April 2011
57 posts
“The proposition is not a mixture of words (just as the musical theme is not a mixture of tones). The proposition is articulate.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (via philphys)
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“1. If you can’t explain something clearly, you probably don’t understand it yourself
2. If you can’t defend it, don’t publish it
3. Whenever philosophers talk about quantum mechanics, it’s usually a bunch of hot air (read: bullshit)” —John Searle’s Three Laws of Philosophy
2. If you can’t defend it, don’t publish it
3. Whenever philosophers talk about quantum mechanics, it’s usually a bunch of hot air (read: bullshit)” —John Searle’s Three Laws of Philosophy
The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science | Mother Jones →
motherjones.com
How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link.
…when we think we’re reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we’re being scientists, but we’re actually being lawyers (PDF). Our “reasoning” is a means to a predetermined end—winning our “case”—and is shot through with biases. They include “confirmation bias,” in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and “disconfirmation bias,” in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.
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Harris is nothing if not self-confident. There is a voluminous philosophical literature that stretches back almost to the origins of the discipline on the relationship between facts and values. Harris chooses to ignore most of it. He does not wish to engage “more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy”, he explains in a footnote, because he did not develop his arguments “by reading the work of moral philosophers” and because he is “convinced that every appearance of terms like ‘metaethics’, ‘deontology’, ‘noncognitivism’, ‘antirealism’, ‘emotivism’, etc directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.”
Imagine a sociologist who wrote about evolutionary theory without discussing the work of Darwin, Fisher, Mayr, Hamilton, Trivers or Dawkins on the grounds that he did not come to his conclusions by reading about biology and because discussing concepts such as “adaptation”, “speciation”, “homology”, “phylogenetics” or “kin selection” would “increase the amount of boredom in the universe”. How seriously would we, and should we, take his argument? It is one thing to want to “start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and can find helpful”, something that many of us, including many of those boring moral philosophers, seek to do. It is quite another to imagine that you can engage in any kind of conversation, with any kind of audience, by wilfully ignoring the relevant scholarship because it is “boring”.
” —Kenan Malik - Test-tube truths | New Humanist (via ronmarks)
“…Wittgenstein insisted that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same logical form. To this [Piero] Sraffa made a Neapolitan gesture of brushing his chin with his fingertips, asking: ‘What is the logical form of that?’ This, according to the story, broke the hold on Wittgenstein of the Tractatian idea that a proposition must be a ‘picture’ of the reality it describes.”
—Ray Monk in The Duty of Genius
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“In Hollywood, more often than not, they’re making more kind of traditional films, stories that are understood by people. And the entire story is understood. And they become worried if even for one small moment something happens that is not understood by everyone. But what’s so fantastic is to get down into areas where things are abstract and where things are felt, or understood in an intuitive way that, you can’t, you know, put a microphone to somebody at the theatre and say ‘Did you understand that?’ but they come out with a strange, fantastic feeling and they can carry that, and it opens some little door or something that’s magical and that’s the power that film has.”
—David Lynch (via thefilmdirectory)
“The pig is an amazing animal- you feed a pig an apple, it makes bacon.”
—Jim Gaffigan
“Busier than a cat covering shit on a marble slab —American colloquialism; Busy as a one legged man in an ass-kicking contest all week long —Pat Conroy; Busier than a Gulag gravedigger —Joseph Wambaugh; Busy as a fiddler’s elbow —Harry Prince”
—Checked Google to make sure “busyness” was a real word. It is and so was discovered this selection of excellent colloquialisms.
“One thing TV does is help us deny that we’re lonely. With televised images, we can have the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship. It’s an anesthesia of “form.” The interesting thing is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are like sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I’m not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of real art fiction’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.”
—David Foster Wallace (via eudaimonist)
Beautiful
