Day 3603, Arrow’s Theorem.

Arrow’s Theorem (SEP)

Kenneth Arrow’s “impossibility” theorem—the “general possibility” theorem, as he called it—answers a very basic question in the theory of collective decision-making. Say there are some alternatives to choose among. They could be policies, public projects, candidates in an election, distributions of income and labour requirements or just about anything else. There are some people whose preferences among these alternatives will inform this choice, and the question is: which procedures are there for deriving, from what is known or can be found out about their preferences, a collective or “social” ordering of the alternatives from better to worse? The answer is startling. Arrow’s theorem says there are no such procedures at all—none, anyway, that meet certain conditions concerning the autonomy of the people and the rationality of their preferences. The technical framework in which Arrow gave the question of social orderings a precise sense and its rigorous answer is now widely used for studying problems in welfare economics. The impossibility theorem itself set the agenda for contemporary social choice theory. Arrow accomplished this while still a graduate student. In 1972, he received the Nobel Prize in economics for his contributions.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arrows-theorem/

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Day 3602, Argument and Argumentation.

Daily picture, Definitions

Argument and Argumentation

Argument is a central concept for philosophy. Philosophers rely heavily on arguments to justify claims, and these practices have been motivating reflections on what arguments and argumentation are for millennia. Moreover, argumentative practices are also pervasive elsewhere; they permeate scientific inquiry, legal procedures, education, and political institutions. The study of argumentation is an inter-disciplinary field of inquiry, involving philosophers, language theorists, legal scholars, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, and political scientists, among many others.

An argument can be defined as a complex symbolic structure where some parts, known as the premises, offer support to another part, the conclusion. Alternatively, an argument can be viewed as a complex speech act consisting of one or more acts of premising (which assert propositions in favor of the conclusion), an act of concluding, and a stated or implicit marker (“hence”, “therefore”) that indicates that the conclusion follows from the premises (Hitchcock 2007).^[1] The relation of support between premises and conclusion can be cashed out in different ways: the premises may guarantee the truth of the conclusion, or make its truth more probable; the premises may imply the conclusion; the premises may make the conclusion more acceptable (or assertible).

For theoretical purposes, arguments may be considered as freestanding entities, abstracted from their contexts of use in actual human activities. But depending on one’s explanatory goals, there is also much to be gained from considering arguments as they in fact occur in human communicative practices. The term generally used for instances of exchange of arguments is argumentation. In what follows, the convention of using “argument” to refer to structures of premises and conclusion, and “argumentation” to refer to human practices and activities where arguments occur as communicative actions will be adopted.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/argument/

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Day 3601, A Priori Justification and Knowledge.

Poetry

At first, this problem was somewhat hard to pinpoint, but after reading the following example on Gettier’s own Wikipage I get it (not proven).

I am watching the men’s Wimbledon Final, and John McEnroe is playing Jimmy Connors, it is match point, and McEnroe wins. I say to myself: “John McEnroe is this year’s men’s champion at Wimbledon”. Unbeknownst to me, however, the BBC were experiencing a broadcasting fault and so had broadcast a tape of last year’s final, when McEnroe also beat Connors. I had been watching last year’s Wimbledon final, so I believed that McEnroe had bested Connors. But at that same time, in real life, McEnroe was repeating last year’s victory and besting Connors! So my belief that McEnroe bested Connors to become this year’s Wimbledon champion is true, and I had good reason to believe so (my belief was justified) — and yet, there is a sense in which I could not really have claimed to “know” that McEnroe had bested Connors because I was only accidentally right that McEnroe beat Connors — my belief was not based on the right kind of justification.

A Priori Justification and Knowledge (SEP)

A priori justification is a type of epistemic justification that is, in some sense, independent of experience. Gettier examples have led most philosophers to think that having a justified true belief is not sufficient for knowledge and the examples there), but many still believe that it is necessary. In this entry, it will be assumed, for the most part, that even though justification is not sufficient for knowledge it is necessary and that a priori knowledge is knowledge based on a priori justification. So much of the discussion will focus on a priori justification.

