important than correctness, he argues. This is consistent with the goals of the non-monotonic logic crowd I know and love. I find this most interesting when looking at individual differences in reasoning processes: perhaps a correctability dimension is out there somewhere, if only we could measure it and its correlates.

Divergences from competence criteria, he argues, suggest new practices. I still see many papers in which people are scored against classical logic. Failure should cause an attempt to work out what practice is being followed by a person rather than the more common concern of what went wrong and how we could bring people back.

Much more in this little paper…

Plato’s The Apology of Socrates

On Saturday I saw Yannis Simonides’s moving performance of Plato’s The Apology of Socrates. Here’s a translation (not the one by Yannis). And an excerpt:

“Friends, who would have acquitted me, I would like also to talk with you about this thing which has happened, while the magistrates are busy, and before I go to the place at which I must die. Stay then awhile, for we may as well talk with one another while there is time. You are my friends, and I should like to show you the meaning of this event which has happened to me. […]

… we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: – either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this? […] What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I, too, shall have a wonderful interest in a place where I can converse with Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and other heroes of old, who have suffered death through an unjust judgment; and there will be no small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own sufferings with theirs. Above all, I shall be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in that; I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not. […]”

Nice interview with Michel Foucault

(Over here.)  Extracts:

“I am not a writer, a philosopher, a great figure of intellectual life: I am a teacher. There is a social phenomenon that troubles me a great deal: Since the 1960s, some teachers are becoming public men with the same obligations. I don’t want to become a prophet and say, ‘Please sit down, what I have to say is very important.’ I have come to discuss our common work.”

“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.”

“Each of my works is a part of my own biography. For one or another reason I had the occasion to feel and live those things. To take a simple example, I used to work in a psychiatric hospital in the 1950s. After having studied philosophy, I wanted to see what madness was: I had been mad enough to study reason; I was reasonable enough to study madness. I was free to move from the patients to the attendants, for I had no precise role. It was the time of the blooming of neurosurgery, the beginning of psychopharmology, the reign of the traditional institution. At first I accepted things as necessary, but then after three months (I am slow-minded!), I asked, ‘What is the necessity of these things?’ After three years I left the job and went to Sweden in great personal discomfort and started to write a history of these practices [Madness and Civilization] … It was perceived as a psychiatricide, but it was a description from history. You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from the lazar house, he becomes infuriated.”