Terence Rajivan Edward

"If you are ahead of your time, your time will catch up with you" - I attribute this proposition to Nietzsche, but is it from him actually? Was it devised earlier, was it a Nietzsche imitator who devised it, or is it an accidental convergence in style (by my lights)? Anyway, I think it is natural (or natural for us) to interpret the proposition as conveying the following: you may be a significant innovator in a certain field and ahead of all your contemporaries in terms of what you do, but in due course, 100 years say, your innovations will have been absorbed and will be regarded as familiar. I have a different interpretation, which perhaps applies to individuals who are slightly ahead of their time. It focuses on what such an individual can actually observe. Such an individual is a scientist, let us imagine. He visits a family (or she does). The parents become competitive: “We are scientists too,” they convey. But they don't compete that well. However, then the children start competing and they are not very old. But they are somehow doing better than their parents. You can literally observe contemporaries (people alive at the same time) catching up with you! “See I told you,” the aphorism maker is disposed to say? Anyway, I have devised this coding/programming task: take a three letter word, scramble it up randomly, and print the result, e.g. "dog" becomes "odg" in the random scramble. This is the beginning of such a program, in GWBASIC or QBASIC (which I still use - what is the advantage of Python, by the way?), with semicolons for line breaks (please press enter instead). 10 THR$ = ""; 20 INPUT "What is your three letter word for scrambling? ", THR$; 30 LL = LEN(THR$); 40 IF LL = 30 THEN GOTO 70; 50 PRINT "Three letters long please!"; 60 GOTO 20; 70 PRINT "Yes, that is a length of three";

Should we aim to get rid of delusions? First we must define what a delusion is and the most exciting issue in the philosophy of delusions, whether delusions are actually believed, makes this very difficult. Let us specify when we attribute a delusion to a person at least. These four conditions seem individually necessary and jointly sufficient for delusion attribution, taking "our" to refer to a set of representative individuals ("I don't like that concept"?). (i) The person asserts something that is false, by our lights (assuming something true or false has been communicated). (ii) The proposition communicated is obviously false, by our lights, e.g. "I am dead," "Government institutions are monitoring me," "The goddess Hera is in love with me," etc. (iii) The person is not moved by evidence supplied to stop asserting the proposition. (iv) There are insufficient signals from the person that the assertion is not accepted by them: there is no "I am just joking," etc. Conditions over. Should we aim to get rid of delusions? One response is that a delusion is abnormal and must be removed, or must be removed by acceptable means: by psychotherapy or by medication. Another response is that we should allow for any delusion, because one can build a system of beliefs based on it, which copes with the data of sensation. This response is inspired by W.V. Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism." There are certain beliefs that we hold come what may, such as "All mammals are animals." But Quine thinks one can rationally hold any belief come what may if one makes sufficient changes elsewhere, to cope with information acquired by the senses. For example, one can always hold that this fellow Edward is a powerful demon, even though he does not harm one, if one also believes that one is an even more powerful angel. The lack of harm is coped with thereby. There is a third response which has occurred to me and which motivated me to write. The response is: some delusions are useful for the community and so we should not get rid of them. Consider a delusion that one is under an obligation to pick up litter (if it even is a delusion: "You don't have to, but in most countries a person such as yourself would be sentenced to hard labour.") One has quite a strong reason not to get rid of this delusion: because it helps keep the city clean.

There is a question I anticipate. "We have looked through the academics at St. Anne's College of Oxford University and we are not sure how they are planning to compete with you, let alone you and friends. These people do not look clever enough." No idea: they must have a way. Anyway, let me tell you the story of the fox, the giraffe, and the bird. “GIRAFFE?” Yes, but to begin with it is not a giraffe as we imagine it: it has quite a short neck. "Listen, giraffe," says the fox, "that bird is up there in the tree but if you stretch your neck, you can reach the same height." The short-necked giraffe does so, but then the bird moves to a slightly higher branch. The giraffe stretches some more, but it cannot reach that height. The fox says, "I see the problem, giraffe. I will work on it." The next day the fox presents the giraffe with some special exercises. The giraffe does them and they reach to a slightly higher height, but the bird moves slightly up and so the giraffe again loses. The fox says, "I see the problem, giraffe. I will work on it." The next day, the fox presents the giraffe with some tight rings to wear around the neck. The giraffe does and they thereby narrow and lengthen their neck. The giraffe can now reach even higher up the tree. But the bird moves a few branches higher. The fox comes back the next day with some medicines. These medicines lengthen the giraffe's neck further, until the giraffe now has the length of neck that we associate with the giraffe, in our idealized images. They reach so high up the tree. The bird, feeling sorry for the giraffe, says, "Okay, you win giraffe." The giraffe celebrates wildly, while the fox returns grumpily to his den.

Liberal social justice, as envisioned by the towering John Rawls and probably unnamed predecessors, is about setting some rules and leaving individuals free to do as they please within the rules. But which rules? Fair rules! But which rules are fair? If the rules restrict liberty too much, then the vision in detail no longer counts as liberal. But if you think about the sort of things that you will have to allow, the dream of a fair society slips away, or so it seems. Will one allow for secret societies? Secret societies are just voluntary associations of individuals, who do not tell you what they are doing. As long as there is consent between the individuals and they do not violate the rules of liberalism, it seems one has to allow for them. But secret societies can achieve advantages for members in various "fields." For example, one knows how to keep a marriage going long after the sexual spark has faded for other couples because of what one learnt in the secret society! Some secret societies go on for generations and have such clever members. Who knows what advantages they gain? One solution to this problem (or attempted solution) is to say that when the just society is achieved, people will simply not be disposed to form secret societies. Really? Are there not people who, when faced with a new system of rules, straightaway put effort into working out how to get the most advantages for themselves and friends? (Or pay someone to do this.) Another solution is to somehow show that these secret societies do not undermine social justice - do not bring unfair advantage. But show to whom? If there are some bits of green slime in water, maybe a pharmacologist can persuade an evidence-oriented biologist that the water is safe to drink; but how to convince the common man or the plain man, etc.? There are limits to rational projects of science communication, and likewise social justice communication. (I anticipate someone's saying, "We are actually the main victims of secret societies, because you can write autobiography whereas we are sworn to secrecy!" Or I wonder if someone will say that. I am more confident that someone will think or say, "Take the same stimulus and go one up a level please than this.")

