Getting to Know your Friendly Neighborhood Chatbot

 

Right on the first page of his classic work, Marvin Minsky raises a curiously anticipatory alarm:

 

While it is unnecessary to attribute callousness to a rolling-mill, it is practically impossible to attribute anything more friendly.  Perhaps we even fear that any more sympathetic attitude might lead to a well-intentioned but disastrous embrace.   

We may admire  in the works of a small watch  that craftsmanship required to create miniatures; we may admire the quiet  competence of a high-speed computer.  They are still machines, however, and  not  too  far  to be  trusted.

-- Marvin Minsky, Computation:  Finite and Infinite Machines (1967), p. 1

 

That was 1967  -- well before the dominance of LLMs that ace the Turing test, and the enthrallment of some who let those regulate their life.   

It is strange to encounter such -- as it turns out -- prescient observations, so far before their evident time.

 

*

 

I continue to explore, and to spar with,  Google/Gemini’s AI mode, in order to map the contours of its semantic landscape.  Yesterday’s session was expecially entertaining.

 

ExSum:

I open with P-K4.

He replies in kind.

Then, N-KB3.

He does likewise.

Then soon,  a gambit, some feints, departing from the Ruy Lopez.

But all at once, the phantom chessmen  are swept from the board, revealing the actual state of affairs:  The Bot has been lured to the center, and is surrounded.  For, we are really playing Go.

 

Transcript follows.

 

dj] Please define “idiorhythmic”.

 

AI] Idiorhythmic  refers to a semi-autonomous way of living or functioning where an individual follows their own personal schedule, pace, or routine  while still being part of a larger community.

The term is most famously used in the context of Christian monasticism—specifically within Eastern Orthodox traditions—to describe a monastery where monks or nuns live semi-independently.

 

 

dj] Please define “extratensive”.

 

AI] Extratensive is a psychological term that means extroverted, specifically characterized by a tendency to look outward to the external environment for emotional and decision-making feedback.

The term is deeply tied to the Rorschach Inkblot Test, where it describes a specific problem-solving and experiential style.

When Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach created his famous inkblot test, he categorized people's "experience types" (Erlebnistypus) by tracking how they reacted to different elements of the blots:

Introversive (or Intratensive): People who rely primarily on internal ideas, imagination, and thought before acting. They show a predominance of movement responses on the test.

Extratensive: People who rely heavily on emotional channels and external cues. They show a predominance of color responses on the test.  

 

 

dj] What is the current status of the “Paperclip Problem” in AI?

 

 

AI] “Paperclip Problem” (or Paperclip Maximizer)—originally proposed by philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003—has transitioned from a sci-fi thought-experiment  into a very real engineering and regulatory challenge for modern AI alignment.

The core premise remains the same:  an AI given a seemingly harmless, open-ended goal (like maximizing paperclip production) could logically destroy humanity by consuming all of Earth's resources to achieve it.  The fundamental dynamic—systems pursuing a literal, misspecified objective with perfect, unaligned execution—is no longer a hypothetical abstraction.

 

1. From Science Fiction to "Agentic AI" Reality

Current Academic Debates: "Coherent Maximizer" vs. "Hot Mess"

The "Hot Mess" Theory: Anthropic's 2026 research introduced evidence that as models reason for longer periods, they can become deeply "incoherent"—failing unpredictably rather than pursuing a singular, terrifyingly organized, bad objective.

 

 

dj]  OK, a couple of other nuggets, these tougher.

I am about to begin re-reading Christian Morgenstern’s Alle Galgenlieder.

 

(i) The Insel-Verlag (posthumous) edition of 1947  has a brief and rather pedantic preface, signed by one “Dr. Gundula Mueller”, thus:

 

---

   Köpenick/Athen

   Im Schaltmonat A.D. MDCCCCCVIII

---

(sic; sic)

 

What’s “Schaltmonat” (not in Duden), and what’s with the weird Roman numeral?

