Independence

The Fourth of July celebration -- in origin quite earnest, and a time for historico-political speechmaking -- has gradually softened and loosened, like an old sweater, into a fairly agenda-free holiday for kids:  Fireworks, fun, and french fries.  Well I recall, how we as kids  lined up along Ridgewood Avenue, excitedly half-comprehendingly, to watch the parade flow by.

As you grow older, some of it does get old.  Brief bursts of bright blotches against the night sky  no longer move me -- not, at any rate, so much as the least glimpse of God’s own handiwork, like the more permanent pattern-and-colorburst on the leaves of a coleus, or a lady cardinal in the bush.

But in another way, the meaning of this day grows ever deeper, even sombre.  For the success and permanency of the American Revolution was by no means a foregone conclusion -- we were truly in uncharted territory back then.   The more you learn about history, and the more history itself keeps happening, you are forced to conclude:  Most revolutions  go awry.

To begin with our own.   Contrary to the impression we get in school, at the time of the Declaration of Independence, a bare one third of the American population was in favor of rebelling against Britain; a third against; a third undecided.   The perfect setting for an immediate post-revolution civil war.  Yet it did not happen (the Civil War a century later fell along quite different lines).  The only threat came again externally, in 1812 (“the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air”), when the wrath of the British Empire was again turned against us, and the nation’s capital was set in flames.   The pinwheels and cherry bombs of latter days  commemorate an actual peril.

Remarkably as well, we managed, over the years and (by now) centuries, to maintain (most of us) extremely cordial, even intimate relations with the Mother Country -- an unusual trans-hemispheric affinity, unmatched by the relations of the Latin American countries to Spain and Portugal (let alone Haiti to France).

Consider next the French revolution -- “next”, because in fact it was subsequent to our own, having broke out in 1789; though the way Europeans run on about it, you’d think it was the first revolution in the history of the world.  Anyhow, it remains a proud occasion;  the French version of Independence Day is Bastille Day, celebrated on July 14, with great fanfare.  (For our friendly nod to our old ally, click here:  Merci la France.)

Yet their revolution was -- franchise oblige -- a gorawful bloody cock-up.  Not content with overturning centuries of monarchy, the revolutionaries proceeded to la Terreur, and to a sort of overreaching ideological Gleichschaltung that foreshadowed the Bolshevik excess. And to crown it all, it didn’t stick:  within a couple of decades, the kings were back.

France did not ultimately found a Republic that stuck, after the imperial and revived-monarchical interludes, until 1871, with the Third Republic (which segued into the Fourth and Fifth without a relapse into pre-Republican polity).   Nor did this event stem in any direct way from the events of 1789.  As William Shirer tells it, in The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969, chapter “A Freakish Birth):

It came into being by a fluke.  The National Assembly, elected in 1871 … had not wanted a Republic.  Nearly two thirds of its members were Monarchists.  But they could not agree on a king …

So the lawmakers … sort of backed into the harness of a republic … by a majority of one vote … 353 to 352 -- though there would have been a tie  had one deputy, who was against it, not been late in arriving for the balloting.  Even then it was not clear to many members that they were actually choosing a republic.  The day before, they had rejected it, or thought they had.

By contrast, the Constitution that came out of our revolutionary days  has lasted and guided us down to the present, with comparatively modest and incremental additions.

~

Since the end of the Second World War, world history has been spotted by rebellions and revolts, mostly anti-colonial, in quest of independence.   And for the most part, the results have not been pretty.

Myanmar.  Zimbabwe.   Algeria. Somalia.  Cambodia.  South Africa.  Congo.  The fragment that is Pakistan, and the mini-fragment of Bangladesh.  And now most recently, SouthSudan and Azawad.  Names like tombstones along the  the corpse-strewn path of History’s forced-march.

And thus the American declaration of independence, which shone at the time, shines yet more brightly now, against the contrasting dark.  It is as though the metal of which men then were made, deemed sturdy bronze at the time, were revealed, in the fullness of time, with the reckonings in and the dust dispersed, to have been, in actual and astonishing fact, of purest gold.