On Thomas Edward Yorke's admission paradox Thomas Edward Yorke is the name of a person who did not apply to the University of Oxford for undergraduate study, according to Wikipedia (an online encyclopaedia, often regarded as unreliable for students and academics - immensely reliable compared to my collection of information?). We are told, "Yorke had wanted to apply to St John's to read English at the University of Oxford, but, he said, 'I was told I couldn't even apply – I was too thick. Oxford University would have eaten me up and spat me out. It's too rigorous.' " Assume the eating him up and spitting him out is metaphorical and refers to something unpleasant (for Yorke). The quotation puzzles me in at least two ways, one of which I shall hopefully set aside: why does he have a preferred college if he is not applying?! Isn’t it just “I want to apply to Oxford to study English” followed by “NO!...”? Yes, I am surely not going to get involved with this. BUT why not St Anne's? A couplet: "If Jimmy Hendrix studied, this would be his abode/ St. Anne's on Woodstock Road." (Woodstock was a famous rock'n'roll music festival and Yorke is known elsewhere as a rock'n'roll star. Jimi Hendrix is a guitarist, with his teeth even. And what is the point of being located there if you cannot attract ambitious rock'n'roll musicians?) Anyway, the main puzzle I wish to address is this. Why is it implied that Yorke would be admitted to Oxford if he is too thick (i.e. stupid), or too thick for the chosen course, to pile on the qualifications (too thick because that course is harder than other Oxford University courses, or too thick in that direction but perhaps clever in others, or something else enabling the “too thick” description?). Here is my speculation. If your university tries to get rid of thick people altogether - by examinations, by interviews or whatever method - some of them somehow still get in. "We tried all that and we failed"? What the University of Oxford found is that it is best to select some thick people, instead of just letting some random thick characters get in, and Yorke is their type. That is my speculative solution to the puzzle anyway. ("This solution does not work under some clarifications of too thick"???)

The title of this contribution of mine quotes some words from Laura Riding's poem As Well As Any Other. I am tempted to offer a crude reading of her message: "I just give up on common sense and focus on growing rare flowers, metaphorically speaking, to get ahead." Anyway, there is a simple set of possibilities that occurred to me, which one can put in a beautiful table I suppose, but also a problem with it occurred to me. Perhaps a dialogue will be excusable here. ME: there is Icarus. He flies briefly but struggles with the heat of the Sun (fire) and with the moisture of the sea (water). There is Daedalus, who flew and managed to avoid/solve both problems. There is the Wicked Witch of the West, who flies, has problems with water but not with fire. (Also Nietzsche? No, he does not fly!) Then there is the witch who flies but has no problems with water but problems with fire. Is that the witch, or kind of witch, you are trying to get rid of? L: Yes. ME: Do you like my chart of possibilities? L: Yes. ME: I did like it and perhaps still do, but it is not good. For one thing, it excludes the alternating witch. In one week (or period of time), she masters fire but fails on water. In the next week (or period of time), she masters water but fails on fire!

"Protecting Everyday Nature" is a prize-winning legal article by Antonia Layard and several others, who probably prefer not to be named. I found it on the St. Anne's College website. I stayed at St. Anne's College, University of Oxford, for three days or something in 2018. (The away match?) The title I have chosen for this contribution quotes a poem by Laura Riding entitled "As well as any other." Now what to say about the article, which I could not finish because I was laughing too much? Here is the opening of the opening sentence of the abstract: " 'Everyday nature’, understood as people’s ability to access nature nearby...." I have doubts, reasonable doubts, that an ability is what they have in mind. Let's imagine that I have a garden. My garden is a paradigmatic piece of nature, by current English middle-class standards. It has green plants, such as lots of blades (?) of green grass, and the sun shines upon it and there are creatures within it, some of them all the time, such as certain bugs, and some of them just passing by, such as wood pigeons that land and depart and neighbourhood cats. But there is a difference between my garden and my ability to access my garden. Perhaps it is more precise to speak of a set of abilities, corresponding to different sense modalities. My visual ability to access my garden is my ability to see it. (Does seeing it on the Internet count?) There is also my ability to have tactile relations with my garden: to feel the leaves of the plants, to be pricked by a thorn, to lie upon the grass and feel it, feel the grassy sensations thereby caused, and so forth. It seems to me that Layard and co-authors fail to distinguish between everyday nature and an ability to access everyday nature.

I consider my main contribution to British structural-functionalist social anthropology to be in my paper "Are individuals a problem for British structural-functionalist anthropology?" I am not confident that I explained the contribution sufficiently clearly there, however. My idea is this. "Structural-functionalist anthropology seeks to present the social structure of a society and how it functions. But traditionally this kind of anthropologist takes the official structure presented to them at face value: the official structure is the actual structure. But what happens if they find that an individual does not meet the requirements of their official role? It is available to the anthropologist to depart from the official conception of the structure and develop an alternative conception of the social structure, in which the individual does fit in their role." This proposal to discern an alternative social structure is news to most social anthropologists, I believe (it is so risky for actual anthropologists), but is it news to everyone? I was reading about the football manager Arsene Wenger on Wikipedia. And it is said that as a young player, he was not the captain but he issued instructions to his teammates, as if he were the captain. I suspect there are footballers who have concluded: the official structure of roles for the opposition is not the actual structure; the captain’s armband for this team merely signals a player unlikely to be subbed in the first half, etc. (He is a clever man Arsene Wenger, but can he connect his experiences to academic literature as well as I can? Ironically, he is not good at the academic passing game!)

