Scottish Nous

Is My Hoax Detector Malfunctioning?

Ok, so here's a link for you.  I strenuously suggest that you read this entire page.  An excerpt following a time lapse picture of the night sky directly "above" the north pole:

If you can do so for a few minutes, just lay aside the Copernican indoctrination that accompanies such pictures and take a good hard look at these photographs of something that really, really happens every single night.  Do you see what I see? I see all the visible stars in the northern skies going around the North Star in perfect circles. In other words, I see all the stars which these time exposures have recorded actually going around that navigational star that is there for we Earthlings in the Northern Hemisphere... This means that each star circles in one 24 hour day (i.e., 23 hours and 56 minutes). (The same thing is captured in circumpolar photos taken in the Southern Hemisphere....) [emph. orig.]

Yes, bizarrely enough, a time lapse photograph of the night sky shot along the earth's axis of rotation from the north pole resembles the corresponding photograph taken at the south pole.  This is because both all the stars directly "above" the earth and all the starts directly "below" the earth move in perfect circles centered on the north and south poles, respectively.  I'll <sarcasm> respectfully </end sarcasm> have to disagree.  This is clearly a case in which the simpler explanation is the better, although, of course, not merely because it's simpler.  He goes on to ask (rhetorically):

What will it be? Will you trust your eyes (and your camera!) to record the truth of the matter?

and answer:

Trust your eyes and your cameras! They have no reason to deceive you about whether the stars are going around nightly!

Frankly, I'm having a lot of difficulty getting this picture to work.  Let's take it for granted that the vantage points of the north and south poles should be privileged.  That is, it's the photographs we take at these special locations that enable us to know how the stars are moving.  (Why?  Who knows.  Maybe because they're the only spots on earth at which compasses spin freely?)  So given this picture, there are one or more planes of stars rotating around a point intersecting with the line defined by the two points known as the north and south poles?  And I know this because "the photographs obviously tell me so".  So what am I supposed to see when I look up at those stars from the equator?  And how are the stars lying on planes perpendicular with that plane supposed to be moving?

I'm very good at detecting hoaxes.  Nothing about this website suggests to me that it's a hoax.  Is my bullshit detector malfunctioning, or is this cat serious?  Here's another quote about modern scientific assumptions:

It must be assumed [by scientists] that the Sun is stationary in the "solar" system relevant [sic] to the Earth (and to the Moon) and that it has never traveled East to West daily across the sky as observed by everyone on Earth throughout all history. -link

Finally:

Given that the definition of "science" is derived from the Latin root scire which means "to know", and the definition of "assumption" is "to take for granted or to suppose", each person is free to determine whether the Helio or the Geo Model is true science.  Just remember: Every time you watch the Sun when it rises, when it is high noon, and when it sets, you must assume that it isn’t doing what your eyes tell you it is doing, but that it only appears to be moving because the Earth is allegedly turning under your feet at several hundred miles an hour. And when you see the Moon in all its phases come up in the east and set in the west, reject what you see. "Science" has trained you to assume that it is going precisely the opposite direction at about 2200 MPH. Then rejoice that you "know" that each assumption is correct because of the correctness of the other assumptions that each is based upon, and because everybody everywhere has learned of their correctness in school.

So, does he think knowledge is factive or not?

 

Sixteen Days Without A Blog Post

I'm sorry.  I'm busy, but I'll try to do better.

Lessons in Fringe Philosophy?

What is feminist philosophy of science?  I take it that it is in large part constituted by pointing out facts such as this one:

Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney from New York points out that there has been far more testing on the possible health effects of chlorine-bleached coffee filters than on chlorine-bleached tampons and related products. - link

After pointing to such facts (which are obviously distressing), the feminist philosophers of science go on to propose scientific methodologies that will avoid the "male bias" in science.  I guess.  The project has more merit (though whether or not it has merit qua philosophy is  a question I leave unanswered here) than, say, feminist logic, which is, contrary to what you may have thought, not a study of the way women reason, but a concerted effort to undermine fundamental laws of logic (such as the law of identity) by pointing out that they contribute to the oppression of vast numbers of people (who do not believe in necessary or objective truths or else allegedly do not believe in "our" objective truths).  That there is no such thing as "objective truth", and therefore no such thing as the modern analytic philosophers "law of identity", is often defended by appeal to the trivial claim that we are all subjects.

We here at Scottish Nous do not find either feminist philosophy of science or feminist logic, at least in their above crystallizations, very philosophically interesting.  If, however, you think that one of your favorite subjects (or arguments) has been here maligned, please take a moment to set us straight.

 

Why Many Philosophers Do Not Have Significant Others

See here and here.

Place the Silly Quote

Wherein a law of logic is abused for vile purposes and forced to bear an insufferable burden:

The source of man's rights is not divine law, but the law of identity.  A is A - and Man is Man. (emphasis added)

Feminist, Are You? Be Prepared to Dry Wretch

I rarely follow any links in the spam I receive.  Today, however, one click led me to a disgusting web site authored by a twisted mental midget.  The site promises to give you access to a grammatically abominable e-book for the low cost of $59.95.  This book allegedly propounds a " System" (not a high brow "System" like Hegel's) for making "any woman submit to you instantly".  The website takes the cake for containing the greatest number of absurd inferences ever found in one continuous piece of text.  What do we think of the following argument?

