notes · in · the · margin · of · error

According to the Berlin dichotomy, wherein "the fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing" I suspect these guys are hedgehogs (if there is one big thing in the later Wittgenstein, the one big thing is that there are instead many little things). Read this way, the distinction really marks level of abstraction. There is also an element of foxiness in each, though, since the writing of each is colorful, and draws from many sources. But they are not "foxy" in the way that Shakespeare or Montaigne are (neither of which I particularly like, in case what I like happens to be a good guide to the real features of these things).

The precisifying tools of contemporary philosophy are a way of attempting to concretize the relationships between abstract ideas. It is still faster to move outside of them, if you can. They may also function as evidence, and for some as aids to understanding. (I often find they stand in the way of understanding; though they may be of help in communicating my thoughts to others. I simply can't hold many stages of a proof in my mind, as I can a monologue or a day.)

I never, of course, try to write like Cavell or Emerson; I'm not even sure I could if I tried. But I always feel found-out whenever someone else says "X is so hard to understand!" and I say, "Really? That's what I love!" And I wonder if it's a real failing of mine that's being exposed, and if it's related to the difficulty I have finding people with whom I can think in an intuitive (natural) way, and if, failing or not, I will ever find a way of compensating for it.

Parallel the Meno Paradox: how can we seek what we don't already know?
Parellel Kant's question: how are synthetic a priori judgmentts (which add to what we already know about the concepts involved, but do so through reasoning) possible?

I love reducing the history of philosophy to a single kind of question over and over again. The Meno Paradox also admits of a pragmatic reading.

It's my interest in the pragmatic sides of these questions in conjunction with the semantic or metaphysical sides that leads me afoul of the traditional foci in philosophy. I don't know whether the two are necessarily linked; but my interest in the pragmatic question probably comes from the sense that, if we're going to look for data a good place to look might be the mind of the person creating or learning something new. Partly this is my inclination because it's what I'm best at; describing my experience in excruciating detail may be my best skill. For the pragmatic side of the question, a first-personal answer is demanded. Whether the first-personal answer has any deep connection to the non-pragmatic side of the question is what I need to figure out. i.e. Are first-personal answers in any way demanded by the non-pragmatic sides of the questions for the reasons of, say, the concepts involved?

I've been thinking lately about how, if Buddhism works, it requires you to walk a very fine line between letting an emotion run away with you and putting it out of sight. Practitioners insist, anyway, that it is not just escapism; but for myself, I don't know what "sitting with" can mean in this circumstance other than "detaching from," or "floating above."

Detaching from thinga and floating above them are important; but I would never call them anyone's ideal state. They're like fevers that immobilize you until you're healthy again. Important in emergencies, as long as there's some determination that will take over and drag you along, some transcendental ego that's all-muscle. It feels almost comforting to be able to rely on it.

That said, when I am in this state, I spend most of my time thinking about how to be myself again. I imagine and reimagine, write and rewrite every feeling, go through my old journals, set myself projects having to do with them, wander around in my endless memory. I've wondered whether that re-imagining itself does any work; whether it might not be a kind of illusion, since there can be no set facts about myself when I'm in that state. I could wander around forever in there, like the stereotypical character stuck in a world of illusion, who, however much she explores it, will not find the missing sense of "reality." I've susepected that what is required to spring out of it is something of another kind entirely. (And having done it many times, I still can't say how it happens. Not unlike the beginnings of actions generally.)

But I wouldn't recommend becoming aloof from oneself as a primary way of life; it's negation, to use a Sartre word, and as such is a little dangerous. The ability to ignore suffering in oneself is at once beneficial and disturbing: the same ability applied to, or by, others could be disatrous.

Something that's made out of a single piece of aluminum I will not be tempted to take apart.

Blame reinforces responsibility. That is, ir reinforces the sense that some occurrence was done or controlled by a certain person. Because of this it can help one to become aware of the things that one does, so that one can be more careful in the future. Thus far, it's alright. But reinforcing an agent's connection to her action can have two different effects: it can lead her to think, this is what I've done, because I'm the kind of person who does these things, and there's no escape from that or to think, this is what I've done, and I can use the control that I now see that I had over this action to make things better now and do better things in the future. Blaming a bad action on someone's character seems particularly useless, as it will only lead them down the first path. Changing one's character (whatever that is) seems much harder than changing one's future actions. Yet, some say (Hume) that the criterion of responsibility is whether an action proceeded from an enduring character trait in the agent.

