Cryptonyms : “up to” (re-upped)

A more descriptive title for this essay would be “multiword idioms, typically not recognized by lexicographers as deserving own-place headword entry paralleling that of any other multimorphemic lexeme”.   But cryptonym sounds snazzier;  and the meaning you’ll find online (“secret word”) is not actually used by those who deal daily with codewords and cover-terms, so we here use it as we see fit.

Our lesson for the day concerns:  up to.

As anyone learning a foreign language is well aware, and as speakers considering their own native language are not aware at all, the hardest words in any language -- the most difficult to characterize definitionally, and the hardest for a nonnative speaker to use with real Sprachgefühl -- are the shortest ones.  (This practically follows from Zipf’s Law.)  And when you have two monosyllables cheek-by-jowl :  Trouble!

~

One of the things that used to irk me when I worked at Merriam-Webster dictionaries, was their characteristic disinclination to deny own-place entry as a lexicalized, bold-face headword, to multi-word idioms, provided these were written with spaces between the words.   If written solid or with hyphens, they were welcomed as own-place entries:  nevertheless, devil-may-care.    This meant that some phrases whose senses were not predictable from their parts, and which permitted only very limited variation in their parts   (cf.  nonetheless, the-devil-may-care) would be defined only as run-ons to one of their constituents (kick the bucket at kick, and not at bucket) -- or, far worse, received no boldface status at all,   but had to be found at some postulated and by now rare or obsolete sense, not called out typographically, and indeed disguised by the practice of replacing the headword in angled-bracketed exemplifications with a tilde:

to function with vitality and energy <still alive and ~ing at 75 years>

-- Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (Unabridged)

From this, the reader would have no idea that alive and kicking is about a million times more frequent than  breathing and kicking or raising begonias and kicking or what have you.

Now, in this case, the M-W Collegiate actually does give own-place entry to our quarry of the day:  You can find up to as a boldface headword, at its own alphabetical place:  right after uptime, rather than as a run-on s.v. up.   So far so good.  But the problem is, they basically give it only one meaning (split unimportantly into two subsenses):  that of reaching as far as a certain limit, that limit being the complement of up to.   There are, however, several other senses, which that dictionary does not there record.

As:

Are you úp to it?

Meaning:  Are you capable of doing it.  (Contrast:  “Are you up for it?”, meaning:  are you in the mood to do it;  are you game.

And:

That’s up to yóu.

Meaning:   The decision is yours to make.   -- Oddly, British English apparently uses down to in the same or similar sense.  (“It’s down to me, the change has come, she’s under my thumb.”)

Note, b.t.w., the accent marks, which are inherent in these idioms, and which scarcely any dictionary thinks of noting.    That the patterns are here different suggests that we are actually dealing with subtly distinct entities, cryptic even within the class of cryptonyms (for that is but a proper class, and not a well-defined set); but that is a refinement with which we need not grapple here.

And:

What is he up to?

The usual meaning of this would be yet another meaning:  What (sketchy, perplexing) thing is he doing?  What is he about?

There is another possibility here, the very same that the Collegiate uniquely lexicalizes, and which requires a special context to evoke.   Namely, suppose that our person is engaged on a stepwise-graduated task (like our diligent meso-hero in the fable Tales of Frontier Times).   Here the phrase would mean:  How far has he gotten?  (Answer: four thousand and seventy-two.)

~

Finally we arrive at a further, delicious use, which is likely unfamiliar to you unless you have studied mathematics, and which motivated this whole post in the first place.   In mathematical writing, this use is extremely common -- but probably unnoticed as being of the technical, special terminology of that subject, whether by adepts or by laymen.  An example:

Semisimple Lie algebras can be factored in a unique way (up to rearrangement) as a direct sum of simple Lie algebras.

-- Timothy Gowers, ed., The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008), p. 232

(Here the “up to” clause modifies unique.) Which is to say:  Their factors are unique, but the order of these is not (just as 3 × 5 and 5 × 3  equally  equal  15.)

