The team would also like to extend their warm thanks and appreciation to Brian for the leadership and vision he has shown in the 6 years since launch. During his tenure, the journal has gone from being a largely unknown online novelty to now playing a unique and respected role in philosophical scholarship.

Welcome Elizabeth, and thanks Brian!

“…Microsoft has imposed itself as an almost universal standard, practically monopolising the field [of computational technology], as one embodiment of what Marx called the ‘general intellect’, by which he meant collective knowledge in all its forms”

This example evinces what we can usefully think of as the capitalization in part of Wittgensteinian ‘forms of life’.  A ‘form of life’ is a useful heuristic for capturing a community’s shared biological and cultural background, in terms of traditional and entrenched patterns of behaviour, in a single phrase.  Žižek’s point is that these patterns of behaviour, which form the ‘general intellect’, are being exapted: parts are being adopted, built upon, and changed to create a new pattern of behaviour, which are then rented out or sold to consumers.

According to Žižek, this privitization of the general intellect is facilitated vis-à-vis a switchover in the mechanism of generating goods: from the 19^th and early 20^th century mode of predominantly industrial production of material goods, to now one centred on immaterial production.  Immaterial production runs the professional gamut from computer programmers to palliative caregivers, and comes in two main flavours: production that creates (or cumulates, after a prolonged process) a kind of material good, like a computer program, a set of pictures, a book, etc.; or a kind of production that is exhausted in – that is, not separable from – the very act of production, such a play, a street performance, the administration of medical care, dispensing advice, etc.. This kind of immaterial production, Žižek states, is now ‘hegemonic’ – the driving means of wealth generation of our economy.

You might well question, ‘what exactly is being produced?’ Immaterial production clearly has something to do with our general way of going about and doing things – but what does it do? –improve our situation? –lead us toward some ideal state? Well, dispensing with any ideas of teleology (except the generation of wealth, of course) Žižek states: “The products of immaterial production aren’t objects but new social or interpersonal relations; immaterial production is bio-political, the production of social life”.  In other words, what’s being produced are new ways of interacting with the world, and with one another.

So with this in mind, while Microsoft is certainly a fine example of the way in which a pattern of behaviour (our way of doing business, managing paper-work, writing, etc.) has been taken-over, and sold back to us – a more pertinent example today is Facebook.  Facebook has taken over and now regulates a great deal of intersubjective communication.  It has effectively co-opted MySpace and online Bulletin Boards (which in turn co-opted real-life equivalents) to create a new space where people interact and share and discuss.  Facebook has essentially privatized a way of engaging with other people.  Correlatively, it’s not surprising that, with such a large chunk of our ‘general intellect’ caught up in engaging with other people, that Facebook’s initial public offering is estimated between 80 and 120 billion dollars.

But wait, you might think, I’m not paying to use Facebook. And that’s true.  But it doesn’t mean that Facebook isn’t renting out and capitalizing on the space it has opened up.  It utilizes the vast amount of traffic on its site to generate advertising and interfacing revenue.  What it’s renting out is space and attention – our space and attention.  Facebook leases out our sustained and repeated absorption in its website.  This is why the quote opening the BBC article linked to above is so appropriate: “If you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”

Facebook has turned our focus and attention – has turned us – into products.

(Apologies if this topic seems old hat to any – if you are a person already familiar with Dehaene, ‘cultural re-mapping’, number sensing, and the like, the payoff to re-reading this extremely cool and interesting stuff about human mathematical capabilities, is some very exciting and interesting new advances in brain localization and machine-learning)

Dehaene’s view is that our mathematical abilities result from the mixture of two evolved mechanisms, and, importantly, a sprinkling of language.  The first of these evolved mechanisms is a capacity to distinguish a certain amount of discrete quantities, or numerosity: the ability to tell apart one, two, three, and maybe four and five.  Then, there is the capacity to distinguish differences in quantity: that six is bigger than one, or that twenty is less than sixty.  Both of these abilities can be found in animals, and, yes, human children.  And it’s easy to understand why such mechanisms might persist over time*:  as an organism, it is very handy to have a capacity to determine between alternatives; whether option (a) was better than (b) because more nutrients, or less competition, or what have you.