Thomas H. Smith has a sense of humour, but so do we? Somewhere in Smith's paper "My job and its requirements," he tells us: this is bedrock. What was the context now? If you are looking for an explanation for why things are as they are here, this is bedrock? I think "bedrock" is a reference to a popular animated television cartoon, from the 1980s onwards, called The Flintstones. It is set in a fictitious cave age. It is like a family sitcom (situational comedy), or it simply is one. There is the hero and working man of the starring family: Fred Flintstone. I am probably cast as housewife Wilma Flintstone in Smith's eyes. Why would he cast a clever male like me in this role, however? My guess at part of the answer is: all the problems you face, my great great great... grandfather faced and we have worked out the best solutions and they are in our behavioural dispositions even, and your dispositions will merely leave you in this role. Anyway, I might be wrong about all of the above, because I am running into a contradiction, or tension at least. ("Who would Fred Flintstone be? And Barney Rubble and Betty?" No. But I am probably not the only one to have interpreted Smith along these lines: Miriam Ronzoni on Crooked Timber wonders whether she is a dinosaur. See "Shambles, But Make It Digital".) This is something former theatre director (or whatever his role was) Thomas H Smith told me in person: around the philosopher Crispin Wright there is a whole of team of people who write down stuff he says. I didn't say it, but I have thought: who will write down stuff I say? There are various answers but I sort-of stopped at one: “You will say everything online.” (Okay, I got to: "Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins will work out everything you would say.") But if I am a WIlma Flintstone type in Smith's eyes, as I read humour in his paper, how do you represent this online activity in the Flintstones, because they do not have Internet? Nevermind. I suspect it is bad to be this concerned about other people's impressions of oneself. There are more interesting things in this life and more pressing concerns. (The title of this contribution quotes the Jane's Addiction song Classic Girl.)

According to the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, the male brain is oriented towards systematizing and the female brain towards empathizing. But there can be human males with a female brain, owing to a greater orientation towards empathizing, and human females with a male brain. Systematizers create or analyze systems, systems being things which are constituted by rules or which operate according to laws. Autistics have an extreme version of the male brain: they are extremely oriented to systematizing and show little or no orientation towards empathizing. Baron-Cohen's work is well-known and extraordinarily popular, for academic research. It more or less proposes that the places to find autistics, or high-functioning autistics, are scientific and technical disciplines, such as mathematics, physics, and engineering. But from December 2024 to April 2025, I attended open mic stand up comedy events in Manchester as a performer and encountered 4 or more people diagnosed with autism, who also performed. Baron-Cohen's book The Essential Difference, from which he does not appear to have significantly departed, seems to discourage the thought that autistics would be able to function well in this “field.” One must understand audiences and what they find funny: surely that requires higher levels of empathy than autistics have, granting Baron-Cohen. But I suspect that Baron-Cohen's expectations about the distribution of autistics is based on an assumption. The autistic comedian, granting his theory, will look for rules or conditions regarding what people find funny. But how far can one get with this project? Consider the proposal: "If a sentence contains an ambiguity, then it is funny." This proposes a sufficient condition. But while it looks promising as a sufficient condition on PhilPapers, it does not when performing in front of various non-philosophers in Manchester. I think we can make progress by jettisoning a tempting assumption: a condition of the form "If a sentence has property X, then it is funny" or a condition of the form "If a sentence has property X, then it is not funny" will not refer to the reactions of other persons when filling in the details of X. Once we jettison this assumption, the autistic can "discover" conditions such as: if a sentence has the property of being the favourite of your mother, then it is not funny. Such discovered conditions may not be correct (people find things funny which violate the conditions) but they might capture a public standard of funniness within a comedic community: audiences don't laugh at whatever they feel is funny, but what meets this public standard. (My title tastelessly quotes the rapper Eminem’s song Lose Yourself, but what was the rapper’s intention? "A rapper is not an amateur autism researcher, like you!"?)

There is a lot of data nowadays and a need to analyze this data ("this data"? we use data as a mass noun), so one can predict jobs in data analysis and people moving into these jobs. I heard that on an online video, a Youtube video probably, but I did not write down who said it. My apologies. I have also probably heard it in the flesh from two Russian speakers, one an economist and the other a statistician. (The economist once told me "When in Rome do what the Romans do," and I heard no irony, but I inferred it later: a Russian saying that!) Similarly, in an age of epidemics, one can predict more jobs in medicine and more people taking up those jobs. But that is going to generate a problem of trust, I think. When there are just four doctors in a practice, people review all four and say words to the effect, "This is the only one who does the job properly." We know this from fiction and various conversations, involving people of various social classes. But when there are 100 medical doctors and they mostly would not be there but for economic incentives, many people will not look for the exception. They will form a stereotype of the doctor (a standard "image"), expressed in jokes, caricatures, and the like, and the exception will be tarred with it as well. It will be like jokes about lawyers and politicians. I RECOMMEND that the medical system anticipates a crisis of trust from "ordinary" people now (who starts the distrust though and who inflames it?) and works on the topic of trust. Philosophers I have read who work on this: Onora O'Neill, Andrew Kirton (one of my former students, also supervised by Joel Smith and Thomas H Smith), and a European philosopher in the politics discipline area of University of Manchester, or he used to be.

I have conceived, or realized or shall propose, a distinction between promotional and progressive secondary literature. Is it new to you? "The terms are unfamiliar but all your realizations are probably built-in to us through upbringing, or the best responses are"? Secondary literature develops around certain thinkers, such as Wittgenstein, Pierre Bourdieu, John Rawls, and David Lewis. But some of the literature may be merely promotional. More and more of this literature causes one to pay attention to the thinker, but there is little evidence of “academic” improvement: epistemic improvement. Leave aside the natural scientist's war cry that no debates here are resolved. There is little improvement in definitions, quality of formulation, and discussion of objections. Other literature is progressive: there is significant improvement in one or more of these areas. To illustrate, let us focus on John Rawls. I taught Rawls for seven years at the University of Manchester, or even more - I have not checked my CV. In various years, students raise this objection: I cannot do his thought experiment the original position. In the original position, we imagine rational actors choosing societal principles but we imagine them lacking (or their lacking!) biasing knowledge, including knowledge of their social class, sex, wealth, talents, and goals. The objection is also suggested or made by Michael Sandel and made by Susan Moller Okin. Samuel Freeman has a discussion of this objection in his Routledge guide to John Rawls. But I cannot see significant improvement over teaching class discussions almost annually. I wrote one of my papers "Doing history in the original position" partly as a mockery of him, by the way. (“You let me know this now, you brat!”?) One further note: you might regard the idea of promotional and progressive literatures as about types, ideal types one might misleadingly say, to which actual cases are mostly approximations. Well, this is just some chat from your perspective. Over to you!

