Tag: quotations

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.

A beautiful bastard

“Psychology – like Psyche – is a beautiful bastard. It promises much to young students who specialize in it. Yet at its heart it has been eternally homeless. It has tried to locate its parents in physiology, physics, or even in art – to be rebuffed by all these alleged parents as either not solid enough – or not sufficiently beautiful. So it continues to wander in the World – between societies – looking for its place. At times it finds a temporary place where there is some ideological order for its products – like tests or ways to re-direct blame for various actions between groups in a society. Yet such applied success – selling one’s actions while hiding one’s soul – does not lead to the latter’s discovery of its own identity, unsuccessfully sought after in Pavlov’s dogs, Skinner’s rats, or (currently) in fMRI pictures.”

—Jaan Valsiner and Alberto Rosa, from Chapter 1 of The Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology

On methodology

“I did not make a deliberate decision to adopt a particular methodology: I had the good fortune to work alongside gifted colleagues from backgrounds in different disciplines, and their various techniques seemed to be producing results. With hindsight, I should describe how one learns from both experiments and intelligent software in terms of the distinction that philosophers draw between the correspondence and the coherence theories of truth. An assertion is true according to the first theory if it corresponds to some state of affairs in the world; true according to the second if it coheres with a set of assertions constituting a general body of knowledge. Experiments provide information about correspondence with the facts, but they exert a dangerous pull in the direction of empirical pedantry, where the only things that count are facts, no matter how limited their purview. Computer programs provide information about the coherence of a set of assumptions, but they exert a dangerous pull in the direction of systematic delusion, where all that counts is internal consistency, no matter how remote from reality. Give up one approach and you turn into a Gradgrind, the teacher in Dicken’s novel Hard Times, whose only concern is with the facts; give up the other and you become an architect for the Flat Earth Society. Those, at least, are the dangers.”

From the prologue to Mental Models by Philip Johnson-Laird

John Fox on SEM

From an Appendix to An R and S-PLUS Companion to Applied Regression:

“A cynical view of SEMs is that their popularity in the social sciences reflects the legitimacy that the models appear to lend to causal interpretation of observational data, when in fact such interpretation is no less problematic than for other kinds of regression models applied to observational data. A more charitable interpretation is that SEMs are close to the kind of informal thinking about causal relationships that is common in social-science theorizing, and that, therefore, these models facilitate translating such theories into data analysis.”

hallucinogenic

What a brilliant way to begin a paper:

“A friend of ours, who was a brilliant mathematician, has been hospitalized because of long-term abuse of hallucinogenic drugs. We decide to give him a digital clock for his room. However, his doctor suggests that the hour and minute displays together might be too confusing. So, we put tape over the minute display, turning our gift into a digital hour clock.”

(from over here.)

Serenity

“A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the charm of existence in this spot, which was created for the bliss of souls like mine. I am so happy, my dear friend, so absorbed in the exquisite sense of mere tranquil existence, that I neglect my talents. I should be incapable of drawing a single stroke at the present moment; and yet I feel that I never was a greater artist than now.”

— A letter from Wether (Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther)

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.