Commonest of all:  unique/uniquely “up to isomorphism”.

~

Suddenly the blood froze in my veins.

Here I thought I’d noticed something clever;  but it is increasingly difficult to say anything original these days, as Wikipedia’s omniscence takes in ever-larger swaths of the noösphere.    And indeed -- unlike the offline lexicographers, Wiki has (like Kilroy) already been there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_to

That article notes that, ‘in informal contexts’, modulo X is, like up to X,  often used in this sense of ‘considering as equivalent  all entitites differing only in their X-value’.    The idioms are not quite equivalent.  First,  modulo -- and especially its abbreviation mod when followed by an integer -- originated strictly in one formal context, namely number theory.   Second, modulo in non-number-theoretic uses has leaked out into the general educated population;  as,

Chairman:  “And so, the ‘ayes’ have it unanimously.”

A handful of agitated spectators in the balcony:  “No! No!  Shame!”

Chairman (unperturbed):  “… modulo certain yelps from the peanut gallery.”

Here it means no more than “apart from”, “setting aside”. -- By contrast, up to is never used in this extended way.

As an additional excellence, there is a corresponding article in French:

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%80_quelque_chose_pr%C3%A8s

But, in line with what we said earlier, that article is contentually different, since we are here dealing, not with an overt terminus technicus like homology/homologie, which are used the same way withing mathematics,  but a cryptonym cobbled-together out of tiny unassuming semantically-multivalent function-words.  Thus, the nearest French equivalent of “up to X”, namely “à X près”,  is synonymous in some uses and not-quite-so in others.

~

Re Karl Popper on philosophical theories:

He then, bar a hairsbreadth, equates these with scientific theories.

-- Margaret Masterman, in I. Lakatos & A. Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970), p. 72

Cf. “except on a set of measure zero”.

Categories and Sameness (with linguistic appendix)

The free product is a sum in the category of groups;

and the direct sum is a sum in the category of R-modules.

-- old folk saying

We earlier had some fun with (in effect) the notion of hierarchical and cross-cutting patterns of Natural Kinds, in the essay Categories for the Working Mom.  And now that the laundry is fresh and folded and tucked away, we can all relax with a cup of your favorite beverage, and take another look.

“Feynman,” said Wheeler, “I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass.”

“Why?” asked Feynman.

“Because," said Wheeler, “they are all the same electron!”

-- Martin Gardner, The New Ambidextrous Universe (1964; third revised edn. 1990), p. 305

Less Zen:

Particles transforming in the same representation of the Poincaré group  and having the same additional quantum numbers  are said to be identical particles.

--  Matthew Schwartz, Quantum Field Theory and the Standard Model (2014), p. 207

~

Linguistic philosophy is familiar with the caveat that to say two things are “the same” must be interpreted under some description.  (The technical name for this:  sortal identity.)

Thus, it is commonly said that the Chevy Whatsis and the Toyota Whomever are the “same” car, because they are built on the same chassis and are mechanically identical, just differently branded.  Now imagine an automotive expert given a pile of paired photographs, each depicting one vehicle; for each pair he must give thumbs up or thumbs down as to whether the vehicles are the “same” in this sense.  He will give thumbs-up to a Whatsis/Whomever pair, though now his assessment is in two steps:  First identifying the particular vehicles depicted as a specific representative  each of a specific brand;  and next, assessing those two models as being “the same” under the applicable metric.

More narrowly -- this, say, for a car-dealer rather than a mechanic -- two vehicles are “the same” only if they are in the same SKU -- a Ford Taurus now being categorized separately from the Mercury Sable, though they are the same for most practical purposes.

More narrowly still, two examples of a Ford Taurus might be accounted equivalent  iff -- we are back in the auto-repair shop -- they are both in the same set of models, these being drawn up according to which parts they require.  The sets will be relative to the part in question:  this group uses drive-train X1, this other requires X2; cross-cutting these, another group uses such&such style of alternator, another another…

Even more narrowly:  the police want to know whether this vehicle sitting here in Arthur J. Mungo’s garage  is the same as the one used as the getaway car in last night’s robbery. 