There are a variety of views about whether a priori justification requires some sort of evidence or whether, instead, some propositions can be “default reasonable”, or that a person can be entitled to accept certain propositions independent of any evidence, perhaps because they are reasonable presuppositions of some area of inquiry. Philosophers who think that a priori justification requires evidence differ about the details. Some think that a priori evidence can be defeated (overridden or undercut) by other evidence, including evidence from sensory observations. There are a variety of views about whether a priori justification, and knowledge, must be only of propositions about what is possible or necessary, and if necessary, only of analytic propositions, that is, propositions that are in some sense “true in virtue of their meaning”. Those who think that a priori justification requires evidence often think that the evidence is provided by rational intuitions or insights, but there is disagreement about the nature of those intuitions or insights, and critics deny that they really do constitute evidence.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/apriori/

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Day 3600, Anomalous monism.

Daily picture, Definitions

I never heard of this theory, but it intrigues me. I spent an hour trying to understand it, and I think I do, but I am hesitant to write it down; I am pretty sure I will have parts of it wrong.

Anomalous Monism (SEP)

Anomalous Monism is a theory about the scientific status of psychology, the physical status of mental events, and the relation between these issues developed by Donald Davidson. It claims that psychology cannot be a science like basic physics, in that it cannot in principle yield exceptionless laws for predicting or explaining human thoughts and actions (mental anomalism). It also holds that thoughts and actions must be physical (monism, or token-identity), contradicting the paradigmatic dualist view of Descartes that mental and physical states are entirely different things. Thus, according to Anomalous Monism, psychology cannot be reduced to physics, but must nonetheless share a physical ontology.

While neither of these claims, on its own, is novel, their relation, according to Anomalous Monism, is. It is precisely because there can be no such strict laws governing mental events that those events must be identical to physical events. Most previous identity theories of mind had held that claims concerning the identity of particular mental and physical events (tokens) depended upon the discovery of lawlike relations between mental and physical properties (types). Empirical evidence for psychophysical laws was thus held to be required for particular token-identity claims. Token-identity claims thus depended upon type-identity (see Johnston, 1985, 408–409). Davidson’s monism is dramatically different – it requires no empirical evidence and depends on there being no lawlike relations between mental and physical properties. It in effect justifies the token-identity of mental and physical events through arguing for the impossibility of type-identities between mental and physical properties. (For detailed discussion of how Davidson’s position relates to David Lewis’s argument for type identity (Lewis 1966), see supplement A.2.1. For discussion of philosophical positions related to Davidson’s version of monism, see supplement A.)

The appeal of Anomalous Monism is owed to these striking and novel features, a fairly straightforward argumentative structure, and its attempt to bring together an intuitively acceptable metaphysics (monism) with a sophisticated understanding of the relation between psychological and physical explanatory schemes (anomalism). Its explicit assumptions are each intended, on their own, to be acceptable to positions opposing monism, but, when taken together, to show that monism is in fact required. Anomalous Monism thus maintains the autonomy of the common sense view of persons as agents acting for reasons while nonetheless acknowledging that persons are part of the physical world.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anomalous-monism/

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Day 3599, Animalism.

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My opinion

Animalists identify the “I” with the human animal, religious views identify it with a soul, and many naturalists identify it with the brain. I believe that the “I” is not a source or entity at all, but a word controled by grammer. Animalism is another sort of dualism in the sense that it still treats the “I” as something that has to be located, this time in the human animal rather than in a soul or a brain. Nochrisis

Animalism

Among the questions to be raised under the heading of “personal identity” are these: “What are we?” (fundamental nature question) and “Under what conditions do we persist through time?” (persistence question). Against the dominant neo-Lockean approach to these questions, the view known as animalism answers that each of us is an organism of the species Homo sapiens and that the conditions of our persistence are those of animals. Beyond describing the content and historical background of animalism and its rivals, this entry explores some of the arguments for and objections to this controversial account of our nature and persistence.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/animalism/

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Day 3598-2, Thinking.