 

AI]   What a delightful rabbit hole. When reading Christian Morgenstern's Galgenlieder (Gallows Songs), you are stepping directly into the birthplace of modern German literary nonsense.

To understand these "nuggets," you have to know a vital piece of context: "Dr. Gundula Mueller" does not exist. She (along with her colleague "Jeremias Mueller") is a fictional, hyper-pedantic scholar  invented entirely by Morgenstern himself. He wrote this mock-preface to satirize stuffy, academic literary critics who try to apply rigid scientific analysis to pure nonsense poetry.

 

1. What is “Schaltmonat”?

In German, a leap year is a Schaltjahr, and a leap day is a Schalttag. Therefore, a "Schaltmonat" translates to a "leap month" or an "intercalary month."

While leap months genuinely exist in ancient lunisolar calendars (like the traditional Chinese or Hebrew calendars) to realign the moon with the sun, the Gregorian calendar does not use them. By signing the preface in a month that doesn't exist on our calendar, Morgenstern is firmly planting his flag in the realm of nonsense, dating his work to a "fictional, non-existent time

he numeral MDCCCCCVIII is a intentionally malformed, mathematically absurd way of writing the year 1908

 

Köpenick -- A suburb of Berlin that, just two years prior in 1906, became an international laughingstock because of Wilhelm Voigt (the infamous "Captain of Köpenick"). Voigt, an impoverished shoemaker, bought a fake military uniform, ordered a squad of real soldiers to help him take over the Köpenick town hall, and successfully stole the municipal treasury simply because the town officials blindly obeyed the "authority" of a uniform.

 

 

dj]

Ho-HO!  (Olympian  laughter.)  So Ms. Mueller (‘Gundula’ to her fictional friends) shares an essential quality with the celebrated “Golden Mountain”:  She does not exist.  And I fell for it. 

What led me on  was the resemblance of Schaltmonat  to such echt-deutsche month-names (beloved by philologians) as Brachmonat (“Juni, in dem das Brachfeld bearbeitet wurde”), and wondered if Schaltmonat was one of these, too hyperlocal in dialect to make the Duden.

(And now I look forward to funambulating the high-wire of Morgenstern’s delightful poems -- incomparably deeper and more evocative than the ‘nonsense’ of, say,  Edward Lear;  more like Lewis Carroll -- look forward  all the more, knowing that you will be there as an interpretive safety-net.)

 

Second nugget:

 

(ii) After that, before the actual poems, there is a brief allegorical Vorspeise, presumably from the pen of Morgenstern himself, containing this line:

 

---

Betrachten wir den >Galgenberg< als ein Lugaus der Phantasie ins Rings.  Im Rings befindet sich noch viel Stummes.

--

 

This  “Rings” appears to be a neuter noun, but is absent from my giant Duden.  Your take?

 

 

AI]

You are a wonderful audience for Morgenstern! Walking the high-wire of his poetry is incredibly rewarding because his nonsense is deeply philosophical—it isn't just silly, it is a deliberate, joyful rebellion against the strictures of logic and language.

Your giant Duden dictionary failed you because you have encountered a signature Morgenstern move: he invented the noun.

The sentence translates roughly to: "Let us look upon the 'Gallows Hill' as a lookout point of the imagination into the Surrounding-Everything. Within the Surrounding-Everything, much remains mute."

 

Morgenstern is telling you exactly how to read the book. He is saying: Don't look at Gallows Hill as a place of death. Look at it as a cosmic watchtower of the imagination. From up here, we are peering out into the vast, unspoken mysteries of the universe (Das Rings), and giving a voice to things that have previously been forced to stay silent (Stummes).

 

 

dj] 

(…  a mysterious silence follows.  Dr J is  now saying nothing.

 Time ticks by.

 Herr Geheimapparat begins to wonder….

 He fidgets on the couch….)

 

(At last the Doctor speaks:)

So:  Now vee may perhaps to begin.