More narrowly still:  I buy a certain car from you, new, for $20,000.  Five years and many fender-benders later, I demand you buy it back for the same price -- after all, it’s the “same car”.  And indeed, in the sense immediately above, it is, and will still serve to convict you if the robbery happened five years ago rather than last night.  But as seen by the eyeshades of an insurance company, it is not the same at all.

We could keep going, until  ultimately  the only pair of photos that will pass the green-eyeshade test  is ... two identical photos.

I have my mother's eyes ... He has his father's nose

Epigrammatic reflections of the paradoxes of ‘sameness’:

The successive unstable cabinets of the 3^me République, were mostly a reshuffling of the usual suspects.  Thus,

There was some truth in the quip of Clemenceau, when he was criticized by a deputy for having overthrown so many governments.  “I have overthrown only one,” he replied.  “They are all the same.”

-- Wm Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969), p. 101

A similar use of same in the sense ‘same-old’, mocking Anglo-American journalists who take the Russia tour and become pundits:

After a year  they went home … sat down at their typewriters, and hastily wrote the same book.  I have been reading that book all spring, under several different titles.

-- Malcolm Cowley, The Flower and the Leaf (misc., collected 1985)

(Here, the determiner "that" actually becomes witty, in context.)

 

These recall Wheeler’s quip about the electron, although there the meaning was more subterranean, having to do with fermion statistics;  cf. clonal colonies of trees:  One aspen, or many?

[Update -- a note to our readers.
It has come to our attention  that a number of you have reached this oft-viewed post   under perhaps a misapprehension:  not out of ontological or taxonomic curiosity, but  by searching for a jpeg of "Homer strangling Bart".   This delicious image  we do indeed offer below;  but it is by no means the meat of the essay.  For those of you whose interest runs to cartoons rather than ontology, you may consult our meagre offerings here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/cartoons ]

~ Sigmund Freud  und  Sherlock Holmes: ~

~ ~ Seelen-vertausch! ~ ~

~     ~     ~

In our discussion of “analogy” and “sameness” in the essay Consilience in Mathematics, we saw that this informal term gets formalized in various ways -- isomorphism, homeomorphism, diffeomorphism, bijection … -- that, despite the variegated terminology, are really just one central idea, namely:  detailed pairings (“maps”) between objects, which preserve structure of some sort.  Which sort, depends on the mathematical category you are working in.

*

Commercial Break

A private detective  confronts the uncanny;

an ecclesiastical mystery:

Murphy Calls In a Specialist

[Kindle] [Nook]

~     ~     ~

Mathematical structures being immutable and eternal, there is no problem about cross-identifying them across time.  But in the peopled world, things change all the time -- or rather, as we now are careful to notice:  change under certain descriptions, and not under others.

The following is an excerpt from an essay, “Continuity of Identity”, which I hope to post someday.

Here’s a really practical case, of current political relevance.

In the year 19xx, a group of local politicians, and a state or municipal employees union, agreed to keep current wages at a specified modest level, against the promise of lavish pensions in the future:  the latter to be paid by “the taxpayers”.

Now, many of these deals were hatched behind closed doors.  Still, there was little pressure to expose them, for “the taxpayers” ca. 19xx  did indeed benefit from this arrangement:   Their taxes were lower than they would otherwise have been, had the services of police and fire and teachers and what have you had to be bid for on the basis of straight salary and current benefits;  these services were acquired relatively cheaply, the full bill being deferred.

And now, circa half a century later, “the taxpayers” are being asked to pay that bill.  Only… they are not the same people who benefited from the arrangement half a century or so ago-- in many cases, before they were born.  Not the same… as individuals;  but as a corporate body, yes, these are indeed “the taxpayers”.  So: legally, morally:  Can a politician and a union seal an agreement that binds, not themselves, but some third parties in the future, who at the time of the agreement were not even born?

