cheese it, the cops!

we might not really be able to get a handle on tsunamis, uncontrolled fission reactions, or libyan airspace. but we can hope to control the yapyap of gilbert gottfried, fitty, haley barbour's staff, and ucla undergraduates. thank god that profound features of the world remain within the scope of our magnificent power! our words are our world. now shut the hell up. i don't know which is worse, nuclear meltdown or twitter one-liners about nuclear meltdown. let us all, as human beings, mobilize to silence comedians. where do i text my contribution? have we no empathy (oops sorry lisa)? just imagine how you'd feel if, like so many victims of the disaster, you were puking from radiation sickness as you sifted through the rubble, looking for your mom's corpse and reading 50 cent's twitter feed. you'd be all like "wtf? that's so insensitive."

The two species’ social structure could scarcely be more different. Chimp society consists of a male hierarchy, dominated by the alpha male and his allies, and a female hierarchy beneath it. The alpha male scores most of the paternities, cutting his allies in on others. The females try to mate with every male around, so each may think he’s the father and spare her child. How did a chimplike society ever give rise to the egalitarian, largely monogamous structure of hunter-gatherer groups?

um. what distinguishes us from chimps, apparently, is our complete self-delusion. our evolutionary advantage is hallucinatory self-congratulation. no in all honesty, i'm sure that social cooperation is a feature of our species, as it is of many others. and i'm sure it's adaptational in some circumstances. it is also the way we get into stampedes of collective delusion. rockets, the piece points out, can't be made by one person all alone. nor can such a person develop an arsenal of rockets and launch a nuclear exchange. it will take all of us acting in concert to end life on earth for all the species on the planet. not only do we act more like chimps than new york times writers seem to think we do, we act more like chumps. what i like is the way the question is framed: how can we explain the fact that our species is so amazingly great, so much better than all the rest? it's as though i wrote an autobiography with the goal of explaining why i am so much better than everyone around me. that in itself would be a refutation of the presupposition it was meant to explain.

male humans are so peaceful, our societies riddled with extreme pacifism. unlike human females, girl chimps are all flirtatious and exhibitionistic. chimps are so disgusting. we rock! thank god we've overcome the primates' tendency toward power/sex hierarchies. but what can explain this? 

a good example of how we have transcended chimp hierarchies and become so excellent is the moammar/beyonce million dollar gig. the blood-soaked cells and idiotic political theories, the banal songs and continuous offering of gold-clad butt are things that chimps can't even dream. nor did moammar and beyonce get to that gig by themselves; you have to have a staff to make alpha. indeed, their ascent pre-supposes our acquiescence/cooperation, crystallized as cash. the key is leadership, role modeling. chimp hierarchies are not the achievement of non-cooperating individuals.

 

i'll just take one tiny example of the fact that this whole 'intellectual' structure is built in mid-air: the whole orientation takes chimpanzees unproblematically as representing an earlier phase of human evolution. well we used to do exactly the same thing with africans. chimps may not be as smart as we are, but they are not as stupid either.

 

i subscribe to the times literary supplement, and it displays many edifying features. certainly it indicates that the british are still more intellectual and stuff than we are. the quibbling is astonishing, with an extreme emotionalism i can only envy. if only i could be that alive! 'i don't know if it is frederick forper's famous stupidity or his equally notorious moral corruption that causes him to express mild reservations about footnote 6,237 of my book on frederick the great's cousin, but...' as the world washes away, melts down, explodes, here is an actual quotation from march 11: "Who owns Coleridge? Whose Coleridge will prevail? The stakes are high." they don't know it, but these people are happy!

just in case you're wondering who the greatest harmonica player in the world may be, his name is jason ricci. he can play a juicy blues, or anything he wants. what he's doing here on a diatonic harmonica is...not possible.

you know in yemen, saleh is asserting that the protests are an american/israeli plot. meanwhile the protesters are asserting that the crackdown by saleh is american-backed. whatever the fact, it's obvious that anti-americanism is something everyone agrees on. i think you'd have to blame the bush admin on that, in part (on the other hand decades of uncritical support for israel, combined with arab antisemitism, doesn't help. neither exploitation of oil, arming despots to the teeth etc.) on the other hand, the 'pragmatism' of the obama admin is extremely disconcerting; i think we don't know which side to be on; we just want to back and thus influence the winners. what we say about libya is exquisitely proportioned to who's winning, as it was in egypt.

in yemen, chaos. from sanaa:

 

lala:  all hell broke loose, crispy

 me:  describe!

 lala:  well, this morning right after sunrise prayer the security forces started shooting at people at the protest

live bullets and gas bombs which were later recognized as nerve agent gas and mustard gas

 me:  they said the biggest crowds ever were out yesterday. so this is the big crackdown??