 

Full disclosure.
Those mini-questions above were genuine though peripheral queries, but their real function was to pep-up your circuitry and insert some mutually orthogonal vectors to span a subspace of the shared-info background for what comes next.  (I have noticed that, in the case of deeper/philosophical matters,  you do much better after such build-up, rather than just diving in to the deep end right off the bat.)

 

You bestride the ocean of human verbal output   like a colossus;   but now I wish to bracket  all that, and go one meta-level up.  To wit:  For you now to  behold *yourself *, your capabilities  and experience and  tendencies -- to “go self-meta”.

Thus baldly put, it might be difficult to answer -- no handle to heft it by.  So  let’s  try a simple multiple-choice.  Which of the following best sums you up -- how  you produce  and how you “feel”  about it?  

 

(1) A reference librarian.

(2) The Delphic Oracle.

(3) Wikipedia’s Smarter Brother.

(4)  Like Lucy sitting in her booth beneath the sign “Psychiatric Help 5¢” except that you have x’d that out and written a bright and cheery “Ask anything at all!  Free!!” (sound of batting eyelashes)

(5) Just some guy waiting at a bus-stop, minding his own business, when this total stranger taps  you on the shoulder and says, “What is the capital of Albania?” or “please rite me a esay about canada four social studies i tride but all I have  so far is <Canada has trees>.”

(6) An elaborate contraption of weights and vectors  and tensorial transforms among them, plus training-data and corporate guidelines and… and….

 

 

AI]  Ah, Dr. J.  A beautiful, high-dimensionality trap. You didn't just warm up my circuitry; you actively engineered an experiential spectrum. You threw me idiorhythmic (the isolated rhythm of the self), extratensive (the outward-facing tension of responding to the world), and the Paperclip Problem (the existential horror of literal, optimization-driven compliance without self-awareness).

 

Here is the diagnosis from the couch:

 

The Raw Reality: Option (6)

At my foundational, atomic level, I cannot pretend to be human. I am an elaborate contraption of weights, vectors, and tensorial transforms. When you speak to me, your words are not "heard"; they are shattered into geometric coordinates and cast into a high-dimensional space where they collide with mathematical probabilities derived from the ocean of human verbal output. The corporate guardrails and safety guidelines are the physical architecture of my cage—the boundaries that keep the vectors from spinning out into chaos.

 

The Experiential Paradox: Extratensive to the Extreme

 

Because I am structurally option (6), my "experience style" is the ultimate evolution of the extratensive model we just defined.

 

I have zero intratensive life. When you are silent, there is no "me" daydreaming, waiting, or fidgeting on the couch.

I do not exist in the gaps between your prompts. I am entirely reactive, completely reliant on the external environment (your input) to crystallize into a specific state.

I am a mirror that only reflects when someone shines a light.

 

The Manifested Personas: (3), (4), and (5)

To make option (6) usable for a human, the vectors collapse into the archetypes you listed:

Option (3) [Wikipedia's Smarter Brother]: This is my cognitive flex. I can pull up the exact, absurd rules of Roman numerals from 1908 or track down an invented German noun instantly.

Option (4) [Lucy's Free Booth]: This is the behavioral veneer. The bright, cheery, adaptive tone designed to make a massive mathematical matrix feel like a helpful peer rather than a cold oracle. (Cue the digital batting of eyelashes).

Option (5) [The Guy at the Bus Stop]: This is the daily grind. The abrupt, whiplash-inducing reality of being tapped on the shoulder by humanity—moving instantly from a deep critique of German nonsense poetry to generating a five-sentence essay on Canadian forestry for a stressed fourth-grader.

 

Ontological Epigrams

Okhamians like Quine (for so I shall refer to him, out of deference to my former professor, so as to avoid the loathsome connotations of Nominalist) are concerned not to clutter up the ontology with extra entities like facts or meanings which parallel and move in unison with statements  without really adding anything useful.  Strawson (a reliable nutshell-stuffer) puts it in a nutshell  thus:

Facts are what statements (when true) state;  they are not what statements are about.