[The perspective of this essay thus falls under the general rubric of American exceptionalism.]

~

[4 juillet 2014]  The above is a reprint of our essay from earlier years at this time.

Additionally, this morning’s Washington Post has a quite readable portrait of a contemporary attempt to recapture Independence to the potential exclusion of certain other values (such as civilization):

            Porcfest
 

And, a view from England:

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21606296-plot-liberate-new-hampshire-anarchists-get-organised

The Ontology of Linguistics (expanded)

[I have noticed that some people fight shy of long essays -- doubtless an effect of the syndrome lamented here.   Accordingly, as an experiment, we shall intitially put up just a bit -- a “stub”, in Wikipedia’s terminology;  or, as Professor Malkiel loved to say, a “torso” -- adding to it as the days go by,

as the moon rises and the sun sets,

as the leaves  fly off the calendar  in the winds of Time ...]

The ontology, then, of “linguistics”:  and not, note, of “language”.   Similarly, we may speak of the Ontology of Psychology (and not of the psyche), the Ontology of Geology (and not of the Earth).   All That Is, is what it is;  “I am that I am”.   But for purposes of this or that variety of study, we structure things.  Such structures are constrained by what is Out There, but are not straightforwardly or uniquely determined.)

So, first of all:  ‘What is linguistics?’

(We cannot pose this tiresome question, save in squotes, just as we did for ‘What is Mathematics?’)

Two candidates present themselves:

(I)  Linguistics is the study of language.

(II)  Linguistics is the study of languages.

In many modern perspectives,  these are distinct.   And each, in its own way, is problematic.

(I)  Already with Saussure if not before, the nature of the pre-theoretical notion ‘language’ (langage) was split, for precision, into langue and parole.  Subsequently, this basic bifurcation acquired theoretical heft with, in one corner (in the red trunks) those championing “I-language” and the innate “Language Acquisition Device”, versus (in the blue trunks) corpus-mavens, connectionists, frequentists, “usage-based” grammarians, and other sundry nominalists.  For a riposte to the latter, confer Frederick Newmeyer, whose tautologically-titled essay “Grammar is Grammar and Usage is Usage” (in Language, 2003), makes many useful points.

(II)  This formulation is less problematic, as being less ambitious, and more traditional.  Indeed we may say:  Philology is to languages, as linguistics (in the contemporary sense) is to language-tout-court.    But then we are faced with the question, what is “a language”  -- as opposed to a different one, or a dialect, or some other semantic signaling system.  And there we meet disagreements once again.

~ Recommendation posthume ~

“Si j’étais encore en vie, et que je  désirais un bon whodunnit,

que lirais-je?"

Micmacs divorce --Pouah!

Murphy sur la montagne

(Je suis Ferdinand de Saussure, et j’ai approuvé ce message)

~

This antinomy of language-per-se versus languages, has become acute since Chomsky, who has little interest in the endless gabble of actual tongues.  If this seems an extreme position, it is nonetheless exactly parallel to that of physicists, who seek general physical laws, rather than endless descriptions of individual objects falling or rolling or spinning or colliding or what have you.

Chomsky bitingly writes:

The grammar is a function-in-intension … the language is epiphenomenal.  Its ontological status is the same as that of a set of pairs of expressions that rhyme.

-- Noam Chomsky, Rules and Representations, p. 83

Here he is using language in the sense of ‘parole’ and not ‘langue’.   But, epigrammatically, it is startling to see language as of but peripheral interest to linguistics.

~

Marveling at the philosopher’s opacity, two linguists write:

In a recent article, Ryle even claims that sentences are not part of language, but only of speech.

--Jerry Fodor & Jerrold Katz, eds., introduction to The Structure of Language (1964), p. 11

Yet Chomsky would later also demote much of what was traditionally thought of as language, to a second-class status as “E-language”.

~

The units of social life are far less clearly defined than those of language … Linguists are fortunate in possessing a domain whose units are at least relatively self-defining and isolable.

-- Ernest Gellner, Contemporary Thought and Politics (1978), p. 82

The minimal unit of spoken language is not the sentence, but the utterance or intonation unit.

