Worlds that aren't the Actual World

In this post i'm going to give a cursory introduction to possible worlds talk as it is relevant to my project, so that I have something to refer back to when relevant.

So there's this world. Take the world to be everything. That is, everything there is. Worlds aren't planets, they're whole realms of being. So everything that you think of as true is true of this world. Now take one of those truths...for instance, Joe Biden is vice president. Now, you might want to say that the proposition expressed by the sentence "Joe Biden is vice president" has interesting properties besides being true. It also has the property of being contingent. That is, it didn't have to be true, and that's an interesting difference between the proposition expressed by "Joe Biden is vice president" and "all triangles are trilateral".

Martini Realism!

These metaphysical disputes, Hirsch points out, seem rather different from disputes about whether the Loch Ness monster exists, or whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They are more like the dispute between the purist who says that only cocktails made of gin or vodka, dry vermouth, and perhaps an olive or two count as martinis, and the sorority girl who calls practically anything a martini as long as it served in the classic V-shaped glass. If these two are seated at a table on which such a glass contains some nonsense made of sour green apple liqueur, the latter will say that there is a martini there, and the former will deny it. This is a paradigm case of a verbal dispute. The disputants agree on all the facts, but disagree on how to use the word ‘martini’. (The purist is of course right about the use of the word. remember that there can be verbal disputes in which one side is straightforwardly mistaken!)

Karen Bennett "Composition, Colocality and Metaontology"

It's rare that a philosophical example is as revealing and insightful concerning the content of the example as they are concerning the philosophical concept that the example is wheeled in to elucidate.

Make thy presence known

I have reason to believe some folks are reading this...but I don't have any way of knowing who or how many! One of the reasons my last blog never took off was because I never committed to posting regularly. One of the reasons I never posted regularly was because I thought (correctly) that no one read. A vicious cycle, you see. I'm doing better this time around, but do me a fave and comment from time to time, so I don't fall into the same rut.

Also, The Books.

Go Blue Team!

Yesterday Lindsey and I did our global duty and watched the world cup (loved it!). It was an epic finish, yada yada, but something interesting happened. Lindsey and I don't know anything about soccer, or the teams playing. We decided ahead of time that we were both going to be rooting for the Netherlands...because the Netherlands were underdogs. And we like underdogs. Also, Amsterdam.

Fucose mutarotase is queer

Studies like these always worry me. While many people see in them the opportunity to decisively demonstrate that homosexuality is not a choice, I see them as both (a) further entrenching an ideology according to which sexuality is a binary determinate property that accurately draws the line down the middle of two different 'kinds' of person, and (b) offering up hope to parents that might want to prevent gayness through genetic engineering, and doctors that would like to profit off of them.

Vanilla extract

As of yesterday I have some 60 oz. of homemade vanilla extract! Back in May, I bought Madagascar vanilla beans on E-bay. I bought a pint of rum, a pint of brandy and a pint of vodka, and three glass jars that cork.

Twerp

I had a feeling we were overestimating that proton.

Is 'Perfect' the word?

Yes. Yes it is.

Well, maybe another word would be better. Maybe 'optimal'.

Yesterday I wrote in defense of, essentially, preference engineering. It claimed that preferences and dispreferences are not immune to ethical evaluation and criticism. The jist of the argument was that there is no reason to think that what one prefers and disprefers are irrelevant to how well one's life is lived, that having strong dispreferences was, in many cases, anathema to a well-lived life. Even though some preferences are bad, and some dispreferences good, in general I think that there is a strong asymmetry. The more open one is to possible experience, the better one's life goes, and the fewer things one is actively disprefering, the more open one is to possible experience.

But yesterday i titled my post 'Perfect Preferences' or something to that effect. And I tagged the post 'Becoming Perfect'. Am I just being overblown in my speech?

Handle With Care.

Last night Lindsey joined in the kitchen where we made a garlic chicken cream sauce over pasta with roasted vegetables. Lindsey insisted on cutting up the brussel sprouts....

Relax in

It was worth the moment or two out of this Saturday morning, between the biscuits and postoffice errands, to sink into Marbert Rocel.

compact masses are not a cyclone's idea of symmetry...

An uncovered, unpublished Mark Twain article found here...not, perhaps, an instant classic on par with his other work, but an interesting read.