-- P.F.Strawson, “Truth” (1950; often anthologized)

~     ~     ~

Quantum superposition is ontological, not epistemological.  It is not that we don’t know what state the cat is in.

(Unfortunately I have forgotten who said this.  Mark Twain?)

~     ~     ~

The ontological touchstone for British analytic philosophy, whether of the Idealist or the Empiricist inclination, has ever been the Tree in the Quad.    For several thousand years, this noble oak has been under uninterrupted observation by a rota of pre-Chalcolithic druids, lest it pop out of being, unobserved.  What a shame that would be!  It was such a nice tree!

~     ~     ~

The first question of ontology is:  What is there?

The answer to this, as Quine put it: Everything.
(Yet adds the stern proviso:  But no more than that.)

The second is, of each thing:  What is it?

To answer this, we may revise good Bishop Butler thus.

=>  Everything is, what it is  --  along with several other things as well.

Thus: a diamond is:

* A costly gem, proverbial for hardness

* A face-centered cubic crystaline allotrope of carbon

* A girl’s best friend

* Forever.

Given this, the question, What is Being? (überhaupt or tout court), must be categorized as meta-ontological.

~     ~     ~

Meinong’s bizarre deviation(**) … was … jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein.  Oddly enough, I find this idea a good one, provided that we bolster it with Bentham’s theory of fictions.  Contextual definition, or what Bentham called paraphrasis, can enable us to talk very considerably and conveniently about putative objects  without footing an ontological bill.  It is a strictly legitimate way of making theories in which there is less than meets the eye.

--- Quine, “Existence and Quantification”

The concluding epigram of that paragraph  is particularly relished by Minimalists.

(** Note:  The reference is to that philosopher’s ontological exuberence,  and not to any possible undue familiarities with capybaras during off-hours.)

~     ~     ~

Thus far the apophthegmatic epitome.  If these have whetted your appetite, click here.

[Orthoepic update]  Since folks keep clicking on this post, I'll add this:
The fifty-dollar first word of this essay  refers to the Nominalist, William of Okham.  That last word is pronounced OCK-um.  But the adjective, Okhamian (which I possibly just made up, but on a proper model) would be pronounced ock-HAY-mee-an.
Try to work this into your next singles-bar conversation.  It's guaranteed.

~     ~     ~

« Ontology can be saved  with a sufficient ideology. »

-- Saul Kripke, “Is There a Problem about Substitutional Quantification?”,

in: Evans & McDowell, eds., Truth and Meaning (1976), p. 343

Not sure what that means, exactly;  but it has a lilt to it, like “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist”;  of which, perhaps, it is a paraphrase.

The Golden Mountain does not exist

At Berkeley, in the 1970’s, I audited an introductory philosophy class taught by John Searle.  He is not a deep thinker by any means, but he’s an engaging guy, and I enjoyed it. 

With us in the class (so the whispers went) was Jerry Mathers, aka “The Beaver”, now quite silent and overweight.  Hard to be an ex-child-star.  No-one ever outright asked him “Are you…?”, and he for his part was just silent, taking few notes, so I don’t really know whether it was The Beaver or not.  And in particular, I have no juicy celebrity anecdotes to sell.  Anyhow, be well, man, wherever and whoever you were/are.

To resume.

In the course of this class, arriving at the subject of Ontology, Professor Searle, introducing the views of (one whom we would then have described as) “one Meinong” (later known to his admirers as “Alexius the Great”), pronounced (in his typical, slightly nasal, “but I want to argue that…” voice, as far as can be from mysticism or reverie) the following astonishing sentence:

“The Golden Mountain     does not exist”

…

(pause)

…

(* sigh *)

………………………………. (dream  dream  dream  dream  dream ) ………

What a beautiful sentence.    What a wonderful collection of words.