Before you answer too hastily with a resounding outraged No, consider that our entire society is webbed with agreements exactly like that, and would likely fall apart without them.  Every time our nation signs a treaty, or issues a bond, or even launches a project like building highways and bridges (which future citizens will need to keep in repair, or much of the money will have been wasted), we are doing this.

~     ~     ~

An incident earlier this evening reminded me of an old conundrum:  the seemingly uncontroversial matter of what constitutes the same tune.

I happened to overhear on the radio, a snatch of a tune of which I’m very fond, of which I did not know the name.  It is melodic, and simple  apart from some rhythmic oddities.  Emotionally, its effect on me is like that of the brief beautiful interlude in waltz time, in Corelli’s Christmas Concerto.

As the piece segued into the next movement, I realized it had to be Copland, probably quoting someone else -- as he quoted “Simple Gifts” in Appalachian Spring.  Fortunately the announcer eventually came on and said the overall suite of which that piece was a part  was Rodéo. 

Looking at the program for this, I was puzzled.  “Corral Nocturne”?  Surely, for the dreaminess.  But no, it turned out to be -- “Saturday Night Waltz”.

Now, I would never have thought of searching for the piece under that name, since, firstly, it didn’t at all seem to be what some farmer-cowboy couples would be up to on a Saturday night, and futhermore -- okay, this is embarrassing -- I did not realize it was a waltz.  There’s an insinuating syncopation;  certainly if I ever tried to actually waltz to it, I would fall on my punkin haid…

Seeking to learn the mystery of this exotic composition, I got together a safari team -- seasoned explorers and native bearers -- and made my way through malarial jungle and crocodile-infested swamps  over the space of many months, finally scaling an icy peak and putting the question to the loincloth-clad hermit who sits at its summit and --  Well, that’s how it would have been in the old days;  to save time, I simply looked it up in Wikipedia.

And learned, to my astonishment, that the quotation in question is from … “I Ride an Old Paint”.   Astonishing because I absolutely grew up on that song, as sung by Burl Ives.  Our family only owned a half-dozen vocal recordings, so I listened to them over and over; and of these,  “I Ri-ide… an old Paint;  I le-ead…. an old Dan” was one of an even smaller handful at the top.  Never did learn what the lyrics meant, but I heard it and sang it   over and over.  And, being told -- like a puppy by the scruff of the neck -- that the tune right in front of me, in Copland’s ballet, is that; well, yes, I can hear the resemblance.

How could I not have heard the sameness in the first place -- the sameness beneath all the strangeness?  The simplest hypothesis is:  Musical retardation.  To which I partly plead guilty, only -- there are other, even grosser cases of mental compartimentation, which require a different explanation (nobody’s that retarded).

Thus, from childhood:  Consider “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and the Alphabet Song.  The tunes are identical, note for note;  failure to perceive similarity might be chalked up to incapacity, but failure to note identity (which was my failure until recent times) -- refusal to assent to "A = A" … something else is going on.

A hint at what this is, is provided by cases in which we children were not mere consumers, but producers of isomelodic products.

Thus:  “Nyaah, nyahh, nya-nyaah nyaah.”

And, on the same ‘tune’, any number of smug worthless despicable taunts:  “TIM-my’s Got a GIRRRL-friend…!!!” or what have you.

[This just in -- probably from the Vatican:  

Homer Simpson, delivering a stern lecture to his wayward boy

The taunts here cited, are sufficient proof that the Fall of Man spares no-one, not even little children, fancied by sentimentalists  to be innocent.   From a secular perspective, such productions suffice to justify strangling the little bastards in the cradle.  That such action is not in fact justified, is a miracle, unexplained by any reasoning within the purely secular realm.  The overriding fact is, that God loves us -- Lord only knows why…]

Clearly, the melodic medium and its message form a gestalt.  To the child, and to some extent later, it would be as artificial to peel off the tune, as to say that two quite distinct people are actually identical (as regards having two eyes, a nose, etc. etc.), their secondary differentia being whatever is left over.