What is gained when language is thrown in the mix is an ability to systematize quantity, to give every number a label that is easy to organize and remember.  This process builds upon the evolved mechanisms mentioned above, and extends them, particularly, our capacity in naming and utilizing discrete quantities (Andy Clark, in particular, has a good account of how this might work).  Eventually, through individual learning from teachers and parents, an infant gain the ability to determine absolute difference between number.  This replaces the kind of logarithmic guesstimation of our biological heritage.  (Radiolab has a fantastic podcast focussing on this aspect of Dehaene’s theory) –And from this, our ability to do mathematics follows (more or less).

So now, let us return to the calculator. Can it still serve as an image, a guiding picture for an understanding of how humans do math?  Well, maybe.  Whatever it does – and it certainly does calculate – a calculator certainly doesn’t have the same mathematical upbringing that we do.  All this means is that, whatever analogical perspicacity a calculator might bring to the mathematical abilities of full-grown, mathematically-capable humans, it won’t shed any light on how these mathematically-capable humans come to have their (near) algorithmic capacities.  If we really want to understand human-style math, we’ll need a new, genetic way of understanding such capacities.

Luckily though, we are beginning to create such a genetic account.

Marzo Zorzi, of the University of Padua has led a team that have created a neural network with the power of comparing estimated quantities.  Unfortunately while the article doesn’t link this research to Dehaene, it’s clear to see that this neural network mirrors the evolved mechanism he (that is, Dehaene) invokes to explain human numerosity.  This is exciting stuff!  Not only might this research help us situate such a pattern in the brain (perhaps via this new groundbreaking method of localization), but it may eventually help us to understand the way in which such a circuit gets recruited by language to allow for our distinctively human way of implementing mathematics.

Of course, there are always caveats.  This neural network has to ‘learn’ the trick of comparing estimated quantities, whereas it seems that evolution has made this ability in some way ‘innate’.  And further, we seem to be a ways away from any ‘hybrid’ approach in machine learning (indeed, language comprehension is a huge, if not the problem for artificial intelligence).  Never the less, I’m please and excited that we are slowly phasing out the more simplistic calculator-cum-human-calculation image, for more realistic comparisons and metaphors for our distinctively human ability to use math.

*It’s a particular bugbear of mine when scientists use the phrase ‘why such a (mechanism/organ/function) evolved’ – rather than this more innocuous and, in my view, correct phrase – thus reading a certain amount of teleology into the particular mechanism/organ/function that isn’t there.

RELATED:

Klein, Colin – Philosophical Issues in Neuroimaging

Clark, Robin – Generalized Quantifiers and Number Sense

Detail from James Gillray's 'New Morality'. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

‘Without a tradition, everything is impermanence and flux.’ Thus writes David Brooks in a New York Times piece giving advice to the rebellious and dissatisfied youth of today. If you are one of these youth, Brooks’ advice is that your rebellion should be grounded in a past tradition:

‘If I could offer advice to a young rebel, it would be to rummage the past for a body of thought that helps you understand and address the shortcomings you see. Give yourself a label. If your college hasn’t provided you with a good knowledge of countercultural viewpoints — ranging from Thoreau to Maritain — then your college has failed you and you should try to remedy that ignorance.’

Many years ago Bernard Crick made a similar point in his book In Defence of Politics. Conservatives anchoring themselves in tradition, he argued, forget that radical, dissenting progressivism is just as much anchored in tradition. ‘The conservative’s choice of being traditional or anti-traditional is meaningless.’

This is a fine point for an Englishman to make. The Burkean conservative claims the mantle of the Parliament of 1688, yet even the most extreme radical has roots that go deeper, into the Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, and Nonconformists of the Civil War decades. Conversely, it was Lord Melbourne, the spokesman for the party of progress, who gave Queen Victoria, the emblem of tradition, the most conservative advice ever given to a sovereign: ‘Never try to do good; you only end up getting into scrapes.’

And you hardly need to look to English history to find the meaninglessness of the conservative’s tradition/anti-tradition dichotomy. Bismarck, whom Frederick William described as a ‘red reactionary smelling of blood’, clung to his agrarian Junker roots against all the progressive influences of a privileged liberal education. Yet he went on to found the welfare state, half a century before the rest of Europe caught up, and to create a kind of nation the world had never seen before.

