Scottish Nous

Well, Of Course

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

Runaway Trolleys

I have used Snopes.com many times in the past and happened to be under the impression that it tends to be a generally reliable source of information.  Yet my judgment may have been a bit premature.  At the very least, I'm going to have to restrict the attribution of reliability to their debunking of urban legends through tracking down sources.  This is Snopes' primary mission, but they sometimes go well beyond it, as evidenced by the passage I found after a discussion of trolley car problems led to the story of a man who opted to sacrifice his son to save the lives of several hundred passengers on a train racing towards an open lift bridge:

Another version involves one child playing on one set of tracks while ten children play on another set the train is headed for and asks if it is right to throw the switch, resulting in one death instead of ten. In that form of the question, the children are not known to the switchman, which removes from the equation the emotional factor of choosing between beloved family members and strangers.

(If you're a philosophy student trying to ace an exam and can explain the reasons for your response, the "correct" answer is to leave the switch alone. By moving it you would be murdering those now about to die. If the switch is left in its original position, no murder will be committed even though deaths occur as a result of inaction. Those who believe in a higher power have a further philosophical reason for leaving the switch untouched; by changing the course of the train, they are usurping God's prerogative in deciding who is to live and who is to die.) - link

This unwarranted digression is due to Barbara Mikkelson, who had taken it upon herself to provide undergraduate philosophy students everywhere with the "correct answer" to a classic trolley car problem.  Now if my memory serves me, it is the general consensus among ethicists that the alleged distinction between killing and letting die met with a grisly death sometime in the early 70's after briefly exploding in the philosophical literature.  Whatever one thinks of that distinction, Mikkelson's analysis is suspicious.  If you aren't getting the flip-the-switch intuition here, just replace the ten men on track one with six point five billion.  Here it looks as if the good to be brought about by flipping the switch is much greater than the evil produced.  Consequentialist intuitions get off the ground best in cases like this where goods and evils are clearly incommensurate.   I don't think I've completely lost my ability to have commonsense intuitions.  Wouldn't almost everyone agree that saving nearly the entire world would be worth causing the death of one person?   (By the way, I'm  not taking sides.)

Matters get even more bizarre when Mikkelson invokes god and his "prerogative in deciding who is to live and who is to die".  I don't recall reading about runaway trolleys in any holy text.  Surely Mikkelson did not personally consult god about trolley cases?   And why isn't it a consequence of her position that we should never do anything to try to save anybody's life, since this would be tantamount to playing god?  All of the above remarks are cursory, but it's not my intent to provide a serious philosophical analysis of trolley problems on my blog.  I'm just wondering why Snopes, an otherwise relatively objective resource, is getting into the business of giving students answers to philosophical problems.

Suppose you've decided that you should flip the switch in one or both of the above cases.  Now let's have some fun.  Other trolley problems are more difficult.  What if the only way to prevent a runaway trolley from smashing into a lot of people was to push a nearby fat man onto the tracks (your build is too slight to jump yourself)?  Is this the same as flipping the switch?   For some minimal discussion of the fat man case, see Crooked Timber.  For related philosophical humor, go here.

Cognitive Abuse

So I was supplied, last night, with a copy of Touchstone magazine.  Patrick Henry Reardon, the senior editor of the magazine, published one of his parashioners letters, a gesture that can only be taken as a token of praise for the perverse and despicable speech acts cited in the contents quoted below:

Every Friday night in Oak Park, a small group of anti-war protesters gathers in front of the Presbyterian church to hold up signs and sing sentimental songs from the sixties.  My family and I were off to the movies to celebrate our son's eighteenth birthday.  The drive took us past the protesters, and since we were stopped at the light, we found ourselves reading their signs.

"Violence Never Solved Anything!" proclaimed one.  "It solved Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Libyan-based terrorism, and the Taliban," I suggested to my companions.

"Who Would Jesus Bomb?" asked another.  "Sodom and Gomorrah," answered my son.