The nec plus ultra of such a perspective  is spoken sentences:  for these each have an intonation which is partly conventional, like a tune:  differing between French and English, or between British and American English.  Hearing a sentence, we do not  on any level  equate it  with all the (thousands of) other sentences we have heard  similarly intoned.

~     ~     ~

To avoid the distraction of same in the sense ‘self-identical’, let us continue the discussion using the term equivalent.  The latter is actually more mathematical, in that there it has a special sense, that of equivalence classes.  (Check Wiki and read all about ‘em.)

So:  Items will be equivalent or not, depending on whether they are viewed sub specie this category or that.  As, in biology:  When working with multiple species, two individuals are equivalent if conspecific.  When working within a species, two individuals might be identified  if, beyond being conspecific, they are of the same sex, and -- for species which show distinctions such as larva vs. adult, sessile vs. vagile, pupa/chrysalis/imago -- in the same stage of life.

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

In mathematics, two objects can be topologically equivalent -- homeomorphic; smoothly equivalent -- diffeomorphic; algebraically equivalent -- isomorphic;  metrically equivalent -- isometric; numerically equivalent -- equinumerous; and so forth.  An example of such usage, in a Hilbert space context:

…the latter direct sum itself is isomorphic (unitarily equivalent) to H …

…It is unitarily equivalent (I might as well say that it is the same as) the bilateral shift.

-- Paul Halmos, “A Glimpse into Hilbert Space”, in: T. L. Saaty, ed.  Lectures on Modern Mathematics, vol. I (1963), pp. 7, 12

[Remarkably, Wikipedia seems not to devote an article to this subject, the closest being this rather abstract one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_of_categories

So I’ll say a little more.]

Further, we speak of two norms on a space as being equivalent if they generate the same topology on that space.  Two group-representations are equivalent if they are interrelatable via conjugation by a nonsingular matrix.  Two signed measures are equivalent if each is absolutely-continuous with respect to the other.  Two vector bundles are equivalent if they are related by a homeomorphism that preserves fibres. Two normal series of a group are equivalent if there’s a bijection between the factor groups with these being isomorphic.

There are even finer distinctions:  Two set-theoretic structures are “equivalent if just the same sentences are true in each, and elementarily equivalent if just the same first-order sentences are true in each.  Isomorphic structures are evidently equivalent, and hence  in particular  elementarily equivalent.” -- Michael Potter, Set Theory and its Philosophy (2004)

As it begins to appear, these different labels are not simply definitional and contentless;  sometimes you arrive at them only after doing some work.  E.g. one reads:

A fundamental fact of differential topology is that the notion of isomorphism in the categories Top[ology], P[iecewise]L[inear] and Diff[erential], is the same in dimensions three and below.  In dimention four, PL and Diff agree, but Top differs.  In dimensions above six, they all differ.

In particular, things go hog-wild in dimension seven.  We thought we knew what roundness was, it turns out we did not.

~ ~ ~

[Update 3 Dec 2011]

This phenomenon of tunes known  but hiding their identities beneath disparate lyrics and thus subjectively unconnected,   deserves a name:  we shall dub it cryptomelodia. 

(©2011 Dr J Worldwide Enterprises Inc.)

[Pronounce this krip-to-meh-LO-dee-a.  The word is modeled upon that other stupendous vocable, cryptomnesia ‘hidden memory’, from crypto- ‘hidden’ and -mnesia ‘memory’, as in amnesia (i.e. a-mnesia ‘no memory’).  Those roots are all Greek;  and I wanted to neologize on a proper Greco-Greek model, rather than conjure up some vulgar Greco-Latin hybrid-hippogriff such as Donald Trump would no doubt coin.  But the Latin-looking aspect of “melody” gave me pause. 