I would like to teach you something. "We probably already know this." Not you. "We represent the majority of your readers: the message does not reach those who could most benefit." The details matter, I hope. Here is some code written in 1980s BASIC (I learnt from QBASIC help though, at lines 10 and 30; the code is easy; don't be afraid; there is more to life than victories on home soil) - I use semicolon for a line break; press enter instead. 10 RANDOMIZE TIMER; 20 N = 1000; 30 XX = INT(RND * N) + 1; 40 X = 0; 50 X = X + 1; 60 IF X = XX THEN GOTO 50; 70 PRINT X; 80 IF X > N-1 THEN END; 90 GOTO 50; That is the code over. The code seems to print a series of numbers to the screen (up to N, in this case 1000) but a number is missing: it does not print a random number within the series (specified by XX in line 30). I call this program MISSING. It seems evil. But this is an even more evil response: this is the same as a lottery program, which picks out a winning ticket. There is a kind of person who is all about the big picture: they do not get involved with fine details and distinctions, which some call hairsplitting. But how can one combat the evil here without doing so? "It's a trivial evil." If we grant this response, does the problem arise in more significant places? (The title of this contribution quotes lyrics from the song Jane Says by the music band Jane's Addiction. This song is poetic, I feel, but maybe locked away somewhere I have lines which respond to it and are even better. I like this band but I also "fancy it" against them somehow! “Fancy it”: I think I could beat them in a poetic competition.)

Who invented this saying: a person who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client? Was it a lawyer? Can you trust lawyers? They are not renowned for being trustworthy, are they? Apologies if this be repetition. I was taken into MRI (Manchester Royal Infirmary) in early September 2023 with a mental health disorder. I was soon moved to North Manchester General Hospital. I escaped there after about 3 weeks and returned home. I was brought back by court order after about a week, despite functioning well I believe. Soon I was involved in a tribunal, where my aim was to justify releasing me. Beforehand I met a lawyer and said, "Don't worry; I will do the law myself." The company sent another lawyer. A relative of mine was at the tribunal and was impressed. She had done research on my lawyer and found that she had an Oxford University degree and told me she performed well. But the lawyer did not win my case. (A nurse implied: there is no way out of here by tribunal.) I did indeed learn things from the lawyer and I try to assume the choice not to be my own lawyer was not bad. (The saying, the saying!) On the other hand, (a) I would have got precious experience as a lawyer if I had taken the risk. Maybe that would have come in useful in the future. I have just seen out a legal case with the University of Manchester and maybe it is not the last. (My lawyers encourage me to take the money now, but I suspect the university needs it more than I do. Yes, I heard Fiona Devine say that 200000 here or there makes little difference, but against some opponents a university of this level needs every penny.) (b) If I performed well as my own lawyer, I could have argued thus: how am I performing so well if I am so ill as to be confined here? I suspect the medical team much preferred the professional lawyer! (I put this contribution in experimental philosophy of law category, but where does it belong?)

The great Scottish Enlightenment economist Adam Smith recommended specialization. You straighten out the wire, I make the head of the pin, he does something else, and there are others too, and together we make a pin more efficiently than if one of us tried to do it all. That is his example, a famous one; he believes the lesson applies to a variety of fields (or disciplines or crafts or professions or areas or just dreams: I am not sure what the best word is). But are not some people better at two specialisms than other people are at any one (fake league table - 1001 Bill Gates, 1000 Dr. Gogarty...): even "I can do what you do and I can do that too"? Smith strangely denies this: we all start with much the same talent and the appearance of superior talent in one particular area is the result of specialization in that area (presumably repeated practice - well, I should let you know that my English lit teacher took my essay and said it is better than the sample one provided and that thenceforth we are using this; "me too," "also me," "don't forget about me"? You are a special one, aren't you?). The contemporary economist does not proceed as Smith does. He introduces an island society (or usually does, Gregory Mankiew) and it is rational for the two people to specialize even if one is better at both tasks under consideration. The economist does not do all this: present Adam Smith, then the objection that some can do two specialisms or more, then his island model. I know people who WILL think this is a mistake. (Economist: "I have a spouse and kids; I am not a bright young philosopher... Please.") I want that, but this is not even my main problem. From Flora Nwapa's Efuru, we learn of women who specialize in one business and then switch to your business to generate competition, until you have to give up (see my faux specialization paper). Of course the problem can arise in different ways, such as "I see you coming and you are going to have to change your game." (Lyrics by the popular singer Madonna, meaning here by me? "I try my very best but I still always get into the academic system and there is no...."? Italians do it best!) If I were in economics, I would like to know about this kind of faux specialization, as I call it. Also between economics, anthropology, and psychiatry, I am worried about this: they put you out of business, literally or metaphorically, until you end up in an insane social role as the only attractive one left to you. An insane social role is paradigmatically, for aesthete-like philosophers, this: the requirements are contradictory but that is not transparent. Someone might even knowingly keep one as a final trap. (Fairly and competently audit economics??? "It is rational for me to kill you!")

In 2024 (September?), my second psychiatrist told me that the brain screens out certain information as irrelevant and that what he thinks happened to me was this: the screening out function (or mechanism or process...) was not operating properly. It was not screening out enough information and I started paying attention to stuff I would not normally pay attention to. But I am not keen on medication to restore me to screening out enough information, because I am worried that my normal level before was 7.1 out of 10 receptivity (or out of 100 even) and it will leave me with 7.099999...8 receptivity. (I should thank the computer science philosophy reading group for help with that example, if it helps.) I think there is a way of dealing with increasing receptivity to information without "going mad," as the common man says (or the vulgar, to use an earlier term), but I haven't worked out the details very well. You might need this information now, however. One develops a framework for dealing with a load of new information, a framework which is acceptable in the current society. For example, one contemplates things that will soon be crimes (perhaps!). Instead of saying the leaves are talking to me, one says, "If you look at a leaf soon, you will be accused of tampering with the natural growth of the tree: twisting leaf/beyond belief/begging for relief." Instead of saying the metal wants me to touch it, you say, "I touch the rails of this private property and I might be sued tomorrow." I don't know: I am going early on this one though. (Sorry if you were about to say this yourself, or if the chief beneficiary of this is not the local psychiatrists.)