It was a Proverbs 22:6 kind of moment.

If you're skeptical that a human being could be so morally depraved as to congratulate their child for recommending the slaughter, by bombing, of the population of multiple cities, for (possibly) some kind of sexual immorality, take a look at Proverbs 22:6:

Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.

Perhaps this child should be taken away from his parents by the state?  This is cognitive abuse.

Care To Up The Stress Level?

It's that time of year. One down, seven to go. If you want to scare yourself to death, go here.

Frege's Argument for Senses

I returned last night from the UCSB conference "Advances in the Theory of Meaning".  The most interesting talk, according to me, was Kit Fine's sketch of a new semantic theory motivated by 1) the alleged unsoundness of the Fregean argument that there is more than one kind of meaning, 2) its purported ability to deal with Kripke's puzzle about belief, 3) and the preservation of direct reference theories.  The conference was worth attending for this bit of brain stimulation alone.

Frege's argument for senses involved three premises.  Here's a quick sketch:

1) The "cognitive significance" (read: meaning) of Hesperus = Hesperus is different from the cognitive significance of Hesperus = Phosphorus.
2) The meaning of sentence is wholly a function of the meaning of its parts.
3) The reference of Hesperus = The reference of Phosphorus.

Premise (2) is the compositional theory of meaning. Premise (3) is obviously true, and premise (1) is used to get the contradiction.  Now supppose for reductio:

4) Reference is the only kind of meaning of which the meaning of a sentence is a function.

It follows that:

5) The meaning of Hesperus = Hesperus is just f(Hesperus, =, Hesperus). (from 2)
6) The meaning of Hesperus = Phosphorus is just f(Hesperus, =, Phosphorus). (from 2)
7) The meaning of f(Hesperus, =, Hesperus) is the same as the meaning of f(Hesperus, =, Phosphorous). (by 3, substitution)

Contradiction (1 and 7).  Therefore, the supposition for reductio is false (if 1-3 are true), and reference is not the only kind of meaning of which the meaning of a sentence is a function.  But since reference is certainly one such kind of meaning, there must be at least one other kind of meaning of which the meaning of the sentence can be a function.  Call that kind of meaning "sense".

This will be the first in a series of posts on Fine's take.  I'll update later with a similar argument Fine ingeniously presented using variables instead of names.  Later, I'll follow with the reasons why Kit Fine takes this argument to be unsound.  Then, after I get to Kit's paper on the subject, I'll post some of my initial concerns over his new semantic theory.  As things currently stand, Fine has forced me to worry much more about this argument than I had previously, and he may well be spot on.  But reaching that conclusion requires a lot more serious thought on my part.  I do like my Fregean senses, but I'm certainly not so committed that I can't be persuaded via argument to relinquish them.

Weeeeee!

I just received this in the e-mail:

Thank you for registering for the Third Steven Humphrey Excellence in Philosophy Conference entitled *Advances in the Theory of Meaning* (February 17-20, 2006).

For more information about the conference, please visit the UCSB Department of Philosophy Website (www.philosophy.ucsb.edu).

Sincerely, Conference Staff

May I point out that, among others, I get to hear Kaplan, Graff, Williamson, Yablo, Glanzberg, Stalnaker, Fine, Soames and Kripke?  All. In. One. Conference.

The Spice Pages

Gernot Katzer is a chemist with a somewhat eccentric but fitting hobby: spices.  The tea my sweet, soft paramour gave me contains lemon verbena, otherwise known as Herba Luisa "in honour of Maria Luisa Teresa de Parma (1751-1819), wife of king Carlos IV of Spain".  The essential oil is present in the leaf in concentrations less than one percent, ant it is charaterized primarily by stereoisomers of citral: neral and geranial.  Links to the chemical compounds are provided to satisfy those of us with a certain fondness for chemistry, and pictures of the spices are provided to placate the less analytic.