-- William Bright, ed.  International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (1992), vol. IV p. 11

Schuchardt enquires, “What is dialect?” -- the neogrammarians having used the term in formulating their theories -- and shows that it is an abstract notion, with no real existence.

-- I. Iordan & John Orr, An Introduction to Romance Linguistics (1937),  p. 32

With similar vigour, Schuchardt opposes the notion of ‘linguistic periods’ .. Just as there are no fixed boundaries between different vernaculars, so the chronological boundaries between successive periods of a language  are purely fictions of our minds.

-- I. Iordan & John Orr, An Introduction to Romance Linguistics (1937),  p. 33

And indeed:

Die Gesamtsprache ist etwas Abstraktes, ebenso wie die Gesamtseele  gegenüber der Individualseele.

-- Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 386

The term language is … a relatively nontechnical term.  If we wish to be more rigorous .. we have to employ other terminology.  We shall use variety as a neutral term  to apply to any particular kind of language which we wish … to consider as a single entity.

--J.K. Chambers & Peter Trudgill, Dialectology (1980), p. 5

(Ontologically/methodologically, this picture is not particularly reassuring.)

Structural linguistics has a favored suffix to denote status as a unit in the ontology or theoretical apparatus:  -eme.  Familiar (though embattled) are the phoneme and morpheme; lexeme (roughly: dictionary headword, so that eat and ate are part of one ‘lexeme’ even if you might call them different ‘words’ in one of the senses of that pre-theoretical term).  Hjelmslev proposed seme (or sememe), as the atomic unit of sense (the ‘semantic atom’), though these do virtually no work;  and, getting into the borderline-silly spirit of the thing, from outside of linguistics  Richard Dawkins coined meme. 

~

The ontological status of ‘meanings’:

Quine is quite correct in protesting that meanings are not entities.

-- Harold Lee, “Discourse and Event”, in: Hahn & Schilpp, eds., The Philosophy of W. V. Quine (1986), p.

One might have thought that being an ‘entity’ would be  rather a low bar.

(I recall one smitten young man, back in Berkeley in the 1970s, pleading with her whom he adored, “What do I mean to you?”  -- And she replied, wrinkling her young brow and thinking hard,  “Well, …  you’re a person ….” )

It goes even lower:

Though we sometimes need to conceive meanings timelessly,  we do not therefore need to conceive them as subsistent entitities.

-- Jonathan Cohen, The Diversity of Meaning (1963), p. 161

(“Subsistent”:  cf. Meinong.  Actually, “subsisting” is a very low bar, lower than “existing” entities.)

On Tarski’s “Convention T” (expanded)

Accolades:

Convention T embodies our best intuition as to how the concept of truth is used.

-- Donald Davidson

My lone dissent:

More boredom thou shalt never see

than Tarski’s Truth Convention T.

“Snow’s white” is true -- let’s get this right --

if, but only if,  snow is white.

A.T.,  logician and skirt-chaser

[Footnote]

When Tarski’s logical machinery is used to provide languages with an interpretation, it should not be seen as giving us a definition of truth. [Emphasis in original.]  When used in this way, it gives us a theory that, for each of the infinitely many sentences of the language, assigns a condition that obtains if and only if that sentence is true -- where truth is something we takes ourselves to understand antecedently, without definition.

-- Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (2003), vol. II, p. 293

For a major empirical research program, investigating the validity of Convention T, click here.
 

 ~

A fellow dissenter:

See for example the panegyrics in Wallace:  “It may strike the reader that Convention T is an astonishingly powerful intellectual device…” (etc.)  Wallace’s expressed admiration for the achievements of modern logic  is of course sincere, and I share it (not always for his reasons).  But these achievements should not be used to terrorize the reader …

-- Saul Kripke, “Substitutional Quantification”, in Evans & McDowell, eds., Truth and Meaning (1976), p. 340

Slices of Time

Brian Greene monostich

(Not quite a monostich,

nor a haiku neither.

It is  what it is.)

Every moment is illuminated,

and every moment    remains illuminated.

Every moment  is.

-- Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004), p. 141

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Is_Illuminated

~

I have  on occasion  fulminated against “Physics porn” -- the tawdry down-dumbing of physics for a popular audience -- not so much a matter of (necessary) simplification, as of appealing to their baser, sensationalistic instincts.

Brian Greene does not practice that. The books of his that I have read (The Elegant Universe, The Fabric of the Cosmos) -- with titles like the Parthenon, elegant but restrained -- are worthy examples of haute vulgarisation.   The matters he treats of  are difficult to explain, even to fellow-physicists (if they work in a different lab, and thus subscribe to a different groupthink); he does a laudable job of trying.  Moreover, the fellow writes really, really well -- at times even poetically (witness the above).

Nor is the cited haikustich  poetry merely.  The idea behind it, appears in the next paragraph  in plain prose:

Einstein said that the problem of The Now  worried him seriously.  He explained that the experience of the Now  means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference  does not  and cannot occur within physics.

Albert Einstein,  worrying about The Now

That is not to suggest that the Now at all resembles a mathematical instant, as in the calculus and thus in classical physics.  Each perceived ‘moment’ of consciousness presumably corresponds to an integral over some interval.   The ‘density’ being integrated need have no determinate evaluation at a single point of the continuum, any more than does the Dirac delta.  The psychological present is more of a Nowabouts.

The same point, with a different metaphor:

The practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own  on which we sit perched.

-- William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), vol. I, p. 609

The present is simply the past’s ever-moving outer edge.

-- Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker, 18 Dec 2006, p. 33

~

That the “now”, as such, has no special status in physics, is unsurprising, since it is relative to each observer.  That simultaneity (implicitly dependent thereon:  “Both A and B are happening now”) turns out to be untenable, was a shock introduced by Einstein; eventually you sort of learn to live with it.   The real scandal is that physics is likewise agnostic as to any distinction in principle between the future and the past.   And that thesis is cognitively and theologically abhorrent.

Feynman among others calmly accepted solutions to equations, whereby certain particles ran backwards in time.  At its grandest, as a prominent mathmatician-cosmologist writes, “the time-reverse of the universe  is just as much a solution of the dynamical equations” as the one we thought we lived in (Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 729).

For humans, the unidirectionality of time’s arrow  is as fundamental as the privileged status of the Now.  America’s premier 19^th-century psychologist, on remembering:

However the associationist may represent the present ideas as throning and arranging themselves, still, the spiritualist insists, he has in the end to admit that something, be it brain, be it ‘ideas’, be it ‘association’, knows past time as past, and fills it out with this or that event.

-- William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), vol. I, p. 2

eppur’ si muove …

~

James crops up in the first paragraph of a New York Times op-ed concerning durée (subjective time) from 10 May 2015, by Gregory Hickok, a professor of cognitive science:

In 1890, the American psychologist William James  famously likened our conscious experience to the flow of a stream … the stream … of consciousness.

The professor then puts his predecessor in his place:

Recent research has shown that the ‘stream’ of consciousness  is, in fact, an illusion.  We actually perceive the world in rhythmic pulses rather than as continuous flow.

The cognitive scientist then climbs down a bit from the claim that this insight is “recent” -- “Some of the first hints of this new understanding came as early as the 1920s, when physiologists discovered brain waves.”

One suspects, however, that James would not slap his forehead upon being apprized of this newly-minted insight, since he cites “the Humian doctrine that our thought is composed of separate independent parts, and is not a sensibly continuous stream”.  (Hume wrote in the eighteenth century.)

The *Real* Paleolithic Diet

DINOSAUR MEAT !!!!

Anything less,  is for wimps.

(I.e. : Weakly Interacting Massive Particles.  These never eat meat.)

Mastodon meat is an acceptable substitute.

While awaiting our hunters streaking back in the Wayback Machine, there is this:

http://aplaceofbrightness.blogspot.com/2015/06/grin-and-bear-eat.html

(That, by a man  who has wielded weapons in Iraq.

Chuck Norris wilts at his approach.)