So we consulted with Dr Massey, the official philologer for this site, and he reassured us:

Melodia is of Greek origin.  μελῳδία : from melos, musical phrase, and aoide, song. Cryptomelodia is a great rendering.

This is excellent news.  Dr Massey and I shall split the royalties from this outstanding new word, and retire in opulence.]

A startling example of cryptomelodia occurred at work yesterday.   I work at a pretty patriotic place;  the political spectrum among the employees is much broader than you might imagine, ranging even remarkably far to the left, especially on antiwar issues.   Still, I was startled that morning to suddenly hear the song -- or I should say, the tune -- of “Solidarity Forever” blaring from a computer in the neighboring pod.  I leapt from my seat to see what was going on.  Had the Occupy movement spread to us -- Occupy the Fort ?   -- No, my companions scoffed, that’s the Georgia fight song.  (The woman whose computer harbors this tune on boot-up is from Georgia.)

That only raised another issue:  Why would Georgia -- a pretty conservative neck of the woods -- choose “Solidarity Forever” for their fight song ?  -- Actually, they replied, it’s the fight song of lots of schools.  And then it dawned on me:  The words being different, and the setting (a football stadium) utterly so, probably very few of the fans make the connection -- if indeed they have even heard of the old Wobbly anthem.  (And if they had, they might deem it ironic that the hymn of One Big Union should be hijacked  by gridiron jingoism.)  The tunes inhabit different compartments of the mind.

There was some argument over whether which song actually came first -- some voted for a football origin, which I thought absurd.   So upon reaching home, I burnt some incense before the altar of the All-Knowing -- and Wikipedia promptly informed me that the tune goes back  not only way before football, but way before the IWW:   that I have myself been the victim of a multiple cryptomelodia in this regard.  For, “Solidarity Forever” is simply a re-lyriced “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, which in turn lyrically recycles “John Brown’s Body”.  I am of course quite familiar with both these songs, having sung the first one  in particular  many times in elementary school.  But I never made the connection among these three.

 

(And upon further reflection … the transposition  to the football field  of the tune that’s held in common by all these anthems, is appropriate after all:  since all of them are  in some sense  fight songs.)

As for the tune itself -- its origins are lost in time;  Wiki traces it to “the folk hymn tradition of the American camp meeting movement of the 19^th century”;  before that, all is mist.

Yet hark -- what lyre upon th' aeolian there wafts ?  Nay, ‘tis Aeneas’ bark, plunging westwards from the flames of Troy !  And what air sets the oarsmen bend their strength as one?  Why -- ‘tis … ‘tis that very tune !

~     ~     ~

[Further examples of the notion ‘same’, this time in linguistics.]

If we project backwards to the Pre-Latin form of a third-conjugation infinitive such as dûcere, we note, for Pre-Latin *doukesi,  formal identity with the locative case of a genuine Indo-European s-stem noun.

-- Robert Jeffers & Ilse Lehiste, Principles and Methods for Historical Linguistics (1979), p. 67

Here meaning:  phonetically identical, though with an ultimately different grammatical role.

Another extraordinarily cavalier positing of equivalence:

Chinese and English, for example, may have the same case system as Latin, but the phonetic realization is different.

-- Noam Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language of Mind (2000), p.

(This recalls an anecdote from Charles Fillmore, author of the classic article “The Case for Case”, from back before the idea of abstract/semantic case was as familiar as the traditional notion that hewed to overt morphology.  He began presenting a paper on “Case in Chinese”, using this expanded or deepened sense of the term;  and his elder examiners, leaning forward in alarmed concern, said: “Aren’t you aware, that Chinese doesn’t have case?!?”)

~

… ‘free variation’:  If two forms are equivalent (that is, freely substitutable for each other), their alternating segments may nevertheless be phonemically distinct.

-- D. Hymes & J. Fought, American Structuralism (1975), p. 214

(Compare that elegant phrase, which slips so smoothly from the pen of Quine:  “substitutable salvâ veritate”.   I have here further spiffed up the expression, by giving the â its neat little ablative hat.)

