Boydstun

A Festschrift for Fred D. Miller, Jr.

Congratulations on 75 years! I'm only six months behind you and still trying to catch up.

I've made it to 75 today, and I'm still learning and writing fine!
(Birthday gift from my husband in the link – design by Eero Aarnio in 1960's.)

Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips has thrown his hat into the Democrat presidential primary ring. He thus offers voters in his party a younger alternative to the President, whose age and mental acuity would be big enough handicaps even if he weren't polling so poorly.

A profile of the new candidate at CNN sees the move as providing the Democrats an emergency option in addition to a way for Phillips to build name recognition ahead of the 2028 race.

I am no fan of the Democrats, but I think this is a much more wiley and viable move than Phillips is being credited with.

On paper, he sounds almost like an even-keeled, younger Democrat version of Donald Trump, in that he is a former businessman who grabbed a political opportunity by the horns:The piece makes much of how this move has angered the Democrat establishment, which, incidentally has unintentionally paved the way for Phillips to establish credibility with an early win in New Hampshire.

This anger puzzles me. The guy voted with Biden 100% of the time as a congressman and flipped a seat in a purplish district.

Many commentators -- left, right, and otherwise -- have said that Trump and Biden need each other in the race to win. Unlike the kooky RFK, Jr., here is a reliable lefty who passes for sane enough to win the kind of suburban district that will be part of a path to victory in 2024.

If the Democrats were halfway sane, they'd heave a quiet sigh of relief, persuade Biden to stand down, and back this guy yesterday.

Phillips puts the Democrats in a position the GOP can only dream it was in: a primary with a single challenger to an old, problematic, and deeply unpopular front-runner, with said challenger being viable in the general and, all other things being equal, getting to face the other party's ancient albatross.

Oh, and I almost forgot: Unlike the case with Trump, Biden doesn't have a core of blindly loyal personality cultists who would vote for him even if he personally shot their own mothers: Phillips thus would have an easier path to victory than a similar challenger to Trump, who would have to work hard to consolidate lots of support very quickly in order to make it to the general.

This isn't a no-chance loon like Marianne Williams or an obvious kook like RFK, Jr. -- who will hurt Trump more than Biden with his now-independent run. This guy is the real deal and, if his own party should support him, the GOP should be jealous and very concerned about its chances in 2024.

-- CAV Link to Original

I've made it to 75 today, and I'm still learning and writing fine!
(Birthday gift from my husband in the link – design by Eero Aarnio in 1960's.)

Since the preceding post by Alex, Putin and Prigozhin reached an agreement, avoiding armed conflict among the Russian mercenary group and the regular Russian troops. I see this as a victory for Putin in his Ukraine quest. Those mercenary troops, as well as the Chechen mercenary troops, are now returned to Ukraine to continue Putin's aggression and hegemony. Prigozhin in exile in Belarus is surely a dead man walking, although Putin may leave him alive until he has secured unity of the Wagner troops with the regular Russian troops, all under regular Russian military command. I still think Putin will not enter negotiations bringing peace to Ukraine until after the US elections of 2024, hoping for Republican wins that might cut US Military aid to Ukraine and bring him advances in the war for bargaining position or perhaps victory.  

Tad, you're correct, I've heard, to use "all youse all" for an audience of three or more.
You're sounding normal to me, just with above-average introspection to report.
Be that as it may, I thought I'd add that I have certain flash-sketch images of scenes in memory that were set when I first read the scene in literature. The final scene of Hank Rearden in his office with the farewell salute from the mills and Galt and Dagny etc, etc, in the abandoned rail tunnel. I don't seem to have any particulars of what their faces look like other than being man's or woman's and being White, but such images and movements in the scenes as I do conjure do not change upon re-reading the book. And I doubt they'd get displaced by any filmmaking of those scenes.
At least one dream researcher Hobson proposed that the stories we make in our dreams are handicapped attempts to make sense of images that are being randomly presented to the dreamer. I've noticed that Freud was right in one thing at least about the phenomenology of dreams, for what it is worth, and that is that frequently objects or actions or problems in dreams are residue of real waking experiences of the preceding day. I think sometimes the day residue can be from experience of television or film images. I still recall a dream from before 1980 during which I became awake. It was just of a nude blonde woman, details of her body indefinite, but she was vertical and as without support and amidst wind-billowing satins and shears, all of it in bright slightly golden light accompanied by my feeling of the greatest preciousness and attractive beauty. (I don't recall if I was having one of those involuntary you-know-whats.) I entered it into a poem I wrote a few years ago called "Dream to Sleep". By her face and hair, I knew well enough that she was not any particular person I'd known at all. Indeed, I'd say she mostly matched ads from 1960's television for Breck.
I have a curiosity, Tad. Imagine having a glove on your left hand. In your mind, take it off and turn it inside out. Pull it onto your right hand. Does it seem like it should fit the right hand? Does it seem a verdict is not reached by this mere imagining? It was in the early 1990's I think that psychologists and neuroscientists found the sequence of brain activities that support human abilities to turn objects over in the mind. I don't know if there has been similar research on inversions such as in the glove transformation. (I've tried it with a real glove, and it fits. That might be useful someday.)