My thoughts, Daily picture

I think, therefore I am is what Descartes famously said. He seems to clarify later that the thinking is undeniable, but that little can yet be concluded about the nature of the thinker. A critique that you can make, and is made, is the “I” in this phrase. How could Descartes concluded thet the “I” he identifies with is the thing that does the thinking?

It is hard to ignore the feeling that there is something in us that does the thinking and that we call I. The reason is that I feel like I think about it. But the I that thinks is also the I that makes bodily sounds, and how much do you control those?

In light of this, “I” seems more like a linguistic tool we use to communicate with others and with ourselves. Our bodies breathe and digest without our intervention, yet we still say that we breathe and digest, just as we say “I think this or that,” even though our control over thinking may not be very different.

But man’s craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavouring to prove to the “ ego ” of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind.

Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Part III, Lecture XVIII (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.278046/page/241/mode/2up)

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Day 3598, Anaphora.

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Anaphora

Anaphora is sometimes characterized as the phenomenon whereby the interpretation of an occurrence of one expression depends on the interpretation of an occurrence of another or whereby an occurrence of an expression has its referent supplied by an occurrence of some other expression in the same or another sentence.^[1] However, these are at best very rough characterizations of the phenomena, since things other than anaphoric expressions satisfy the first characterization and many cases of anaphora fail to satisfy the second. For example, in some sense of “interpretation”, the interpretation of the expression “bank” in the following sentence depends on the interpretation of other expressions (in particular, “of the river”):

1. John is down by the bank of the river.

But no one would say this is an example of anaphora. And as to the second characterization, though all agree that the following is an example of anaphora (and “he” is an anaphoric pronoun here on one reading of the sentence), it is not a case of the referent of one expression being supplied by another expression, (since “he” is not a referring expression on the reading in question):

2. Every male lawyer believes he is smart.

Hence, rather than attempting to characterize anaphora generally and abstractly, we shall begin with some examples. There is generally thought to be many types of anaphora, though in some cases there is disagreement as to whether to classify those cases as anaphora or not.^[2]

Pronominal anaphora:

3. John left. He said he was ill. (The antecedent is “John” and the anaphoric expression is “he”.)

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anaphora/

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Day 3597, On Reading and Writing.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

On Reading and Writing

Of all that is written I love only that which one writes with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit. It is not easily possible to understand the blood of another: I hate the reading idlers.Thus Spoke Zarathustra Whoever knows the reader will do nothing more for the reader. One more century of readers – and the spirit itself will stink. That everyone is allowed to learn to read ruins not only writing in the long run, but thinking too. Once the spirit was God, then it became human and now it is even becoming rabble. Whoever writes in blood and proverbs does not want to be read, but to be learned by heart. In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, but for that one must have long legs. Proverbs should be peaks, and those who are addressed should be great and tall. The air thin and pure, danger near and the spirit full of cheerful spite: these fit together well. I want to have goblins around me, for I am courageous. Courage that scares off ghosts creates its own goblins – courage wants to laugh. I no longer sympathize with you; this cloud beneath me, this black and heavy thing at which I laugh – precisely this is your thundercloud. You look upward when you long for elevation. And I look down because I am elevated. Who among you can laugh and be elevated at the same time? Whoever climbs the highest mountain laughs at all tragic plays and tragic realities. Courageous, unconcerned, sarcastic, violent – thus wisdom wants us: she is a woman and always loves only a warrior. You say to me: “Life is hard to bear.” But why would you have your pride in the morning and your resignation in the evening? Life is hard to bear: but then do not carry on so tenderly! We are all of us handsome, load bearing jack- and jillasses. What have we in common with the rosebud that trembles because a drop of dew lies on its body? It is true: we love life not because we are accustomed to life but because we are accustomed to love. There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. And even to me, one who likes life, it seems butterflies and soap bubbles and whatever is of their kind among human beings know most about happiness. To see these light, foolish, delicate, sensitive little souls fluttering – that seduces Zarathustra to tears and songs. I would only believe in a god who knew how to dance. And when I saw my devil, there I found him earnest, thorough, deep, somber: it was the spirit of gravity – through him all things fall. Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughing. Up, let us kill the spirit of gravity! I learned to walk, since then I let myself run. I learned to fly, since then I do not wait to be pushed to move from the spot. Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath me, now a god dances through me. Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Day 3596, The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction.