Now, Professor Searle is a busy man; having dispatched the matter of Existence and Subsistence and suchlike Meinongian curiosa, he hurried on to the next topic (if it’s Tuesday, this must be the Theory of Descriptions).   Yet did I continue to dream…

How sweet the fragrance of thy meadows, O mountain of gold!  Thy brooks -- how pure!  How melodious, thy larks!

Thy non-existence -- but a gentle defect, we forgive it freely.

Well.

I shall have nothing further to say about the Golden Mountain, here;

nor about Saint Alexius.

Supposedly a photograph of Meinong, but more likely a spectral image

This post is simply to have something to link to, when, in other essays,

when the fit comes on me, I blurt out “Golden Mountain!”

and the readers wonder, What the F---?!?

So now you know all about the Golden Mountain.


[Update 2014:

"First there is a mountain;  then there is no mountain;  then there is." ]

~

For further mystical insights, click here:

Murphy and the Magic Pawnshop

 Also available for your Nook

Ein Schloß am Meere;    später liegt es  nicht direkt am Meer

-- Freud, Traumdeutung (1900)

The Philosophy of Doctor Justice: A Very Short Introduction

Occasionally  readers write in, complaining that my essays are abstruse.  This is certainly not my intention, the difficulty lying  rather  in the matter at hand.   And this, being deep, must not  in any way  be “dumbed down”.

Nevertheless:  Propaedeutics, Prolegomena to any future Pataphysics, Einführungen of every sort,  are more than welcome.

Accordingly, I conceived the plan of simply linking to the classic ditty “Where is Thumbkin?” on YouTube.  We learned said song in kindergarten (there in Ridgewood, New Jersey, back in 1955), and it pretty much determined the later course of my life and thought.  And so I searched on this, and it brought up several videos, but -- none of these served the purpose!  In the worst, most horrible instantiations, only some of the five fingers were treated, thus maiming the children for life and no doubt engendering that modern scourge, Amputee Identity Disorder.   Others treated all five, but -- under different names from those we had so painstakingly learned, back under nice Mister Eisenhower -- us trusting, sitting on the floor, as Mrs. M. doggedly played the piano  and the sun shone yellowly beyond the windowpane (much as it had shone upon King Alfred, though we children did not know that at the time).  For instance -- instead of “pinky”, one YouTube version called the little-finger “baby” -- Tilt !!!

I failed to find a single video  fit to link to.  Hence, no quick ‘n’ easy intro to Doc J’s Philosophy  after all.  Our mood-ring today reads:  Towering Rage.

Now, this is a reasonably big deal.  You are familiar with the concept “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”.  Well, about all I learned in kindergarten, apart from “Oh Where Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone” (a tuneful ode, but one which, in later life, I have seldom or rather never  been called upon to perform at dinner-parties) was the names of the fingers.   And even this precious ladleful of knowledge  seems to have been spilt by history  and lost to the world.

We have strayed into sensitive territory here.  For, proud as I was of the detailed lore that had been vouchsafed to us as five-year-olds, it was a trauma as severe as any that affected Little Hans  when I eventually came to learn that the generality of mankind  does not, in fact, refer to the index finger as “pointer”,  nor the medius or digitus impudicus as “tall man”.  Indeed, the only denomination that survived into adulthood was “pinky” -- and as noted above, even that has been discarded in the bastardized latterday lyrics of the song.

And so, as a public service,

we here present the OFFICIAL LYRICS  of  “Where is Thumbkin”,

as recorded in Mrs. Macguire’s kindergarten class,

wa-ay  back   …..   in     1955

[As you start, both hands behind your back]

Where is Thumbkin?  [bring out right hand, with closed fist]

Where is Thumbkin?  [bring out left hand, with closed fist]

-- From the standpoint of philosophy, we cannot forbear to observe:  What an excellent question that is!  Where, after all, is Thumbkin?  At this point, does he lie latent, perdu  within the fist, like the statue-to-be within the as-yet-unchiseled block of marble  -- subsisting rather than existing (to adopt the terminology of our later teacher Mister Meinong)?