Radicalism, then, can be as sunk in tradition as conservatism. But should it be? Brooks does not say so, but the reasons radicalism ought to align itself with tradition concern moral philosophy.

Anybody hoping to do good in the world, whether by conserving, reforming, or revolutionising it, must have a clear idea of what it means to do good. There are only two ways of determining this – two metaethical theories – that have really influenced politics. One claims that doing good consists of making as many people as happy as possible. The other claims the concept of goodness cannot make sense apart from a notion of the proper function or end for things of a particular kind. To be a good person is to admirably fulfil the proper function, or serve the proper end, of a human life; a good society is one in which people are provided what they need in order to do so.

Of course there are other metaethical theories, but what political influence have they really had? G.E. Moore’s theory that goodness is a non-natural property, perceived through moral intuition, is said to have influenced John Maynard Keynes. And he definitely influenced politics. Certainly Moore’s reminder that people sometimes pursue intuited and intangible goals may have inspired Keynes’ attention to the so-called ‘animal spirits’ at work in the economy. And yet did Keynes need this reminder from Moore? It seems a historical extravagance to think so.

There are also various constructivist and social contract theories around, which some people might take offence at my having dismissed as not politically influential. But social contract theory in its authentic Hobbesian form is really a version of the first of the above-listed theories. It identifies the good with the maximisation of happiness, the social contract being the reliable mechanism for ensuring it. Alternately, in its corrupted Lockean version, it is a form of the second theory; the social contract and the natural rights of man flow out of the purposes our creator had in making us social beings. In its modern Rawlsian form social contract theory is not a metaethical theory at all, and anyway has not been massively influential over modern politics, not, at least, if modern politics is held to involve the governed as much as the governors.

Now out of the two main politically influential metaethical theories, the second leads very quickly to an emphasis on the importance of tradition. Where are we meant to learn the proper end of a human life, if not from some tradition? Looking at nature doesn’t help. The only purpose for which, according to our best science, nature has built us is to help enlarge the possibilities for a certain macromolecule to make copies of itself. That is not morally inspiring. Indeed to morally endorse the ends for which natural selection employs the human phenotype leads us down a very dangerous path. ‘That way’, to quote Alex Rosenberg, ‘lies the moral disaster of Social Spencerism (better but wrongly known as Social Darwinism).’ There have been a few interesting attempts recently to arrive at more positive forms of moral naturalism, such as Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness. But it is possible to claim that these are underdetermined, if not undermined, by modern biology.

If nature doesn’t give any morally satisfying answer to the question ‘what is the purpose, function, or end of a human life?’ does that mean that only tradition can do so? Probably not. But being embedded within a tradition does give the only semblance of authority to our answers. This was the main point of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. Novelists, artists, and philosophers often make guesses at what life is all about. But how we should determine which guesses are better than others is completely unclear. ‘We’re here on earth just to fart around,’ wrote Kurt Vonnegut. Well, why not? And then, at the same time, why?

The only real hope of convincing somebody not already convinced that your vision of the good life is the correct one lies in pointing out to her that she is already committed to that vision herself, following from her commitment to some shared tradition. As a liberal, as a democrat, as a Christian, as a socialist, she must think that this is what life is for – this is, it would seem, the closest one can hope to come to having right and wrong answers to questions about ultimate ends.

And yet, of course, it’s tremendously limited. This authority, or pseudo-authority extends only to the perimeters of a single tradition, and has only as much force as that tradition has internal unity and consistency.

This might push one to adopt what looks like the more natural and objective measure of goodness found in the first of the two metaethical theories listed above. Applied to politics, it places major demands on social science. It requires a policy, program, or revolution to be justified in terms of the happiness it is likely to provide, rather than in terms of its embodying some correct vision of ultimate ends. To make such a justification requires a social science with considerable predictive power, a social science that can predict when, under what conditions, and how much people will be happy. We seem a long way off having anything like this, as I’ve mentioned before. Indeed, a chapter of After Virtue is dedicated to arguing that predictions of even the near future of society are forever beyond our power to make.

Thus we might be pushed back again to the other theory, that what we do, both as individuals and as societies should be determined by beliefs about ultimate ends. But, again, agreement on these beliefs seems to require mutual embededness in a single tradition. None of the great moral conflicts of the future are likely to involve only stakeholders committed to a single tradition.

