From Slate Star Codex: ‘All In All, Another Brick In The Motte’

Click through (great comments)

‘The original Shackel paper is intended as a critique of post-modernism. Post-modernists sometimes say things like “reality is socially constructed”, and there’s an uncontroversially correct meaning there. We don’t experience the world directly, but through the categories and prejudices implicit to our society; for example, I might view a certain shade of bluish-green as blue, and someone raised in a different culture might view it as green. Okay.’

From Remarks On Bertrand Russell’s Theory Of Knowledge:

“The following, however, appears to me to be correct in Kant’s statement of the problem: in thinking we use, with a certain “right,” concepts to which there is no access from the materials of sensory experience, if the situation is viewed from the logical point of view.

As a matter of fact, I am convinced that even much more is to be asserted: the concepts which arise in our thought and in our linguistic expressions are all — when viewed logically — the free creations of thought which cannot inductively be gained from sense experiences.”

From Bloggingheads: Adam Frank And Eliezer Yudkowsky Discuss The Epistemology Of ScienceFrom Bloggingheads: Adam Frank And Eliezer Yudkowsky Discuss The Epistemology Of Science

From Maverick Philosopher: ‘Peter van Inwagen, “A Theory Of Properties,” Exposition And Critique

Exposition and critique here.

‘I’ll begin the critique with the last point. “We never see properties, although we see that certain things have certain properties.” (179)  If van Inwagen can ‘peter out,’ so can I: I honestly don’t know what to make of the second  clause of the quoted sentence.  I am now, with a brain properly caffeinated, staring at my blue coffee cup in good light.  Van Inwagen’s claim is that I do not see the blueness of the cup, though I do see that the cup is blue.  Here I balk.  If I don’t see blueness, or blue, when I look at the cup, how can I see (literally see, with the eyes of the head, not the eye of the mind) that the cup is blue?’

From Darwinian Conservatism: ‘The Evolution of Mind and Mathematics: Dehaene Versus Plantinga and Nagel’Repost: From the Cambridge Companion To Plato-T.H. Irwin’s “Plato: The intellectual Background’

Elizabeth Bishop-Chemin De Fer

Chemin De Fer

Alone on the railroad track
I walked with pounding heart.
The ties were too close together
or maybe too far apart.

The scenery was impoverished:
scrub-pine and oak; beyond
its mingled gray-green foliage
I saw the little pond

where the dirty old hermit lives,
lie like an old tear
holding onto its injuries
lucidly year after year.

The hermit shot off his shot-gun
and the tree by his cabin shook.
Over the pond went a ripple
The pet hen went chook-chook.

“Love should be put into action!”
screamed the old hermit.
Across the pond an echo
tried and tried to confirm it.

Elizabeth Bishop

Wednesday Poem: Pearl By Pearl Of Light

Flying Over The Nebraska Of My Life

So much of our lives dissolves.
What did I do the day before
I met you? You remember
what I was wearing that holiday.
What did I wear the next morning?
What did I write the day my mother died?

I fly at night over the plains.
There is a cluster of lights,
a starfish shape glittering. Then
darkness and darkness.
Then another clump bearing
long daisy petals of roadway.

Then nothing again. How much
of my living has fled like water
into sand. The sand is not
even damp to the hand.
Tears and wine and sparkling
water all vanish the same.

I know looking out the plane’s
dirty window that there are houses,
barns, roads, trees, stores
distinct in that darkness I once
drove through. I knew them and will
never know them again.

The plane is flying from lighted
place to lighted place, but
our arc is from the dark into
brightness then back into darkness.
I want to possess my own life like a
necklace, pearl by pearl of light.

Marge Piercy

For a special friend, you know who you are.