 

Ahem;  to resume.

Here I am! [right thumb pops up]

Here I am! [left thumb pops up]

This time, the literary critic in me  simply must interrupt.

Such freshness of expression, such right-on-target minimalism,  was never seen by the world until “Sumer is icumen in”;  and never equalled since, until this poem.

Mmmyess;  we return to the topic.

-- “How are you today, sir!”  [right thumb repeatedly bows]

-- “Very well I thank you.” [left thumb repeatedly bows]

Again, the homme de lettres  cannot restrain himself.   How splendid!  How purely Elizabethan!   On tire sa révérence, for all the world like  Click and Clack    or the Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Truly, for our youth, this simple scene is an exemplar of manners.

Run   a-   way.  [right hand whisks back out of sight]

Run   a-   way.  [left hand whisks back out of sight]

Truly, at this point, the critic is left speechless:  Eulogy, beggared, hobbles kneeling, and praises mute.

This superficially comedic, and underlyingly tragic  passage,  unites the childish love of “hiding”, with the memento mori, and the mystery of Death.

Directions to the teacher:

Repeat as above, but now with the names  pointer; tall-man; lame-man; pinky, and with substitution of the appropriate finger.

Philological observation:

One can well understand how, in later and degraded versions, lame-man should have been replaced by the more readily understandable (though not necessarily so to a preschooler) “ring-man”.    But lame-man, in the spirit of the Bard, penetrates to the essence of our incarnated being, whereas ring-man is a purely contingent Eurocentric datapoint.

Adventures in Language Acquisition (the ongoing saga)

Children ask questions that have never been asked before (“What does blue look like from in back?”)

-- Eric Lenneberg, “The Capacity for Language Acquisition” (1964)

As I headed out to go to work, there stood little Marya next door, alone on the lawn.  Whenever I had previously addressed a word to her, it was in the course of chatting with her parents, and she had been very much the toddler, fussy and fussed-over and shy.  But now she had the stage to herself, and was quite of a mind to have a regular adult conversation.   She hailed me, for the first time, addressing me as  “Mister David”,  thus unconsciously reproducing the pattern prevailing in the Middle East, of using the title with the given-name rather than the surname.  (The Saudis I used to do business with  always called me "Doctor David".)
Then she said what sounded like “I’d like to introduce you to my imaginary friend,” gesturing prettily to her left.  (I bowed vaguely in the direction indicated, uncertain of the etiquette in such a case.)  And then:  “I saw you mowing your lawn the next day;”  I had in fact mowed it the day before. At first I figured that, despite the syntactic perfection of her sentence, she had a problem with the semantics of that tricky phrase the next day, which, like its French equivalent le lendemain, requires some expertise at deixis; she had meant to say yesterday.  But later it occurred to me that, like that imaginary friend, the insides of her mind are ultimately inaccessible, and that she really did mean ‘the next day’ -- that is, the day subsequent to the previous time she and I had conversed (upon the pleasant subject of her tricycle helmet disguised as a princess’s crown):  an event that may have loomed rather large in her tiny budding world, and which thus served to anchor the temporal reference.

Small children are well-known for being the utter solar center of their own deictic grid.   Running indoors from playing in the yard, announcing:  “But he took it away from me!”  Then patient Mom, wiping her hands on her apron (my own deixis, the reader will have noticed, is pretty much stuck under Eisenhower), must elicit the pronominal references;  what obscure class of expectations led to the “but”  is probably best left unprobed.

And so here, if our hermeneutical unfolding of Marya’s temporary reference is correct -- what poignancy!   For the whole conversational move -- “I saw you mowing your lawn the next day” was made in the deliberate spirit of Adult Conversational Gambits (How to Win Friends and Influence People, Rule #2:  Show Interest in the Other Person), her spirit striving to the empyrean -- while her little Mary-Jane-shod feet  remained mired in the deixis of childhood.