The ever enjoyable Marshall Sahlins takes up what might seem a paradoxical position in the first essay of his Stone Age Economics: hunter-gather societies are poor by our measures; but they are affluent because members do not desire more material goods that they have. He relies on a specific definition of an affluent society: one in which the material wants of members are easily met. Contemporary economics, or the mainstream variety, does not refer to desire (or wants) rather to preferences, and Sahlin’s position is less easily defensible when one switches to preference and to the standard conception of preference as hypothetical choice: you prefer option A over option B if and only if, given a choice of only A and B, you choose A.

It is dark. I hope it is safe now to discuss the great question of our society: what is the difference between the universities of Oxford and Cambridge? I cannot write with confidence on this matter, but I have observed some lecturers with degrees from one or the other of these hallowed institutions. And from my observations I have come to the conclusion that the difference is quite small, but to your discerning "eye" it might be large indeed. To present the difference, I must make a bold and probably unwise move. I shall present three entries from a fictional diary I conceived, of now Professor Miriam Ronzoni. My apologies. DAY 1 (2013): Dear Diary, my name is Miriam Ronzoni. I have joined the department of politics at the University of Manchester, or the discipline area of politics as it is called. It is evident that there has been much and traumatic conceptual mockery carried out by an individual, a Cambridge type. He does not have a Cambridge University degree, but the solution to that paradox is obvious: skip Cambridge and start the mockery early. I am a woman with an Oxford University degree. As a woman, I am empathetic. As an Oxford degree holder, I have reserved some brains for understanding others. My approach will be different. DAY ?? (2017?): Dear Diary, unlike bright young things from Cambridge University, I don't ask this person not to laugh in the research seminar. The function of such laughter is obvious. It helps sensitive people who are not studying enough to improve, by mocking them into improvement. But can it carry out this function if one is regarded as insane? I have a plan, because I am surely not regarded as insane. This person will come up with an extraordinarily clever piece of conceptual mockery. And I shall laugh! DAY ?? (2021): The conceptual mocker has gone and, in his place, I have been both mocking and laughing, hoping for students to improve by pricking their sensitivities. But now they do not want me to come to the department anymore. They think my place is in the kitchen. But also they still want some conceptual mockery to learn from. I am angry and a bit insane, I think. It is not about personality, social class, country of origin, Oxford or Cambridge: the social role available for me and persons of my level leads to this result. I shall make a video online to display my current situation and acknowledge my failed project. DIARY OVER. The puzzle I hope to have solved is what Professor Miriam Ronzoni is doing in a kitchen in her Youtube video lecture "How Should Republicans Conceive of Transnational Solidarity?" She is signalling "This is where they want me," but still providing teaching, and indicating that she did not get further than I did.

What is a tent? "A tent is a kind of portable dwelling, or the paradigmatic instance of a tent in our society is. It can be put up and put down and relocated and..." But what is the social function of a tent? This function has been known by children in multiple countries: to find out who (whom) your friends are! Only your friends will stay overnight with you in a tent. But that leads to a problem. Have you ever been in a crowded tent? You have? You want more air. But how can someone who is genuinely your friend deprive you of air. On the one hand, the social function of the tent is to find out who your friends are - that seems beyond doubt. Only your friends will stay with you overnight in the tent. On the other hand, a friend does not deprive you of air and these people in the tent are doing precisely that! My title quotes a song by the band the Smashing Pumpkins, entitled "Disarm." I think I only really like this song 1979 though, from what I have heard of this band.

Psychiatrists have their ways of assessing insanity; but so do others and here I wish to introduce the concept of a person who is regarded as insane for occupying a certain social role (an insane social role), even if by current psychiatric standards they are sane: the role insane. I shall illustrate this concept of an insane social role by an amusing dialogue, if permitted. A Chinese friend says to me, "I will write a book with block-like sections on Carl Schmitt. I won’t be webby." I reply, "I will read it and write some cute objections to Carl Schmitt, in little papers, and perhaps gather them together in a document which lists them all." She says, "Sure." A third person joins the conversation. Third says, "I will write a finely woven essay, a webby essay, that cunningly summarizes Carl Schmitt and includes some cute objections." At least one of the two think, "Why would anyone do that? People new to Carl Schmitt would probably want the philosopher presented at a more leisurely pace. You can develop the presentation of a subtopic on him within a blocky book. And you can compare Schmitt with another political philosopher in the book. And..." Maybe there is some demand for this third approach (e.g. "If you combine the best of these two, you can further combine them at our university") but it is not a sane social role, because of the numerous reasons listed above. Maybe it gets a place in the renowned Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and gets lots of citations, but society will surely catch up with an argument this compelling. I think the psychiatrist is disposed to classify both the occupants of sane social roles as actually insane and the person who enters into the insane social role as sane. From the senior psychiatrist (?), I anticipate this reaction: "If I start saying that this kind of character is insane, who strategically enters into insane social roles, I will be regarded as an intellectual and be put in the same position as you."