More than this, conservatives like Brooks and MacIntyre (I’m hurting somebody by putting them in the same sentence and I’m not sorry), perceiving that tradition hardly plays the role they would like it to play in people’s moral decision-making, recommend that we all actively embed ourselves into a tradition. The problem is that I suspect we all know deep down what a tradition is, namely a set of reasons for doing a set of things there are no good reasons to do. Once you’ve engaged your critical faculties, disengaging them is often impossible. Yet this is what would be involved in making the kind of uncritical allegiance to the moral authority of tradition that conservatives want us to make, whereby tradition would speak within us as a kind of second nature.

This, then, is the dilemma for the young people dissatisfied with the current order of things Brooks is addressing. If they – actually we – set up general happiness as our objective moral standard, we have no guarantee that our projects will help us to meet it. If we commit to some vision of ultimate ends, we have nothing but appeals to tradition by which to justify our commitment, and tradition won’t work the way we need it to. What, then, should we do? Create a new tradition, I suppose. That, however, might take a few centuries. For now just fart around.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Achieving happiness is easy. I don’t mean eudaimonia – that oversophisticated happiness for Pinot-snuffling yuppies. I mean ordinary, practical happiness for ordinary, practical folk: utility. Achieving eudaimonia is definitely not easy; at your very approach it dances away like a will-o’-the-wisp on gossamer winds of pretentiousness. But utility? Utility is solid and graspable. In fact, Australians say ‘utility’ to refer to what Americans call a ‘pick-up truck’. A ute, we normally say. What’s more blunt and practical than that? Eudaimonia is a concept for sprinkling on your puy lentils to add that certain je ne sais quoi. Utility, on the other hand, is a concept you could change your sparkplugs with.

So, achieving ute is easy. Here’s how you do it. Start with the things you have. Now exchange them with people for other things you would prefer to have. People will participate in these exchanges whenever their preferences are different to yours. This will be often, since humans are psychologically diverse. Keep exchanging for as long as your preferences fail to be maximised, and you’ll always be getting closer to full happiness.

As long as there are free markets, the opportunity for exchange will be there. You may not like where you are, but you can always exchange your way to somewhere better. Suppose, for example, you inherit a large manor house from your parents, but you don’t like manor houses. Suppose, also, that you’ve always wanted to be a collector of comic books, but you don’t own a single one. Blast! But exchange provides the way out of this cruel trap. In fact, it provides the way out of all cruel traps. More money than sense? Buy yourself some education! All dressed up and nowhere to go? Exchange some of your clothes for invitations to exciting events! Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink? Find somebody who prefers non-potable water to potable water, and let the trading begin!

Why does it somehow happen, then, that markets are relatively free and yet people aren’t moving towards full satisfaction? There are three main explanations. Maybe people are already fully satisfied. Maybe they’re refusing to exchange on account of some perversion. Or maybe they’re screwing up. (There is a fourth possible explanation, which is that some factor external to the whole system of exchange is causing interference. This possibility threatens to undermine the whole theory by introducing untestable ceteris paribus clauses into its main principles. Let’s never talk about it again.) So, as I said, there are THREE explanations. The third requires the introduction of a new concept. It’s possible to screw up by being mistaken about your preferences or by forming false expectations. This is why we need the safety net.

The safety net is a familiar concept from the circus. The tightrope walker, for example, is meant to walk across a rope, but sometimes she makes mistakes. So, as she’s training, they put a net under her. Otherwise she would fall. See? Safety net. Likewise, a free market lets you exchange your way to happiness, but just in case you make mistakes and make yourself less happy, there’s the safety net, in the form of the welfare system. It keeps you from getting too unhappy as a result of your own maladroit exchanges. You could also call it ‘training wheels’. It’s for people who haven’t quite got exchange right yet – people whose hedonic balance is a little off. Don’t worry, little darlings. We’ll catch you. Now, back on the rope.

I said back on the rope! Yes, you see? The problem with the safety net is that it also catches the aforementioned perverts, who simply refuse to help themselves to greater happiness through exchange. Imagine a lazy circus student who doesn’t even try to walk the rope, tumbling straight off every time and using the safety net as a big hammock until somebody prods him off. That’s a good reason not to make the safety net too comfortable. Make it out of some kind of tough material so it chafes the skin, or, better yet, rig it up like the rope-beds in the hostel described by Sam Weller in the Pickwick Papers: every morning the ropes go slack and oversleepers are dropped onto the hard wood.

