Phil of math - interesting note

By my nature i am disposed toward a P. Maddy type explanation of basic mathematical objects. That is, that we do interact with mathematical entities, at least the most basic ones (such as natural numbers) by doing such things as counting. That is, our knowledge of the basic parts of math is empirical knowledge.

Tonight I am reading Azzouni's "Metaphysical Myths, Mathematical Practice" and right before we are heading into a dozen pages on Quine / Quine-Putnam (to which i am also well disposed) Azzouni makes the point ...

"Consider Greek geometric practice as compared to that of their Egyptian predecessors. Egyptian geometers apparently did rely on perception to derive their conclusions. This is why they got many things wrong."

It is an off-hand comment in the closing paragraph of a section, so i suspect it could use some research and reinforcing, but it certainly seems true from what i know of the ancient mathematicians.

Thought provoking.

Steppenwolf quote

"You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of you whatever, and that life was no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and radio music. And whoever wants more and has got it in him - the heroic and the beautiful, and the reverence for the great poets or for the saints - is a fool and a Don Quixote."

argument from performance

One of the things for which i am looking in my current reading of ancient material is what i call the "argument from performance". The contemporary version of this within my field is roughly the claim that sciences/engineering does know something about the real world and we can tell that it does because of things like the Deep Impact type missions. That is ... the amount of things our species must have right in order to have successfully completed the Deep Impact probe missions is astounding.
What i am looking for in the literature is, then, when did this form of argumentation begin, and are there cases where it has been wrong?

I am reading A.A. Long's book on Hellenistic philosophy after Alexander and i did come across a related argument tonight. The Stoics claim that their concept of determinism must be right partially because divination and astrology work. Since, obviously, we do not think that they do (but make great allowances for confirmation bias making it seem as it does), perhaps this counts as a strike against. And yet, if a Stoic were to list the things that would have to have been wrong if astrology was not correct would be fairly short and highly theoretical ... not so for Deep Imapct.

So ...

ethics

I'd like to talk about ethics, i think.

I'd like to talk some about positive versus negative ethics ... but also about the scope of one's ethics.

My main problem with the former of the former is the latter. The 20th century Germans were not, per say, unethical. The problem lay with the scope of their ethical system, that is, their ethical system did not include Jews and Gypsies and other non-Germanic peoples ... and those outside the scope of the established ethics (obviously) suffered greatly.

The question on my mind tonight is ... can one formulate a (reasonable) system of positive ethics that cannot be hijacked (via the same arguments) by those chanting God, nation, and language? That is ... one person might say that some individual X is not free because they lack a certain amount of capital. Someone else, however, might say that person Y is not free because they are being kept down by The Man. OK, good so far. But what happens when person Z, in popular opinion, is being kept down by The Jews, or is being undercut by The Immigrants. Is there a principled way to allow a Volk the right to decree the former is always true, but the latter is always false?

Return to Withered Fields

... perhaps

Withered Fields was supposed to be about Phil of Art, but perhaps i shall broden it to epistemology as well, and so to return my interest to it. I am feeling the need to write down, to write-thru, at least, my current philosophical stances, if for no other reason than to work them out.

mostly moved ...

I have pretty much moved all my posting over to my xanga site. I like the communities/rings over there.

Most my blogging is now done at my nihilism page.


I do still plan to do some technical posts, from time to time, at this site ... especially in aesthetics.

Your thoughts?

http://www.claremont.org/writings/crb/fall2005/voegeli.html

A time for silence

It is time for silence. I return underground.


"What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread, It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada."

- Ernest Hemingway (A Clean, Well-Lighted Place)

On Creativity, take one

A few initial notes on creativity ...

As a very basic definition creativity is simply "thinking outside the box". I think this applies whether the creative impulse is right or wrong ... it's simply new. Often when we use the term, i think we interchange it with the phrase "creative genius" and emphasize when the creative impulse was correct. I do not want that notion in my denotation ... creativity is simply the ability to produce new approaches, whether or not they work.
"New approach" is a problematic term, though. In general we mean new to the person coming up with the approach. Fine, all things being equal, but the result of this would imply that complaetely ignorant people who do anything are creative, and the most well-learned persons in the world can only be creative by essentially throwing out their entire knowledge base of their culture. This conclusion does not seem right.
In areas like science, in speaking of scientific creativity, this is point is gotten around by talking about creativity in terms of applying what you know to something new.

[Bah humbug. This is all wrong]

A different approach ...
Physiologically, the underpinnings of creativity in the brain is the process of making more neural connections (between brain areas). This process always brings something new to the table when in use (old things seen new ways) and it brings old learning to new topics (apllying what one knows in new and novel conditions).
I think this gets at both impulses, to some degree, in common definitions of creativity.
Again, its just the ability to create connections. There is no judgement here on whether those connections are useful, beautiful or even detrimental.
(Case in point, most paranoid personalities are highly creative ... there brain work to interpret phenomenon in very novel ways ... just not in ways condusive to a healthy life.)

Well, then, so ...
I think i'll take this notion in the direction of comparing and contrasting creativity as bringing new ideas to old areas or old ideas to new areas ... and maybe discuss whether, in meaningful cases, these are generally one in the same thing.