 lala:  and there were snipers from the buildings that were evacuated last night

shooting at ppl

 me:  wait seriously on the gas? 'nerve gas'?!

 lala:  there was a good hour during which gun fire was non-stop, then it was on and off for a couple more hours

yeah, nerve gas, insecticide for ppl, makes u flip on ur back and twitch

thousands of cases of suffocation and serious burns

they killed several school students in Aden

 me:  american media does not seem to be reporting this!

 lala:  and snipers got a number of protestors in Taiz as well

 me:  fuck

 lala:  well, there's a civil war in libya, and japan is under water, what do they care about here?

a member of a big tribe from Marib was killed today

his tribe is promising revenge

and it's reported that thousands of tribal members are driving to sanaa armed right now

armed thugs are all over the place

i am a prisoner at home today

because some ppl from my neighborhood ARE pro-gov thugs

and are guarding eac exit/entrance point to the neighborhood in guns and sticks

they've been chasing down the protestors and beating them up

 me:  family ok?

so tribe-types are coming to invade sanaa and take out saleh?

 lala:  i certainly fuckin hope so!! i dont know if they wud be allowed in town though

all major cities have been surrounded by tanks for the whole past week

 me:  it is one of these chaotic situations where all rumors are swirling at once! how are communications internally? are you in touch with people on the streets?

 lala:  not that much

AlJazeera Live has a live broadcast from the square

we've had it on all morning

my uncle is coming in and out

gets us some news

 me:  ok i gotta tune in. nuclear meltdown in japan! right we are distracted.

 lala:  oh fuck

shit shit

i hear gunfire again

me:  what time is it there?

 lala:  1600

omg it's intense

 me:  oh shit. who is shooting at who, can you tell?

 lala:  u could tell it is from an elevated area

it's loud

fuck, this is a war zone

 me:  ohmygod. what is the name of your neighborhood? describe location within sanaa.

 lala:  we're about 5-6 blocks from the university square

 me:  i'm going to put this up on the blog, ok? people should have a sense of what's happening.

 lala:  east to the university

west to tahrir sq.

it's the ministry of justice area

lala:  the snipers are still in place

and they seem to shoot at every prayer time

when no one is looking

and more nerve gas bombs

 me:  sure it's not tear gas?

 lala:  nope

the protestors are convulsing like dying cockroaches

no tears

 me:  christ. is there any medical care?

 lala:  they have set up a volunteer hospital of sorts down in the sq

but several hospitals and volunteering to help too

many ppl are being sent to hospitals

my uncle and i put together a couple of informative pages about chemical bombs and how to react to them

so he could possibly distribute them so these kids know what to do

now everyone is saying

that the USG gave the pres the green light to do this

i told ppl about two weeks ago

after reading about the ambassador's statement

that the US supports dialogue, and that the president's initiative is good and shud be accepted

 me:  what did the ambassador say??

 lala:  that something bad will happen

coz on the same day

all embassies and foregin companies started sending their employees out of the country

 

ok while there seems to be an actual nuclear meltdown, cnn is doing reports on the role of social media and ireports from two days ago. have you lost your minds?

here's how i think about it. heinrich wolfflin, in principles of art history, describes different ways or representing reality. one pair is "linear and painterly": think raphael vs rembrandt. in raphael, all the emphasis is on clarity of outline in a well-ordered, plane-oriented composition. rembrandt breaks the symmetries and planes and builds figures from within rather than tracing definite outlines. raphael effaces the brushstroke: you don't see the traces of the manual work. rembrandt is just the opposite. rembrandt disperses the light, yet makes clear that it emanates from a definite source; raphael bathes the scene in a relatively uniform, unsourced light, etc. wofflin writes: "They are two conceptions of the world, differently orientated in taste and in their interest in the world, and yet each capable of giving a perfect picture of visible things" (p. 18 of the dover edition). there is not a way to adjudicate between them wherein one would be 'objective': there is not one objective system of representation.

now science is not the world: it's a series of systems for representing the world. at any given moment, like art even where it is concerned with accurate depiction, it also responds to all sorts of factors: cultural moods, funding mechanisms, academic hierarchies, mood. and it responds constantly to aesthetic factors: simplicity vs complexity, clarity vs richness, etc. but this is not to say that science is 'nothing but' these factors.

there can be more than one accurate representation of the same thing. but there could be inaccurate representations. giotto really is truer to the world and our experience of it than a medieval altarpiece (not surprising because the medieval painter wasn't trying for accuracy!) and masaccio really is more accurate than giotto. perspective really was an advance in truth, even though it was also a set of representational conventions and had its limits.