The above should give you everything you need not only to achieve happiness but also to build the good society. So why is there so much debate about political economy? Because people don’t understand these simple principles. Maybe they didn’t read The Constitution of Liberty, because it was too long. Now they can read this blog post, which is much shorter with no loss in content.

Take Mitt Romney. He recently got into trouble for saying he wasn’t concerned about the very poor, because there was a safety net for them. That’s perfectly sensible, as I have proven. People like Paul Krugman might come whinging with their statistics about tax rates and poverty, but they ought to listen to Adam Smith, who said ‘I have no great faith in political arithmetic’ (Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter V). The theory I’ve just fully outlined requires no reference to numbers; it’s a piece of folk psychology. Treating it as some kind of scientific theory, tractable in terms of quantitative laws with specific values for its variables runs it straight into the objection that all attempts to do so hitherto have rendered it either false or so generic as to be vacuous (see my previous post, which asserts the same point, also without evidence). Let’s never talk about that again either.

Back to Romney, who next said something even more sensible, which is that if there are holes in the safety net, he’s happy to repair them. Good thinking! Imagine if the circus school net-maker wasn’t vigilant! The real problem is the next thing he said, which is that he wants to focus on the middle classes, rather than the very poor or the very rich. Certainly focusing on the very rich would be silly and pointless. They’re miles above the safety net! They’re not just walking the tightrope; they’re flying over it, somersaulting off unicycles and pogo sticks with big goofy grins on their faces. The middle classes are also above the tightrope, leaping up to swing on trapezes at various levels. But that means Romney’s idea is foolish. If government starts trying to help the middle classes, this will involve putting safety nets at different levels above the tightrope instead of below it! But if you do that, the nets will get in the way of the performances! This is what economists call ‘crowding out’.

In conclusion, Romney’s views are horribly confused and show a basic failure to understand political economy, which consists, to recap, of the following two principles: (1) people make themselves happier by exchanging, and (2) government’s only role is to provide a safety net for people who suck at exchanging. Deviating from these principles, Romney will end up wrapping up the whole circus in safety nets like a crazy incontinent spider.

Perhaps, however, his social philosophy is not the one I have just outlined. Maybe he is applying some heretical social philosophy, one that draws from a stock of concepts going beyond those of exchange and safety nets. If so, he must tell us so, and what his new, deviant social philosophy is. But then he also shouldn’t confuse the matter by using a term like ‘safety net’, which immediately signals commitment to a classical theory admirable in its straightforwardness, if nothing else.

Aaron Meskin is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on aesthetics and other philosophical subjects. He was the first aesthetics editor for the online journal Philosophy Compass, and he co-edited Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007). He is a former Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics and is Treasurer of the British Society of Aesthetics.

Roy T Cook is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, a Resident Fellow of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, and an Associate Fellow of the Northern Institute of Philosophy (Aberdeen). He works in the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and the aesthetics of popular art. He blogs about comics at:  www.pencilpanelpage.wordpress.com

Philosopher’s Eye: Why did you two decide to edit The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach?

AM: I thought there was enough good work out there being done on comics that someone could produce a good book on the subject matter. I like to work collaboratively, so when I met Roy it seemed like a good idea to work together. I suppose there’s also a sort of selfish reason–philosophy is about conversation and I wanted more conversation (and more interlocutors) on a topic I care about.

RTC: Aaron was nice enough to ask me – someone with no prior professional experience in aesthetics – to comment on a three-paper session on comics at an aesthetics conference. The volume was conceived over coffee at the same conference, based on the positive response to the papers and resulting discussion.

PE: What’s the central concern of the book, and why is it important?

AM & RTC: The book focuses on the aesthetic issues that are raised by the art form of comics. It is not philosophy ‘in’ or ‘through’ comics–the basic idea is to take comics seriously as an art and explore the philosophical questions that art raises. One of the most useful and interesting thing for philosophers of art to do is to focus on the specific issues raised by particular art forms–this strategy has really paid off in recent philosophical work on film and music.