And something in that criterion is right: namely, that it seems natural to excuse someone experiencing temporary insanity of some kind, or someone coerced, from at least some of the responsbility for what they do in that state. How to reconcile the intuition that blame often leads down a pernicious and useless path for the responsbile party, and the intution that people are responsible only when their actions stem from enduring character traits?

1. One could say that blame is not necessarily part of responsbility; it's something we do in reaction to an agent's having been responsible for something.

2. Perhaps we need a criterion other than stemming from an enduring character trait; one that does not tempt the agent to think he cannot avoid doing such things in the future.

3. An action's stemming from an enduring character trait does not necessarily mean that the agent will be unable to escape such actions in the future. (...But it is my complaint that this criterion brings us too close to condemning a person, and not an action.)

Note: if above photo is enormous, click on the photobucket link, then go back to this page and refresh.

(Freshman dorm room, 1999.)

"Stepping into the other guy's shoes works best when you resemble him. After all, the procedure is to use yourself as a model: in goes hypothetical beliefs and desires, out comes hypothetical actions and revised beliefs and desires. If you are structurally analogous to the empathee, then accurate inputs generate accurate outputs-just as with any other simulation. The greater the degree of isomorphism, the more dependable and precise the results. This sensitivity to degrees of resemblance suggests that the method of empathy works best for average people. The advantage of being a small but representative sample of the population will create a bootstrap effect. For as average people prosper, there will be more average descendants and so the degree of resemblance in subsequent generations will snowball. Each increment in like-mindedness further enhances the reliability and validity of mental simulation. With each circuit along the spiral, there is tighter and tighter bunching and hence further empowerment of empathy. The method is self-strengthening and eventually molds a population of hyper-similar individuals--which partly solves the problem of other minds" (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LVIII, 1, March 1998).

I like feeling like there is a way of thinking that I need to find, and that finding it will require all my faculties--empathetic, intellectual, aesthetic--to be open, and which itself might involve all of them.

Denmark has a special high school for owls. Perhaps I should move to Denmark.

Now, with the miracle of digital cameras, you can:

Or see behind it, anyway. More here.

And I thought putting a picture of the top of my desk on my desktop was clever.

(A) George tells Jenn that Min is on a cruise. Min believes him even though she doesn't know him very well. So probably (2) is false. (3) is supposed to be an "abominable conjunction." But I just don't see why.

1. Jenn knows that Min is on a cruise.
   
2. Jenn knows that George isn't lying about Min. (False, on some construals of 'know.')
   
3. Jenn knows that Min is on a cruise, but not that George isn't lying.

I assume it's supposed to be abominable because she shouldn't know that Min is on a cruise if she has no good reason to trust George's word. (But, all the same, Min is on a cruise--for which reason we might want to say that Jenn knows this. She has true belief, albeit unjustified.) The abominality must be a formal-epistemological abominality, and not an ordinary one.

(B) An even less abominable example.

1. If John had met someone in the alley, he would have provoked him.
   
2. If John met someone in the alley who immediately killed him, John would have provoked him. (False.)
   
3. If John had been killed by the man he met, he would not have provoked him, but if he had met a man, he would have provoked him.

Now B3 is abominably expressed, but it's not incomprehensible. Turning it around, so that the 1st scenario comes first makes it better. It doesn't strike me as embedding any deep philosophical puzzle. But then, I find possible worlds remarkably uninteresting.

(It's been awhile since I've failed to find something puzzling. So I felt like recording the fact.)

Conclusion: snow makes everything look like it was made by Apple.

Spring 2000
"Is the peculiar quality of this 'beholding' state of mind that it is a state in which we 'see' whatever we see 'as' nothing in particular--not even, perhaps, its rudimentary definition ('tree, 'field,' etc.) . . . . Meaninglessness does not suffice to make things aesthetically compelling, does it? It must be a promising ambiguity . . . .