on this parallel, there could be different paradigms neither of which was more accurate, or which highlighted different aspects or had different contexts, purposes, and so on. however it certainly does not follow that any paradigm is fine, and it would take a lot to make me think that two paradigms were in any sense 'incommensurable'; certainly not if they're consecutive in the very same culture or science. (i don't offhand entirely preclude the possibility of 'incommensurable' scientific paradigms which are equally accurate or inaccurate, but i wouldn't expect to see that and of course it depends, as it so did in the interpretation of kuhn, what you mean by 'incommensurable.') but certainly linear and painterly are very different. but but you got painterly in response to linear: the paradigms are historically connected, in fact they more or less have to have the sequence they do, and they are certainly not globally or entirely different in the way they represent the world.

now what wolfflin misses (though not entirely), and maybe what kuhn misses, is the massive overlap of alternative systems and paradigms. rembrandt understood raphael; he could recognize the objects depicted even as he he worked through it into a different but equally comprehensible representational schema. raphael and rembrandt are very different, but not alien to one another, and there is a story to tell about how you get from one to the other. and they are both, among other things, trying to 'imitate' or accurately represent the very same world.

how we see and how a dog sees are very different, but you can tell in our interactions that we experience the same world in somewhat different ways. (when the dog wants out, she barks at the door; she doesn't pass through the wall.) you can tell that aristotle's experience overlaps massively with our own - that the world he's trying to account for is our world (albeit different in the ordinary ways; he didn't have cable) - though he produces such a different representational scheme. it is really interesting and important to try to enter into that scheme, and you can't evaluate its capacities for truth unless you enter into it as far as you can in its own context or in its own terms. then it reveals its truths, or its role in a history that does in some ways to some extent make progress. then if you were trying to narrate physics aristotle to einstein as a series of paradigms, you'd have to do all sorts of things: smooth shifts between closely-related paradigms, relatively sudden relatively radical displacements (like maybe ancient to medieval), revolutionary developments re-explaining experimental results developed within the previous paradigm, and so on.

our actual sensory experience, on my account, is not representational; that's why we share a world; and that's why modern philosophy at least since descartes has been a dead end: we are not looking at our own ideas or mental images, we are looking at, which is to say, ingesting, actual things. but there are representations: things like paintings and theories. the analogy of our experience to such things is compelling. but it's wrong. the current fad for the idea that the universe consists of information is a version of this mistake, which seems intractable. the notion that in interacting with my dog i am immediately acquainted only with a series of percepts, images, feels, etc is a terrible betrayal of our actual experience and world. it is non-explanatory and it raises a thousand unanswerable skeptical doubts. and it seals each of us in our own percepts, behind a screen, or a bunch of us together in our language.

i'm not denying that einstein is truer than aristotle. orbits are elliptical and the earth isn't flat and people do believe all kinds of crap. but you do want to treat einstein's physics as a system of representation responding to all sorts of factors too: no scientific theory is 'objective' in the sense that it does not deploy representational schemata which are alterable, and to which there are alternatives. but representational schemata are not all equal truthwise, even though there could be equally true representations in some two systems of the same thing. and some representational systems are sensitive to different kinds of truths or different features of real things than others; no human schema is entirely adequate to an infinitely profuse reality; or, reality is always in radical excess to its representations.

and it is worthwhile really to immerse yourself in different historical moments, different cultures, different groups' experiences, insofar as that is possible, among other things so that you don't just think your moment or group must have the truth or the only true schema, and so that you don't stop being critical of all sorts of factors in your own representational schema. it's hard to be aware of your own era's/culture's representational schema and you can't become completely aware of it. but you need always to be seeing the compelling qualities of other schemata, know the present structure is optional, not the last word. because it will certainly be replaced. under aesthetic demands and sociological shifts, but also in a quest for representational accuracy.

and what the history of science shows among other things is that the world will keep blasting through every representational schema, that each is impoverished; none is exhaustive. that's one reason why you keep observing and experimenting instead of just repeating the commonplaces of your present science or the present syntax of your community's language.

the end of the errol morris series just shows perfectly clearly that (a) the thing is a personal grudge (and too late! the guy is dead dead dead), and (b) morris does not have the equipment actually to grapple with kuhn's position. if only it was that easy! morris's grudge might have been richly motivated fifty years ago. but alien abductions? flat earth? these objections were answered and exhausted before kuhn even finished his book. ridiculing kuhn as a total irrationalist etc is just not engaged in his writings, and ridiculing the way he sucked on a cig of course doesn't help at all. no one would have read kuhn if the position was that mind-numbingly implausible. (and again, i speak as a realist.) the sensation kuhn had when he read aristotle was the sensation of entering into a globally different way of thinking. he saw how it hung together, saw what happens when, for example, you take seriously the concept of final cause. well you need to have that sensation, even if you also need to narrate a somewhat more continuous set of developments than kuhn's structure suggests. but then you just take the stupidest thing that aristotle ever said (women have fewer teeth than men), and discredit the whole worldview on that basis, and then accuse kuhn of agreeing? dude please. and it does make you re-think the grudge a little. it makes you wonder how carefully morris ever read anything, makes you see why kuhn might throw an ashtray.

continuing on with errol morris: 

The actual quotation is from paragraph 241 of “Philosophical Investigations”:

“So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?” –– It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.