Just a second… how would you visualize a spatial problem?  For example imagine placing furniture so that it fits a room but also imagining it in place to determine if there is flow and if it will work functionally long term?  Do you not visualize it i.e. see it in your mind’s eye?
If someone described “An isosceles triangle pointing straight up, its horizontal base longer than and resting on a square, a smaller vertically oriented rectangle resting in the square at its base, a small circle inside and to one side of the rectangle” do you see anything in your mind’s eye or would you literally have to draw it first following this description as if they were a set of instructions?

Yesterday I heard mention of a phenomenon called aphantasia , the self reported lack of 'innner' imagery. Oddly it seems "I have it", odder still a few weeks ago I was discussing this with my wife! But I thought the fact that what I was trying to explain to my wife and her reporting back of her phenomenal experience of imagination visually, in comparison to what I was describing didn't 'line up' was due to semantic misalignment.
I did not realize that when most people report 'seeing' 'things' in their mind's eye or imagination that they were not speaking metaphorically. I always assumed 'visual imagery' was a collectively agreed upon ambiguous concept to describe an 'inner' understanding or cognition(?) of an imagined 'thing', and not a 'quasi-actual' visual image.
If I were prompted to close my eyes and imagine say a pink elephant, I only 'see' the dark behind the lids, there is nothing 'there' that appears anything akin to visually apprehending a pink elephant, but the 'idea' of a pink elephant is present or experienced, perhaps better described as almost a state of awareness of being predisposed to 'accepting' a nonheretofore 'appearance' of a 'visual experience' of a pink elephant .. actually it is rather hard to describe, especially because I never thought I would have to describe this aspect of experience , going off the assumption that all youse all was just speaking metaphorically!
I do dream 'visually' and I sometimes mistake the experience of having read a novel as having watched a film of the story, but i don't seem to be able to bring up visual imagery 'on demand' , so maybe on the spectrum as it were, lol.
So , yeah AI imagery ain't never gonna live up to my expectation, but only because the bar is too low !
 
 

This reminds me of much, and brings up a thought or perhaps a sentiment...
a certain asymmetry...
 
Although "We cannot know things-in-themselves" is flawed
it is a certainty that
"things-in-themselves cannot know We... only We do." is true.

That is not my viewpoint, but a viewpoint not compatible with "Rand's substantial theory of truth".  I led off my message with "It" and the referent of that "It" was "Rand's substantial theory of truth" from the quote that was given immediately above in that post.  Long form writing and message board writing are very different, so my apologies for contributing to your confusion by not spelling things out more explicitly.   
To be clear, I agree with your "... unknown facts need not be characterized as a standing in some mind, specifically, as in a God-like omniscience-perspective."  I was making the point that arguments based on hindsight have similarity to arguments based on that God-like omniscience-perspective.  If the omniscient perspective is rejected then so should the hindsight perspective be rejected.

@Boydstun Actually, I bought Tylor in order to get more context for Bellah, which you recommended in a past post. I also went ahead and read Clifford Geertz’s essay, which Bellah takes as a starting point. I really appreciated his theory that religion is more or less ethics and metaphysics mutually reinforcing one another through emotion.  

I’m reading Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture and the first chapter - introducing evidence for his theory that civilizations typically evolve from lower states to more advanced ones, rather than degrade from an initial “divine” state - finishes with this bit:
“We may fancy ourselves looking on Civilization, as in personal figure she traverses the world; we see her lingering or resting by the way, and often deviating into paths that bring her toiling back to where she had passed by long ago; but, direct or devious, her path lies forward, and if now and then she tries a few backward steps, her walk soon falls into a helpless stumbling. It is not according to her nature, her feet were not made to plant uncertain steps behind her, for both in her forward view and in her onward gait she is of truly human type.”
Thought that was nicely put. 