[Update 12 June 2015]
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-latest-in-math-porn.html

Any Ideas ?

  

Those solutions make the greatest appeal to the mind which depend upon ideas  rather than upon calculations. It is sometimes amazing to see what can be produced from a simple idea, and what great consequences may flow from it.  It seems almost incredible  that so much can come  from so little.

-- Louis J. Mordell, Reflections of a Mathematician (1959), p. 40

An essay in this morning’s NYTimes, on the dwindling public status of Big Ideas, prompted me to fret upon the fact that I’ve been sitting on an exploration of the subject for several years, adding a paragraph every few months or so, until (in the fullness of infinite time) it might be ripe (“Pauca, sed matura” -- the motto of Gauss):  thus virtually daring the Reaper not to take me just yet, ere the work be finished.  But the Reaper might have other plans.   And so, as earlier with the subject of Causality, I here publish some preliminary notes.

The essay in question, by the author of a study on such wide-ranging deep thinkers as John von Neumann and Arthur Koestler -- oh no wait, actually his magnum opus is about Walt Disney, nevermind -- is the lead article on the front page of the section I always go to first:  what used to be known as “The Week in Review”, but which, in a bold rebranding, aimed no doubt at recuperating those twentysomethings and panda-handlers and whatever other demographic has been abandoning the print media, has been re-baptized… wait for it…. [But! We! Can’t! Wait for it!  We’re the InstantGratificationGeneration !!!] ….  ‘Sunday Review”.  But on the Times website, it is deeply buried, so we link to it here:

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinion/sunday/the-elusive-big-idea.html

It, itself, dives to no particular depths, seeming more like the musings of someone who is bored with what has recently been on TV (hey man, it’s summer, hold out till the fall schedule).   But it is very, very refreshing, even to see a sort of placeholder of an article on the subject of ideas, rather than the latest vaporings of Michelle Bachmann, or a conspectus of Celebrity Tattoos.

And even at that, in the timid middlebrow venue of the New York Times, as a primary representative of the "Elusive Big Idea", we are offered (along with the inevitable Einstein) ... George Washington Carver.

(True, true, I’m being snarky again.  The Times article in turn used its lead paragraph to be snarky about the Atlantic -- apparently an eyebrow’s-breadth lower on the nation's Middle Brow.  -- Meanwhile somewhere there’s a blog that is snarky about me.  Unfortunately, it is written in Klingon.)

And so, I herewith offer, the beginning of a selection of observations, to be continued if I am spared -- as yet but halfway baked, but which else would have been mere scraps in the Nachlass, while I lay cold upon the slab.

~ ~ ~

ANY IDEAS?  (incipit)

            Basic ideas, like idealized geometric figures, are few.

            --S.J. Gould

Locke, we learn, innovated, in his use of the term idea:

The term ‘idea’ as coined by Locke  and used by Berkeley  does not have its normal sense – a fact much remarked upon by Locke’s contemporaries. … Locke.. defined an idea as ‘whatever is the object of the understanding..’

[H. Robinson, intro to Berkeley, p. xii]

We too shall do so, though not with philosophical intent, but only expository convenience. We shall use the term roughly in the sense of a ‘leading idea’ (French: idée-force), one which really does lead your thought and behavior, as opposed to, say, ‘bright idea’, a balloon that goes poof when it bumps up against the cactus of reality; or idea in the sense of ‘general impression’ (“Any idea how…?”); or ‘proposal’ (“I have an idea!  Let’s go out for tacos.”) .  Idea, in our shorthand sense, denotes battle-scarred propositions that have repeatedly won laurels on the open field.  We shall crown them with a capital:  Ideas.