This passage, as well as many others in “Philosophical Investigations,” has produced extended commentary. But Wittgenstein, notoriously difficult to pin-down, at least in this one instance, seems to be saying what he’s saying. And he opens the door (or the lid of Pandora’s Box) to a relativistic notion of truth. [79] [80]In paragraph 241, it’s agreement between human beings that decides what is true or false. It suggests that we could agree that the earth is flat and that would make it so. So much for the relationship between science and the world. And yet, Kuhn made peace with this idea. He even made it the cornerstone of his philosophy of science. A couple of years later in “Structure,” Kuhn would write, “We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, implicit or explicit, that changes of paradigm bring scientists and those that learn from them, closer and closer to the truth.” [81]

ok understand that the attack on 'postmodernism,' on wittgenstein, kuhn etc, is just to boil it down to raw relativism and idealism and then shoot that fish. first off, i will not take that about 'postmodernism' in general, which is a huge grab-bag. but if you think you can just nail deleuze or foucault with this in a simple way, for example, you're wrong. and then the problem stretches way back: it's in hegel, in the pragmatists starting with peirce, and in some form virtually everywhere in modern philosophy. but second it is not without bite.

now one thing that always frustrated me about these figures (also quine, gadamer, davidson (brought in by morris on the other side), rorty etc) is that they just were not going to be nailed with this charge; they were always squirming out. so rorty (following davidson) always held that relativism was a senseless position that presupposed realism: if you couldn't compare your language to a world outside all languages, then you couldn't talk in terms of differing representational or conceptual schemes. wittgenstein was unpinnable on anything, and i always have had the feeling that was because he simply would not permit himself to be refuted, as that might reflect badly on his transcendent genius persona. well it's hard to refute someone who never really says anything clearly, or never actually resolves toward a flat assertion. morris says kuhn made his peace with relativism but he never did; he was constantly squirreling out of the charge through a million escape routes. in 1988, i thought it would be really refreshing to hear someone say: hell yes i'm a relativist, and then weather the storm, but then you couldn't do that and be a major philosopher. (at the time i was defining myself as a 'bone-head realist': i just went for an intractable world and a hard-ass truth you had to face up to.) and there are good reasons to be a relativist: the radically different interpretations of the world in different eras, culture etc have to make you wonder whether there is a simple standard or an objective reality they can be held up to, and it should make you worry about the objectivity of your own worldview: things like that have been used as instruments of oppression or to dismiss people and peoples. on the other hand there are very good reasons not to be a relativist too.

it's self-refuting, as someone, um, on morris's level, is going to point out relentlessly. isn't your own account of paradigm shifts 'merely' a paradigm? that all truth is relative to a culture, is that truth relative to a culture, etc? no one in their heart of hearts believes when pressed that any moral system is just as good as any other. and on and on. it's easy to attack, and that's one reason to make sure you can put someone neatly in the box: then you just stomp on the box.

so anyway, i've come to take the moves i used to regard as merely evasions a little more seriously. so wittgenstein does not at all say we can believe whatever we want and it will come true, or that agreement makes truth, despite what morris says he says. he's playing with the ambiguity of 'agreement': we share a form of life. we couldn't reach agreement on it - like sign a contract to believe it - because we can't see its edges; it's our world; it's not or it's not only a set of doctrines or beliefs. republicans share it with democrats, relativists with anti-relativists.  'form of life' is intentionally ambiguous, but it's intentionally rich too. nobody is really solicited as to their opinion on their own form of life, or can form such an opinion, and it could also encompass extra-linguistic physical objects and stuff (this is hinted at, for example, by wit's 'slab' language-game early on in the investigations). kuhn really had various complex ways of dealing with the concept of 'anomaly,' and what it is that forces a paradigm shift, and you'll notice that morris doesn't actually try to explain these globally different models of understanding as they have actually developed in the history of science. (i myself would strongly resist equating 'science' with objectivity, or framing the issue in terms of objectivity at all, or making science the sole center or deliverer of truth, and my own arguments for realism were more like 'drop a bowling ball on your foot and then try to believe that there are no real physical objects or that you are not yourself one such object,' etc. science is a style of representation, or many such styles.) the accounts of quine and davidson are remarkably, though perhaps deceptively, precise, and their ways around and through relativism are things you have to grapple with very elaborately or not at all.