The perfect preferences

Have you ever thought to yourself, "I don't like sushi, but everyone else does. Moreover, everyone else loves sushi. Maybe I should like sushi..." or "I'm not a morning person. But Sam is a morning person, and he seems so happy all of the time, and he's so much more productive than I am. Maybe I my life would be better if I were a morning person." or "I can't stand classical music. I like hip hop (especially Criss Cross!). But my parents like classical music. In fact, a great many of the people I respect like classical music. Maybe there's something laudable about liking classical music and something censurable about disliking classical music."

Not the Same, Jon

It's a sign of respect for a public intellectual that when they say something incautious, on any subject, no matter where their own expertise (if they have any) lies and how far it may be from the topic of conversation, that they are criticized. John Stewart interviewed Marilynne Robinson (whose novels i love, but whose forthcoming book about science and faith sounds self-indulgent) and said the following.

I've always been fascinated that the more you delve into science the more it appears to rely on faith. You know and they start to speak about the universe, they say..."Well, there's uh, it's actually, most of the universe is antimatter" "Oh really, where is that?" "Well, you can't see it"..."Well where is it?" "It's there." "Well, can you measure it?" "We're working on it."... and it's a very similar argument to someone who would say "God created everything" "Well, where is he?" "Well, he's there." And i'm always struck by the similarity of the arguments at their core.

Death in Venice

I saw Visconti's Death in Venice last night. A lovely film, assuredly. I was particularly struck by the tension between the formalist/platonist tension that Gustav (loosely based upon Gustav Mahler) expressed and the expressivist/sentimentalist/empiricist views that Alfred countered with. This disagreement over the proper objective of music was constantly manifest in the dual ideological roles that Tadzio played in Gustav's idealization (on the one hand, he evokes uncontrollable emotion, on the other hand he is aligned with purity and timelessness) as well as the tension between the Cholera infested chaos of Venice with the purified tourism-conducive picture of perfection that the Venetians work to preserve. The tension is particularly manifest in the final scene, where Gustav is overcome by the local dissease while looking upon the vulgarization of the boys purity (made earthly by a fight in the sand with his friend). A great film, one I'd recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it. It makes me particularly excited for the continuing Italian film series, and also leads me to want to read the Thomas Mann book upon which the film was based.

The movie I saw was dubbed by the way. Sorry for the language barrier in the above video.

The Knights of Cydonia confirm General Relativity

One of my favorite physics blogs reminds us of the perils of philosophers trying to legislate to the physicists. Though in this anecdotal case it was a physicist that wanted to deny the possibility of black holes on (from the sounds of it, pretty terrible) a priori grounds.

Epic win, mostly because of the Muse video.

Introducing Perspectives

So there's this world. There's some way the world is, just like there is some way your left leg is positioned right now. I'm sitting in a chair right now. That's one of the ways the world is.

There are sentences. Some of those sentences are true. It's plausible and intuitively appealing that the distinction between the sentences that are true and the sentences that are not true has something to do with the way the world is. It's an equally attractive thesis (though not equally plausible) that sentences are true when (and only when) the world is some way that matches the content of the sentence. For instance, my belief that there is a female philosopher is true because the world is built out of things, among them a philosopher that has the property of being female. In fact, you might think that all sentences are true (if they are true) in virtue of some corresponding bit of the world that makes them true. If you subscribe to the last thesis, you might espouse a correspondence theory of truth, according to which the world is full of truthmakers that suffice to make certain sentences true. Sentences, in turn, represent the world as being a certain way, and the true sentences are the ones that represent the world as containing their a truthmakers that the world does, indeed, contain.

They're probably on Neptune

Dan Issler reminds us that Kant believed in aliens. Once again, Kant says something true.

Asleep against each other in the whiskey dark...

You know how you have that friend, named _____ who you turn to whenever you want to know about that one slice of popular culture because s/he is an expert in it and you are but a blind vagabond in need of a confident seeing eye dog?

My friend Shanley Jacobs is my poetry guru, and I positively love it when she posts links to poems on facebook. It's important to me to know that something is good before I read it, lest I be tricked by a clever title into enjoying something that is crap.

Anyway, today she decided that her facebook friends needed to read Joanna Klink's "Some Feel Rain" so go read it.

systematic unification

Until last night we thought that Lindsey was going to be going on a business trip today, so I pulled out a few recipes to try to make dinner a bit more special. (Turns out she's going out of town next week, but that's good, because we have a lot of leftovers.