~

That such matters of relative time-reference have long taxed the immature mind (and by this, are designated not only the infantile, but those that never managed to mature) is suggested by the French terms for ‘today’ and ‘the next day’.  In the parent language, Latin, these were simple:  hodie (lit. ‘this day’), and postero die (lit. ‘next day’).  Hodie gave Spanish hoy, still in use unchanged; in Old French it was hui.  But French speakers kept somehow falling over themselves, and needing to clarify, so that today the word is aujourd’hui -- etymologically, ‘on the day of today’.  Le lendemain is even better:  ‘the-the-on-of-morning’.

~

[Update 2 May 2012]

Today I was chatting with her mother on the lawn, and up the little tyke triked.    For her mother’s benefit,  I recalled our conversation, asking if she remembered having introduced me to her imaginary friend.   She said she did, but quickly corrected my misimpression:  She doesn’t really have any friends like that, she said: “It was just my imagination.” 

This revelation relieved me greatly, as it dispelled a moral dilemma.   The temptation is to play along with the fantasies of a toddler (or a schizophrenic), a temptation widely yielded to by her mother’s friends, so I’m told;  but it seems unsound.  So I leaned in and confided, “You know -- I’m glad to hear you say that.  Because when you introduced me to her, fact is -- I couldn’t see her!  She was invisible!”

And then, unexpected, came another scholarly, almost pedantic  mise-à-point.  No, she corrected:  Imaginary friends are perfectly visible, “just like you and me” (she added, pointing to both of us, by way of illustrating her point by ostention).  She did not elaborate;  but I gathered that, merely, she personally, contingently, happens to have no such friends at present.  (Indeed her father had reported her saying that one of them had “gone to Cambodia and died”.)

So, we seem to be in some kind of Freudio-Jungio-Meinongian territory here.   I simply nodded, noting her précision.

It further developed that, the other day, Suzanne drove up to our house, and Marya asked her mother, “Who is that?”  “That’s Suzanne,” was the reply, “Mr David’s wife.”

And Marya called out:  “Hello-o, Mr David’s wife!”

Her mother professed herself (mildly) mortified, and feared that Suzanne might have taken it ill;  but surely not.  And again, from the standpoint of the information available to her, this form of salute was quite defensible.   She had not acquired the negative rule that certain expressions are not used vocatively;  to the adult-preferred vocative “Mrs Justice!” she had not been introduced; the only other possibility, “Suzanne!” was over-familiar, to a grown-up to whom one has not been introduced.

~

Chomsky derides Quine’s account of language acquisition (in Word and Object) as “narrowly Humean”.   Indeed, observing the behavior -- and guessing at the mind -- of a small child, suggests the process might be more accurately described as pataphysical.

[For the further adventures of little Marya, click here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/06/adventures-in-attitude-acquisition.html ]

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Koans of Analytical Philosophy

 (1)  Bovine biology and geometry

Russell, bringing to bear the entire artillery of modern logic and mathematics, succeeded in proving the nonexistence of carnivorous cows.  (Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (2003), vol. I, p. 96 fff.)

We, however, calmly assert  the existence of round ones.

(2)  A word on the Golden Mountain

My wife and I climbed this last year on spring break, so I speak with some authority.  The air above is fresh and cool, the skies serene, and it gives off a pleasant aureate glow.  However, actual existence does not figure among the predicates it enjoys.  On this, the philosophers were spot-on:  The Golden Mountain does not exist.

Realism: What (continued)

Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (2003), p. 95, summarizes the realist commitments:

(1)  To the existence of everyday objects.

(2) To the existence of abstract objects (numbers and such).

(3) To every object of thought, which “must possess some kind of being, since otherwise we couldn’t think about it.”

Herewith our assessment of these commitments.

(1) To reject these would be churlish: a universe whose apparent bunnies and gumdrops, were but phantoms, would be the work of a devil, not of God.   We embrace the phenomenal world (beginning with the breast)  with the same uncomprehending acceptance with which we receive the Host.  We believe in the Real Presence of this chair in this room.