I have found this Chinese Instagram comedy composed of short very well-crafted sketches, mostly featuring four women: four young women? Are they the bright young things of Chinese comedy? I bet they will love this then! I will just give you my casual first and second impressions. (a) When I watch this comedy, I wonder whether it is successful because various places are going to see a lot of young Chinese women like this. They are male heterosexual dominated places, at the top anyway, and how to expand into these places except with fresh young women? (b) I tend to see two characters (and their relationship) as the stars of the sketches. A young woman with her hair in two bunches. And a woman who looks tired to me and slightly older, but she might be the same age on closer inspection. (c) When I looked through the sketches again, I noticed that the star is absent from the first sketch. I tend to take this message: she only turns up when things get going; she is there once you have done the foundational work (in comedy, a business, etc.) and then she gets all the attention. (d) In the opening sketch, the woman who is also a star in my eyes is engaged in horrible-looking labour. Another Chinese woman is sitting on a wall lazily watching her, yawning. She calls her over and engages in a misleading conversation and when the woman realizes that she has been misled, she just stares blankly. In later episodes, she chases the girl with two bunches, but she just takes “the pain” in this initial sketch. It is as if she has no choice. I wonder whether this Chinese woman sitting on the wall is based on a male character: what we in England would insultingly call a tosser. But I suspect there could be a woman like this. Nevertheless, because they are talking about dreams of money, I wonder whether this is like a young John Rawls, before he has learnt a few lessons. Sorry for this. I am not posh, or I am by a bizarre route. (e) I also notice that in the first sketch the tosser is the teacher, but in most later sketches the labouring woman is. (Please do not hack my account; I am an admirer of the comedy by the way.)

Thomas H. Smith is the founding father of our contemporary philosophy literature on romantic love, we bright young things etc. There were texts before, but we don't appear to notice them. Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins has argued against Smith, like so: "Romantic love as all about couples is not something natural. It is a social construction. There could be a society in which there is romantic love but the paradigm of romantic love is not the couple." Reflecting on Jenkins, I tend to have a non-philosophical reaction: "I work on how things, like concepts, are socially constructed and not natural. Is she just anticipating what I would say in response to Smith and thereby blocking me from saying it? Is she just a ruthless soldier of defence of some kind, metaphorically speaking: I won't let you expand in this direction? Are they all?" But that is too pessimistic for Britain. More optimistically... Anyway, I would not say what Jenkins does. I am thinking to not follow my earlier training in social anthropology very well and speculate a bit. Once upon a time in Western societies, what we call falling in love was just regarded as madness and treated accordingly. But a set of rules have developed which prevents genuine madness from occurring. For example, one does not say to someone one has romantic feelings towards, "Hurry up, we both want to have sex," at least not in the "courting" stages. The things we learn from popular culture (kitsch movies, trashy novels, etc.), which vary somewhat from society to society, form a system which protects against raw love, which is just madness.

Certain fields have a reputation for cleverness, or brilliant minds if you prefer that description: philosophy, physics, literature. The great philosophers. Physicists: the philosopher kings of our day - a remark I picked up from The Telegraph comments section, probably ironic though. Literature: Alice Munro was the best in her class. My worry is this: there is a way of sending our best minds to where needs are, at least at elite universities. The level of Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, and Evans-Pritchard is very high, but they are anthropologists. Why? Well, what is the obvious reason for fieldwork amongst the Trobrianders, the Andaman Islanders, the Azande: study these people now before Westernization occurs. And why is my psychiatrist so clever? Maybe the whole medical system is getting cleverer and cleverer, because we are heading for a period of diseases! Best to warn you now: how are you going to cope with this change, nurses? Where’s the intellectual nurse? (In North Manchester General, they told me: we are all patients here. Which messed me up! What is the social structure here? But I get the message: "A clever person like you has to now work in medicine; it is nothing to do with Asians over here, Europeans over there, blacks over that way; the white working class..." BUT my mother told me I was too clever for medicine and she doesn't make many mistakes.)

You are working hard at a department, aren't you? But you are not getting a promotion. Why not? On paper, you deserve one. You interview well. Still, it is not happening. Why not? Why on earth not? Bourdieu says that these things are also about achieving an acceptable style, the department's style let us say, and this style cannot be defined. (If it cannot be defined, you may well have severe problems learning it, especially if you don’t belong to that social class, says Bourdieu.) But is this true? I had this student once and he told me a structure for an essay and I told him, "That is a WEBBY structure. Here they like a BLOCKY structure." Have I not defined the department's style? He switched to a blocky structure and his marks improved. A man he hated, a notoriously harsh marker, gave him 70%. If you have written a few essays, I think you know what a significant change from webby to blocky is. And I can tell you that and you can get ahead. But there is a person who is going to say that this is not defining a style. It has to be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions and they are going to block "blocky" and "webby" as acceptable concepts unless these are further defined. A variation on Bourdieu, whom we can call McCourdieu 1, is going to say that you can define styles and blocky and webby are acceptable primitive terms, rather than ones that need to be further defined. A variation on Bourdieu, whom we can call McCourdieu 2, is going to say that you can define styles within a community and blocky and webby are acceptable primitive terms within this community involving you and the student (and various others, but not all possible people). There is another person who is going to say, “I am interested in Bourdieu for improving access to institutions and this debate is not of interest to me: blocky and webby as definitions will do; they function.” By the way, I have a friend who read an article in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and she said that it is like web and she cannot do that. (Whether she can or she cannot do that is something I take no stand on! I wouldn't use this poem for her though: I don't know what she thinks/All I know is that she blinks.) I assume I can do a webby style, but I cannot see the philosophical value of doing so (unless philosophy involves annoying people on purpose): if I want to develop a point a blocky style is better; if I want lots of undeveloped points just write a list of them, like a set of aphorisms. So I don't see the house style as an added extra here. I have given high marks to webby essays before and so have the other new lecturers, now not so new; but is the old system better? (A better question: why is my psychiatrist this clever?)

In inductive reasoning, we generalize on the basis of some evidence, on the basis of a sample. This fool was bad for me, this second fool was bad for me, this third fool was bad for me.... I have not tried all fools, but all fools are bad for me! Hume's problem of inductive reasoning is often presented by students graded second class as follows: we cannot be certain of the conclusions, so inductive reasoning is unacceptable. It is not actually this. It involves the uniformity principle. But for my purposes here - for perceiving problems with the whole - the second class student's version will do. Hume thinks that inductive reasoning is faulty, but we cannot avoid it, because the mind works by custom. It is not a solution which makes inductive reasoning epistemically legitimate (legitimate for reliable knowledge) but it does defend our continuing use of it: how can we not, given the creatures we are? Now Hume's objection to miracles is this, on my interpretation: a law of nature is an exceptionless regularity (whenever EE occurs CC occurs); a miracle is an exception to a law of nature; so there cannot be miracles. The experts may have other interpretations. Now consider this situation. You rate a certain person at 7/10. Then you see more of his work and you rate him at 7.1 out of 10. Then more and you rate him at 7.2 out of 10. Eventually you inductively conclude that he is a god. But a god should be able to perform miracles and miracles are impossible, says Hume. Thus you probably have to give up on Hume's solution to the problem of inductive reasoning: his solution that it is allowable because our minds are customary. His problem and his anti-miracles stance will join together against this solution. Thank you PhilPapers for suddenly verifying whether I am human!