as j.l. austin (who is a good figure to throw in here ) famously said, "there's the bit where you say it and there's the bit where you take it back." and these guys did that with relativism. but i've come to think that merely nailing these guys as relativists is actually simplistic. they're all different and none of them is that simple. irritating, but these are very hard issues! and morris i think ends up as a primitive; there are delightful excursions, but finally the charge is remarkably unsubtle, doesn't engage the real details of either science or the philosophies, and simply repeats the sort of simplistic complaint that people make when they don't want to grapple with the complexities, the sort of objection that people have made thousands of times. and he'll pick out the little bits of the texts he's attacking where that seems plausible. emergency! postmodernism! relativism! let's rally to truth, science, etc.: it's a very, a comfortingly rudimentary slam. but putting it mildly you need to read more carefully and, in general, work a lot harder.

but however there are real facts and a real world! (see i will never be a major philosopher because i do resolve into flat assertions.) and we are constantly in the midst of them. they're everywhere. human perception is a way that the world actually penetrates human bodies: we are it. we are not representational systems: we are part and parcel of a real, material world, individuated within it but not distinct from it. as we move through it, it moves through us. we are real things of necessity operating in and as part of a real environment: our senses constantly give us this real world. and so on.

one more thing i'll say: all the figures i've mentioned in this entry (well, other than morris) are dead. and now unlike '88 when these guys (foucault, deleuze, baudrillard, lacan, davidson, quine, rorty, the leering corpse of wittgenstein, kuhn, gadamer, derrida) were the eminent living (well foucault and lacan had died early in the 80s) dominant figures in philosophy, we now are beginning to look back on them as embodying an historical era (albeit complex). my feeling is that there is less at stake now in the question of whether kuhn is a relativist. the horizon has opened. we no longer have to destroy these people to make ourselves free or to get on to the next phase; we're in the next phase like it or not. their issues are not our issues, necessarily, and their ways of grappling with any issue are not our ways, necessarily.

 

 

this thing about professors welcoming disagreement from their students is actually pretty difficult, more difficult than i've made it appear, perhaps. i don't teach grad students, though i have here or there, and i'd say i rarely run into an undergrad who i would think presents a serious challenge to my point of view. like i say, philosophical prodigies are exceedingly rare, because you have to know a lot - it takes years of study - to really be in the debate. also undergrads tend to be kind of passive overall, and you're not usually reading very extended treatments etc. but i've been a grad student and had problems in this regard and i'm in the culture where this is often a question. i've seen all the possible responses.

at any rate, one thing is that you have the opinions you do and that means that you regard those opinions as the right opinions. and if you're in my line of work, you've spent years or decades developing lines of argument for these views, which you obviously regard as superior to those of your rivals for their contrasting views (though if you're a reasonable person you also wonder whether your arguments are as good as you think, etc). so it can be hard to see the quality of another argument, especially from someone who's not quite as thoroughly in the question as you obviously are. now also people like, let's say, kuhn, were constantly embattled. they were attacked all the time and they had to fight for their ideas (rorty too, come to that). so they're already in a defensive crouch and they are probably sick of most of the obvious moves. (on the other hand, though, you are in a serious power-differential with your own students, and the actual current threats are people at your own level of eminence, and you just need to be aware of the power you actually have. it's never right simply to crush people whose careers depend on you.)

also people like that have a stake in regarding their ideas as the beginning or the avant-garde of a movement, as progress, as things people will come to eventually (thus also of course recognizing your importance). so if grad students come at you with an attempt at refutation, you take them to be reactionaries. you might not know it exactly, but you are trying to gather followers; you think you're right and you want the right to prevail. this was absolutely explicit in rorty: he had a whole history of human thought, and he thought he'd discerned its direction, and he was pushing it along. he lined up a history of progressive figures who'd had partial insights and of course in a certain sense this culminated in his work. the very worst example is hegel, who i think believed that the world-spirit had reached in culmination of self-consciousness right there in his own work. but most people in philosophy who are not primarily historians - or would like to regard themselves as major figures - have something like this sense. (i have always written as though i was a major figure, even though i am one of the few people who thinks i might be.)

so it is a sticky difficult matter to see two students of equal knowledge and intellectual ability as equal where one agrees and one doesn't. one is progressive and sees and one is reactionary and doesn't. obviously the one who does is right and also easier to talk to and more ego-gratifying. it's not that you want to judge people wrongly; it's that the lens can't help but distort. i too am subject to this. edge toward my point of view, or add to it, and my heart goes: yes!