{{{ stopping for now }}}

innate math study ...

I don't know that "innate" applies corretly to studies on 5 year olds, but it fits in under the general mathematical notions that have been discussed here ... article on study

Withered Fields ...

I started this blog to talk about art ... philosophy of art, and aesthetics.
Except for some parallel arguments about humor, this just does not seem to happen often enough.

mia culpa

Withered Fields: means what it says
... the artworld as wasteland

Some years ago a good friend of mine, in speaking about "Saving Private Ryan", said that it made him feel impotent as an artist because there sat growing men, crying, at a pretty simple idea ... while he could not get any reaction from most people at all.
On implication of such a movie, that it can make conservative older men cry, is that more art should be like that.
I found myself initially thinking along this line, anyway.
But i eventually, within a few weeks, actually, came to have problems with the notion.

In a phrase ... Tone Painting.

Tone Painting, as a form of music, generates its force simply by mimicing the sound it wants to use to evoke sympathy ... the violin cries or the sound is calm and pastoral.
Movie soundtracks badly overuse this same technique ... to make a seen scary they simply dump loud dire music over it, rather than write a scene that is actually scary.

Movies makers now know exactly how to trigger the triggers in our brains. They produce a certain kind of realism. "Saving Private Ryan" is one of the best examples of this kind of work. But the emotional response invoked by the movie has nothing to do with art and everything to do with psychology and emotional triggers, and knowing how to set them off. If is advertising, but for tears rather than purchases.

This same friend has discussed with me how the introduction of the photograph made painters rethink art, rethink the role of images within art.
I call for the same re-evaluation in the light of cinema and modern sound systems. Much great art in the past has used psychological triggers, but art should not be reduced to such triggers. Great art has never been merely such triggering.

Shall we just burn the whole facade to the ground ... again?

New Kant post ....

Kant said something akin to "Hume awoke me from my dogmatic slumber"
... by dogmatic, Kant meant rationalist

By ratioanalist ... Kant meant ...
... a group that believed most all mathematical truths were analytic (true by the form of presentation) ... and that the core beliefs of humankind (Newtonian science) were likewise reducible to analytic truths.

But Kant argues that not only were the rationalists wrong about physical world truths ... they were wrong about mathematical truths. Most mathematical truths, at least the important ones, are NOT analytic to Kant.

The early parts of the Critique of Pure Reason are given to this topic.

Yet, still, Kant wants to validate reason.


He takes time, too, to attack the skeptic (of reason) in the Critique
... the skeptic believes that all reason is only polemic.
But free citizens seem to get together and agree on many things.

True ... where agreement is coerced, there we have force agreement. Such "truth" agreements are limited by geography and time.
Free citizen agreement is important for just this. It allows a notion of agreement outside coercion.

(Foucault, and ilk, in a nutshell, is the claim that there is no, never, "without coercion")


And, lastly, Kant will attack the relativist project in truth, about reason. Limited goals for truth gain us nothing. This lies somewhere between the rationalist and the skeptic.


Kant's positive project is this ... taking what materials and capacities we have, what can humans build. They cannot reach Rationalism in truths, but they are not reduce to Skepticism either. This is a main claim of the Critique.


At heart ... the Critique is saying ... there is a problem (hence the Rationalist is wrong), but the problem is not that reason can come up with no truths (and so Rationalism is wrong, in his day). The problem is this ... there does seem to be a "reason" that is the coming together of free men. But ... they can come up with many solutions, given our material input and our capacities.

This will come out many years later as the notion of "underdetermination". The problem is not so much that we can't agree on what is true as that we can agree on so many things (non cohesive) being true.


Today ... in the world of the Foucault skeptic, where all reason is reason by coercion ... we can say equally that it is one of the truths ... which has defeated other truths by coercion ... and both of these notions can hold at the same time.


The most basic truth of Kant, then, is the awakening from rationalism thus described. From there, it dependends on the skeptic or positivist-materialist in yourself (and in my case, i like to think, both). Underdetermination or non-reason.

Flexner quote ...

We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from becoming too complacent. - Abraham Flexner


This i like about our American 2 party system. It keeps the extremists at the extremes. They perform their function and perform it well. They get airtime at the early Presidential primary debates. Sometimes they say things that catch hold ... and then they have done their job, and a more moderate candidate runs forward with that banner.

Kucinich handed the baton to Dean who handed it into the mainstream of the Democratic party.
Pat Robertson in 1988.
There is even a role for the David Dukes and Pat Robertsons of the world in the early stages.

There can be no fair and just political system that allows the Kuciniches to flourish but not the Robertsons and Dukes ... not if one really believes in the free flow of ideas.
... but that is another post.

Selling Fear ...

Here is an interesting little article from Frank Furedi, sociologist at Kent.
There are certain sociological claims here-in i do not fully accept, and of course we all have at least one item he mentions that we probably believe we really should fear ... but ... even at that, the mode by which the activists for that fearful cause proceed, those should stop and give us pause.

But if everyone else is doing it, how else to get "on the stage"?


http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAD7B.htm