There is much interest in the later work of John Rawls, which I regard as chiefly contained in his book Political Liberalism. Nobody is perfect and I wish to confess now that I made a joke in very poor taste to Dean Redfearn (now Dr. Dean Redfearn). I called Rawls's two renowned books, by which I mean A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, the twin towers. He must be telling everyone in Harvard? But it is not just a vulgar joke; it is also misleading I think. The 1971 tower is much higher than the later tower: to my casual eye, the later tower must be TOJ height divided by 100 or something. Rawls’s main idea in the later work is that there need to be some shared commitments amongst liberal citizens. If you ask just about any hausfrau ("Yes, you can violate political correctness if you teach them some foreign language"??? Some people who greatly desire to do that don’t know the lingo I suspect), she will say that in contemporary liberal societies there are different religious and other groups and there needs to be a set of values that they all subscribe to, in order for them to stably live together. With Rawls, is the interest in the details, the filling in - the which set of values? BUT Rawls's requirements on being a liberal citizen (or reasonable citizen, to use his term) do not seem carefully-thought through, as David Enoch has repeatedly flagged. Is the value of Political Liberal elsewhere? Or is there simply none? It is a hard work to digest for such a common vision. Did he become psychotic? (I can't make sense of him in his showpiece debate with Habermas. An argument. 1. If we can only make sense of one of the participants in the Rawls-Habermas debate, then the intelligible participant wins. 2. We can only make sense of one of the participants in the Rawls-Habermas debate. Therefore 3. The intelligible participant wins.) 29 May 2026: the value must be in the idea that the constitution of a liberal society should be justifiable to liberal citizens, given the commitments that defines these, rather than the familiar idea that there need to be some shared values for a liberal society to work.

It is, or was, the received wisdom amongst British anthropologists that one cannot do group worldview description in liberal Britain (but there is a decorated exception who is keen on this, namely Dame Marilyn Strathern - they don’t listen to her on this crucial matter, despite the appearance of a cult). I have my view and you have your view and he has his view and she has her view, and that is all you can say, rather than "They all have this view." A view here is a proposition one can justifiably ascribe to a group (any set of individuals). Let us include should/ought statements as expressing such propositions, e.g. "I should not have laughed at the cross-looking woman who bobbed out of that little house." Now we find that individuals diagnosed with autism are functioning members of some communities, for example the stand-up comedy community here in the city of Manchester, UK (or they were until a couple of months ago?). Simon Baron-Cohen says that autistics display an extreme instance of the male brain, even if they happen to be female. The male brain is oriented towards systematizing over empathizing: creating or analysing systems, systems being composed of rules or laws (laws of nature or society). The majority of human males have it, hence its name, but if one has the dispositions, then one also has it. The best explanation for the success of these autistic comedians, it seems, is that they have a reliable grasp of the rules of comedy in this community. An example of such a rule might be: "If this joke is the favourite of this kind of audience (e.g. your Mum), then you should not make it at the large gong show called Beat the Frog, at the Frog & Bucket." ("Every time you make a joke, Terence, you violate a local taboo!"? I don't think it is a good idea to find the audience for that and do it at home, Mr. Oedipus.) It seems available to the anthropologist to specify these rules. Is this a worldview, or is it not? Well, the main clash between traditional group worldview description and focusing on diverse individuals is that the individuals don't share anything, or enough, to pursue the former project, but in the case under consideration one can describe these shared rules, whatever one calls the final report: a description of a shared worldview, shared rule system, a model for doing comedy, etc. (The details might matter in other contexts, by the way.) The title of this contribution quotes a song by the band Jane's Addiction. (My friend introduced me to them in school. The artist's touch!)

This is a bit messy. In September 2023 - was it the 6th? - I was taken into the MRI (Manchester Royal Infirmary) by the police (about seven of them, all white except a token brown person, Muslim-looking; I remember shouting, "Who’s the man here?" and a young blonde woman said, "I'm the man"; did I see her the other day?) and then moved to North Manchester General Hospital. It was mainly white people at MRI: so many; were there any minorities? I thought hospitals were full of minority workers! By the way, who were those two watching me for so long after I had been injected? In North Manchester General, there were white nurses but ALSO so many ethnic minority nurses: Asians, many blacks (Africans), a person of Chinese origin I believe. (One of my patient friends played Tupac: when I get free? I liked it! “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”) Now I am out and I had a French care coordinator (she said she was clever in her class and wanted a copy of my article, so did the black nurse who visited my house before, what was his name now?); then for more than a year there is an English white man as care coordinator, now joined by a junior white nurse, from MMU (a few months into a first year course, from Sheffield). And the nurse who accompanied the psychiatrist in her psychiatric review at my home on Wednesday was a white woman. I am not racist, but I live in a building full of ethnic minority nurses (or it used to be). Another white nurse and I will start wondering about statistics, distributions, and best explanations: it is a legitimate topic of inquiry, is it not? (When previously inquiring elsewhere, Sean Crawford said words to the effect, what are you expecting? - I can’t remember the exact words, is it in the report I got, when I complained about a job in philosophy? You didn’t advertise it publicly, only internally, and we didn’t hear about it, Paula Satne and I, please forgive me Paula, now Thomas H. Smith’s wife, and you even showed Michael Rush how to apply, he emailed me, which a woman in law suggested was ill-advised; she moved in 2018, so did quite a few: all similar level by my assessment, across four departments maybe. You don’t rate them, I think, but they reserve some “brains” for departure timing? "He does ill-advised things"???) I talked to a nurse who lives in my building about 2 months ago and she said that she had to move out and she was looking for a place and we exchanged numbers, because I thought it might be a good idea to have someone live with me. (Social interaction is a box they tick or not, for how well I am doing? I didn't say that to the care coordinator though!) The nurse is an Asian young woman. I asked her if she likes her job at MRI and she made an expression: I interpreted it as "There are problems." (I can relate to that!) My care coordinator keeps asking if I know enough about her; and says she might work nights and disturb me. (Well, it is like living in a little poem here! You’ll spend time outside anyway. You know what I mean, do you, Spanish footballers, or maybe you don't?)