but it is really really important to have some tendency or ability to step back from that, though this will always be limited. you have to affirm consciously a commitment to pluralism, and you have to worry constantly that your ego is engaged one way or the other. some people are extremely bad at doing that (such as kuhn as portrayed by morris). no one can do it perfectly. but i did have a fairly good experience with rorty as i attacked and attacked. and i wasn't completely right, and my arguments were half-formed or were the same old realist arguments that he'd been dealing with for decades. but he read carefully, helped me improve, sometimes took pleasure in the challenge. that speaks incredibly well for him. i know i wasn't his favorite student ever; how could i be? (he always mentioned robert brandom, who i'd say has more than paid off on that assessment.) but he let me write a dissertation, get a degree, and he wrote me a letter of rec. that is a pretty good model of how to behave.

(there are completely different models of education, of course, that reverse-value pluralism or a critical test of ideas. the, um, german model. you have to serve an apprenticeship; get so far inside the ideas of your professor that you know them as well as, and in the way that, he does; then you're ready. i've seen the cult of the herr professor in action. i'll name names: charles scott and john sallis (whose persons and followerships i knew at vanderbilt when i was on a post-doc there), but also maybe cora diamond at virginia when i was in grad school, who wanted to make you a grand-acolyte of wittgenstein. let's just leave this approach entirely out of consideration, though i never had any luck in actually ripping it to shreds at first hand, and among grad students the follower is always more common than the critic.)

i think in part 3 morris seriously lost his way. i like this style of intellectual writing, a kind free-associative set of moves between ideas, figures, objects. morris arrives at many interesting moments. what he doesn't arrive at is anything that actually bears on kuhn. you begin to see that it's an act of vengeance; well, morris apparently has very good reasons to regard kuhn as an intolerant person etc. but then to take his "hint" that he got 'incommensurability' from mathematics, and get to intolerance by a possible pythagorean execution in whatever b.c. doesn't actually work, even a little, and if hippasus was executed, he was executed precisely for incommensurability. but whether he was executed or why or what the pythagoreans thought or did is just breathtakingly irrelevant to kuhn, and though free association is fun, it is not likely to refute anyone's philosophy of science. if kuhn had said, 'i take my concept of incommensurability directly from maths, and it means exactly the same when i use it with regard to scientific paradigms,' you might have something. but what he said was more like 'i think i ran into the word in eighth-grade algebra.' insofar as there is an argument it's the old argument: this is relativism, irrealism etc. all the math stuff does less than no actual argumentative work, and you begin to realize that he's just grinding an axe. just leave it at: thomas kuhn was a jerk who chainsmoked and threw and ashtray at me and plus his theory is wrong. then write something else about the pythagoreans if you're interested intrinsically.

i would recommend to npr that they don't just keep buckling. you start decimating your staff in response to every little sting etc and i'll tell you this: the hornets will be swarming. you're making o'keefe almost unbelievably effective. now on the other hand there is a problem, and there is a whole culture of elite incredible arrogance that serves no one well, even itself. i was sitting with some profs the other night, and we were discussing something or other and the loudest among us said, "but republicans are just so stupid." of course everyone nodded along (well except me, but i also didn't merely blast away; it seems wrong to destroy a friendly dinner conversation with an honored outoftown guest (in this case the curator of french painting from the national gallery in dc), plus i ain't no republican). well if the topic had been tea partiers, it'd have been worse. no argument, just extreme group self-esteem-enhancement: these are the wrong sort of people. they didn't go to the right colleges. that's exactly what the npr fund-raiser said, and it's doubtful he's ever had lunch with someone who would have had any response but enthusiastic nodding and mutual backslapping. that there would be a problem. it's almost impossible to generate any actual opinions in an environment like that; it's just bobbleheads nodding in synchrony.

i actually think npr bends over backwards to be fair. but they do have to bend over backwards; it would surprise me if the basic politics wasn't close to unanimous.

it's pretty amazing what errol morris is doing in the new york times. (but memo to nyt: it is stupidly difficult to get access to all the parts of the piece smoothly: make sure each post links smoothly to all the others right at the top.) and kuhn's ashtray is a pretty good little concomitant to wittgenstein's poker etc. i do remember a long and laborious apprenticeship before i could get anything out of kripke's naming and necessity - which is, for one thing, a beautiful model of philosophical prose - or even understand the questions from which it emerged or the taxonomy of positions in which it took up a place.