I want to butt in with a distracting point that may seem irrelevant but I argue is a central issue. The ancient Greeks did not have the idea “all animals are mortal”, as I understand it, the expansion beyond singular terms originates from William of Ockham. More to the point, the ancient Greeks did not have ideas about animals and mortal, but they did have concepts and perhaps ideas about θήρ and βροτός. Specifying the referents for these words is way above my pay-grade. The nit that I am picking is that one must first inspect the referents as a unit, and see what label (word) is assigned to that unit. Discussion of concepts in Ancient Greek have to focus on facts of Ancient Greek and ancient Greeks. As I understand it, the above terms more closely translate to English as “wild beast” and “mortal man”. All concepts are specific to a language, but the potential to create extensionally-identical units with some label is universal,
Let’s then ask whether concepts have changed in the context of English, but taking other terms like “press” or “arms”. The latter two figure in the US Constitution in the First and Second Amendments. When the document was written, newspapers were literally printed on presses (originally designed for pressing wine), and “arms” were all single-shot muzzle-loaded metal tubes. The concepts “press” and “arms” are not limited to the extant technology of the time, they refer more abstractly to the practice of disseminating “expressions”, and to weapons. Meaning is concepts and propositions, not a list of concrete instances – meaning is intensional, not extensional. Thus the meaning of these concepts has not changed at all.
There are cases where something other than technology or knowledge changes, for example “sick” has gained a new, positive meaning (at least for the time), and in British English, “boot” has been metaphorically extended first to mean “where you step to get into a coach” then “lower luggage compartment”, now “trunk”.
I have deluded myself into thinking that I have a tolerable understanding of the concept “concept” and “proposition”, and I also know what a “sentence” is. I know the history of the word idea but I can’t say very exactly what an idea is (what distinguishes it from a proposition). I would be strongly inclined to say that a proposition is a specific type of sentence, except that propositions generally have to be paired with additional information that overcomes the vagueness of natural language (for instance, “He said that Stephen spoke” does not say who “he” is except it cannot be “Stephen”). In one knowledge context “he” would mean “David”, and in another context it would mean “Fred”. It would be correct to say that a proposition is a pairing of a sentence a context. It is also advantageous to promote language, not just because of my professional interest in it but because sentences can be objectively inspected and are not abstract and unjustified constructs like Cartesian mental images projected onto our brains. This is what the technical concept “semantic interpretation” refers to.
A well-meaninged declaration that “He likes mammals, like lions and penguins”, it not and does not convert into a contextual truth when you discover that the person has a false belief that penguins are mammals. The declaration “He likes mammals, like lions”, is also not rendered contextually false because you can imagine there is some person whose pronoun is “he” yet who have most mammal species. Truth has to be about an objectively correct grasp of reality, unless we resign ourselves to saying that objectively false beliefs make false statements “contextually true”. I do not have a solution to the problem of distinguishing false beliefs, redefinitions of concepts, and “pronominal” terms like “I, that…”, but I would say that admitting false beliefs as contextually true solvent that creates truth from falsehood is not a good solution.

Hamas Network of Tunnels Under Gaza

Israel's War -- Update | Yaron Brook
 
 

Breaking News -- Israel Under Attack 
 
 

A neat guide to what is in OPAR is here.
Thanks to KP.

Kuhn's Intellectual Path <– a review by Howard Sankley of this book by K. Brad Wray
(My copy of that book of Wray's arrives tomorrow.)
Of related interest (which I have already):
The Essential Tension by Thomas Kuhn
The Road Since Structure edited by Conant and Haugeland
Reconsidering Logical Positivism by Michael Friedman
The Cambridge Companion to Carnap edited by Friedman and Creath
Scientific Revolutions edited by Ian Hacking
Interpreting Kuhn edited by Brad Wray
The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Anderson, Barker, and Chen
 
 

As an example of the popularity of this book, when I was in college in the late 1960s it was already part of the required reading for not only my History of Science course, but also the History of Economics and Sociology. 