Our concern is not at all with the (perhaps hopelessly) abstract, and properly philosophical, question of what ideas ARE, simpliciter.  Rather, given an initial intuitive notion of leading ideas, what are some examples?  The answers will differ from epoch to epoch, and nation to nation, and person to person – and to that extent, the question is of scant general interest.  (You might want to stop reading right here.)  I am simply attempting an inventory of the various struts and strengths of my own ideation, and more broadly that of the scientific/intellectual community with which I am conversant.

First, a sketch of what we shall not be considering under this head.  We mean only such ideas as we come to learn, and may explicitly reflect upon, and cite evidence for: thus excluding capabilities or notions that we are more or less born with.  Otherwise many or most lower species might be said to possess Ideas.  In some sense they may, but it is not our sense here.

Nor do we consider Life’s Lessons Learned.  As a result, the roster below may seem skewed towards the brainy and the bloodless, but there is a reason for the exclusion.  I have the sense (and this itself might almost qualify as an Idea) that such life-lessons tend to be, and perhaps always are, merely relative to a time and a culture, and even to be largely conditioned by one’s individual psychology.  The Ideas we consider must be of general validity, so far as we know (things like the Existence of Other Minds, or Induction; rather than, say: “Women – you can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them” – true enough for most of us, but a dictum which singularly fails to obtain on the Isle of Hnork).

So, to our roster, in no particular order.

(1) The Isomorphism of Other Minds

Consider any member of a species of born solipsists.  As time goes on, he would notice a large number of regularities;  and,  if of a logical cast of mind, would soon hit upon the Idea that his conspecifics are mentally quite comparable to himself – that solipsism is in fact false: in a sense, radically so.  Human beings, apart perhaps from autists, are not born solipsists, so this insight does not arrive as an Idea: we innately assume the existence of like minds; it does not strike us as a revelation.  We have to be taught in philosophy class  even to entertain the solipsistic hypothesis as logically possible.

            [In like fashion:  After reading a great many attacks on the notion of free will, both empirical and philosophical, I have nevertheless concluded that some core thereof is epistemologically as irreducible as the Cogito.  But this does not qualify as an Idea, since it merely preserves the naïve assumption.]

            So:  Thus far we have an organizing principle, a basic assumption, but it is not an Idea, because we are born with it; we share it equally with Mike the Milkman.

            There may, however, be a further appreciation of Other Minds  which does qualify as an Idea in our sense.  Namely, that successful communication often depends upon a wealth of shared tendencies and attributes among communicants; failing these, attemps at communication, even elaborate attempts, seemingly inexplicably go awry.  This (quite disturbing) result  contravenes the straightforward assumption that communication succeeds by virtue of its content and presentation.  The model of human communication becomes  not so much the Dialogue concerning Two New Sciences, as rather the antennae-canoodling of ants -- very effective, but whose content is nowise propositional, but lies wholly in chemistry..

            Much could be said on this score, but it is not our concern here to prove or even motivate this.  It is a conclusion I have gradually come to, and it qualifies as an Idea. It may of course just possibly be false, and would indeed be so if even the weaker hypothesis of the Existence of Other Minds (connected to our own) were false – the old brain-in-a-vat scenario.  For that matter, all of mathematics may somehow be a mistake, the physical world an illusion, etc. etc.  We won’t worry about that.  In light of our best intuitions, tutored by reason and guided by experience, it is well-founded, and is an Idea.

(2) There is a Universe

           

            Which is to say: There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in the nursery.

            Here the genetic development is straightforward, and well-known.  Initially there is just the Breast, and (in its tragic absence) one’s Blankie.  Then there is the House to be explored, and the Neighborhood, and School; and foreign lands, and even planets; et cetera, et amazingly cetera.

It grows to an Idea, in that it eventually reflects back on items  initially not conceived as so situated.   The cup of coffee on one’s desk is no longer just an object, surmounted by a curl of steam, but the proverbial Universal Cup of Coffee, embedded in a nexus of economic-social-technical relations.   Eventually, every single thing you meet  you may assess in terms of its being an instantiation of a universal.

[Continued here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/06/ideas-case-of-induction.html ]