kripke was that rarest of things - a philosophical prodigy - and there was just no denying the lightning-strike brilliance. but he also kind of flamed out, and i don't think anyone would take his later work (wittgenstein on rules and private language, for example, which i remember everyone waiting eagerly for at hopkins in 1982) to be comparable. and kuhn wasn't the only jerk; a couple of female students i knew had insanely difficult experiences with kripke at princeton. anyway, i have to say i'm with kripke on reference in a big way, and that would have gotten me an ashtray from rorty. only rorty was not the kind of fuckhead who threw ashtrays! this will tell you a lot about the intellectual culture of the era and place morris describes. it really really mattered! which is good, but not good.

one reason it was not good was that if you disagreed with your prof - which one would think offhand should be welcome - you could get smacked to the tune of ending your career, which is what morris is describing. rorty, who came right out of that princeton environment, was sort of weary of being disagreed with, but he also just wanted to make sure you gave the best argument you could for your disagreement; that is a very very better approach.

there is not a direct contradiction between kuhn and kripke, though there is a tension. and kuhn was always trying to hedge his thing about incommensurability. (i did see him give a series of lectures at uva, rorty in attendance.) people were always like: but according to you there's no real world and no truth! and then he'd say: no not at all, and then it got really complicated. but rorty, who taught kuhn all the time, would be all 'exactly. no real world, son. aren't you tired of that crap anyway? it's so oppressive.' and his eyes would twinkle. 

if i haven't been writing about bradley manning, it's not because i haven't been watching. i will remind you of article III, section 3 of the constitution: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court." i'll say this: it is far far past time that bradley manning faces his accusers in open court. effectively, he has been convicted and is being confined and brutalized for treason without any judicial proceeding that i have been able to detect. they are constitutionally obliged to try or release him, right now.

i was down on the farm this weekend, arguing with my mom and my ex-wife (a professional writer) about intellectual property. so anyway, a few thoughts:

things like science, history, and philosophy are collaborative/argumentative arenas. that's how they make progress. did einstein own special relativity? did crick and watson claim ownership of the double helix model of human dna? if they had claimed and been able to enforce such ownership, that would have unutterably impoverished human knowledge. i have given theories of knowledge and beauty. i don't even understand what it would mean to own such a thing, to try to hoard it or sell it. if i'm right about what knowledge is, do i own knowledge?

 and the arts are very much the same. what if you let fielding patent the novel or petrarch the sonnet or kandinsky abstraction? well, why can't people own things like that, on an intellectual property model? who owns the twelve-bar structure of the blues, or the line "woke up this morning'? if louis armstrong takes buddy bolden's jazz and repeats it, then re-interprets it, then deconstructs it, is that theft? then there is no art that's not theft. if someone claimed to own things like this, they would be claiming the right to cut off a century-long history of amazing art, a whole portion of a culture (or really of all the world's cultures). could 'clueless' be a violation of jane austen's copyright? what if shakespeare's ghost or heirs were around, filing suit every time someone re-made or re-interpreted hamlet or a comedy of errors? all this stuff takes place within an unfolding history of appropriations and re-interpretations, and did way before there was such thing as cut-and-paste or digital sampling. 

theories and texts and musical forms are not only things that cannot be owned, they're things that should not be owned. if someone explores my theory of beauty, i think it is an ethical principle, and a code of my guild, that they should attribute it to me if they can. if they want to know how it first came about, they should read my book and they should try to get it right. but if i assert that i own the idea or the text 'beauty is the object of longing' and that you have to pay me to use it, i'm just trippin.

 

the man crisis is everywhere. and it's true, i think: we're becoming unnecessary and we're mediocre, and we will soon be subordinated. one factor in this is that we have a bad conscience about our own power, and there are a thousand mechanisms by which girls' self-esteem is nurtured to gargantuan proportions. but i'll say this about the self-esteem monsters that are taking over the world; we'll be back. the fragility is almost incredible, probably because the whole thing is pretty impoverished and jive-infested. so a woman will spend hour after hour for years telling herself how valuable she is: how smart, how beautiful, and maybe invest thousands on plastic surgery or absorb infinite consumer goods because she's worth it, and then she'll feel better about herself, if that is possible. she will express an unbelievable quantity of self-confidence, and roll over everyone around her because no matter what she does she's a good and valuable person. cock an eyebrow at her, though, and it collapses like a house of cards. any criticism or resistance is completely intolerable, because underneath the jacked-up pneumatic self-love is a seething mass of extreme insecurity. 

one reason for this is that the idea that every woman should esteem herself a good and beautiful person is not actually based on reality, or is a program for irreality. y'all should, i suggest, seek to understand yourself, seek to have an accurate self-image, cultivate self-reflection and even self-criticism. you are exactly as attractive and smart as you actually are, and you should maybe spend a moment facing up.  i know it seems like that might be debilitating or a barrier to your conquest of the world. i know you think that if you believe you're incredible, it's true. that's false. reality is actually the only secure basis for going forward, the only way to construct a self that is not always threatened with collapse. 