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The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction

“Analytic” sentences, such as “Pediatricians are doctors,” have historically been characterized as ones that are true by virtue of the meanings of their words alone and/or can be known to be so solely by knowing those meanings. They are contrasted with more usual “synthetic” sentences, such as “Pediatricians are rich,” (knowledge of) whose truth depends also upon (knowledge of) the worldly fortunes of pediatricians. Beginning with Frege, many philosophers hoped to show that the truths of logic and mathematics and other apparently a priori domains, such as much of philosophy and the foundations of science, could be shown to be analytic by careful “conceptual analysis” of the meanings of crucial words. Analyses of philosophically important terms and concepts, such as “material object,” “cause,” “freedom,” or “knowledge” turned out, however, to be far more problematic than philosophers had anticipated, and some, particularly Quine and his followers, began to doubt the reality of the distinction. This in turn led him and others to doubt the factual determinacy of claims of meaning and translation in general, as well as, ultimately, the reality and determinacy of mental states. There have been a number of interesting reactions to this scepticism, in philosophy and linguistics (this latter to be treated in the supplement, Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics); but, while the reality of mental states might be saved, it has yet to be shown that appeals to the analytic will ever be able to ground “analysis” and the a priori in quite the way that philosophers had hoped.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic-synthetic/

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Day 3595, foresight in hindsight

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Back in the summer of 2016, we were in America visiting family. We, of course, talked about the upcoming elections and, like any sane person, assumed that Hillary would win. We all know what happened, and back home, I got a spark of inspiration. Over a few weeks, I created many “portraits” of the situation using pictures I took in America and Photoshop.

I’m just a nobody, but for me, it was pretty clear what was going on. I studied history and paid close attention to what happened in Germany between the wars. I had also read several biographies about Trump, which might not tell the whole story, but certainly paint a bright picture.

Back then, many people who should know better took him seriously and maybe questioned him, but not the role he played as president of the most powerful country in the world. I never understood this, and to me, it was clear what kind of person he was. I don’t say he would do what the Nazis did, but I do say that if he had lived in Germany back then, he would definitely have built the concentration camps with “Arbeit macht frei” in neon letters, with an even larger sign on top of it bearing his name.

Sadly, after ten years, we see that he is actually moving closer to becoming a full-blown sadist, much like a typical Nazi who partied just a stone’s throw away from the ovens. And the people are gleefully arresting the hated aliens, smiling behind a mask, while most Americans remain silent, praying to God to protect their savior. All the disbelievers start to realize that the path he’s paving for many of his critics leads straight to Auschwitz, and it doesn’t matter if we might never get there or how you call your concentration camp, enough people with official titles are planning it, and more than enough are willing to look the other way.

Below, you can see what I created and, in a sense, predicted in 2016.

This is a picture I took when we drove into Utah. I got the distinctive feeling that a lot of Americans are not so into the “you”-tah, so I changed the sign into Me-tah. Selfish as they sometimes are, like good Christians.

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Day 3594, Analysis.