The System always works with every woman.  Age and social status of the woman don’t matter. As well as the color of her skin and her nationality. As well as her character and life experience.  All of the stuff listed above doesn’t matter at all because the methods of the System are based on simple instincts which are the same for every woman. 

If a woman has menstruation she’s a mature female.  Therefore, she has the instincts of a female. So all her behavior depends primarily on her female instincts. All the other traits of her behavior are secondary.  The main human instinct is reproduction, propagation of our species. For women this instinct means finding a strong male who is willing to make sex with her and impregnate her. (emph. original) - link (warning: pornographic)

I really don't believe that you can get any stupider than this.  The level of discursive reasoning the author appears capable of is surpassed by a two week old specimen of Pan troglodytes.  Heck, the author is due for a full frontal lobotomy complete with electrical shocks administered directly into the neural cortex.  I know of several rotten tree stumps filled with stagnating, frog infested spunk water that can think faster than this social derelict.  Following the spam trail is like reading the newspaper... it just makes you angry and depressed.  I learned my lesson for the day.

 

Basking in the Glory

I realized at 10:30 this morning that I had been in the same room as Allen Wood, for the past hour and a half, without knowing it.  That would be the "Wood" of "Guyer-Wood".  Ok, so that was somewhat discomfitting.  Wood's CV can be found here.   I'll be in the same room as him again when I go back to the conference later this afternoon to hear his talk "Herder and Kant on History".  I don't really know anything about Herder, but that's unimportant, since, to reiterate, I will be in the same room as Allen Wood.

Kit Fine, Compositionality Proper and Coordination Relations

I apologize for the slight delay in the promised forthcoming posts.  I had intended to read Kit Fine's paper sooner and send him some questions/comments, but I now have suspicions that he may be sitting on NYU's admissions committee.  Since I have applied to NYU (although sadly, it appears I was not a first round draft pick), I'd rather not do anything that might be perceived as a pathetic attempt at insincere, opportunistic ladder-climbing.

At the UCSB conference, Kit Fine presented a revised version of Frege's argument in which he substituted variables for proper names.  You can see a quick sketch of Frege's original argument here.  Fine's version appeals to what seems to be an obvious fact: the cognitive significance, i.e., meaning, of "x" is no different from the cognitive significance of "y".  For the record, Fine was careful to avoid talk of "cognitive significance" when he presented, but since I just intend one to read that as "meaning", I'll use the term occasionaly for the sake of literary variation.  Now you're asked to consider the meaning of the identities "x = x" and "x = y".  Just like "Hesperus = Hesperus" differs in meaning from "Hesperus = Phosphorus", "x = x" differs in meaning from "x = y".  The same values need not be substituted for the variables in "x = y".   But if reference is the only kind of meaning, and if the meaning of a sentence is wholly a function of the meaning of its parts, how does one account for this?

Fine's answer is to deny the principle of compositionality being appealed to.  In my last post, here, I offered premise two as a gesture in the direction of compositionality: the meaning of a sentence is wholly a function of the meaning of its parts.  Now that's not exactly compositionality, of course, but I intended lines (5) and (6) of the argument to be going a long way towards giving more of the idea behind compositionality.  A full and precise statement of the principle of compositionality being appealed to in Frege's argument would involve a complicated syntactic algebra, and the rules of such an algebra will operate on the components of the sentence in a well-defined order that depends upon the structure of the sentence as the function f(x, =, y) suggests.  Obviously, the value of f(x, =, y) will not be the same as the value of f(=, x, y).  But enough of that.  Fine wishes to reject this simpler principle of compositionality (i.e., the principle Frege relies upon) for what he called "Compositionality Proper".

It's easy to see what Compositionality Proper is, but it's not so easy to see whether or not it's true.  Or, at least, whether or not it's true in way that allows it to underwrite semantic facts.  In effect, Fine wants the new compositionality function to operate not on the crude ordered sequence containing only "x", "=", "y", but rather on a more fine-grained sequence you can think of as containing subdivisions of "x", "=", and "y".  Subdivisions of variables, names, properties, etc... are created by introducing "coordination relations" as basic semantic facts.  Say that "x" can be subdivided into "x*" (x star) and "x'" (x prime). Compositionality Proper (CP) operates not over the crude variable "x", but over "x*" and "x'".  Using CP will return different values for the following functions 1) f(x* = x*) and 2) f(x* = x').  Say that (1) is coordinated while (2) is not.

Now you know have a nifty analog of Frege's argument argument which uses variables, you know which step in the argument Fine rejects, you know what Compositionality Proper is, and you've got a straightforward account of what these coordination relations are.  I consider this post a success.  (Fine's argument is reproduced solely from memory, but I think this is exactly right.)  If you want to picture these coordination relations as Fine does, think of a little strings linking the coordinated variables.  Soames humorously dubbed this "string theory".