PE: And what is it that draws you to this broad area?

AM: I care about the popular or mass arts. I particularly like comics. I like working in relatively new areas — I like the freedom and the challenge of figuring out what to say about topics that haven’t been previously explored by other philosophers.

RTC: Aaron and I arrived at this shared interest from completely different directions. While Aaron is an aesthetician who began to explore his interest in comics, I was just a guy really into comics who, as a result, started working in aesthetics (prior to this I had neither training nor experience in aesthetics). I think the different backgrounds and approaches helped when we were putting together the volume.

PE: What comics do you recommend for people who don’t know a lot about the art form?

AM: It’s an obvious recommendation, but Art Spiegelman’s Maus is the unquestioned masterpiece of the form. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Some other great works: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Charles Burns’ Black Hole, Daniel Clowes’ works such as David Boring, Ghost World and Ice Haven. Anything by Chris Ware. The British artist Posy Simmonds is wonderfully literary. I like some things by the (oddly) mainstream comics author, Grant Morrison, very much–Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Seven Soldiers of Victory. George Herriman’s early twentieth-century comic strip, Krazy Kat, is amazing, as is Winsor McCay’s even earlier strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland. The former is strange and profound, the latter is visually stunning.

RTC: Of course, Aaron and I don’t agree about every comic, but I won’t name the comics in his list that I think are overrated! Comics that I would add to the list are Canadian cartoonist Seth’s It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken and Wimbledon Green, anything drawn by either Jack Kirby or by Darwyn Cooke, and anything written by Warren Ellis (who was kind enough to write a preface for the anthology!). Aaron didn’t mention what is, in my opinion, Grant Morrison’s masterpiece – The Invisibles. In addition, I cannot emphasize enough my love for John Byrne’s work on The Fantastic Four and on The Sensational She-Hulk during the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Finally, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts is widely held to be a national treasure here in the States, but it deserves still more attention (and much more academic study).

AM: And I’m not saying anything about Roy’s list. Except that Seth really is worth reading.

PE: What sort of audience did you have in mind for this book?

AM & RTC: The volume should be of interest to philosophers, philosophy students, and anyone interested in comics (i.e., fans, comics theorists, comics makers). Anyone interested in the popular arts. So everyone, basically!

PE: What sort of reaction do you hope the books will get?

AM & RTC: Philosophers and philosophy students who read it will see that there are serious and interesting issues raised by comics. We hope they’re encouraged to think seriously about comics and other under-explored art forms. And we hope that people from outside of philosophy (comics fans and artists and theorists) will come to understand what philosophical aesthetics has to contribute to the understanding of the art form.

PE: Why do you think people should take comics seriously as an art form and topic of philosophical interest?

AM & RTC: Comics have tremendous artistic capacities–they can do pretty much everything literature and painting can. They have a remarkable capacity to tell complex and emotionally rich stories by means of visual narration. And they raise fascinating philosophical questions about representation, narrative, artistic value, authorship and more. Even those who aren’t fans should recognize that they raise interesting philosophical issues.

PE: What’s your current project? What’s next?

AM: I’ve got a lot of things other than comics that I’m working on–some experimental aesthetics, work on relativism and the semantics of aesthetic predicates, work on the short story, co-editing a book on aesthetics and the sciences. But I’m not going to stop working on comics–I’m in the process of writing an introduction to the aesthetics of comics for a forthcoming anthology on the philosophy of art, and I’ve just had the idea for a way of structuring my own book on comics. It has to do with opera! I hope to get round to writing that book sometime in the not-too-distant future.

RTC: After all the work involved with this volume, I need to get back to my day job – logic and philosophy of mathematics. So I am working on two main projects. The first is developing a version of logical pluralism from an intuitionistic perspective. The second is continuing my work defending, and mathematically developing, Scottish logicism, a contemporary variant of Gottlob Frege’s logicism. On the side, however, I am also currently working on a short book examining John Byrne’s use of metafictional strategies in The Sensational She-Hulk, and what this kind of ‘formal play’ has to teach us about how comics work.

A little pet peeve.