Proof That God Exists

I've been linked by Vintage Piranha, so I'll formalize the valid argument for God's existence we've been discussing below.

Let:

G = God exists.
P = I pray to God.
A = God answers my prayers.

Here's the natural language version:

Premise 1:  If it is not the case that God exists, then it is not the case that if I pray to God, God answers my prayers.
Premise 2:  It it not the case that I pray to God.
Conclusion:  God exists.

And here's the proof in propositional logic:

Proof:

1. ~ P                                     (Premise)
2. ~ P V A                            (Disjunction Addition)
3.  P --> A                            (Material Implication)
4.  ~ G --> ~ ( P --> A)     (Premise)
5.  G                                       (3,4, Modus Tollens)

I'll post remarks later.  For now, please feel free to comment if you wish.

Reason Go To Hell

Via Pharyngula, we get Ken Ham victimizing small children.  Do not read the following unless you're prepared to vomit.  Here's proof that Ken Ham is a mental pervert raping the minds of credulous pre-teens:

Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.

"Boys and girls," Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, "you put your hand up and you say, 'Excuse me, were you there?' Can you remember that?"

The children roared their assent.

"Sometimes people will answer, 'No, but you weren't there either,' " Ham told them. "Then you say, 'No, I wasn't, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.' " He waved his Bible in the air.

Read More...

"Who's the only one who's always been there?" Ham asked.

"God!" the boys and girls shouted.

"Who's the only one who knows everything?"

"God!"

"So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?"

The children answered with a thundering: "God!"

The LA Times article these utterly depraved rantings of a lunatic were ripped from states:

A former high-school biology teacher, Ham travels the nation training children as young as 5 to challenge science orthodoxy.

I wonder if Ham needs to prey on five year olds because middle and high schoolers are just too smart for him?  Ham's diseased mind needs to rot away quickly before more children are infected with the contagion of irrationality he carries.

Cartoon Extravaganza

Get your Danish cartoons and a brief history of the controversy at You're the Man Now Dog.  Or, if you prefer, access the Mohammed Image Archive to see a history of depictions of the prophet ranging all the way from beautiful images dating from Ancient Persia through recent responses to the Danish cartoons.  Many, but not all, of these images are offensive, and the most offensive depictions are only linked.  (The highly recommended archive has the Danish cartoons, but you can also find them at the Brussels Journal.)  Now, in order to go some way towards justifying the cartoon accompanying this post (which contains a common example of Arab cartoonist work), why don't we take a brief look at some of what appears in newspapers in the Islamic world?  I bring you the following links courtesy of the Anti-Defamation League: the nazi jews, more nazi jews, a jew watering a nazi-jewish flower, a long list, a swastika superimposed on the star of david, born to kill.  Tom Gross, a Mideast media analyst, prefers his cartoons bloody.  According to the Guardian, an Iranian newspaper will be bringing you holocaust denying cartoons (as if there weren't enough of those in the Arab media already) to "see if they [Western papers] mean what they say [about freedom of expression."  A noble cause that will do Mohammed proud.  Because I'm an equal opportunity basher, however, I'll point to some folks, namely the Infidel Blogger's Alliance, who have poorly opted to exercise their right to act like jerks.  The last of the cartoons I have to offer, Republican Jesus, can be found at exgaywatch.  The comments thread there is occupied by some peeved Republicans and Christians, but at least they aren't planning on firebombing anything. I leave you with Sura 6:68 and Sura 9:23 of the Qur'an:

And when thou seest those who meddle with Our revelations,  withdraw from them until they meddle with another topic. - linked at submission.org

Along with something called the "progressive Muslim" interpretation:

And if you encounter those who make fun of Our revelations, then turn away from them until they move on to a different topic. - submission.org

Then again, there's always this:

O ye who believe ! fight such of the disbelievers as are near to you and let them find hardness in you; and know that Allah is with the righteous. - submission.org