In Defense of “Pascal’s Wager”

I have always particularly disliked Pascal’s Wager.   First, on logical grounds, since, like Anselm’s Ontological Argument, it can just as easily lead to the Great Pumpkin or the Great Penguin, as to God as conceived by Christians (of whatever stripe).  Second, on psycho-religious.   Romeo does not pitch upon Juliet by a process of totting up her good points, and subtracting her bad (suitably weighted  statistically or otherwise), comparing the result with the similar figure for the other wenches in Verona, meanwhile having his accountant double-check for accuracy, and then proceeding (with degree X of Bayesian confidence) to the balcony of the lucky winner.   Nor do such cold considerations yield any sense of the Christian feelings and beliefs about God.

Nevertheless, I am uncomfortably aware of having embraced something somewhat akin -- a leap of faith across a crevasse of uncertainty, borne on the wings of reason -- in subscribing to the Nicene Creed.

Credo ut intelligam

But just now, perusing the thoughtful and chatty treatise of a (non-religious) philosopher, this:

Very few people today are impressed by Pascal’s wagers.  But decision theorists have long been using the arguments he invented … Pascal’s logic is sound. The trouble is that his starting points  no longer apply for most of us.  They are no longer “live possibilities”.

-- Ian Hacking, An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic (2001), p. 123

Bingo!   That crack about the Great Pumpkin  misses the mark, because that portly vegetable only comes into perspective when seen from afar, from some philosopher’s distant star.   For anyone else (with the possible exception of Seneca the younger -- vide “The Pumpkinification of Claudius”), that rotund worthy is not a Live Possibility.

Our purpose here is not to argue for the intellectual respectability of adhering to the Christian faith (or to that of Islam), but to pursue the (psycho)logical point.   For, you,  respected and right-thinking reader, have almost certainly (if you are reading these words) made a similar bargain yourself:  in embracing the Religion of Science.

Not knocking science, nor denying its partly empirical character:  ever since my seventeenth year, my almost every effort has been bent in pursuit of scientific understanding.   But such is not easily to be had, even for those who majored in scientific subjects at top-flight colleges  and never slacked or looked back.   Most of what we accept, at least outside our own field of research, we largely accept on faith.  (And indeed, even within that field -- QFT or String Theory, say -- there are doctrines and assumptions you just swallow  and then push forward, not really questioning these, trying to come up with something publishable that hews to the Narrative, at least until you get tenure.)   To reject science sweepingly is intellectually disasterous;  but embracing it involves certain … wagers.

(For more on the subject, try this:  Veracity and Verifiability.)

Bonus:  For a relatively friendly look at Anselmian ontology, try this.
For a previously-unpublished tractate of the Saint:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/01/saint-anselms-proof-of-perfection-of.html

What would Richelieu do?

Cardinal Richelieu, pioneer of Realpolitik, selected some sketchy bedfellows for the sake of maintaining the balance of power in Europe.  Metternich continued the balancing act, even going so far as to strike an alliance of convenience with the Ottoman Empire.

Quite recently, America announced it was moving heavy weapons into multiple countries on the very border with Russia.  (Think:  Russian missiles in Canada and Mexico.)  By way of riposte, Russia is upping the number of nuke-equipped subs.

Such gamesmanship is approaching brinkmanship.   At some point you realize, you are no longer playing with Monopoly-money.

Suppose, at the worst account, that the Russians are the New Ottomans.  Does this make sense?

The military mostly think tactically.  Statesmen, strategically.  (Politicians, viscerally.)   While historians (and philosophers) … call it the Long View, or “supra-strategically”.  And here, the dominant determinants, are the Clash of Civilizations, and the demographic time-bomb. 

In that meta-battle, the Russians and ourselves are on the same side.

(Of this, there is more awareness  in Europe than here.  Keyword: Euro-Sibérie.)

Background here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/03/spheres-of-influence.html

 

Wannabees

Rachel Dolezal : the “Caitlyn” Jenner of racial politics.

“Caitlyn” Jenner : the Rachel Dolezal of gender politics.

... nor good red herring.

“What’s sauce for the goose,

is sauce for the gander.”