and i just want to point out that the therapeutic idea that no no matter what you do, you're good, does not help you be good. it helps you be bad; it is a formula for moral impunity. well, girls just want to have fun.

i have a funny feeling that the patriarchy will endure until y'all take this in, because you're actually still giving us incredible power: any edge of criticism is an existential threat. you can't run the world from that extreme fragility, and you can't run it without knowing it and yourself within it as it and you actually are.

people are deeply confused about the nature of the state. obama yesterday remarked that gaddafi has 'lost his legitimacy.' now first of all i've argued that no government (for example, obama's) has legitimacy, but what in the world would cause you to think that gaddafi ever had any legitimacy? is a military coup a social contract? then cnn is doing a piece right now on worries that the libyan government's weaponry "might fall into the wrong hands." whose are the right hands? moammar fucking gaddafi's? the government of libya's? we're concerned that the weapons will fall into the hands of 'terrorists.' meanwhile he's using whatever he has left to strafe his own population. it's like people just can't think around this government thing at all, like it's a totally effective smokescreen or fireproof theatrical curtain.

Lobbing a softball into Crispin's wheelhouse

I try not to abuse my guest blogger privileges over here. It's all Crispin's fault anyway...

The idea that punk rock, skepticism as a way of thinking about everything and science have some sort of relationship is pretty intriguing. And, of course, why didn't I think of this before... Although, the YouTube request to disable embedding makes me wonder about how pure the motives can remain. 

so there have been some pretty dramatic protests at the college where i work (dickinson in carlisle, pa) concerning sexual assault of students (mostly, of course, by other students, and mostly acquaintance assaults by male on female students, again of course). hundreds of students have occupied the administration building for the last couple of days, and coverage has been kind of amazing: it led all the local newscasts and the local newspapers, and you've seen slices even on huffpost and other national outlets. 

now first of all, it's actually great to see students active in this way; dickinson hasn't really in my time there been a hotbed of activism, and more students seem interested in binge-drinking (which of course you'd have to say plays a large role in this problem, which is serious) than anything that has anything to do with anything. and the demands of the protesters seem by and large reasonable: more transparency in the disciplinary process, expulsions for serious sexual offenders, and so on. but we're also back to the following, which is the kind of thing i've spoken out against at a number of the institutions where i've worked (this is from the list of demands as presented by the protesters this morning):

The college must recognize sexual violence as existing on a spectrum: cat-calling, lewd comments, and homophobic or misogynistic slurs contribute to a culture conducive to sexual assault. This is one sideof the broad spectrum of offenses that we consider sexual violence, with the most extreme end of said spectrum being rape and sexual assault. These behaviors must be dictated in the same policies thatgovern sexual violence and formally punished, though certainly not with the same severity as sexual assault and rape.

the definition of speech as violence, and the banning of certain phonemes, is just completely wrong and counter-productive and counter-educational. i and others have put forward these arguments for so long that it seems almost silly to repeat them, but i will just a bit. it matters who uses the 'slur' and when and why. a gay person throwing around 'faggot' and 'queer' (like a black rapper with 'nigger' or a feminist with 'bitch') is routine and part of the ways that words mutate and get constantly inflected and turned around. i just mentioned or quoted those words, and that is completely different for my money than hurling them at someone as a form of verbal abuse. you actually get the feeling that people are scared of certain sounds, and 'the n word' etc is just pathetic: gutless. they want to ban even talking about what words they want to ban. please.

banning certain words just leads to the spiral of useless euphemisms, and if you think people can't replace 'retarded' with 'special' or whatever you may authorize next, i will demonstrate that you are mistaken. and even if you could get teenage boys actually to stop using 'gay' as an all-around term for anything they don't like, that wouldn't keep them from feeling like they have to continually establish their heterosexuality to each other using whatever terms you might leave at their disposal.

you increase the power of any word that you brand as an act of violence or propose to delete from the language. in fact you attribute to words a literally magical power: like i can literally assault you, damage your body, by sitting here in my little house typing. and i can make you love me by writing your name on a piece of paper and folding it up just so. if it were true, i might be tempted actually to make use of this supernatural ability.

and if you can't hold out some sort of distinction between words and violence, you can't stop censorship anywhere, of anything. etc!

 

on the great mystery of frank rich's departure from the times: it seems unlikely, but maybe they realized that he's really been sucking now for a long time. HIIIIIII!!!!!!!!! from jane!

today does indeed seem to be the biggest day for protests in yemen. the question of whether they can keep from becoming a tool of the islamic party islah or other existing political factions is important, however!