So there are a ton of different usages of the word ‘philosophy’.  Leaving aside its double-life as a verb, the OED lists nine noun entries for ‘philosophy’ – and one of them really grinds my gears.  I might be the only philosopher that gets the irritated, nails-on-chalkboard sensation when someone uses the term in this way, but I suspect not.  Not only are philosophers incredibly sensitive to their own use of language, splitting already split hairs, I find that they’re almost preternaturally attuned to the misuse of words in others.  Maybe we’re just all jerks.  Number six in the OED list is the spine-shivering offender, particularly, entry (b): “In extended use: a set of opinions or ideas held by an individual or group; a theory or attitude which acts as a guiding principle for behaviour; an outlook or world view.”

Maybe now you’re starting to sympathize with me.

Maybe now you’re starting to get that nervous twitch at the corner of your eye.  Such usages invariably begin with ‘My philosophy…’ (or worse, ‘our philosophy…’).  Businesses, politicians, and celebrities are, if not the worst offenders of this usage, certainly offer us the most prevalent examples.  Here are some, randomly culled from Google: ‘Our marketing philosophy […] depends heavily on our belief in limitless possibilities’, ‘My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.’, and so on*.

Why is this, and lets not mince words here, offensive to the two ears of (at least this) academic philosopher?  My own suspicion is that it has less to do with an ivory-tower defence of a proper usage of the term, than with the inevitable Crocodile-Dundee-style confrontation between 6B and these proper usages: i.e. ‘That’s not a philosophy, this, is a philosophy.’  To wit, when people start thinking that academic philosophy is the same as gathering and living by a collection of opinions, or indeed, ethical statements, which academic philosophy believes is but a subset of problems under only one (but a major) division of the discipline.  This, at least, is what pushes my button.  Not the use of the term, but that it misleads people about what philosophers actually do on a daily basis.

One might think that definition 6b hasn’t applied to mainstream philosophy since the time of the Ancient Greeks, where one’s philosophical analyses and conclusions really were a world view: things really did look different if you were an Epicurean as compared to a Stoic.   So maybe, what we need to do is isolate this use of ‘philosophy’ and try to slowly replace it with ‘ethos’ or ‘guiding principles’ or ‘firmly held beliefs’.   Would that solve the problem?  I’m not sure, and I’m starting to come round to the fact that this idea is a little misguided.  That really, 6B, and all its usages, even the extremely annoying uses, really does belong with all the other definitions, and that it should not only be used in this way, but encouraged.

Say what you will about David Foster Wallace – but in this area, I think he’s right.  In his doorstop of a book, Infinite Jest, he spills a lot of ink showing the wisdom of common phrases.   He picks up on this theme in the heart-wrenching (and mercifully, much shorter) 2005 Kenyon commencement speech.  What does a liberal art’s education really mean? –and the platitude, that it “teaches you how to think”?  I won’t retrace the article, suffice to say, that “teaching you how to think” has more depth, and more to teach, than you might think a common, bandied-about phrase really should.

And this, I think, is the way we should treat number 6B.  It might seem irritating, and a distortion of the ‘real’ uses of ‘philosophy’ – but it is just as real, and just as relevant.  Philosophy was, as alluded to above, once much more than an analysis of the necessary and sufficient conditions, or of supervenience bases and non-reductive explanatory levels: it did capture something about the world, and the way we do (or should) live in it.  And I think we should keep that in mind as we go about our studies, our great tracts of analyses – we are doing more than definition no. 1, creating “[knowledge], learning, scholarship; a body of knowledge”, and doing more than performing 4a “[rational] inquiry or argument, as opposed to divinely revealed knowledge” – that we are attempting to understanding the world by carving it at its joints, and trying to find our place in it – that we are, after all, crafting a world view.

Related:

David Vessey – Gadamer and Davidson on Language and Thought

*I have a suspicion, that the word ‘philosophy’ becomes something of a null search term when attached to most words.  Outside of its specifying usage with words like ‘ancient’ or ‘of law’, I doubt it really adds any great value to the trimming of search results.  I also think there are rules for a drinking game in here somewhere.

The BBC (picked up by Slate) go on to make the link between the discovery of such planets and astral systems, and SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.  With the discovery of more and more of these potentially-hospitable earth-twins, SETI gains a more plausible target to turn its arrays.  With the discovery of more and more of such planets, it is more likely (though I am hesitant to use this term here) that we may discover intelligent life.  Another variable in the Drake Equation starts its climb up in the cardinal numbers.