But often the intellectual state of contemplation is similar to this, and articulating these thoughts to describing a compelling image, a tree in sunlight. The way we [or maybe just I] stare contentedly at a thought that looks promising before investigating it is like what? Perhaps a better analogy would be regarding a landscape, a 'view,' from a distance, then approaching it . . . . It does not lose its beauty as we walk into it, but the view changes."

****
It's weird to see relatives of recent thoughts in my previous selves' writing. I wonder if I should be keeping up with all these records (mostly scribbled on scraps of paper, undated) so I don't have to reinvent the wheel over and over. But maybe they fell by the wayside for a reason; their time wasn't right; or my thought-forming-process was less refined. Or maybe I really should just type them all up and backdate them. I never know what to do with the past.

(My favorite Dennett-isms: "if you make yourself very, very small you can externalize virtually everything," and its opposite.)

More.

On the economy, on the other hand, Kant was right. If everyone takes on debt they have no intention of paying back, the practice of lending money becomes impossible.

The origination of action, phenomenologically, is mysterious. It just happens. Even the most thoughtful, planned action feels spontaneous--even impulsive--at the moment it begins. I may be more prone to notice this than some because it always feels to me, when I'm on stage or in front of a class, like the controlled, thoughtful parts of my brain are off limits; I'm swept up in whatever I'm talking or emoting about. (The benefit of this diminution of consciousness is that I'm never nervous while I'm doing something. The drawback is that it makes adjusting or improving my technique difficult.) My peculiarity aside, I'm willing to venture that impulsiveness is crucially important to the beginning of action; otherwise, it might never begin at all.

If this is true, there's a strange dynamic going on in us whereby we make it the case that we give ourselves over at the crucial moment to the very thing we want to do. The impulsiveness I mean here may only be a seed, but it's a seed that brings something about. This is a deep fact (if it is a fact) because it points to the limits of the self in precisely the domain for which it's known--the domain of what it can do.

There may not be reason to believe that this type of question is paradigmatically philosophical. I've met with resistence many times to my insistence on focusing on the 'how' question in the neighborhood of some other problem. One reason to think they might be, however, is that so many philosophical problems are problems about how to get from here to there, given a limited set of tools. Examples: induction, the Meno Paradox, the central problem of philosophy of mind (how do we get mind from matter?), the central problem of philosophy of action (what differentiates action from behavior?). Questions about how we get from here to there are especially frustrating when there is by definition a place we can never reach: it seems possible that we could be brains in vats because if the illusion were complete then, if we were brains in vats, we could never know that we were.

External world skepticism, many of these questions and/or problems seems amenable to scientific answers. There's a powerful instinct to answer every question empirically that can be answered empirically. One line of response holds that a problem at the level of concepts has to have a conceptual-level answer; that is, we ought to be able to either provide answers in terms of our concepts, or explain why the problem is mistaken because it gets the concepts wrong. I've been inclined to do each of these things at one point or other, and I'm left thinking we need all three. But my predeliction for 'how' questions seems rooted in the desire for rules for the direction of mind (as it were). I like the idea of solving a problem with nothing but the mind (and pen and paper)--partly because that's what I'm comfortable with. The ability to navigate mental space--logical, imaginiative, emotional--has many uses (see bio on my newly uglified profile page). (What I'm not sure about is how to weigh those uses with the obvious values of not forcing oneself to reinvent everything.)

Part of this is feeling like part of the same world as other people, preferably a community of people, with whom you share a lot of things, enough to make them intelligible, accessible, promising, not threatening. If I have a home, this feeling is it; and half the time I don't know where it is, or how to get there. What I do know is that it is blue.

It's easy to do things there, to see what to do. (Though not to go from imagining a space of possibilities to an imaginary life; I can't imagine imaginary lives.) It's much harder to find that kind of energy when disconnected from that sense of possibility. So I rearrange furniture or do things online, to try to make other places that will remind me of the sense that the world is open and all within my reach. Lately with little success.

Of course, usually people carve scary faces into pumpkins, so it may not say what I want it to.

It could probably be done more elegantly and thoroughly, but this is a start.