Gravitational Effect on Motion of Anti-Matter Observed
 

Image by Arthur Rackham, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.As of this morning the poll at Drudge Report shows four double-digit performers in the second Republican debate. Currently, they clock in at Haley (35%), Ramaswamy (20%), DeSantis (19%), and Christie (16%). (Pence, whom I said didn't have a base and called "Trump-limited," finished dead last at 2%.) I called the race after the first (in which Ramaswamy and Haley's numbers were reversed) a sprint for Ramaswamy and a marathon for Haley.

One headline characterized the debate as "trading insults," and partisan media, left and right, have hastily written it off as irrelevant, charging that, with Trump leading Biden in the latest polling, that the "electability argument" has evaporated, and that with Trump leading among Republicans that his coronation -- like Hilary Clinton's in 2016? -- is inevitable.

Balderdash!

I submit that, since Haley polls best against Biden, there might be some wishful thinking behind any leftist outlet proclaiming that Haley can't hang her hat on electability, and double for any Trumpist saying this. Anyone else is likely being lazy or giving up too soon.

As for Trump's supposedly insurmountable primary lead, that's rich after the way polling largely missed Trump's win way back in 2016 -- and probably also wishful thinking. Leftists know that Trump is Biden's best bet to get reelected. And Trumpists? The fact that they're frontloading winner-take-all primaries shows that they fear an electorate taking any time to think through its options.

Seriously. Where's the fire?

If Trump is so ace, why hurry? And why not show up for the debates? If Trump is the Only Man Who Can Save America, what has he to fear from some piker being "unfair" to him at a debate?

Continuing with what's actually going on: The first state primary/caucus isn't until January. In the meantime, polling in early states shows that while, yes, majorities give Trump as the answer to the "if the election were held today" question, most of these people aren't political junkies or Trump cultists. More to the point, over three quarters of Republicans are considering someone other than Trump:It's not quite early days, but there is ample time for Haley to continue building momentum and for Trump to make an ass of himself, even without showing up for the debates.

I remain cautiously optimistic that Haley can win.

-- CAVLink to Original

Last week, I wrote:This scenario, which I already viewed as unlikely to occur, but the best shot of the Republicans nominating a decent alternative to Joe Biden, appears to be even less likely than I thought.

This is because Trump's disciples within the GOP have been pushing for earlier, winner-takes-all primaries:Perhaps because the rules are obscure and vary from state to state, the article is unclear about how much this tilts the scales in favor of Trump, but it does note that the strategy could backfire if Trump falters enough early in the race.

It would appear, then, that in addition to a smaller field of competitors to Trump, narrowing it down quickly will be necessary.

It is a shame that the Republicans have allowed a power-hungry liability like Trump to cause it to have to choose a candidate quickly, rather than deliberately.

-- CAVLink to Original

The Semafor, David Weigel opines that Nikki Haley is "riding a charming, focused, and consistent campaign to third place."

With polls all over the place, I presume Weigel is placing the former South Carolina governor behind Trump and one of DeSantis or Ramaswamy.

I think it is premature to consign Haley to third place: Aside from political junkies and Trump-worshipers, not that many people are paying much attention. This means that, while part of Trump's overwhelming-looking support is never going away, a significant amount remains persuadable.

In this context, Weigel's description of how Haley has been running her campaign sounds more like strategic patience than futility:Yeah, Gus, but this depends on Trump imploding, you might say.

I say that with all his legal troubles, he may have already imploded, and closer to election time, it's going to look uglier to the persuadable part of the GOP electorate. And with Trump's volatility, there's always the chance he'll scare away a few voters on top of that.

Haley is building her case now, and has neither alienated nor pandered to the Trump base. She has been running a frugal campaign, but stands to benefit when big anti-Trump GOP donors -- who have been backing away from DeSantis since he began his stupid war on Disney -- decide where their best chances lie.

Haley does best against Biden in polling of any Republican in the field now, and there is no doubt that if Trump ends up in jail, or is declared to be disqualified from office, she would have a decent chance of winning the GOP primary. She is ready, if things break her way, and more people paying attention might constitute breaking her way in this election.

I wouldn't write her off just yet.

-- CAVLink to Original

I should locate this work and its Addendums in this collection of works. I expect to be adding yet another addendum, this one on Descartes and Rand in their relations to Aristotle's metaphysics and philosophy of mechanics and biology.
Foundational Frames: Descartes and Rand