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Analysis

Analysis has always been at the heart of philosophical method, but it has been understood and practised in many different ways. Perhaps, in its broadest sense, it might be defined as a process of identifying or working back to what is more fundamental by means of which something, initially taken as given, can be derived, explained or reconstructed. The derivation, explanation or reconstruction is sometimes conceived as the corresponding process of synthesis, but it is more often counted as part of the analytic project as a whole. This allows great variation in specific method, however. The aim may be to get back to basics and elucidate connections, but there may be all sorts of ways of doing this, each of which might be called ‘analysis’. The dominance of ‘analytic’ philosophy in the English-speaking world, and its growing influence in the rest of the world, might suggest that a consensus has formed concerning the role and importance of analysis. But this assumes that there is agreement on what ‘analysis’ means, and this is far from clear. Throughout the history of philosophy there have also been powerful criticisms of analysis, but these have always been to specific forms of analysis, which has only encouraged the development of newer forms. If we look at the history of philosophy, and even at just the history of (recent Western) analytic philosophy, we find a rich and extensive repertoire of conceptions and techniques of analysis which philosophers have continually drawn upon and modified in different ways. Analytic philosophy is thriving precisely because of the range of conceptions and techniques of analysis that it involves. It may have fragmented into various interlocking subtraditions and, increasingly, is now being ‘backdated’ and widened in scope to include earlier and contemporaneous traditions, but those subtraditions and related traditions are held together by their shared history and methodological interconnections. There are also forms of analysis in traditions clearly distinct from Western analytic philosophy, and these also need to be recognized and brought into debates about analytic methodologies, to open up new approaches and perspectives. It is the aim of this article to indicate something of the range of conceptions of analysis in the history of philosophy and their interconnections, as well as their role in understanding the history of philosophy itself, and to provide a bibliographical resource for those wishing to explore analytic methodologies and the philosophical issues they raise.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analysis/

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Day 3593, Medieval Theories of Analogy.

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Medieval Theories of Analogy

Medieval theories of analogy were a response to problems in three areas: logic, theology, and metaphysics. Logicians were concerned with the use of words having more than one sense, whether completely different, or related in some way. Theologians were concerned with language about God. How can we speak about a transcendent, totally simple spiritual being without altering the sense of the words we use? Metaphysicians were concerned with talk about reality. How can we say that both substances (e.g., Socrates) and accidents (e.g., the beardedness of Socrates) exist when one is dependent on the other; how can we say that both God and creatures exist, when one is created by the other? Medieval thinkers reacted to these three problems by developing a theory which divided words into three sorts. Some were univocal (always used with the same sense), some were purely equivocal (used with quite different senses), and some were analogical (used with related senses). Analogical terms were thought to be particularly useful in metaphysics and theology, but they were routinely discussed in commentaries on Aristotle’s logic and in logic textbooks. The background to the discussion was given by what is often called the analogy of being or metaphysical analogy, the doctrine that reality is divided both horizontally into the very different realities of substances and accidents and vertically into the very different realities of God and creatures, and that these realities are analogically related. Nonetheless, the phrase “medieval theories of analogy” as used here will refer to semantic analogy, a set of linguistic and logical doctrines supplemented, at least from the fourteenth century on, by doctrines about the nature of human concepts.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analogy-medieval/

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Day 3592, Alienation

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Alienation

The concept of alienation identifies a distinct kind of psychological or social ill; namely, one involving a problematic separation between a self and other that belong together. So understood, alienation appears to play a largely diagnostic or critical role, sometimes said to suggest that something is awry with both liberal societies and liberal political philosophy. Theories of alienation typically pick out a subset of these problematic separations as being of particular importance, and then offer explanatory accounts of the extent of, and prognosis for, alienation, so understood. Discussions of alienation are especially, but not uniquely, associated with Hegelian and Marxist intellectual traditions.