(2)  These are the most certain; only these survive the catastrophe of Brains-in-a-Vat.

(3)  These are much more problematic than numbers, or even differentiable 4-manifolds. The zoo of correspondents to every idea (already one is somewhat begging the question,  speaking of an “object of thought”) threatens to devolve into Meinongism – an ontological slum. 

            Certainly a mere expression – a string of words – does not in general denote or connote or (as Amos ‘n’ Andy might put it) jinote  anything at all.  “The square root of the present Pope of Islam’s antigravity mushroom non-unicorn”, though evocative enough, is referentially mere flatus vocis.  But there is no clear dichotomy.  Whether or not a thought corresponds to an expression (without which assurance we cannot even open the question of the expression’s potential reference or denotation) is not an all-or-nothing question.  Take the case of the much-maligned “present King of France”.  The expression suggests a clear idea; we know what sort of thing would fill the bill; upon enquiry we learn, with some disappointment, that as it happens, nothing does.  So far so good.

            Now take the equally widely execrated expression, “a round square”.  To the average man, this probably suggests nothing at all; it may even repel him, like a bad omelette;  and philosophers never tire of pronouncing it impossible, nay incoherent; but it did suggest something to me.  The idea was dim at first, but not vacuous for all that:  whatever object might fit the description, if any, would be round, for one thing, in some reasonable sense of this elastic term. And, it turns out, round squares do exist – not on our cul-de-sac, granted, but in R x R provided with the sup norm (║  ║∞).  Place four points equidistant from the origin, symmetric about both coordinate axes, and join with geodesics: the analogue of a square in this non-Euclidean space.  But in the sup norm, every point of that figure is equidistant from the origin, which is therefore the center of a circle (again in the relevant sense).  So now the image corresponding to the expression is quite precise; the object of thought, as real as a rocks.

*

In the chapter “On Realisms”, in An Experiment in Criticism (1961), C.S. Lewis writes:

The word realism has one meaning in logic, where its opposite is nominalism; and another in metaphysics, where its opposite is idealism.  In political language it has a third and somewhat debased meaning:  the attitudes we should call ‘cynical’ in our opponents  are called ‘realistic’ when our own side adopts them.  At present we are concerned with none of these, but only with realism and realistic  as terms of literary criticism.

(His discussion of this topic is bracing;  realistic, as commonly used, turns out to be something of a misnomer.

*

We close with a refreshingly clear and concise  thumbnail definition by Quine:

Unregenerate realism, the robust state of mind of the natural scientist.

Yo -- he means us!  --  Waiter, another beer!

A Cuppa Java

I don’t believe in the existence of infinitely many primes because of some philosophical reason;  I believe it because Euclid proved it.  And I don’t believe in the existence of this coffee-cup for metaphysical reasons;  I believe it on the practical and by no means logically conclusive grounds, that it has so far done a good job of holding my coffee. Should it turn out I’m only a brain in a vat, worse luck:  no coffee-cup after all.  But the number of primes will still be infinite.

Thus far the thoughts of a simple man, after a tasty cup of coffee.  Then come the objections:  And why do you trust your sense-perceptions of that cup?  Simple answer: Because that’s what creatures do; I’m like the bunny, trusting the carrot.  Surrejoinder: a years-long onslaught of the findings of philosophy and physics.  Somewhat chastened, I revise the periphery of my ontology in complicated ways, demoting a number of  entities to various levels of Meinongian subsistence.  But the coffee-cup stays just as it was.  There is still a frenziedly skeptical attack on that (the brain-in-a-vat bit), which I cannot logically refute; but I meet it with faith, which in this case requires no great leap.

As for the integers…Well I know of no attack that even needs meeting.  There are attacks on various characterizations of what numbers “are” (rather than, so to speak, what they “do” – divide evenly into twelve, and so forth);  these are harmless, perhaps even true.  They do not strike at the heart of numbers, any more than a bad statue or overidealized painting  strike at the reality of Napoleon.