But wait! What is intelligent life?  The ability to broadcast galactic radio-waves?  Drake, at least, keeps that a separate variable, a tier that only a select group of intelligent critters will ever reach.  But that really seems to operationalize our search for intelligent life.  What if, being impatient, we send a probe (‘Make it so Number One’, etc.) to Kepler 22-B and discover strange, barely congealed bioluminescent areas – would we be right in attributing it with intelligence?  Might our current conceptions of it be too broad? – too exclusive?

Alva Nöe, my usual blogulocutor, seems to think that our current understanding of intelligence is limited.  Drawing on Enactivism (championed by, among others, Evan Thompson and the late Francisco Varela), Nöe argues that we have overlooked plants for too long!  On an Enactive understanding, life and mind and constitutively linked – the organizational structures of life are ‘intelligent’ – and plants are surely alive.  Thus, they are in some way intelligent!  Sure, plants won’t be constructing radio-arrays anytime soon, but they display some kind of intelligent life.  After all they adapt, and adapt to, their ecological niche, they can orient themselves towards nutrients, etc.

There are reasons both to agree and disagree with the organization cum intelligence view.  It certainly gives a deep unity between all living things, and may create a gradational scale of intelligence that, yes, would probably be more useful for our Kepler probe.  But it is less likely to proffer any meaningful observations about what makes human intelligence so unique and powerful – why we have constructed radio-arrays, and are actively looking for other array-assemblers.  Such arguments are very poor at explaining how our level of intelligence could arise: how one could jump from sunflowers to super-sunflowers to humans.

When it comes to searching for intelligent life, I have to agree with SETI: wait and hear.  While it might be unfair to many planets with hypothetical plant-proto-intelligence, if we hear radio waves, we have a pretty good reason to think we’re listening to the emanations of an intelligent creature.

Related:

Scientific Models – Stephen M. Downes

Einstein's Clock

To me, the first of January is always a write-off.  Nothing productive ever happens.  It exists among the days of hangovers and jetlag.  But now it is the day after the first, and it is now (as it was yesterday) 2012, and that means it is the perfect time to discuss, well, time.  And there have been quite a few timely stories lately, from Samoa and Tokelau going back to the future, to the growing schism between international time and astronomical time.  Even the Royal Society has some choice words on tricky temporal travails. And, resolutions aside, I’m going to attempt to be timely myself, and make this a rather short post.  I want to share a few thoughts and links about the commercialization of time.

Of course, time is involved in many non-trivial ways in our daily life: the flow and change of seasons that signalled times of growth and harvest; the rotations of the sun that marked out the day’s working hours; the shivers of tide that allow for the gathering of molluscs, and so on.  There is a strain of philosophy, particular the early Phenomenologists, that assert that such relationships to time are primordial, originary.  These initial demarcations of time and change are what allow our mind to grasp a hold on the concept, to bring it to the rarefied reaches of reason, and to gain a measure of control over it.  This is a rich field of thought, but I want to make just a few remarks about one aspect of this control: when time becomes part of – a tool, even – of our commercial and economic spheres.

Harvard Professor Peter Galison, and his book, Einstein’s Clocks and Poincare’s Maps, helped me make sense of how time was reigned in.  Until the late 19^th century and early 20^th, every major urban central had its own ‘local time’, most often set to accord with astronomical time, where noon corresponds to the apex of the sun in the sky.  But with the introduction of telegraph lines (and predominantly their use in calculating longitudinal maps), among other reasons, time was brought under international purview, and regulation.

We can find in these telegraph lines the beginning of time’s integration into our economy.  This shouldn’t be taken to mean those aspects of our economy ‘where time is of the essence’ in expediting parcels, or trading stocks – where time, or the lack thereof, is prized – but in date-line jumping and satellite calculations (the modern day telegraphy).  Time is no longer just a way of marking change, or an absolute stream, or the meaning of the structure of care – and maybe it never has been just these things – but now it’s not just something we value, but an integral part of our economy, something to be debated over in terms of dollars and cents, part of what makes the world as we know it go round.

Related:

Matthew McGrath – Temporal Parts

Sonia Roca-Royes – Essential Properties and Individual Essences