The present entry clarifies the basic idea of alienation. It distinguishes alienation from some adjacent concepts; in particular, from ‘fetishism’ and ‘objectification’. And it elucidates some conceptual and normative complexities, including: the distinction between subjective and objective alienation; the need for a criterion by which candidate separations can be identified as problematic; and (some aspects of) the relation between alienation and ethical value. The empirical difficulties often generated by ostensibly philosophical accounts of alienation are acknowledged, but not resolved.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/alienation/

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Day 3591, Akan Philosophy.

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Akan Philosophy of the Person

The culture of the Akan people of West Africa dates from before the 13th century. Like other long-established cultures the world over, the Akan have developed a rich conceptual system complete with metaphysical, moral, and epistemological aspects. Of particular interest is the Akan conception of persons, a conception that informs a variety of social institutions, practices, and judgments about personal identity, moral responsibility, and the proper relationship both among individuals and between individuals and community.

This overview presents the Akan conception of persons as seen by two major contemporary Akan philosophers, Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye. These scholars present two very different accounts of the concept, particularly with respect to the relationship between social recognition and innate characteristics to personhood. Examining the Akan conception of personhood from these two different perspectives highlights both the richness of the conception as well as the myriad ways in which the resulting conception contrasts with Western conceptions. Among those contrasts are four on which we focus below: (1) the continuous nature of personhood, (2) the means by which individuals achieve full personhood, and the implications of this conception of personhood for (3) the relationship between individuals and the community and (4) the Akan understanding of responsibility and freedom.

The debate between Wiredu and Gyekye provides insights regarding not just the substance of the conception of personhood, but also the way empirical evidence can be used to inform philosophical analysis. In this particular case, the Akan view of personhood has, like many other metaphysical and moral conceptions, far-reaching effects on social practices and institutions. Using facts about these practices and institutions to reconstruct a conception of personhood underscores another important general theme in African philosophy: the practical implications of philosophical principles on everyday life. For the Akan, judgments about personhood are not matter of merely academic interest, but play an important role in shaping and supporting their highly communal social structure. To the extent that the Akan notion accommodates a common humanity as an innate source of value, it supports moral equality. At the same time, its emphasis on the social bases of personhood helps firmly to embed trust, cooperation, and responsibility to the community in cultural practices. The Akan philosophy of persons thus represents an attempt to resolve questions of identity, freedom, and morality in favor of a communalistic way of life that has evolved as a rational adaptation to the exigencies of survival under harsh conditions.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/akan-person/

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Day 3590, groundlessness.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak

Book IV

358 Grounds and their groundlessness. -You dislike him and present many grounds for this dislike – but I believe only in your dislike, not in your grounds! You flatter yourself in your own eyes when you suggest to yourself and to me that what has happened through instinct is the result of a process of reasoning.

Day 3589, Agency.

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Agency

In very general terms, an agent is a being with the capacity to act, and ‘agency’ denotes the exercise or manifestation of this capacity. The philosophy of action provides us with a standard conception and a standard theory of action. The former construes action in terms of intentionality, the latter explains the intentionality of action in terms of causation by the agent’s mental states and events. From this, we obtain a standard conception and a standard theory of agency. There are alternative conceptions of agency, and it has been argued that the standard theory fails to capture agency (or distinctively human agency). Further, it seems that genuine agency can be exhibited by beings that are not capable of intentional action, and it has been argued that agency can and should be explained without reference to causally efficacious mental states and events.

Debates about the nature of agency have flourished over the past few decades in philosophy and in other areas of research (including psychology, cognitive neuroscience, social science, and anthropology). In philosophy, the nature of agency is an important issue in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of psychology, the debates on free will and moral responsibility, in ethics, meta-ethics, and in the debates on the nature of reasons and practical rationality. For the most part, this entry focuses on conceptual and metaphysical questions concerning the nature of agency. In the final sections, it provides an overview of empirically informed accounts of the sense of agency and of various empirical challenges to the commonsense assumption that our reasons and our conscious intentions make a real difference to how we act.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/agency/

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