Have you ever tried to avoid the core system of an institution or a system of institutions or a country? It can be more difficult than it seems. I am thinking to write about popular culture, which is generally not held in high esteem, but will that help? Also I want to write something about the Sun - something quite silly it seems (but what is silly or not is perhaps culturally relative). Let's start with the Sun. I went out this morning and really felt the brightness of the Sun. Even I felt it was shining a little too brightly for me. I sat down on a bench, of a hospital nearby, and said some words to a woman, but she ignored me, given my criterion of ignored: she was on her phone (rabbiting on, I am tempted to rudely say). I returned to my apartment. Then I remembered the words of Abdulhamit Iris, the last person I lived with, for months and months but not a year I think. Abdulhamit told me, "This country would be better if the Sun shined more!" But I wanted the Sun to shine less. Then I thought that I might be making a mistake. If we rate the intensity of sunshine on a scale 10 (very unscientific by today's standards probably), I like it when the Sun shines at an odd number. I can take brighter I want it to move 8, either to 7 or 9. Suddenly, I looked out the window and the Sun was shining less. I began thinking that the Sun is not getting the rhythm right! I like rhythm, but I don't like every rhythm! It needed to change to an odd number slightly sooner! Why do poets love the moon so much, I began to wonder. Anyway, I have to be careful with what I say. "Is that madness, is it not, is that madness, is it not?" people wonder. Let's change topic. My plan was to write about popular culture and avoid the core system. But if you have to make cuts, you have to make cuts; cut the above or cut the below, it is tricky, I understand, but forgiveness has never been my strength though I might need to be forgiven myself, for some minor annoyance that is illegal in 50 years time: writing this hybrid? Martina Hingis was an intuitive tennis player, according to standard perceptions, and she was a young prodigy (or prodigy, if young is unnecessary). As a teenager, she played in the French open against Steffi Graf. She did not behave well by many people's standards, Hingis that is. She crossed over into Steffi Graf's side of the court and complained about a decision. The media cast it as talented childish brat versus reasonable mature woman of some talent. But did everyone see it like that? How did Hingis perceive it? I am out of my depth there. But I am confident that some people cartoonishly perceived it much like this: "HIngis has crossed over into the German castle of Grafenstein. She is carrying her gun. Oh no, her gun does not have any bullets. She turns to the French for help. No help. She returns safely to her base, to rethink how to overcome the German menace!" Hingis years later appeared on a famous dancing television show in Britain. She was voted off first. My track record with understanding the general British publis is so poor, that I think it is best not to say anything about what I think it went on, though I guess one point of view.

Warning: this contains autobiography and might be a bit avant-garde 100 years ago… I was in this pub where I am a regular (Flour & Flagon) and I got water and cheese & onion crisps. And the water tasted a touch fruity and I opened the crisps and they tasted a bit salt & vinegary. (Can one have taste hallucinations? It's subtle, so try again.) I talked to the barmaid, if that is the right term, the white girl, stocky (sorry - she is probably scared; "this one might well come back whatever happens here"; did you see what happened in the other pub in coronavirus time???). I explained that I am not sure, it is subtle, it does not feel quite right. She told me she will change the water and she cannot do anything about the crisps, but they are always there when I am in! I continued eating the crisps and they tasted right. It's weird and there was a young swan, I think (slang for posh person; 20 something I presume), who did not look happy with me at all. He said something to me at the bar and then didn't wait to hear my reply! You are scared, yes? More scared than me, but that is just who I am for years/decades. Bourdieu time, though it is American independence day. If Bourdieu gets cut out of this club (of prestigious anthropologists), it is going to be even more scary. People turn to these French thinkers not just for their theories, also for themes. You are interested in Derrida, you are interested in writing systems, writing and speech, iterability - is it time to mock British social anthropology yet or is it too soon? (Every member has their stash of information on the computer revolution, hidden away? I will have to say everything anyway? "Look, we incorporated this person; and he did the fieldwork in childhood and adolescence!" Consent, age of consent, ethics - forget it; this is too massive a problem? Every turn an enigmatic trap.) If you turn to Bourdieu for themes, like taste preferences across social classes, can we not offer you a similar sociological system but with a focus on written and unwritten rules rather than undefinable stylistic touches? Call the maker of this system Fourdieu. Fourdieu says (or he used to, in England; it is so fast moving what you study - compared to the circle in Euro-American society; this old woman is good, you/I have to admit it - the ageing system is different), "This class don't like tattoos, this class accept them." There is a sociologist who says, "Okay, I will accept Fourdieu. He'll do for me." There is another sociologist who will say, "I want to be part of the Bourdieu trend." (Well, I have not talked much to sociologists, only one who told me to make a modern style video game and manspread a lot, but that's my impression. "He LAUGHS at us." He didn't say that; I just put those words into his mouth. The rain suddenly stopped and now it starts again. It's got great rhythm this rain. Self-control: this lax and everyone will think party time and do things everyone regrets. All or nothing: 1 or 0, 1 or 0; you will say, "I am a good person/persona/etc later.") There is this sociologist who I think will say, "It is not organic; it does not feel natural: Fourdieu." Clunky, isn't it? Like a...There is a sociologist who will (or whom I think will) say, "There needs to be just one and that should be Bourdieu, not a series of little guys." I will tell you something: I had an interview in politics for a lectureship job which I really wanted, and I cockily did a rational reconstruction in the interview, and the female sociologist was monitoring or whatever, with three politics figures, all male. Did she save me??? I didn't get the job. Did I not fit with the culture? Sorry, you will have to forgive me too, for various things. ( I will have to hope for: "It was wrong but...")